by Walter and Rosemary Brasch

Sens. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) flexed their muscles, shook their rattles, and told President-elect Barack Obama not to tread upon them.

"I don't believe in the executive power trumping everything," Reid, the Senate's majority leader, told the political newspaper, The Hill. He said he believed "in our Constitution, three separate but equal branches of government." For emphasis, he warned, "If Obama steps over the bounds, I will tell him. . . . I do not work for Barack Obama, I work with him."

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Gaither Stewart

C’est la lutte finale
Groupons nous et demain
L’Internationale
Sera le genre humain.

(The Internationale in its French version)

(Paris) The great tower stands like a beacon over Europe. From the top one can see the Chartres Cathedral seventy kilometers away, on a rare clear day. Evenings from my bedroom window I watch the magnificent tower illuminate. Gradually. Gracefully. As day ends the searchlight at the top at 1000 feet altitude begins sweeping the sky. During last year’s French EU Presidency, as daylight departed and night fell, the gigantic iron structure progressively turned blue, bit by bit, nearly unnoticeable. At first it was a faint, very faint, shade of blue, before, when winter night arrived, it assumed its luxuriant cobalt sheen.

A magic moment for prescient dreamers fascinated by towers and overviews. Nostalgic views, too, which might also end in illusion, in mirage and chimera.

Or in pipe dreams.

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PCHR

10 January 2009: 34 Palestinians Killed, Including 4 Children and 3 Women, and the Total Number of Victims Now Mounts to 799, Including 193 Children, 53 women, 6 Medical Personnel, One Palestinian Journalist and 165 Civil Police Officers.

As the Israeli offensive on the Gaza Strip has entered its third week, Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) have continued to kill Palestinian civilians, especially children. Gaza City and the northern Gaza Strip have been a scene of intense aerial, ground and sea attacks.

Investigations conducted by PCHR indicate that IOF have continued to bombard Palestinian houses and civilian facilities persistently day and night, while the Palestinian civilian population suffer a humanitarian crisis as they lack electricity, water and food supplies. IOF have continued their war on the Gaza Strip with total disregard for international humanitarian standards and humanitarian law and in violation of the resolution issued by the United Nations Security Council yesterday morning calling for a ceasefire. Israel has stressed that it would continue its offensive and has even threatened to escalate it. PCHR is concerned that IOF may commit more war crimes against the Palestinian civilian population. Additionally, IOF have continued to attack and obstruct the work of medical, civil defense crews and humanitarian relief crews. Last night, IOF bombarded al-Jawhara building, in which a number of journalists were present. As a result, one journalist was wounded. The high number of civilian victims and the extensive destruction to public and private property are clear evidence that IOF, instructed by the Israeli political and military establishments, intend to cause maximum deaths and casualties among Palestinian civilians and maximum destruction to their property.

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URUKNET

January 10, 2009: As our readers know, on April 24, 2008 Google stopped indexing Uruknet.info as a news source. It was the fourth time that Google discontinues indexing Uruknet. The previous times google had reinstated it following many complaints sent in by our readers. The last time there was nothing to be done: in a first moment google news wouldn't even answer to our emails and, at last, after about ten days has answered with a series of lies.

Hi Enzo, Thank you for your note. We received numerous complaints from users about your site and after reviewing it we’ve found that we could no longer include it in Google News. We currently don’t include sites that are primarily news aggregators, and we weren’t able to find any stories on your site that weren’t from outside sources. We apologize for any inconvenience this situation may cause. Please be assured that we’ll log your site for future consideration should our requirements change Thanks for your interest in Google News. Regards, The Google Team

Of course, they were only excuses.

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Uri Avnery

Palestinian boy in gunsight feeding pigeons on a roof
in West-Casbah, Hebron.

Uri Avnery views the past week’s war crimes committed by Israel and shrouded in a flimsy cloak of lies. He argues that these crimes reflect “the personality of Ehud Barak – a man whose way of thinking and actions are clear evidence of what is called “moral insanity”, a sociopathic disorder”.

”... a new doctrine was applied: to avoid losses among our soldiers by the total destruction of everything in their path. The planners were not only ready to kill 80 Palestinians to save one Israeli soldier, as has happened, but also 800...

“Even if the Israeli army were to succeed in killing every Hamas fighter to the last man, even then Hamas would win.”

Nearly 70 ago, in the course of World War II, a heinous crime was committed in the city of Leningrad. For more than 1000 days, a gang of extremists called “the Red Army” held the millions of the town’s inhabitants hostage and provoked retaliation from the German Wehrmacht from inside the population centres. The Germans had no alternative but to bomb and shell the population and to impose a total blockade, which caused the death of hundreds of thousands.

Some time before that, a similar crime was committed in England. The Churchill gang hid among the population of London, misusing the millions of citizens as a human shield. The Germans were compelled to send their Luftwaffe and reluctantly reduce the city to ruins. They called it the Blitz.

This is the description that would now appear in the history books – if the Germans had won the war.

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Suzanne Baroud

Ironically, it was in Palestine, 20 years ago, that I concluded that there is no God. For how could a God, who claims to love all and treat all with impartiality, allow such horrors like those in Palestine to happen?

This unbelief grew stronger with each curfew, with each strike that mourned the death of yet one more martyr, with a decapitation induced by gunfire in the main square on a sunny Ramallah afternoon so many years ago. But it was cemented the day I had to tell one of my fifth grade students that his brother had just been taken away by the Israeli army. His expression, his body going limp, the shuddering of his shoulders as he wept with his classmates…that’s what finally did it.

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From the 1927 Grand Council of American Indians:

“The white people, who are trying to make us over into their image, they want us to be what they call “assimilated,” bringing the Indians into the mainstream and destroying our own way of life and our own cultural patterns. They believe we should be contented like those whose concept of happiness is materialistic and greedy, which is very different from our way.

We want freedom from the white man rather than to be intergrated. We don’t want any part of the establishment, we want to be free to raise our children in our religion, in our ways, to be able to hunt and fish and live in peace. We don’t want power, we don’t want to be congressmen, or bankers….we want to be ourselves. We want to have our heritage, because we are the owners of this land and because we belong here.

The white man says, there is freedom and justice for all. We have had “freedom and justice,” and that is why we have been almost exterminated. We shall not forget this.”

Ramzy Baroud

"We are all Hamas," screamed a scrawny Mauritanian, repeatedly, as he determinedly drew his face closer to a TV camera. Behind him, thousands more tunefully chanted similar words, chants that were heard in different Arabic dialects, in fact in many different languages all across the globe.

Yet, Israel, somehow is claiming victory in the media war, which it calculatedly unleashed weeks before its most violent attack on Gaza yet. Thousands have been reportedly killed and wounded in the first two weeks, starting Dec. 27, in the tiny stretch of land (roughly 140 square miles), yet densely populated Gaza Strip of 1.5 million people.

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Mitakuye Oyasin / Republic of Lakotah

Thousands of Israeli troops, backed by tanks and helicopters, have entered the Gaza Strip as Israel escalated its offensive into the territory on the eighth day of operations.

Tanks entered the besieged territory through several points mainly in northern Gaza, crossing shortly after nightfall on Saturday, officials said, while the Israeli cabinet said it had also called up about 9,000 reservists. U.S. Backed Weapons vs. Homemade Rockets VIDEO

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Mohawk Nation News

How many Palestinian infants, toddlers, children and schools have been bombed by the criminals in charge of Israeli forces in the last few days? What law are they following? An eye for an eye! A tooth for a tooth! This is primitive barbarity. The Israelis claim if they kill enough Palestinians, Hamas will stop sending in rockets. Conveniently overlooked is the fact that Israelis have built a wall around Gaza to control every Palestinian and everything that comes in and out of the ghetto to deliberately force the people into desperation.

Also forgotten is that parts of the new smart bomb, GBU 39, designed for urban warfare, is made in Canadian facilities with the help of government tax breaks and Canada Pension Plan investments. This is obscene!

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