Child Miners

The Yaa-ya-guaa tin mine in Bolivia has been active for 100 years.

A touching sequel follows the developments in the life of Bolivian child miners. The tunnel is endless and beginning to take its toll.

LATEST NEWS

• US admits Afghan civilian deaths.

“”” Far more civilians and children were killed in several US air raids on a village in Afghanistan in August that was first acknowledged.US officials had maintained only about seven civilians had died in the attacks on Azizabad in western Afghanistan on August 22.The Afghan government and UN officials said at the time about 90 had been killed.”Our investigation determined approximately 55 persons were killed – 33 civilian and 22 anti-coalition militants”  a summary of an investigation by US brigadier general Michael Callan. Videos showed the bodies of 12 children, three women and eight men were laid out for burial in the village mosque the day after the fighting, the report said.The incident brought angry recriminations from Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, and added to fears that support for the US military in Afghanistan was being further undermined by repeated cases of civilian casualties at the hands of US-led forces.”We were holding a prayer ceremony when the bombs started to fall … it was heavy bombardment. The whole village was on fire and about 90 were killed,” Abdul Rasheed, the brother of one of the dead, said.

More than 500 civilians have been killed during military operations by foreign forces so far this year, according to the Afghan government and some aid groups. “”” [SOURCE]

~~~

• ‘US missiles’ hit Pakistan village

“”” At least four people have been killed by a suspected US drone that fired two missiles into a Pakistani tribal area bordering Afghanistan, security officials say.According to a local resident in Sam, two big explosions had shaken the village.
US-operated pilotless drones have stepped up strikes in Pakistan since the beginning of September, firing missiles at suspected fighters 11 times and killing dozens of people, Pakistani security officials have said. “”” [SOURCE]

~~~

• Israel seals off Acre after clashes

“””

“Crowds have gathered in several neighbourhoods and police reinforcements have been deployed in order to avoid new clashes.Trouble began in Acre on Wednesday after an Arab drove into a Jewish neighborhood on Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement when traffic in Israel largely comes to a halt. A group of Jewish youths assaulted the Arab driver accusing him of deliberately disrupting the sanctity of Yom Kippur, a day when

Israeli Settlers Terror (BBC NEWS)

“They don’t want us to stay on our land. But we won’t leave. We’ll die here. It’s ours,”…

That’s what the Palestinian woman said after being hospitalized for three days because some rotten “Israeli settlers” have beat the hell out of her, leaving her with a shattered cheeckbone. Not just that but they beat her husband and her son with baseball bats. What’d that woman do? Utterly nothing!!!

The Israeli police, though promised to investigate this incident, did nothing. Why? Because their job, exclusively, invloves protecting Israeli settlers from Palestinians. The poor guys don’t have the “jurisdiction” to protect Palestinians from Israeli settlers and that means they can do nothing about the incident.

Come September (by Arundhati Roy) -text

[EN]

Transcription of Arundhati Roy reading

and Ms. Roy and Howard Zinn in conversation

Lensic Performing Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico(18 September 2002).

“””

Recently, those who have criticized the actions of the U.S. government (myself included) have been called “anti-American.” Anti-Americanism is in the process of being consecrated into an ideology.

The term “anti-American” is usually used by the American establishment to discredit and, not falsely – but shall we say inaccurately – define its critics. Once someone is branded anti-American, the chances are that he or she will be judged before they are heard, and the argument will be lost in the welter of bruised national pride.

But what does the term “anti-American” mean? Does it mean you are anti-jazz? Or that you’re opposed to freedom of speech? That you don’t delight in Toni Morrison or John Updike? That you have a quarrel with giant sequoias? Does it mean that you don’t admire the hundreds of thousands of American citizens who marched against nuclear weapons, or the thousands of war resisters who forced their government to withdraw from Vietnam? Does it mean that you hate all Americans?

This sly conflation of America’s culture, music, literature, the breathtaking physical beauty of the land, the ordinary pleasures of ordinary people with criticism of the U.S. government’s foreign policy (about which, thanks to America’s “free press”, sadly most Americans know very little) is a deliberate and extremely effective strategy. It’s like a retreating army taking cover in a heavily populated city, hoping that the prospect of hitting civilian targets will deter enemy fire.

But there are many Americans who would be mortified to be associated with their government’s policies. The most scholarly, scathing, incisive, hilarious critiques of the hypocrisy and the contradictions in U.S. government policy come from American citizens. When the rest of the world wants to know what the U.S. government is up to, we turn to Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, Howard Zinn, Ed Herman, Amy Goodman, Michael Albert, Chalmers Johnson, William Blum and Anthony Amove to tell us what’s really going on.

Similarly, in India, not hundreds, but millions of us would be ashamed and offended if we were in any way implicated with the present Indian government’s fascist policies which, apart from the perpetration of State terrorism in the valley of Kashmir (in the name of fighting terrorism), have also turned a blind eye to the recent state-supervised progrom against Muslims in Gujarat. It would be absurd to think that those who criticize the Indian government are “anti-Indian” – although the government itself never hesitates to take that line. It is dangerous to cede to the Indian government or the American government or anyone for that matter, the right to define what “India” or “America” are or ought to be.

To call someone “anti-American”, indeed to be anti-American, (or for that matter, anti-Indian or anti-Timbuktuan) is not just racist, it’s a failure of the imagination. An inability to see the world in terms other than those the establishment has set out for you. If you’re not a Bushie you’re a Taliban. If you don’t love us, you hate us. If you’re not Good, you’re Evil. If you’re not with us, you’re with the terrorists.

Last year, like many others, I too made the mistake of scoffing at this post- September 11th rhetoric, dismissing it as foolish and arrogant. But I’ve realized it’s not foolish at all. It’s actually a canny recruitment drive for a misconceived, dangerous war. Everyday I’m taken aback at how many people believe that opposing the war in Afghanistan amounts to supporting terrorism, of voting for the Taliban. Now that the initial aim of the war – capturing Osama bin Laden (dead or alive) – seems to have run into bad weather, the goalposts have been moved. It’s being made out that the whole point of the war was to topple the Taliban regime and liberate Afghan women from their burqas, we are being asked to believe that the U.S. marines are actually on a feminist mission. (If so, will their next stop be America’s military ally Saudi Arabia?) Think of it this way: in India there are some pretty reprehensible social practices against “untouchables”, against Christians and Muslims, against women. Pakistan and Bangladesh have even worse ways of dealing with minority communities and women. Should they be bombed? Should Delhi, Islamabad and Dhaka be destroyed? Is it possible to bomb bigotry out of India? Can we bomb our way to a feminist paradise? Is that how women won the vote in the U.S? Or how slavery was abolished? Can we win redress for the genocide of the millions of Native Americans upon whose corpses the United States was founded by bombing Santa Fe?

None of us need anniversaries to remind us of what we cannot forget. So it’s no more than co-incidence that I happen to be here, on American soil, in September – this month of dreadful anniversaries. Uppermost on everybody’s mind of course, particularly here in America, is the horror of what has come to be known as 9/11. Nearly three thousand civilians lost their lives in that lethal terrorist strike. The grief is still deep. The rage still sharp. The tears have not dried. And a strange, deadly war is raging around the world. Yet, each person who has lost a loved one surely knows secretly, deeply, that no war, no act of revenge, no daisy-cutters dropped on someone else’s loved ones or someone else’s children, will blunt the edges of their pain or bring their own loved ones back. War cannot avenge those who have died. War is only a brutal desecration of their memory.

To fuel yet another war – this time against Iraq – by cynically manipulating people’s grief, by packaging it for TV specials sponsored by corporations selling detergent and running shoes, is to cheapen and devalue grief, to drain it of meaning. What we are seeing now is a vulgar display of the business of grief, the commerce of grief, the pillaging of even the most private human feelings for political purpose. It is a terrible, violent thing for a State to do to its people… “””

COME SEPTEMBER VIDEO >>> CLICK HERE

Israel accused of targeting Gazan children

The Israeli military is facing accusations from a human rights group that it is responsible for civilian deaths.
And for deliberately targeting children in Gaza.

Violence at West Bank olive harvest

[EN only]

“”” The Israeli police responded to the situation on Saturday by stopping the harvest.The scuffle near the town of Hebron was the latest in a series of incidents blamed on settlers trying to disrupt the annual harvest which provides a livelihood for many Palestinians.Jewish settlers have been caught on camera punching and kicking two news photographers and a British woman who was helping Palestinians pick olives near a West Bank town.

The settlers claim the trees are on Israeli land and the harvest is illegal.

Reuters television footage showed four settlers heading into a grove next to an illegal Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank where several Israeli, Palestinian and foreign peace activists were harvesting.

The settlers punched and kicked Abed Hashlamoun, a photographer for the European Pressphoto Agency (EPA), leaving a bloody scratch beneath one eye.

They also assaulted his brother, Nayef Hashlamoun, a Reuters photographer.

Janet Benvie, a British activist with Christian Peacemaker Teams, sustained a scratch to her lip after a scuffle with a settler who had grabbed a camera.

Benvie told Reuters television: “When I went to get the camera, one of the settlers punched me in the face.” Footage showed Israeli soldiers arriving to break up the scuffle, but Benvie said they allowed the settlers to leave.Al Jazeera’s correspondent in Ramallah, Nour Odeh, said: “This is not the first time … olive harvest season in the occupied West Bank sees a peak in settler attacks against Palestinian farmers.

“There are more than one million olive trees belonging to Palestinian farmers feeding about 100,000 Palestinians in the West Bank. Most of these groves border the Israeli settlements which are, of course, illegal by international law.

“Picking these olives often requires the permission of the Israeli authorities, but in any case it is a chance for increased friction between the farmers and Israeli settlers.”

Danny Poleg, a spokesman for the Israeli police in the West Bank said the area had been declared a closed military zone, effectively stopping the harvest.
Poleg said settlers and Palestinians had thrown stones at each other at the site.
Issa Amro, a Palestinian who works for the Israeli human rights group B’tselem, denied that any stones had been thrown and said police arrived after the scuffle had ended.
Poleg said no settlers had been arrested because no formal complaint had been lodged.
Three Israelis at the grove to help Palestinians with the harvest were later held for questioning after they refused police orders to leave, Poleg said. “””

MIDEAST: Breaking the Silence (by Cherrie Heywood)

[EN]

“”” RAMALLAH, West Bank, Oct 2 (IPS) – An Israeli police commander has called them “provocateurs”, “militants”, and, “lawbreakers”. Earlier in the year the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) decided that their presence in the city of Hebron, 30km south of Jerusalem in the Palestinian West Bank, constituted a security threat and banned them from the city, stating that any member of the organisation caught there would be expelled forthwith.

They’ve been spat at, stoned and assaulted, but these former members of the IDF, many of whom served in Hebron, are determined to expose what is being done in their name and in the name of Israel’s security.

Breaking the Silence (BTS) was co-founded in 2004 by Yehuda Shaul, 26, an Israeli soldier who served for nearly three years in the volatile city of Hebron.

The organisation’s main aim is to break the silence and taboo surrounding the behaviour of Israeli soldiers in the Palestinian territories in an endeavour to enlighten ordinary Israelis on what happens behind the scenes as their sons and daughters, husbands and wives serve the Jewish state.

Hebron is an especially tense city as clashes break out frequently between the city’s approximately 600 illegal Israeli settlers, protected by over a thousand Israeli soldiers, living amongst a Palestinian population of about 170,000.

The Israeli settlement of Kiryat Arba in Hebron used to be the home of the U.S. doctor and immigrant Baruch Goldstein, who mowed down 29 Muslim worshippers as they prayed in the Ibrahimi Mosque during the holy month of Ramadan in 1994. Survivors beat him to death.

BTS has used the anonymous testimony of more than 500 Israeli soldiers who served in the Palestinian territories to hold photo-exhibitions as well as conduct fact-finding tours of Hebron for the Israeli public.

Jerusalem-born Shaul was so horrified by what he witnessed and the kind of person he felt he was turning into that he decided to

B’Tselem video reports – II –

The Rashid family lives in a cave in the village of Haribat a-Nabi in the Southern Hebron Hills – right next to the Separation Barrier. In September 2007 the family made a video tape to introduce Israelis to their home and way of life. The tape also presents one of the children reading a letter to Israelis, and soldiers detaining farmers near the cave during the month of Ramadan, captured on film by the children.

~~~

Greenhouses owned by Abed-el Carim Kahaled were neglected for four months, until he received a permit to go through the gate in the barrier. As a result, the crop was 50% of its size in previous years.

~~~

The Bidu-Qatanna village bloc, in Ramallah District, suffers from a severe water shortage, as do many other areas in the Occupied Territories . Mekorot, the Israeli water company, supplies only one-half of the water consumed by the 50,000 villagers of this area. To meet the rest of their water needs, the villagers have to buy water from private suppliers at a much higher price and store it in unsanitary conditions. As a result, the residents are forced to consume poor-quality water and use it in small quantities. Meanwhile, the 3,000 settlers in the nearby settlement of Har Adar receive an unlimited amount of water, which comes from the same reservoir.

~~~

The Jundiyeh family live in a-Tuba, one of the most remote areas in the South Hebron Hills. In this first attempt at filming by the Jundiyeh children – reflected in the shaking camera – the children film settlers from the nearby Ma’on settlement (wrapped in white prayer cloths) throwing stones at them on their land (11 Aug. 07). When the settlers spot the camera, they cover their faces and retreat.

Poverty in Haiti spawns child slavery

Haiti is one of the poorest countries in the western hemisphere and the poverty has fuelled restavek, a system of domestic servitude of hundreds of thousands of children that is tantamount to modern-day slavery.The country’s government acknowledges that child slaves exist but says it is part of the culture.

UNFINISHED DREAMS (by Cristian Movila)

ROMANIAN CHILDREN NEED HELP ! HELP THEM ! STOP CANCER ! HELP THE MARIE CURIE HOSPITAL TO CURE THEM ! THEY STILL HAVE A CHANCE !

HELP THIS LITTLE ANGELS !

FOR MORE ABOUT THIS …

>>> CLICK HERE <<<

FOR HELP AND DONATIONS

>>> CLICK HERE <<<

~~~

STOP CANCER !

.