blessed britons

The UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s (FCO) 2005 Human Rights Annual Report identified 20 ‘major countries of concern’. In 2005, the UK approved arms export licences to 12 of these, including Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and Israel. Saudi Arabia has been the focus of UK arms promotion since the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979, the UK has been Indonesia’s main weapons supplier over the past decade and Israel has received a steady flow of UK arms regardless of the situation in the occupied territories.

— CAAT

mad world

Since 1990, the energy and natural resources sector (mostly coal, oil, gas and electricity) has given $418m to federal politicians in the US. Transport companies have given $355m... The big polluters favour the Republicans, but most of them also fund Democrats. During the 2000 presidential campaign, oil and gas companies lavished money on George Bush, but they also gave Al Gore $142,000, while transport companies gave him $347,000. The whole US political system is in hock to people who put their profits ahead of the biosphere.

— George Monbiot

Hooray! We're going backwards

I am forbidden to enter Ariel

Submitted by antarchi on November 30, 2007 - 03:49.

I’ve never visited Ariel’s beautiful homes and green gardens, so different from our poor, parched community, because as a Palestinian I am forbidden to enter Ariel, even though it sits on Palestinian land in the West Bank.
In 1978 when construction of Ariel began I was a child. Yet I recall my frustration and sorrow for the many Palestinian farmers who lost their lands to the Israeli colony...
Cutting deep into the heart of the West Bank, the Ariel settlement bloc separates the northern West Bank from the rest of the West Bank. U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher warned against the construction of Israel’s wall around Ariel in June 2004, saying that it would make Palestinian life more difficult and confiscate Palestinian property. Nonetheless, hundreds of acres of Palestinian land were confiscated for that wall.

mostly nuggets

blessed britons

mad world

I am forbidden to enter Ariel