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Speaking on behalf of AI, Middle East and North Africa Programme Director Malcolm Smart issued a very direct appeal to the Obama administration:

'As the major supplier of weapons to Israel, the USA has a particular obligation to stop any supply that contributes to gross violations of the laws of war and of human rights.
'To a large extent, Israel's military offensive in Gaza was carried out with weapons, munitions and military equipment supplied by the USA and paid for with US taxpayers' money.
'The Obama administration should immediately suspend US military aid to Israel.'

The report also "called on the UN on Monday to launch an immediate investigation into allegations of war crimes by Israel and Hamas during the conflict last month."
Findings of the report - which can be downloaded here (pdf) - include :

Both Israel and Hamas used weapons supplied from abroad to carry out attacks on civilians - thus committing war crimes ...

In their summary of findings on Israeli actions, they note:

As the fighting ended in Gaza last month, Amnesty researchers found fragments and components from munitions used by the Israeli army - including many that are US-made - littering school playgrounds, and in hospitals and people's homes. They comprised artillery and tank shells (including 'flechettes'), remnants from Hellfire and other airborne missiles and large F-16 delivered bombs, as well as still-smouldering, highly incendiary 'white phosphorus' remains from US-made shells.
They also found remnants of a new type of missile, seemingly launched from unmanned 'drones', which explodes large numbers of tiny sharp-edged metal cubes, each between 2mm and 4mm square in size. These lethal, purpose-made shrapnel had penetrated thick metal doors and were embedded deep in concrete walls. They are clearly designed to maximise injury.
Palestinian civilians killed by the metal cubes weapon, says Amnesty, include a 13-year-old girl asleep in bed, two young women on their way to a shelter in search of safety, a 13-year-old boy on his bicycle, eight secondary school students waiting for a school bus, and an entire family sitting in the courtyard of their home.

Charges against Hamas and other Palestinian parties include:

Meanwhile, in southern Israel, Amnesty saw the remains of 'Qassam', Grad, and other indiscriminate rockets fired by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups against civilian areas. These unsophisticated weapons - smuggled into Gaza or constructed from components secretly brought in from abroad - cannot be aimed accurately and do not compare with Israeli weaponry, but have nevertheless caused several Israeli civilian deaths and injuries, and have damaged civilian property.MORE

Full report

Colorado Springs-based Focus on the Family gave $727,250 in cash and services to the anti-gay marriage Proposition 8 campaign in California, according to records released by the California secretary of state, including a $100,000 check in late October, just days before the evangelical media empire announced it planned to lay off nearly 20 percent of its employees. While there has been public scrutiny of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for its attempts to influence the campaign to reverse a California Supreme Court ruling allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry, Focus on the Family and related donors pumped more than six times as much as the Mormon church did into the ProtectMarriage.com campaign, records show.
Altogether, donations supporting Proposition 8 from Focus on the Family, one of its major benefactors and an offshoot lobbying organization totaled more than $1.251 million — just shy of the $1.275 million contributed by ProtectMarriage.com’s largest donor, the Knights of Columbus, the Connecticut-based political arm of the Catholic Church. In addition to $727,250 reported by Focus on the Family, major backer and board member Elsa Prince, the billionaire heiress of Holland, Mich., donated $450,000 to ProtectMarriage.com in two cash chunks and the Washington, D.C.-based Family Research Council, a Christian-right lobbying organization spun off from Focus on the Family and founded in part by Prince’s foundation, chipped in $74,400.
...

The Mormon church donated $189,000 in nonmonetary expenditures — mostly staff time and airline tickets — to help pass the ballot measure, according to the latest disclosure from the California secretary of state. The church remains “under investigation” by the California Fair Political Practices Commission after a complaint was filed against the church by the anti-Proposition 8 group Californians Against Hate, the Salt Lake Tribune reported Monday.
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‘Behind Closed Doors’
U.S. farm and shipping lobbyists have stifled efforts to simplify aid deliveries, leaving Africans to starve when they might have been saved, said Andrew Natsios, a professor at Georgetown University in Washington who led USAID, the Agency for International Development, from 2001 to 2006.

“No one can take the high moral ground against it, so they hide behind closed doors and kill it,” he said. “It’s all done behind the scenes.”

The shortcomings of the half-century-old humanitarian program show how efforts to protect American shareholders can have unintended consequences. After approving $2.62 billion of food aid in June, Congress has since authorized 267 times that much in the $700 billion financial system bailout and begun debate on requests from U.S. automakers for billions more.
Lawmakers this year failed to pass President George W. Bush’s January proposal to buy food closer to starving people rather than shipping American produce. In May, Bush renewed his request to spend 25 percent of the program locally after food riots broke out in Africa, South Asia and the Caribbean.
Companies Benefit
Cargill Inc., Archer Daniels Midland Co. and Bunge Ltd. accounted for 47 percent of 2007 commodities spending for aid, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The program was created in the 1950s, partly to reduce domestic surpluses. The regulations require that almost all the peas, corn and other crops come from American sources, effectively steering the bulk of the business to the biggest food-trading companies.

The rules also stipulate that 75 percent of the food must be transported on U.S.-flagged vessels, benefiting ship operators, including Liberty Maritime Corp., based in Lake Success, New York, and Sealift Inc., of Oyster Bay, New York. In 2007, the program’s shipping contracts were worth $385 million, according to the USDA.

Politics isn’t the only manmade cause of the disaster that befell Ayako and his family in Ethiopia. Dozens of interviews on six continents show that the global food crisis also has roots in the failure by governments of developing countries to invest in agriculture, in a three-fold jump in fertilizer prices over two years and in speculators who doubled bets on grain futures and drove prices to records.

...
ADM, the world’s largest grain processor, spent $1.78 million to lobby Congress and federal agencies though Dec. 3 this year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a non- partisan research group in Washington that tracks spending on campaigns and lobbying. Over the past two decades, the company’s campaign contributions amounted to $8.2 million, 91st among political donors, the center said. ADM declined to comment for this story.
Cargill, a closely held company that is the world’s largest agricultural business, spent $660,000 on lobbying this year, the center said. ADM, Cargill and Bunge lobby on other issues besides the aid programs. Cargill favors the added flexibility of local purchase, spokesman Bill Brady said in an e-mail.
Bunge, the biggest oilseed processor, devoted $395,000 to lobbying, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The company advocates the use of U.S. crops to ensure quality, said Deb Seidel, a company spokeswoman.
‘Support Not There’
“The support is not there in the Congress” to overhaul the system, said Collin Peterson, a Minnesota Democrat who is chairman of the House Agriculture Committee.
Peterson, mentioned as a possible Agriculture Secretary under President-elect Barack Obama, received the second-most donations from crop processors and farm groups among non- presidential candidates in this election cycle, $236,500, according to the center. He ranked behind Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the top Republican on the Senate Agriculture Committee, with $304,349.
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bradhicks

Washington, Moscow and other non-signers say cluster bombs have legitimate military uses such as repelling advancing troop columns. But according to the group Handicap International, 98 percent of cluster-bomb victims are civilians, and 27 percent are children.

The Bush administration has said that a comprehensive ban would hurt world security and endanger U.S. military cooperation on humanitarian work with countries that sign the accord.MORe

Naomi Klein, Chris Hedges, Joe Conason, Robert F Kennedy, Jr. and Naomi Wolf. Five American Thinkers brought together to peer into the under-reported corners of American democracy - where the Constitution is up for grabs. "The Warning" traces the radical steps America had taken toward a new, wholly unconstitutional form of government, a transformation that uses fear, emergency powers and the supremacy of military command to gather power into the office of the Presidency.
These steps lead to a potential tipping point, from democracy to something different. Something ominous.
This is their warning. These are the stories Sottile says he couldn't do in his ten years at the networks. "The Warning" details exactly what is at stake as we move into a new administration.
Sottile is currently seeking theatrical distribution. The film is available right now on the web, at truthtopower.tv. Sottile's also been working for two years to make a film about the Gulf War depleted uranium mess and the health problems our vets are facing - and the depleted uranium disaster we've created in Iraq.

Researchers have long blamed childhood obesity and diabetes, especially in poor neighborhoods, on too much food and too little exercise.

But new findings from a San Antonio study point to another explanation: children living in poverty are obese in part because they don’t eat enough to meet the daily nutritional requirements needed for cell function and metabolism.
A 9-year-old should consume 1,400 to 2,200 calories daily to sustain growth, said Dr. Roberto Trevino, director of the nonprofit Social and Health Research Center. But in the study of 1,400 inner-city children, 44 percent were consuming less than 1,400 calories, and 33 percent were obese.
“They were not overeating,” Trevino said. “This study shows these kids were not eating enough, and when they did eat it was all the wrong things.”
Missing from the children’s diets were four key nutrients: calcium, magnesium, potassium and phosphorus. All play important roles, but magnesium is involved in more than 300 enzymatic reactions in the body that help to spur metabolism and cell function.MORE

Some 691,000 children went hungry in America sometime in 2007, while close to one in eight Americans struggled to feed themselves adequately even before this year's sharp economic downtown, the Agriculture Department reported Monday.

The department's annual report on food security showed that during 2007 the number of children who suffered a substantial disruption in the amount of food they typically eat was more than 50 percent above the 430,000 in 2006 and the largest figure since 716,000 in 1998.

Overall, the 36.2 million adults and children who struggled with hunger during the year was up slightly from 35.5 million in 2006. That was 12.2 percent of Americans who didn't have the money or assistance to get enough food to maintain active, healthy lives.MORE

"My country, right or wrong. When right, to be kept right. When wrong, to be put right."-- spoken by Carl Schurz, during an address he gave at the Anti-Imperialistic Conference in Chicago, October 17, 1899 (the original quote).

If your human rights are not for everybody, they are not rights, they are just privileges. -- Italian doctor Gino Strada, from the documentary "Jung (War) in the Land of the Mujaheddin"

"The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion." -- The Treaty of Tripoli 1796 is an Official US Federal Treaty penned by George Washington and James Adams as Presidents.


"The United States of America should have a foundation free from the influence of clergy."-- George Washington