Ethiopian Jews are not alone – they are the latest in a long line of victims of Israeli intolerance
Incredibly, racism is not limited to gentiles in the diaspora; sadly, it’s also present here amongst Israeli Jews.
Last week, we heard reports that residents of Kiryat Malachi had signed secret agreements not to sell or rent out properties to Ethiopian Jews. Interviewed on Israeli television, locals described their Ethiopians neighbors as “cockroaches.”
Prejudice against Ethiopians is particularly sad given the excitement that accompanied their arrival in Israel. The world was riveted by this ingathering of the exiles. We, too, reveled in stories of how this community was adapting to modernity, proudly noting that ours was the first western country to bring black people to freedom in its land.
If the beginning was so promising, how did things go so wrong? Former minister Rabbi Michael Melchior points out that there is no such thing as “half-human rights”; either we respect everyone’s rights or no one is safe.” This winter saw a succession of attempts to pass ugly, racist legislation through the Knesset. “Price tag” attacks were carried out on Palestinian olive groves and mosques and these were followed by assaults on Israeli soldiers. Then, we heard about the humiliation of Israeli girls in Beit Shemesh, which were followed by revenge attacks on ultra-Orthodox Jews.
Ethiopian Jews are not alone. They are the latest in a long line of victims of intolerance.
Racist parties in other countries such as the English Defence League now carry our flag at their demonstrations, portraying Israel as an outstanding model of their racist ideology.
see the rest of the article, from haaretz, israel – also, click on image to see article about protest
from anarchists against the wall -
While the rest of Israel fiddles, the West Bank continues to burn – both literally, in the scores of cases of settlers setting fire to the crops and homes of Palestinian farmers, and metaphorically, as the prospects for peaceful resolution go up in smoke the longer the settlers are given free rein to thumb their noses at the law and run riot in the area. On ground level, as well as in the political arena, the authorities seem perfectly content to offer the occasional fig leaf to international pressure to clamp down on the settlers, while never implementing concrete measures to end the overall injustice. Who this charade is fooling is anyone’s guess, but the longer it continues, the more certain it becomes that the state’s kowtowing to the settlers is driving yet another nail into the peace process’s coffin.
immigrants used as fodder to throw into illegal settlements in palestinian land
The building of new settlements and the expansion of existing ones has never been as immense as it was throughout the preceding 15 years since the initiation of the peace process in September 1993, as the number housing units in Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza has doubled. Excluding settlements in East Jerusalem, the number of housing units in West bank and Gaza settlements were 29,390. From 1993 to the year 2000; right before the second Intifada broke out; the number of the housing units increased by 70.5 percentage; (20,680). By the year 2000, the total number of housing units in settlements exceeds 53,000; an increase by 20+ thousands housing units (56%) growth since 1993. the figures above clearly illustrates the impact that the Intifada had on the construction and development process of the settlements. Between the years 0f 1993 - 2000, the annual construction of housing units in Israeli settlements counted for approximately 2,955units (14%). As for the years of the Intifada; 2000 - 2003; the construction pace dropped to 4.5% annually (under500 units). The drop was the direct impact of the Intifada on the so-called “development process” of the settlements.
As for the settlements population, an increase of number also achieved due to the new arrivals - immigrants - and the attractive subsidies provided for those willing to reside in the settlements. The number of settlers residing in the West Bank and Gaza in 1993 estimated at 115+ thousands. By the year 2000, the number of settlers estimated at 200,000+, an increase by more than 74%. Since then, the number of settlers estimated at 260,000 and on the rise; an increase achieved since 1993 by nearly 130%.
Girls Around Me is a standard geolocation based maps app, similar to any other app that attempts to alert you to things of interest in your immediate vicinity: whether it be parties, clubs, deals, or what have you. When you load it up, the first thing Girls Around Me does is figure out where you are and load up a Google Map centered around your location. The rest of the interface is very simple: in the top left corner, there’s a button that looks like a radar display, at the right corner, there’s a fuel meter (used to fund the app’s freemium model), and on the bottom left is a button that allows you to specify between whether you’re interested in women, men or both.
It’s when you push the radar button that Girls Around Me does what it says on the tin. I pressed the button for my friends. Immediately, Girls Around Me went into radar mode, and after just a few seconds, the map around us was filled with pictures of girls who were in the neighborhood. Since I was showing off the app on a Saturday night, there were dozens of girls out on the town in our local area.
Girls Around Me’s splash screen (left) and geo-maps interface (right). Lots of girls around the MFA.
“Wait… what? Are these girls prostitutes?” one of my friends asked, which given the Matrix-like silhouettes posing on the splash screen was a pretty good question.
“Oh, no,” I replied. “These are just regular girls. See this girl? Her name’s Zoe. She lives on the same street as me and Brittany. She works at a coffee shop, and I’m pretty sure she doesn’t moonlight picking up tricks.”
“How does it know where these girls are? Do you know all these girls? Is it plucking data from your address book or something?” another friend asked.
“Not at all. These are all girls with publicly visible Facebook profiles who have checked into these locations recently using Foursquare. Girls Around Me then shows you a map where all the girls in your area trackable by Foursquare area. If there’s more than one girl at a location, you see the number of girls there in a red bubble. Click on that, and you can see pictures of all the girls who are at that location at any given time. The pictures you are seeing are their social network profile pictures.”
“Okay, so they know that their data can be used like this for anyone to see? They’re okay with it? ”
“Probably not, actually. The settings determining how visible your Facebook and Foursquare data is are complicated, and tend to be meaningless to people who don’t really understand issues about privacy,” I explained. “Most privacy settings on social networks default to share everything with everyone, and since most people never change those… well, they end up getting sucked up into apps like this.”
it would be interesting to see how the statistics on murder would increase if the numbers included unarmed citizens murdered by police. no one keeps track on that. i wonder why?
with police forces across the country eager to kill for any – or no – provocation, it is not surprising that there are people out there who would rather go down in a shootout than surrender to the police, only to be murdered while handcuffed or unarmed.
For 20 years, crime in the US has been falling and figures from the FBI show a sharp drop in the last two years, despite the recession. Why?
There is little evidence the recession has influenced crime rates
Murder and robbery rates nearly halved from 1991-98, a phenomenon that has saved thousands of lives and spared many more potential victims of crime.
The pace of the reduction slowed in the late 90s but new FBI figures show the sharp drop in crime that began around 2008 continued last year, despite high unemployment.
from the new york times:
As violent crime has decreased across the country, a trend has emerged: rising numbers of police officers are being killed.
According to statistics compiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, 72 officers were killed by perpetrators in 2011, a 25 percent increase from the previous year and a 75 percent increase from 2008.
The 2011 deaths were the first time that more officers were killed by suspects than car accidents, according to data compiled by the International Association of Chiefs of Police. The number was the highest in nearly two decades, excluding those who died in the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001 and the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.
fresno ca. has long been the forefront of the police state in america. the police – with their paramilitary units, armored vehicles and helicopters – are more like an occupying army, and fresno resembles places in iraq and afghanistan more than america.
see this article about how the police handcuffed a man and threw him to the ground in front of his family, then drowned him by shoving a garden hose in his face, while his children heard him pleading for his life.
For years, legal scholar Susan Freidwald has been raising alarms about police tracking the locations of average American cellphone users, without warrants or judicial oversight.
But the extent of routine surveillance on the whereabouts of millions of people, outlined in a new report from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) based on 5,500 pages of internal records from 205 police departments across the US, shocked even seasoned observers like Freidwald.
“I am surprised agents are getting information from all the calls to a particular cellphone tower,” Friedwald, a law professor at the University of San Francisco, told Al Jazeera. “I think that is one of the biggest intrusions.”
Cellphones register their location with phone networks several times each minute. This function cannot be turned off when the phone is getting a wireless signal. Police ask phone companies to provide them with data on the phone communicating with the tower, allowing police to monitor the movements of cellphone users, which includes virtually everyone.
In Tucson Arizona, for example, police sometimes obtain cellphone numbers for all the phones in a particular area, allowing innocent people to have their personal information and movements potentially scrutinised by authorities.
‘Casting a huge net’
“In order to track one person who may have committed a crime, law enforcement [in several towns where all calls to a particular tower have been traced] got the whereabouts of hundreds of innocent people,” Catherine Crump, an ACLU attorney, told Al Jazeera.
There are also ways to track a cellphone which is turned off, she said, but that requires more extensive steps from law enforcement agents.
Updated at 11:55 p.m. ET: Forecasters are warning of a major tornado outbreak in Kansas and Oklahoma this weekend, with Oklahoma getting a first taste of it on Friday with a tornado touching down near the National Weather Service office in Norman.
A tornado touched down near the University of Oklahoma campus in Norman just after 4 p.m. local time – the same town that holds the National Storm Prediction Center, the National Weather Service confirmed.
An operator at the University of Oklahoma said people had been warned to get to a basement or low floor.
“I was watching this tornado on TV, which was neat until I realized it was right here in Norman,” said the operator, who did not give a name.
Video from television helicopters showed the tornado ripped roofs from buildings, downed power lines and uprooted trees in the city of about 100,000 about 20 miles south of Oklahoma City, but Oklahoma Department of Emergency Management spokeswoman Keli Cain said there were no reports of serious injuries.
“This is just a fraction of what’s to come tomorrow,” Chris Vaccaro, a spokesman for the National Weather Service, warned.
This graphic, provided Friday by NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center, shows areas at risk of severe weather in Kansas and Oklahoma on Saturday.
Government is in the last resort the employment of armed men, of policemen, gendarmes, soldiers, prison guards, and hangmen. The essential feature of government is the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning. Those who are asking for more government interference are asking ultimately for more compulsion and less freedom.
Thursday Internet traffic dropped off substantially to and from China. Paul Mozur of the Wall Street Journal’s China Real Time blog tracked the outage as a data dropoff lasting from 11:00am to 1:00pm local time.
The interruption spawned a host of possible explanations. These included the powerful 8.6 magnitude earthquake the day before off the coast of Indonesia, a cinching down of the “Great Firewall of China” censorship system, a failure in the country’s network backbone, and a software upgrade.
There is a bottleneck of undersea cables in the Malacca Straits which could have been affected by the quake. China is connected to the Internet from only three major points, as the Guardian notes in its coverage. This makes the country arguably more vulnerable than countries like the US.
However, Xu Chuanchao, an executive with Sohu, one of China’s largest Web portals, posted to his microblog his opinion that “This malfunction is caused by the failure of China’s backbone network and is under renovation.”
The publication also pointed out that many “lesser known VPNs seemed to connect without any problems.” and quoted David Wolf of Wolf Group Asia as saying, “It’s possible they were short of capacity and that’s why some people got through, but given that obscure VPNs were working I find that hard to believe.”
According to Tech in Asia, (via China Digital Times), two of the largest Chinese ISPs, Telecom and Unicom, are denying knowledge of the source of the interruption but both insisted that a breakdown on their end was not to blame.
Mozur’s reporting however, based on data from CloudFlare, indicated that the overwhelming majority of the dropoff was from Telecom and Unicom and it was almost exclusively HTTP traffic. This, according to CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince indicates it was probably a result of filtering, “which suggests that someone made a mistake when filtering something—likely they filtered the entire internet.”
Tech in Asia’s writer C. Custer theorized it was the test of a new government Internet “kill switch.”
A locksmith hired to help in the process of evicting a California tenant was shot dead, along with the sheriff’s deputy serving the eviction notice, police said Friday.
In addition to the two men shot dead, a lone body has been found inside the charred ruins of the Modesto, California, apartment building, Modesto police Officer Chris Adams told CNN on Friday.
He did not say definitively that this was the same person being sought out for the eviction notice, adding that it could take days or weeks to positively identify the body. But he did say that police are no longer looking for any suspects in the case.
The incident actually began Thursday morning, when Stanislaus County Sheriff’s Department Robert Paris, 53, tried to serve an eviction notice at an apartment when a gunman opened fire.
Paris, a 16-year veteran of the department, was shot dead.
So, too, was Glendon Engert, a 35-year-old locksmith hired by the apartment complex’s management company to get access to the unit as part of the eviction process, said Adams.
The suspect locked himself into the home after the shootings, starting a standoff that lasted more than 10 hours.
After 10 p.m. local time Thursday, a fire erupted from the apartment and flames could be seen shooting from the roof.
The fire ignited after authorities threw flash grenades and tear gas into the apartment to try to flush the shooter out, Stanislaus County Sheriff Adam Christianson told reporters.
identify the body. But he did say that police are no longer looking for any suspects in the case.
