Israel’s Secret Nuclear Biological and Chemical Weapons (NBC)

Israel’s Secret Nuclear Biological and Chemical Weapons (NBC)

By Manlio Dinucci

Global Research, March 02, 2015

ilmanifesto.it (original in Italian)

Region: Middle East & North Africa

Theme: Militarization and WMD

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This article was first published by Global Research in October 2013.

For years, Syria and Egypt refused to abandon their chemical weapons facing a threatening neighbor, Israel, which develops very sophisticated ones, in addition to biological and nuclear weapons. However, while Syria has joined the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons , we are taking a look at Israeli activities.

The UN inspectors who monitor chemical weapons in Syria would have much to do if they were sent to monitor the nuclear, biological and chemical weapons (NBC) of Israel.

But according to the rules of “international law”, they cannot do so. Israel has not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, nor the Convention Banning Biological Weapons , and has signed but not ratified the Convention Banning Chemical Weapons.

The entrance of the Israel Institute for Biological Research,  Ness- Ziona . This structure is the cover for the research and manufacturing of Israeli chemical and biological weapons.

According to Jane’s Defense Weekly, Israel – the only nuclear power in the Middle East, has 100 to 300 nuclear warheads and their appropriate vectors ( ballistic and cruise missiles and fighter-bombers ). According to SIPRI estimates, Israel has produced 690-950 kg of plutonium, and continues to produce as much as necessary to make from 10 to 15 bombs of the Nagasaki type each year.

It also produces tritium, a radioactive gas with which neutron warheads are made, which cause minor radioactive contamination but higher lethality. According to various international reports, also quoted by the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, biological and chemical weapons are developed at the Institute for Biological Research, located in Ness- Ziona, near Tel Aviv. Officially, 160 scientists and 170 technicians are part of the staff, who for five decades have performed research in biology, chemistry, biochemistry, biotechnology, pharmacology, physics and other scientific disciplines. The Institute, along with the Dimona nuclear center , is “one of the most secretive institutions in Israel” under direct jurisdiction of the Prime Minister. The greatest secrecy surrounds research on biological weapons, bacteria and viruses that spread among the enemy and can trigger epidemics. Among them, the bacteria of the bubonic plague (the ” Black Death ” of the Middle Ages ) and the Ebola virus, contagious and lethal, for which no therapy is available.

With biotechnology, one can produce new types of pathogens which the target population is not able to resist, not having the specific vaccine. There is also strong evidence of research to develop biological weapons that can destroy the human immune system. Officially the Israeli Institute conducts research on vaccines against bacteria and viruses, such as anthrax funded by the Pentagon, but it is obvious that they can develop new pathogens for war use.

The same expedient is used in the United States and in other countries to get around the conventions prohibiting biological and chemical weapons. In Israel the screed secret was partially torn by the inquiry that was conducted, with the help of scientists, by the Dutch journalist Karel Knip. It has also come out that toxic substances developed by the Institute have been used by the Mossad to assassinate Palestinian leaders. Medical evidence indicates that in Gaza and Lebanon, Israeli forces used weapons of a new design: they leave the body intact outside but, upon penetration, dévitalise tissues, carbonise liver and bones, and coagulate the blood. This is possible with nanotechnology, the science that casts microscopic structures by building them atom by atom.

Italy also participates in the development of these weapons, linked to Israel by a military cooperation agreement and being its number one European partner in research and development. In the last Finance Act, Italy provided an annual allocation of € 3 million for projects of Italian- Israeli joint research. Like the one indicated in the last notice of the Farnesina (Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs), “new approaches to combat pathogens resistant to treatment.”

In this way, the Israel Institute for Biological Research could render pathogens even more resistant.

Translation Roger Lagassé

                               http://www.globalresearch.ca/israels-secret-nuclear-biological-and-chemical-weapons-nbc/5352454

Judge overturns Nebraska's ban on gay marriage

Judge overturns Nebraska's ban on gay marriage

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Survivors of 1980s AIDS crisis reveal what happened to them

From the role of lesbians to the vanishing of whole neighborhoods, real LGBTI people share their experiences

02 FEBRUARY 2015 | BY JOE MORGAN

Photo via Twitter.

Survivors of the 1980s AIDS crisis have shared accounts of their experiences.

As the UK celebrates LGBT History Month, users of Reddit revealed what it was like to be living in what felt like a constant state of tragedy.

Real LGBTI people remember the confusion, the lack of information, the lack of support from the government because of the suffering from the virus known only at the time as GRID (gay-related immune deficiency).

'I'm a 62-year-old gay man. I thankfully made it through the epidemic that started in the early 80s and went right through the mid-90's. You ask what it was like? I don't know if I can even begin to tell you how many ways AIDS has affected my life, even though I never caught the virus,' one user said.

'By the early 80s, I had what I would consider a really large circle of friends and acquaintances and once the epidemic really started to hit, it was not uncommon to find out three, four or more people you knew had died each month. We set up informal and formal support groups to look after our friends who took sick. Feeding them when they would eat. Changing them. Washing them. Acting as go-between with families who "were concerned" about their sons, nephews, brothers, etc., but wouldn't lend a hand to help because AIDS was, you know, icky.

'After they passed, there were memorial services to plan with no real time to grieve because when one passed, you were needed somewhere else to begin the process all over again.

'I kept a memory book/photo album of everyone I knew that died of AIDS. It's quite large to say the least. Who were these guys? These were the people I had planned to grow old with. They were the family I had created and wanted to spend the rest of my life with as long as humanly possible but by the time I was in my late 40s, every one of them was gone except for two dear friends of mine.

'All we have left of those days are each other, our memories and pictures. I hope that statement doesn't come off as pitiful though. I am fit, active, healthy and you know what? I enjoy every single day of my life. I enjoy it because most of my friends can't. In my own personal way, I want to honor their lives by living and enjoying mine.'

Another user said: 'It was flat out scary. every guy you met was like a possible time bomb. especially the early period when we knew very little about it - didn't know if you could get it by kissing, by holding hands...

'Then lots of your friends or friends of friends get sick and sicker and then die. And you never ever quit being really really fucking pissed off about the whole thing. I'm alive today due to sheer randomness.'

And another said: 'If you were living in the Castro in San Francisco, everyone in the neighborhood was gay... So it wasn't just your friends that were dying, it was your whole neighborhood. One day your mailman would be replaced, the next day that flower shop was gone... You wouldn't be invited to the funeral, so it was just like people were disappearing.'

'It was madness. It was terribly cruel,' another Redditor said. 'It was inexplicable and unexplained, for a very long time. Research was underfunded, and in many cases large institutions and public figures rooted for it to be happening. People died suddenly of unexplainable things. Toe fungus! Tongue thrush! Rashes. Eyes welling up with blood. Horrible shit.

'Everyone knew it was hitting gay men, nobody knew what it was. They called it the gay cancer. People were very superstitious. I had handfuls of groceries and man lectured me on not pressing the elevator buttons with my nose because I could catch AIDS from it. Yes. That happened.'

A lesbian of the era said: 'While I was not 'at risk' (per se, we know more these days), we all lost many good friends. It is true that there is a somewhat mystifying (to me) separatist attitude between some gay men and lesbians, especially back then, this tragic time really brought us together.

'Sitting at the bedside of a terminally ill friend, and just holding their hand when everyone else was just terrified, was a gift I was one of those willing to give.

'No one should die alone, and no one should be in the hospital on their death beds with family calling to say "this was gods punishment". My friends and I, men and women, acted as a protective layer for ill friends, and companion to mutual friends juggling the same, difficult reality of trying to be there, and be strong when we were losing our family right and left. Difficult times, that should never be forgotten.'

Another Redditor paid tribute to the role of lesbians, calling them 'every bit as heroic as soldiers on the front lines of any war'.

'These women walked directly into the fire and through it, and they did not have to. And that they did it even as some of the gay men they took care of treated them with bitchiness, scorn, and contempt.

'It was, at the time, not at all unusual for gay men to snicker as the bull dyke walked into the bar with her overalls and flannels and fades. Much of the time, it was casual ribbing which they took in stride. But it could also be laced with acid, especially when lesbians began gravitating toward a bar that had until then catered largely to men.

'When the AIDS crisis struck, it would be many of these same women who would go straight from their jobs during the day to acting as caregivers at night. Because most of them lacked medical degrees, they were generally relegated to the most unpleasant tasks: wiping up puke and shit, cleaning up houses and apartments neglected for weeks and months. But not being directly responsible for medical care also made them the most convenient targets for the devastating anger and rage these men felt - many who’d been abandoned by their own family and friends.

'These women walked directly into the fire. They came to the aid of gay men even when it was unclear how easily the virus could be transmitted. Transmission via needlestick was still a concern, so they often wore two or three layers of latex gloves to protect themselves, but more than once I saw them, in their haste and frustration, dispense with the gloves so that they could check for fevers, or hold a hand that hung listlessly from the edge of a bed whose sheets they had just laundered.

'They provided aid, comfort, and medical care to men withering away in hospices, men who’d already lost their lovers and friends to the disease and spent their last months in agony. They’d been abandoned by their own families, and were it not for lesbians - many if not most of them volunteers - they would have suffered alone. And when there was nothing more medicine could do for them and their lungs began to fill with fluid, it was often these same women who’d be left to administer enough morphine to release them, given to them by the doctor who had left the room and would return 15 minutes later to sign the certificate (a common practice at the time).

'I knew a woman around that time who’d had at one point been making bank in construction. But at the outset of the AIDS crisis she had abandoned her career to pursue nursing instead, and was close to her degree when we were hanging out. She was a big, hearty drinker, and fortunately so was I. We’d been utterly thrashed at a bar once when someone whispered a fairly benign but nonetheless unwelcoming comment about her. Middle fingers were exchanged, and afterwards, furious and indignant, I asked her, Why do you do it? Why did you abandon a career to take care of these assholes who still won’t pay you any respect?

'She cut me a surprisingly severe look, held it and said, “Honey, because no one else is going to do it.” I remember feeling ashamed after that, because my fury and indignation weren’t going to clean blood and puke off the floor; it wasn’t going to do the shit that needed to get done.

'HIV killed my friends, took my lover from me, and tore up my life. During that time, I did what I could. But nothing I did then or have ever been called to do in my life puts me anywhere near the example set by the lesbians I knew in the 80s and 90s. I’ve felt obligated to remember what they did, and to make sure other people remember it too.'

- See more at: http://www.gaystarnews.com/article/survivors-1980s-aids-crisis-reveal-what-happened-them020215#sthash.HIXfOZfs.dpuf

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Orthodox Jews in Talks With Health Officials Over Oral Suction Circumcision

Orthodox Jews in Talks With Health Officials Over Oral Suction Circumcision 

Daily Mail (Britain) with Associated Press

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2963564/Orthodox-Jews-talks-health-officials-oral-suction-circumcision-linked-herpes-children.html

The Orthodox Jewish tradition known as oral suction circumcision reaches back to biblical times but it has created a modern-day dilemma for New York City health officials, who have linked it to 17 cases of infant herpes since 2000. Two died and two others suffered brain damage ... City health officials estimate more than 3,000 babies are circumcised each year using the oral suction method - formally called metzitzah b'peh in Hebrew. A 2012 report by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advised against the practice, saying it increases the risk of herpes infection in baby boys by 3.4 times that of other male newborns.

Leaked cables show Netanyahu’s Iran bomb claim contradicted by Mossad [incl. documents]

Leaked cables show Netanyahu’s Iran bomb claim contradicted by Mossad

Gulf between Israeli secret service and PM revealed in documents shared with the Guardian along with other secrets including CIA bids to contact Hamas
• Read the leaked document here

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Netanyahu’s Iran bomb claim contradicted by Mossad, leaked spy cables show

Seumas Milne, Ewen MacAskill and Clayton Swisher

Monday 23 February 2015 18.06 GMT Last modified on Thursday 26 February 2015 17.22 GMT

Binyamin Netanyahu’s dramatic declaration to world leaders in 2012 that Iran was about a year away from making a nuclear bomb was contradicted by his own secret service, according to a top-secret Mossad document.
It is part of a cache of hundreds of dossiers, files and cables from the world’s major intelligence services – one of the biggest spy leaks in recent times.
Brandishing a cartoon of a bomb with a red line to illustrate his point, the Israeli prime minister warned the UN in New York that Iran would be able to build nuclear weapons the following year and called for action to halt the process.
But in a secret report shared with South Africa a few weeks later, Israel’s intelligence agency concluded that Iran was “not performing the activity necessary to produce weapons”. The report highlights the gulf between the public claims and rhetoric of top Israeli politicians and the assessments of Israel’s military and intelligence establishment.

An extract from the document Photograph: The Guardian

The disclosure comes as tensions between Israel and its staunchest ally, the US, have dramatically increased ahead of Netanyahu’s planned address to the US Congress on 3 March.

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The White House fears the Israeli leader’s anticipated inflammatory rhetoric could damage sensitive negotiations between Tehran and the world’s six big powers over Iran’s nuclear programme. The deadline to agree on a framework is in late March, with the final settlement to come on 30 June. Netanyahu has vowed to block an agreement he claims would give Iran access to a nuclear weapons capability.
The US president, Barack Obama, will not meet Netanyahu during his visit, saying protocol precludes a meeting so close to next month’s general election in Israel.
The documents, almost all marked as confidential or top secret, span almost a decade of global intelligence traffic, from 2006 to December last year. It has been leaked to the al-Jazeera investigative unit and shared with the Guardian.
The papers include details of operations against al-Qaida, Islamic State and other terrorist organisations, but also the targeting of environmental activists.
The files reveal that:
• The CIA attempted to establish contact with Hamas in spite of a US ban.
• South Korean intelligence targeted the leader of Greenpeace.
• Barack Obama “threatened” the Palestinian president to withdraw a bid for recognition of Palestine at the UN.
• South African intelligence spied on Russia over a controversial $100m joint satellite deal.
The cache, which has been independently authenticated by the Guardian, mainly involves exchanges between South Africa’s intelligence agency and its counterparts around the world. It is not the entire volume of traffic but a selective leak.
One of the biggest hauls is from Mossad. But there are also documents from Russia’s FSB, which is responsible for counter-terrorism. Such leaks of Russian material are extremely rare.
Other spy agencies caught up in the trawl include those of the US, Britain, France, Jordan, the UAE, Oman and several African nations.
The scale of the leak, coming 20 months after US whistleblower Edward Snowden handed over tens of thousands of NSA and GCHQ documents to the Guardian, highlights the increasing inability of intelligence agencies to keep their secrets secure.
While the Snowden trove revealed the scale of technological surveillance, the latest spy cables deal with espionage at street level – known to the intelligence agencies as human intelligence, or “humint”. They include surveillance reports, inter-agency information trading, disinformation and backbiting, as well as evidence of infiltration, theft and blackmail.
The leaks show how Africa is becoming increasingly important for global espionage, with the US and other western states building up their presence on the continent and China expanding its economic influence. One serving intelligence officer told the Guardian: “South Africa is the El Dorado of espionage.”
Africa has also become caught up in the US, Israeli and British covert global campaigns to stem the spread of Iranian influence, tighten sanctions and block its nuclear programme.
The Mossad briefing about Iran’s nuclear programme in 2012 was in stark contrast to the alarmist tone set by Netanyahu, who has long presented the Iranian nuclear programme as an existential threat to Israel and a huge risk to world security. The Israeli prime minister told the UN: “By next spring, at most by next summer, at current enrichment rates, they will have finished the medium enrichment and move[d] on to the final stage. From there, it’s only a few months, possibly a few weeks before they get enough enriched uranium for the first bomb.”
He said his information was not based on secret information or military intelligence but International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reports.
Behind the scenes, Mossad took a different view. In a report shared with South African spies on 22 October 2012 – but likely written earlier – it conceded that Iran was “working to close gaps in areas that appear legitimate, such as enrichment reactors, which will reduce the time required to produce weapons from the time the instruction is actually given”.
But the report also states that Iran “does not appear to be ready” to enrich uranium to the higher levels necessary for nuclear weapons. To build a bomb requires enrichment to 90%. Mossad estimated that Iran then had “about 100kg of material enriched to 20%” (which was later diluted or converted under the terms of the 2013 Geneva agreement). Iran has always said it is developing a nuclear programme for civilian energy purposes.
Last week, Netanyahu’s office repeated the claim that “Iran is closer than ever today to obtaining enriched material for a nuclear bomb” in a statement in response to an IAEA report.
A senior Israeli government official said there was no contradiction between Netanyahu’s statements on the Iranian nuclear threat and “the quotes in your story – allegedly from Israeli intelligence”. Both the prime minister and Mossad said Iran was enriching uranium in order to produce weapons, he added.
“Israel believes the proposed nuclear deal with Iran is a bad deal, for it enables the world’s foremost terror state to create capabilities to produce the elements necessary for a nuclear bomb,” he said.
However, Mossad had been at odds with Netanyahu on Iran before. The former Mossad chief Meir Dagan, who left office in December 2010, let it be known that he had opposed an order from Netanyahu to prepare a military attack on Iran.
Other members of Israel’s security establishment were riled by Netanyahu’s rhetoric on the Iranian nuclear threat and his advocacy of military confrontation. In April 2012, a former head of Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, accused Netanyahu of “messianic” political leadership for pressing for military action, saying he and the then defence minister, Ehud Barak, were misleading the public on the Iran issue. Benny Gantz, the Israeli military chief of staff, said decisions on tackling Iran “must be made carefully, out of historic responsibility but without hysteria”.
There were also suspicions in Washington that Netanyahu was seeking to bounce Obama into taking a more hawkish line on Iran.
A few days before Netanyahu’s speech to the UN, the then US defence secretary, Leon Panetta, accused the Israeli prime minister of trying to force the US into a corner. “The fact is … presidents of the United States, prime ministers of Israel or any other country … don’t have, you know, a bunch of little red lines that determine their decisions,” he said.
“What they have are facts that are presented to them about what a country is up to, and then they weigh what kind of action is needed in order to deal with that situation. I mean, that’s the real world. Red lines are kind of political arguments that are used to try to put people in a corner.”

Netanyahu has rejected two-state solution

Netanyahu has rejected two-state solution - Al-Monitor: the Pulse of the Middle East

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al-monitor.com - The March 3 speech by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the US Congress is expected to focus on the Iranian threat, but the Israeli public — and the American one, for that matter — probably also...

Palestinians call on PA to cancel Israeli gas deal

Palestinians call on PA to cancel Israeli gas deal

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middleeasteye.net - Ramallah, Occupied Palestinian Territories – Palestinian civil society leaders and politicians have called on the Palestinian Authority to pull its backing from a $1.2bn deal that would see Israeli...

Texas Republican Whines About State’s First Gay Marriage, Has Been Married FIVE Times

Addicting Info – Texas Republican Whines About State’s First Gay Marriage, Has Been Married FIVE Times

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Germany Files War Crimes Charges Against Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld And Other CIA Officials

he European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights has filed a criminal complaint against U.S. torture program architects and members of the Bush Administration. The organization has accused CIA director George Tenet and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld of war crimes and they’ve called for a German prosecutor to conduct an immediate investigation.

This move follows the release of the damning Senate report on CIA torture that includes the case of German citizen Khalid El-Masri, who was captured in 2004 by CIA agents in a case of mistaken identity. The report revealed the shocking contrast of democracy and corruption.

Bizarrely, the only person involved with the CIA torture program who has been charged with a crime is the man who exposed the war crimes — whistleblower John Kiriakou.

The relevant parties in this case have given an extensive interview to Democracy Now…

Read more… (liberalamerica.org)

The European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights has filed a criminal complaint against U.S. torture program architects and members of the Bush Administration. The organization has accused CIA director George Tenet and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld of war crimes and they’ve called for a German prosecutor to conduct an immediate investigation.

This move follows the release of the damning Senate report on CIA torture that includes the case of German citizen Khalid El-Masri, who was captured in 2004 by CIA agents in a case of mistaken identity. The report revealed the shocking contrast of democracy and corruption.

Bizarrely, the only person involved with the CIA torture program who has been charged with a crime is the man who exposed the war crimes — whistleblower John Kiriakou.

The relevant parties in this case have given an extensive interview to Democracy Now. Some of the important points are below.

Wolfgang Kaleck, the general secretary of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights and the author ofInternational Prosecution of Human Rights Crimes said this:

“By investigating members of the Bush administration, Germany can help to ensure that those responsible for abduction, abuse and illegal detention do not go unpunished.”

Michael Ratner, president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights and chairman of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights said this:

“I strongly disagree that Bush, Cheney, et al., would have a defense. This wasn’t like these memos just appeared independently from the Justice Department. These memos were facilitated by the very people — Cheney, etc. — who we believe should be indicted. This was part of a conspiracy so they could get away with torture. But that’s not the subject here now.”

“Secondly, whatever we think of those memos, they’re of uselessness in Europe. Europe doesn’t accept this, quote, ‘golden shield’ of a legal defense. Either it’s torture or it’s not. Either you did it or you didn’t. And that’s one of the reasons, among others, why we’re going to Europe and why we went to Europe to bring these cases through the European Center.”

http://beforeitsnews.com/alternative/2014/12/germany-files-war-crimes-charges-against-bush-cheney-rumsfeld-and-other-cia-officials-3081838.html

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Boehner’s worst failure yet: Incompetence, near-shutdown & sorry state of GOP “governance”

Speaker gets bailed out by Dems (again) after GOP rebukes him on DHS funding. Here's the bad news going forward

John Boehner (Credit: Reuters/Jonathan Ernst)

On Friday afternoon, just a few short hours before the Department Homeland Security was set to shut down, the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives scheduled a vote to grant DHS three more weeks of funding. The idea was to buy John Boehner some time to do… something. The legislative impasse that led us to the precipice of the shutdown was created by Boehner, who passed a bill tying DHS appropriations to the rollback of President Obama’s immigration executive actions. He spent several weeks insisting that the House had “done its job” and would not pass any new legislation funding DHS. But Senate Republicans and Democrats came together to pass a clean DHS funding bill, which forced Boehner to once again act. Rather than bow to political reality and take the only route available to him to actually fund the agency, Boehner opted to prolong the agony and punt.

And he couldn’t even do that. The three-week continuing resolution failed when over 50 conservative Republicans voted against it, rebuking Boehner and the leadership and sending the entire process into utter chaos with less than half a day remaining until the shutdown.

As has happened so many times over the last four years, the rest of the Congressional leadership was impelled to overcome Boehner’s incompetence and cobble together a last-minute solution. Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid pushed a one-week CR through the Senate late Friday night, and Nancy Pelosi instructed House Democrats to support its passage, with the promise from Boehner that the House would pass a clean, long-term DHS funding bill this week. The one-week bill passed with the overwhelming support of Democrats, and Obama signed it.

So, for all intents and purposes, the House minority leader was calling the shots last Friday, determining which legislation would pass and mapping out future votes. Boehner was along for the ride, keeping a low profile with the rest of the Republican leadership while the Democrats held press briefings sketching out the way forward. It’d be embarrassing enough of this had never happened before, but it’s getting difficult to keep track of how many times Pelosi has had to bail out Boehner. That it is still happening despite the fact that Boehner is now sitting on one of the largest Congressional majorities in decades is about as damning an indictment of his speakership as one could ask for.

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And that spells real trouble going forward. The story of the first two months of the all-Republican Congress has been complete dysfunction and the inability to perform the rudimentary tasks of government. The Republicans are fighting amongst themselves and venting obvious frustration with Boehner’s shambolic approach to governing. On Friday night, McConnell passed the one-week CR and then immediately adjourned the Senate for the weekend – putting all the pressure to act on Boehner and sending a clear message that he’s done with this fight. Earlier in the day, Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL) pleaded with House Republicans to stop the madness. “Hopefully we’re gonna end the attaching of bullshit to essential items of the government,” he said.

But the DHS finding fight is just the first test of basic governance confronting the Republican Congress. Sometime later this year the U.S. is going to bump up against the debt limit, and there’s an excellent chance that the debt limit renewal will coincide with the next appropriations fight (the “Cromnibus,” passed last December, only funded government operations through this September). The difficulty the Republicans have had working in concert to fund a single department doesn’t bode well for a combination debt limit/government funding showdown (with the attendant threats of default and shutdown).

But before we even get to that point, there’s a chance the Republican Congress will have to deal with the potentially catastrophic fallout from the King v. Burwell decision. If the Supreme Court strikes down the Affordable Care Act’s subsidies in 37 states, Republicans will be under intense pressure to do something to mitigate the damage. Can anyone credibly argue that Congress is up to the task when the Speaker of the House has little to no control over one-fifth of his caucus?

And, of course, the DHS funding fight still has to be resolved. Congress bought themselves an extra week, and Democrats agreed to the extension with the thinking that cold political logic and a sense of self-preservation will finally push Boehner to give in and fund the agency without strings. But Boehner’s capacity for illogical and irrational behavior is why they’re in this situation to begin with. Boehner will eventually cave, but there’s no guarantee when that will happen.

And really this fight never should have happened in the first place. From the moment of its inception, the Republican strategy was bound to fail. But the leaders in both houses of Congress plowed ahead because they had no idea what else to do, and now they’re being dragged along as the Democrats push through last-minute legislative patches to keep the lights on at DHS. There are a lot of words to describe that process, but “governance” is not one of them.

http://www.salon.com/2015/03/02/boehners_worst_failure_yet_incompetence_near_shutdown_sorry_state_of_gop_governance/

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10 Sexiest Cities In America

10 Sexiest Cities In America (Guess Which State Has 8 Of Them!)

By Kait Smith

They say everything is more relaxed in California. Maybe it's because they have so much sex.

With the extreme sexualization of pretty much everything in our culture — from toddlers inbeauty pageants to commercials about eating salad — I'd think it's safe to assume that America cares about sex.

But alas, it's true what they say about making assumptions. Thanks to an investigation fromChemistry.com, it was discovered that people in certain geographic areas value sexy timemuch more than in other regions of the country. Sadly, as someone born in one of these unsexy cities, the odds are not ever in my favor. The dating website took results from more than 10 million surveys and determined which areas felt sex was the most important, and which could seemingly care less.

 

Here are the top 10 cities that value sex as an essential part of a relationship:

1. Venice, CA
2. Santa Monica, CA
3. Newport Beach, CA
4. West Hollywood, CA
5. West Los Angeles, CA
6. Woodland Hills, CA
7. Miami Beach, FL
8. Redondo Beach, CA
9. Hoboken, NJ
10. San Francisco, CA

For those rough on geography, let me point out something amazing: Eight of those cities are in California. Is it all the beaches full of bikini bodies, or maybe the "420?" In any case, people in the top 10 cities that value sex the least — like Lubbock, TX; Schenectady, NY; and Norfolk, VA — could learn a thing or two from the Golden Coast.

Read Dr. Helen Fisher's, Chemistry.com's chief scientific advisor, explanation of why some cities care more about sex: Top 10 Cities That Value Sex The Most (And Least) In America

US Police Arrest Five Anti-Israel Activists

US Police Arrest Five Anti-Israel Activists

Al-Akhbar | March 2, 2015

Five activists were arrested Sunday in the American capital for demonstrating outside the Washington Convention Center where the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a well-known pro-Israeli lobby, was holding its annual policy conference.
Believed to be one of the largest pro-Israeli gatherings, the AIPAC policy conference kicked off on Sunday, and will last for three days.
A group of protesters mobilized by an anti-war group known as CODEPINK or Women for Peace on social media under the hashtag #ShutDownAIPAC tried to block the entrance to the convention center. Several civil society organizations, including Jewish ones, joined the demonstration.
Some protesters were waving flags of Hezbollah, a Lebanese resistance movement against Israel which is listed as a “terrorist organization” by the US.
Israel occupied parts of Lebanon for 22 years until 2000 and the two countries are still technically at war.
The latest Israeli war on Lebanon in the summer of 2006 killed more than 1,200 Lebanese, most of them civilians, and 160 Israelis, most of them soldiers.
“The purpose of the rally was to draw attention to this organization’s role as a special interest lobby that maintains a dangerous stranglehold over US policies and diverts US tax dollars from American needs and into Israeli militarism,” a statement by CODEPINK read.
The activists were violently removed by police from the front of the Washington Convention Center while chanting: “Netanyahu, War Criminal! Free, Free, Palestine!”
“We’re here to say that this organization is on the path of war,” one of the protest organizers, Medea Benjamin told Anadolu news agency. … Full article

Ferguson police levied excessive traffic fines on blacks – DOJ leak

Ferguson police levied excessive traffic fines on blacks – DOJ leak

RT | March 2, 2015

A US Department of Justice report, to be released this week, alleges that Ferguson police are guilty of disproportional fining and arresting African-American residents to balance the town’s budget, making the lives of those unable to pay a nightmare.
Officials familiar with the report told The New York Times that it will be “highly critical” of police practices in the town, where the majority of the population is black but the police department and local government are mostly white.
Traffic fines are the town’s second largest source of income, after sales tax. The DoJ report says that financial incentives are driving law enforcement to continue unfair policies, predominantly targeting African-Americans.
In 2013, African-Americans accounted for 86 percent of traffic stops, while making up 63 percent of Ferguson’s population.
For those too poor to pay their tickets, routine traffic stops in Ferguson could end up in repeated imprisonment due to mounting fines.
“Because such systems do not account for individual circumstances of the accused, they essentially mandate pretrial detention for anyone who is too poor to pay the predetermined fee,” the NYT cited the top civil rights prosecutor supervising the Ferguson inquiry at the Justice Department, Vanita Gupta.
Grievances against the city administration have been accumulating for years before finally erupting in the form of violent protests in August 2014, sparked by a killing of an unarmed African-American young man, Michael Brown, by white police officer Darren Wilson on August 9.
The DoJ report will likely result in significant changes inside the Ferguson Police Department, because local officials will have to either negotiate a settlement with the DoJ or be sued by the department on civil rights charges.
The Justice Department recently filed a similar lawsuit against the city of Clanton, Alabama, which imprisoned poor debtors unable to pay fines.
The report is not expected to dig specifically into racial motivations behind Ferguson police concentrating their activities on African-Americans, but it will criticize police tactics as having a “disparate impact” on the African-American majority, which could be avoided.
Last summer, when the DoJ prepared a report into similar activities by the police department in Newark, it acknowledged that local law enforcement stopped African-Americans significantly more often than whites, meaning that African-Americans “bore the brunt” of the unconstitutional police practices taking root in the city.
“This disparity is stark and unremitting,” the Justice Department wrote in that report.
READ MORE:
Ferguson sued for municipal fines & jailing those who can’t pay
US jail system stacked against poor, ill nonviolent offenders – report

LAPD officers shoot, kill homeless man on skid row

Los Angeles Times | March 1, 2015 | 5:50 PM

In a dramatic confrontation caught on video, Los Angeles police shot and killed a homeless man in the heart of downtown's skid row Sunday.
Read more>>

VA Refuses to Recognize Veteran’s Wife and Child

VA Refuses to Recognize Veteran’s Wife and Child

Posted: 01 Mar 2015 04:05 AM PST

The Department of Veterans Affairs has frozen the disabled veteran’s benefits until she pays back the full amount the VA mistakenly awarded for her wife and child.
read more

Declassified: Shin Bet knew Israel Kastner was targeted in cover up of collaboration with Nazis

Eitan Altman

Was Israeli government involved in the assassination of Kastner so as to silence the debate on the collaboration of the zionist leadership with the Nazis? See http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/.premium-1.636130

Declassified: Shin Bet knew Israel Kastner was targeted

Just-released 1956 cabinet minutes on assassination of journalist and public figure who was accused of collaborating with the Nazis only deepen the mystery surrounding one of stormiest affairs in country's history.

By Ofer Aderet | Jan. 9, 2015 | 3:01 AM

Israel Kastner, assassinated in 1957 by Lehi activists.

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Did the Shin Bet seek to silence Israel Kastner?

By Tom Segev | Dec. 11, 2014 | 1:47 PM

Israel Kastner vs. Hannah Szenes: Who was really the hero during the Holocaust?

By Dan Laor | Nov. 9, 2013 | 1:23 PM |  6

Paragraph 380 of the minutes of the cabinet meeting of March 11, 1957 remain classified to this day. Its heading: “Assassination of Dr. I. Kastner,” could explain why. “Dr. Kastner’s assassins have been found and confessed,” Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion said at the start of the meeting. “The individual who did the shooting carried out the work of others. There is an organization that appointed him to shoot … he did not do it of his own accord.”

Portions of the 20 pages of minutes are being published here for the first time, after the head of the State Archive, Dr. Ya’akov Lozowick, acceded to Haaretz’s request to open them to the public, except for a few sentences that are still censored.

A look at the minutes only deepens the mystery surrounding one of the stormiest affairs in Israel’s history, and could strengthen the conjecture of some that the Shin Bet security service was involved in the murder of Kastner, one of the most controversial figures in the history of the state.

The minutes raise difficult questions, such as why the head of the intelligence services, Isser Harel, requested that the murderers be pardoned before they had finished out their prison terms. Why was the murder not stopped even though the Shin Bet knew the plan was afoot. Why was the murderer not put on trial earlier, for distributing defamatory leaflets?

Assassin's new book

In conversation with Kastner’s daughter, Suzi Kastner, and from reading the new book by the assassin, Ze’ev Eckstein, another question comes up: Who was the other man who shot Kastner to confirm the kill?

Dr. Israel Kastner, a journalist and public figure, was shot at the entrance to his Tel Aviv home on March 4, 1957 and died of his wounds 11 days later. Two years earlier, the Tel Aviv District Court ruled that Kastner had “sold his soul to the devil,” collaborated with the Nazis and indirectly contributed to the destruction of Hungarian Jewry in return for the saving of some 1,700 “distinguished” Jews. Ten months after the murder, the Supreme Court cleared his name, but determined that he had assisted Nazis to escape their punishment after the war.

Harel told the cabinet that the intelligence services knew of the plan to kill Kastner and had arrested eight people who were “among potential terrorists.” One of them, who was convicted of the murder and imprisoned, was Eckstein. Harel told the cabinet that Eckstein had taken part in a 1955 plan to assassinate Kastner that did not go forward.

Harel’s statements to the cabinet do not conform to the version he related in his book, “The Truth About the Kastner Murder,” published in Hebrew in 1985. There, the murder was presented as a surprise. “It was clear that the assassination was planned in a small, very closed group and kept a deep secret among the planners and those who carried out the plan,” he wrote.

Dr. Yitzhak Katzir, Kastner’s nephew, told Haaretz this week that he knew of no concrete warning that his uncle would be murdered. However, he said, “Friends warned him that he was a candidate for assassination, along the lines of, ‘The bullet with your name on it is in the gun barrel.’”

Kastner was given a bodyguard by the Shin Bet, who “for some reason was pulled off a few days before the murder,” Katzir said, adding that this fact encouraged those who believed in a conspiracy theory involving the Shin Bet.

And a related, even more explosive question is whether the organization itself was involved with various conspiracy theories promulgated over the years. To understand them, it must be recalled that Eckstein, the assassin, worked as an informant for the Shin Bet before the murder.

Harel told the cabinet, according to the minutes, that ties with Eckstein were cut off before the murder, once it was realized that he was a double agent. “Two years ago, he called the police of his own accord and proposed working against the underground,” Harel said at the time, adding, “But later it became clear that this man came to the police with bad intentions, that is, he was guided in this matter by the members of the underground.”

Killer: 'Woe is me'

Eckstein, now 81, confirms these statements in his recent book “Smichat Tla’im” (“Quilt Blanket”) (Carmel Publishing House, 2014). “Little by little, without feeling how the change was taking place in my thoughts, in my opinions – and finally in my desires as well – the understanding grew stronger in me that when I spy and inform for ‘ours’ against ‘them,’ I am lying in my soul,” Eckstein wrote. He described how he became entranced with the underground against whom he was sent to spy. “They knew they were surrounded by agents and provocateurs, and I understood that if I wanted to be part of them, I had to bring them a suitable ‘dowry’ and thus – woe is me – I became the servant of two masters.”

Harel told the cabinet about Eckstein’s arrest for handing out leaflets defaming Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court Judge Moshe Peretz, who was about to find Kastner innocent of perjury in his trial.

Harel told the ministers that the reason Eckstein was not tried was a lack of evidence, and because the justice minister feared people would say he was a provocateur.

But in his book, Harel tells it differently. “The unfortunate decision not to try the people who initiated and distributed the leaflet … was what doubtless gave rise to the diabolical idea that Kastner’s murder would be carried out by Eckstein, … the man who could claim if arrested that he had carried out the despicable act on orders of the security service.” In this way, Harel wrote, the planners of the murder hoped to kill two birds with one stone – kill Kastner, whom they hated … and pin it on the political and government establishment.

Eckstein, in his book, alludes to another person’s involvement in the murder. “Another shot thundered at the very instant of my third shot, followed by agonizing cries. Apparently someone was there, in any event, carried out confirmation of the kill and, as a true professional, did not miss even in the dark.”

Kastner’s daughter told a similar story this week. She says she remembers clearly “a torn piece of paper, a small note,” on which the family took down Kastner’s words as he was taken to the hospital, which spoke of another person who was involved in the shooting. That person was never arrested.

“My father got out of the car. Eckstein tried to shoot him and it didn’t work. My father fled, ran into the building, but somebody prevented him from going in. He ran out again, and took a bullet in the back,” Suzi Kastner says, recalling her father’s words, adding, “Regretfully, I do not remember today where I laid that piece of paper.”

Suzi Kastner says she believes the mysterious other man, who confirmed the kill, was a Shin Bet agent, and that a senior Shin Bet official was behind the murder, to take revenge on Kastner for not saving his family in the Holocaust.

Still censored in the cabinet minutes are statements by Police Minister Shalom Sheetrit, to which Harel responded: “There is proof that they assassinated Kastner.” Did Sheetrit doubt that Eckstein and his accomplices, Dan Shemer and Yosef Menkes, were the actual murderers, and raise the possibility that the Shin Bet had assassinated Kastner?

Harel made a surprising suggestion to the cabinet: “If we can release the young men on bail by the time the trial ends and they behave all right, the judge will make his ruling, but they can be pardoned later.”

Indeed, in 1963, only six years after the murder, the three were pardoned and released. According to Prof. Yehiam Weitz, in a 1997 book about the Kastner trial, there was no conspiracy here. Rather, the pardon was pushed forward by a former Lehi underground member, Yehoshua Cohen, a member of Kibbutz Sde Boker who was very close to Ben-Gurion.

“Many questions, and eventually a great many questions, have been gathered in the reservoir on questions-not-asked, and if they were asked, they were not answered,” Eckstein wrote in his book.

‘Grand show’

In February of 1963, when Ben-Gurion met with the family to inform them he had decided to pardon the murderers, he said: “The daughter is completely at peace with the release.” But Suzi Kastner is still not at peace. “Everything was a farce. …Even while in the midst of talking to him I had all kinds of doubts,” she said this week, referring to Ben-Gurion. About 17 at the time of her father’s murder, she says, “I went to the army, I got married, the years went by.” Today she is sure that the conversation with Ben-Gurion was part of a grand show to hide the truth of her father’s murder.