Die jahrelangen Bedenken der Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika, Bagram der afghanischen Regierung zu übergeben, drehten sich darum, was es bedeuten würde, wenn die Gefangenen in der Folge Zugang zu ordentlichen Gerichten bekommen. Im Nachhinein lässt sich viel leichter erkennen, warum das so war.

In contrast to the situation from 2003 to 2012 when most Palestinian fatalities occurred in the Gaza Strip, in 2013 the majority of Palestinian fatalities occurred in the West Bank. According to the data for the past year, Israeli security forces killed 27 Palestinians in the West Bank in 21 separate incidents and nine Palestinians in the Gaza Strip in seven incidents. (..)

In contrast, in 2012, Israeli security forces killed 8 Palestinians in the West Bank and 246 in the Gaza Strip (including 167 during Operation Pillar of Defense), of whom 104 who were not taking part in the hostilities.

Kerry is due to arrive on Thursday for meetings with the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, and the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, in his 10th visit to the region since March.

The Special Coordinator of the OPCW-UN Joint Mission, Sigrid Kaag, told Reuters in Damascus on Monday that the OPCW is „comfortable in the knowledge that all the work is about to be completed“ but she did not say how long the delay will last.

Kaag said on Sunday the deadline will not be met, citing technical delays, and she said on Monday there had been delays at customs without elaborating further.

Six world powers and Iran have made good progress in expert talks in Geneva on how to roll out last month‘s landmark nuclear deal which obliges Tehran to suspend its most sensitive atom work, a senior Iranian official said on Tuesday.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu seeks social justice for everyone– including animals.

“So many journalists write so many stories, but what happens to the whistleblowers? They’re left swinging in the wind,” Machon said in a speech at the Chaos Communication Congress (CCC) in Hamburg at the weekend. “If they can’t survive the process of coming forward, then we will not have these people.”

NSA catalog pages from video

by: Jacob „@ioerror“ Applebaum

By zooming in on high-resolution face photographs, we were able to recover images of unseen bystanders from reflections in the subjects‘ eyes.

(27.12.) The government’s claim that the program is constitutional rests on a 1979 Supreme Court case, Smith v. Maryland, which held that a robbery suspect had no expectation of privacy — and no Fourth Amendment protection — in the telephone numbers he dialed. Judge Leon found the Smith decision to be inapplicable to a daily, indiscriminate sweep of hundreds of millions of phone records. Judge Pauley, however, said its logic still applied.

The more people look at the ruling last week by Judge William Pauley saying that the NSA‘s bulk metadata collection is legal, the more perplexed they become. We noted multiple problems with the ruling last week, but at almost every turn is evidence that Judge Pauley not only came into the court with his decision already set, but that he took the government‘s claims at face value, even when they were flat-out factually incorrect — and which could have been easily checked. We already noted that Pauley‘s argument that 9/11 could have been prevented with such a metadata collection had been widely debunked, but it‘s worse than that. Pauley‘s ruling cites the 9/11 Commission report for this particular argument. There‘s a big problem with that. The 9/11 Commission report doesn‘t even mention the story that Judge Pauley claims is in the report.

I served in the military for seven years, and the VA for another 10. I saw both the physical and psychological wounds of war…As Americans, so few of us serve that the nation has a convenient amnesia that we are even at war. We don’t realize how the war mentality affects us all. Humanity must turn from Apocalypse Now thinking to the active nurturing of peace in our public debate and our private lives.

FRANK WARMAN

The world community must admit that war is no more a solution to their problems and can be resolved peacefully. The growing political and social tension in different regions of the world can be lessened only by arranging and highlighting such activities. Political parties and state institutions should also promote ‘conciliatory’ politics. Consequently, such initiatives should be highlighted as they promote mutual understanding and exchange ideas and cultural and literary heritage of different countries. Such peace moots should be held not only in Pakistan but across the world so that they may serve as a platform to enhance not only bilateral relations between the countries but overall relations in general as well.
The world community must come to know that although Pakistan is a victim of this ‘War on Terror’ it still believes in the peaceful resolution of problems. Besides, the government should recognize its responsibility and endeavor to organize such events on regular basis, to promote peace and harmony not only among its own people but among the world community as a whole.