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NOVANEWS How to watch the killers in Sri Lanka (via the web) The beginnings of something positive in Sri Lanka (maybe). Accountability and transparency for human rights abuses is vital if the country is to have any chance of being respected again as a viable democracy. Right now, it’s a tawdry police state that tortures and murders with impunity: The Sunday Leader recently reported on a new, unique initiative by the Consortium of Humanitarian Agencies (CHA) in Sri Lanka to gather information on human rights violations. Called Citizens Net, the news report notes that it is open to logging “issues regarding gender-based violence, the rights of children, the elderly and the disabled.” However, there is no mention of this on the site itself, which already displays well over 1,500 human rights...

NOVANEWS   What interest does America have by blindly backing Israel? Foreign Policy’s Marc Perry argues: In early February of 2006, I submitted a book proposal about the wartime relationship between Generals George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower to a group of New York publishers. I had worked on the proposal for nine months and believed it would garner significant interest. Two weeks after the submission, I received my first response – from a senior editor at a major New York publishing firm. He was uncomfortable with the proposal: “Wasn’t Marshall an anti-Semite?” he asked. I’d heard this claim before, but I was still shocked by the question. For me, George Marshall was an icon: the one officer who, more than any other, was responsible for the American victory in World War Two. He was ...

NOVANEWS Even Obama knows where America is headed    Images from Nepal

NOVANEWS The Israeli story that the Israeli press can’t/won’t report A story that’s been percolating on the blogosphere for a while – initially revealed by US, Jewish blogger Richard Silverstein (look here and here) – now finally reaches The Daily Beast, courtesy of one Judith Miller. What a teaser: A 23-year-old journalist is under arrest for exposing a secret Israeli assassination plot, and another has fled to London, afraid for his life. Judith Miller talks to insiders who have been gagged by the government about the scandal rocking Tel Aviv, and Israel’s slide toward Iranian-style censorship.

NOVANEWS Yes, a US official sits and talks with Hamas (that’s news, apparently) Al-Jazeera reports on a story that shows the rather pathetic fear that accompanies even meeting an Islamist organisation. Better watch out, you may catch the resistance bug: I could not believe my eyes this morning at the Al Jazeera Centre for Strategic Studies conference on Political Islam.  Perusing the programme I noticed a panel that included Hamas politburo member and  spokesman Osama Hamdan alongside my friend and fellow blogger Steve Clemons.  But what made my eyes pop out was the panel’s inclusion of Rachel Schneller, an international affairs fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations AND commissioned US Foreign Service Officer.

NOVANEWS Thomas Hegghammer in Foreign Policy reminds us that ignoring Palestine, or suggesting that leaving the conflict unresolved doesn’t bring hatred towards the West, is deluding themselves: In recent weeks, U.S. Gen. David Petraeus and others have made headlines by suggesting that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict increases anti-Americanism in the Muslim world. The Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens takes issue with this claim, arguing that cultural Westernization — in the form of Lady Gaga and other imports that scandalize Muslim conservatives — is a more important cause of anti-Americanism in the Muslim world than the Palestinian conflict. Stephens notes that Islamists resented American culture well before the Palestinian issue became prominent. As key evidence, he cites Muslim Bro...

NOVANEWS The Independent has a letter from Tony Greenstein and Deborah Fink explaining Why we protested at Wigmore Hall: As Jewish participants in the protest against the Jerusalem Quartet concert, we reject the suggestion by Elisa Bray and Kim Sengupta (1 April) that the JQ were targeted because their members had served in the Israeli army. Although those brave Israeli high school students, the Shministim, do refuse to serve and suffer repeated imprisonment as a result, this was not the reason for our protest. The Jerusalem Quartet has repeatedly gone out of its way to identify with Israel's military. According to the Jerusalem Music Centre, which helped to found and support the JQ, and which is itself based in the illegal West Bank settlement of Mishkenot Sha'ananim, the JQ serve in t...

NOVANEWS by Michael Leon RFK announces assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., April 4, 1968. Violence, as King lived and died to tell us, is a betrayal. RFK picked up the torch and was struck down. Do we hear their voices? From Bob Herbert, We Still Don’t Hear Him ‘I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight,’ said the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., ‘because my conscience leaves me no other choice.’This was on the evening of April 4, 1967, almost exactly 43 years ago. Dr. King told the more than 3,000 people who had crowded into Riverside Church that silence in the face of the horror that was taking place in Vietnam amounted to a ‘betrayal.’ He spoke of both the carnage in the war zone and the toll the war was taking here in the United States. The speech comes to mind n...

NOVANEWS  by Michael Leon The new New C-SPAN Video Library is a great resource for political junkies. From Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire on the New C-SPAN Video Library: Here are a few great clips I found: President Reagan in Berlin tells Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.” The Kennedy-Nixon debate in 1960. Col. Oliver North’s testimony at the Iran-Contra hearings. Bill Clinton declining to run for president in 1988. Gary Hart drops out of the 1988 presidential race and his reentry several months later. John Edwards announced his wife’s cancer has returned.

NOVANEWS  by Bob Higgins Another Gulf War Syndrome? Burning trash on bases is sickening soldiers, but the Army refuses to extinguish the burn pits. * By Beth Hawkins Mother Jones * Before her last deployment, 31-year-old Staff Sergeant Danielle Nienajadlo passed her Army physical with flying colors. So when she started having health problems several weeks after arriving at Balad Air Base in Iraq, no one knew what to make of her symptoms: headaches that kept her awake; unexplained bruises all over her body; an open sore on her back that wouldn’t heal; vomiting and weight loss. In July 2008, after three miserable months, Nienajadlo checked into the base emergency room with a 104-degree fever. She was sent to Walter Reed Army Medical Center and learned she had been diagnosed with acute In...