Israel’s cabinet has approved punitive sanctions on the Palestinian Authority, now led by militant group Hamas.
Israel will withhold an estimated $50m (£28m) in monthly customs revenues due to the PA, and will tighten borders for people and food crossing into Gaza.

Before the cabinet meeting, acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert called the Hamas-led PA a “terrorist authority” and ruled out direct talks.

Israel would allow humanitarian aid to reach the Palestinians, Mr Olmert said.

“It is clear that in light of the Hamas majority in the PLC and the instructions to form a new government that were given to the head of Hamas, the PA is – in practice – becoming a terrorist authority,” Mr Olmert said.

“Israel will not hold contacts with the administration in which Hamas plays any part – small, large or permanent.”
bbc.co.uk

Israeli troops kill 2 Palestinian stone-throwers
NABLUS, West Bank (Reuters) – Israeli troops shot dead two Palestinians during confrontations with stone throwers in the West Bank refugee camp of Balata on Sunday, witnesses and medics said.

They said soldiers were searching Balata, near the city of Nablus, for suspected militants when they came across stone-throwing youths and opened fire. Two 18-year-olds were killed. A third youth was wounded in the incident, medics said.

The Israeli army had no immediate comment on the incident.

KABUL: Taliban claimed to have killed seven Afghan troops in southeastern Afghanistan.
A Taliban spokesman, Qari Yousaf told Radio Tehran that the Taliban blew up a vehicle of the Afghan troops with a remote controlled landmine in Ghazni province that resulted in killing of seven Afghan troops.
paktribune.com

6 Killed in New Taleban Attacks
KANDAHAR, 17 February 2006 — Suspected Taleban rebels killed four policemen in Afghanistan while a bomb blast claimed the lives of two militia soldiers working with security forces, officials said yesterday. About 60 suspected Taleban rebels armed with machine-guns and rockets raided a police post in southwestern Nimroz province on Wednesday, killing at least one policeman and injuring four others, the provincial governor said.

Some Taleban fighters also appeared to have been killed in the almost two-hour gunfight, judging by blood and ripped clothes and shoes left at the scene, Gov. Ghulam Dastagir Azad said.

…A shocking 37 million Americans live in poverty. That is 12.7 per cent of the population – the highest percentage in the developed world. They are found from the hills of Kentucky to Detroit’s streets, from the Deep South of Louisiana to the heartland of Oklahoma. Each year since 2001 their number has grown.

Under President George W Bush an extra 5.4 million have slipped below the poverty line. Yet they are not a story of the unemployed or the destitute. Most have jobs. Many have two. Amos Lumpkins has work and his children go to school. But the economy, stripped of worker benefits like healthcare, is having trouble providing good wages.
guardian.co.uk

More than 100 inmates at a Los Angeles County jail were ordered to strip naked, had their mattresses taken away and were left with only blankets to cover themselves for a day as Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department officials tried to quell racially charged violence that has plagued the jail system for nearly two weeks.

The tactics — defended Friday by jail officials as necessary to stop the fighting — were immediately criticized as dehumanizing and highly inappropriate by civil rights activists and the Sheriff’s Department’s independent overseer.

“I have no problem taking privileges away…. It comes to a different level of basic human rights if you take away clothing and dignity,” said Michael Gennaco, chief of Sheriff Lee Baca’s office of independent review. “I don’t know if it is consistent with the sheriff’s core values.”
latimes.com

A Half-Dozen Questions About 9/11 They Don’t Want You to Ask
By WERTHER

The events of September 11, 2001 evoke painful memories, tinged with a powerful nostalgia for the way of life before it happened. The immediate tragedy caused a disorientation sufficient to distort the critical faculties in the direction of retrospectively predictable responses: bureaucratic adaptation, opportunism, profiteering, kitsch sentiment, and mindless sloganeering.

As 9/11, and the report of the commission charged to investigate it, fade into history like the Warren Commission that preceded it, the questions, gaps, and anomalies raised by the report have created an entire cottage industry of amateur speculation–as did the omissions and distortions of the Warren Report four decades ago. How could it not?

While initially received as definitive by a rapturous official press, the 9/11 Report has been overtaken by reality, not only because of unsatisfying content–like all “independent” government reports, it is fundamentally an apology and a coverup masquerading as an exposé–but because we now know more: more about the feckless invasion of Iraq, more about the occupation of Afghanistan and the purported hunt for Osama bin Laden, more about the post-9/11 stampede to repeal elements of the Bill of Rights, more about the rush to create the Department of Homeland Security, an agency to “prevent another 9/11,” which, in retrospect, is plainly about cronyism, contracts, and Congressional boodle.

Many of the amateur sleuths of the 9/11 mystery have based their investigations on microscopic forensics regarding the publicly released video footage, or speculations into the physics of impacting aircraft or collapsing buildings. But staring too closely at the recorded traces of subatomic phenomena involved in a one-time event can deceive us into finding the answer we are looking for, as Professor Heisenberg once postulated. Over 40 years on, the Magic Bullet is still the Magic Bullet: improbable, yes, but not outside the realm of the possible.

But there is surprisingly little discussion of the basic higher-order political factors surrounding 9/11, factors that do not require knowledge of the melting point of girder steel or the unknowable piloting abilities of the presumed perpetrators. Let us proceed, then, in a spirit of detached scientific inquiry, to ask questions the 9/11 Commission was unprepared to ask.
counterpunch.org
(more…)

Vice President Dick “Buckshot” Cheney kept his word to the inmates at California’s maximum security Folsom State Prison. He played a one hour set with his band “Dickie and The Trigger Happy Birdie Killers”. The set received a luke warm reception until Cheney launched into his new, as yet unreleased, single “Go F*** Yourself”. During the guitar solo the Vice President thrilled the assembled audience by producing a rifle and opening fire. “He seems angry. Very angry” one inmate said “I mean, I always thought that the American people didn’t like to vote for angry people but…Man, that dude is angry!” I managed to obtain a tape of the performance and am proud to present it here….
huffingtonpost.com

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld yesterday called for the military and other government agencies to mount a far more aggressive, swift and nontraditional information campaign to counter the messages of extremist and terrorist groups in the world media.

Rumsfeld criticized the absence of a “strategic communications framework” for fighting terrorism. He also lashed out at the U.S. media, which he blamed for effectively halting recent U.S. military initiatives in the information realm — such as paying to place articles in Iraqi newspapers — through an “explosion of critical press stories.”
washingtonpost.com

…Now is the time for all good people to come to the aid of their country and become unapologetically paranoid. Paranoia should now be the normal state of mind for thinking people. Sneers and dismissive remarks about “conspiracy theorists” must be ignored. We don’t want to end up like the proverbial frog who boils to death because the heat was turned up slowly.

…What ought to shock and terrify every American is that KBR, a Halliburton subsidiary, was awarded a $385 million contract to build “temporary detention facilities” in case of an “immigration emergency”:

“The contract may also provide migrant detention support to other U.S. Government organizations in the event of an immigration emergency, as well as the development of a plan to react to a national emergency, such as a natural disaster. In the event of a natural disaster, the contractor could be tasked with providing housing for ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) personnel performing law enforcement functions in support of relief efforts.”

Anyone paying a little bit of attention will ask, “What immigration emergency?” If there is an immigration emergency looming on the horizon it is a big secret. Of course immigrants will be the first ensnared in the net that big brother Bush has in mind, but the net won’t stop with them.

What sort of national emergency requires detention centers? America has plenty of prisons. More of our population is behind bars than in any country on earth. There are detention centers for immigration in existence already. As for helping in case of a natural disaster, hurricane Katrina proved that saving American lives is not on the Bush agenda.

When the word detention comes up, hairs should rise on the back of every neck. Thanks to the Patriot Act and the creation of “enemy combatants” these detention centers can be used to lock up anyone for any reason for any length of time that Uncle Sam wishes.

In the best case scenario, this contract may be just the latest hand out to the welfare queen of corporate America. It is a sad day indeed when we must hope that good old fashioned greed, and nothing more, is at work with this latest theft from the United States treasury. Even if greed is the larger part of the equation, the threat of taking our rights and subjecting us to fear cannot be far from the minds of Dick Cheney and his ilk.
blackcommentator.com

…Dr Sentamu, the Church of England’s second in command, urged the UN Human Rights Commission (UNHRC) to take legal action against the US – through the US courts or the International Court of Justice at The Hague – should it fail to respond to a report, by five UN inspectors, advising that Camp Delta at Guantanamo Bay should be shut immediately because prisoners there are being tortured.

…”The US should try all 500 detainees at Guantanamo, who still include eight British residents, or free them without further delay. To hold someone for up to four years without charge clearly indicates a society that is heading towards George Orwell’s Animal Farm.”
independent.co.uk

TEHRAN – “In the current situation, the colonialist countries have focused all their efforts on preventing the development of independent countries,” Iranian Majlis Speaker Gholam-Ali Haddad-Adel said in Caracas on Tuesday, underlining the fact that the West intends to trample upon Iran’s right to access peaceful nuclear technology.

Haddad-Adel, who is currently in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela heading a high-ranking delegation, told members of the Venezuelan Parliament that in recent years, the Iranian nation and officials have eagerly followed developments in the friendly country of Venezuela because the fate of these two revolutionary countries is intertwined, and this has led to closer relations between the two nations.

Underlining the fact that bilateral relations between Iran and Venezuela have been promoted, Hadad-Adel expressed hope that the two nations would soon witness the fruition of their efforts in all political, economic, and cultural spheres.
tehrantimes.com