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NOVANEWS So said women in Deptford in south east London interviewed by the BBC after the coalition government’s 22 June emergency budget. ‘An admirably tough-minded statement of intent,’ said The Economist, noting that sterling and gilts had strengthened, demonstrating the City’s approval of the attack on public spending and on the working class (26 June 2010). ‘Overall, everyone will pay something, but the people at the bottom of the income scale will pay proportionately less than the people at the top. It is a progressive budget,’ claimed Chancellor George Osborne.  This brazen lie was quickly exposed even by the ruling class’s own Institute for Fiscal Studies and the Financial Times. The emergency budget will cost £113 billion by 2014-15, that is £4,300 a year on average for every ho...

NOVANEWS The history of Britain's biggest clothing retailer Marks and Spencer demonstrates how consumer habits in Britain are tied to the oppression of other peoples. Marks and Spencer has championed the state of Israel and thus connived in the dispossession and suppression of the Palestinians. Our comforts and pleasures, which Marks and Spencer so eagerly service, have been bought at an unacceptable price, as TREVOR RAYNE reveals. Russian Tsar Alexander II was assassinated in 1881. Pogroms against the Russian Jews followed. Many Jewish people fled to the USA, some came to Britain and a trickle went to Palestine – a land they called Zion. Among those coming to Britain was Michael Marks, who was settled in Leeds by 1884. Between 1870-1900 real incomes per head in Britain rose by up to 70%. ...

NOVANEWS  Globes publishes guide to post-flotilla international business for Israelis   Didi Remez Here's a simpler, three-step, guide: Accept the existence of a connection between your government's policies and the trouble you're having; recognize that alternatives exist (hey, your PM just said that the blockade was a mistake); use your clout to force the government to adopt them. Until they sober-up, however, Israeli businessmen will continue throwing money at consultants peddling the satirist's treasure trove below.   Business in the flotilla's shadow Demonstrations were staged in the United States against unloading the cargo off a ZIM ship; Sweden declared nine days of Israel's boycott; and the UK boycotted of Israeli companies -- which proves that business and politics do mi...

NOVANEWS Yediot: In summit with Netanyahu, Obama will demand full lifting of Gaza blockade     Obama demands end to blockade Shimon Shiffer, Yediot, June 27 2010 [page 4; Hebrew original here and at bottom of post]   The lifting of the blockade on the Gaza Strip and permission for Palestinians to leave the Gaza Strip freely through Israeli border crossings. These are the unequivocal demands that President Barack Obama is expected to make during his meeting with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in the White House in two weeks. If anyone thought that lifting the economic blockade of the Gaza Strip would satisfy the Americans, it is now clear to them that is only the beginning. Reliable sources who have been apprised of the preparations that the White House is making for the meetin...

NOVANEWS Targeting Israel's Palestinians  By Ben White Palestinian Israelis watch as Sheikh Raed Salah is brought before magistrates for participating in the Gaza aid flotilla [GALLO/GETTY]  Israel's Palestinian minority has always been subject to discriminatory policies, but some now say that a more open conflict between the Israeli establishment and its Palestinian citizens appears to be brewing. In May, Ameer Makhoul, the director of Ittijah, a network for Palestinian NGOs, was taken from his home in the middle of the night by the Shin Bet, Israel's internal security service. Once the media gag was lifted, it emerged that Makhoul and another Palestinian citizen, Omar Said, a natural medicine expert and Balad party activist, were facing serious security-related cha...

NOVANEWS Exclusive: Leaked documents show PA undermined Turkey's push for UN flotilla probe Asa Winstanley, The Electronic Intifada, 22 June 2010   A document sent to Ibrahim Khraishi, Palestinian Authority representative at the UN in Geneva, proves that the PA attempted to undermine Turkey's push for a UN Human Rights Council investigation in to Israel's attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla (Patrick Bertschmann/UN Photo) The Palestinian Authority attempted to neutralize a United Nations Human Rights Council resolution condemning Israel's deadly attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, leaked UN and Palestinian Authority documents obtained by The Electronic Intifada show. Israel's 31 May attack killed nine Turkish citizens, including a dual US-Turkish citizen, and injured dozens o...

NOVANEWS Zionist diamond tycoon Dan Gertler, grandson of Zionist Diamond Bourse founder Moshe Schnitzer, recently purchased stakes in oil and mining projects in the Congo. It's unclear where the money is going. //  ]]> The President of the Israel Diamond Exchange, Shmuel Schnitzer, looks at an 11-karat South African diamond in Tel Aviv in 2000. At the time, the board of directors of the exchange said that it would revoke the membership of any diamantaire who knowingly trades in diamonds originating with rebels in Angola, Sierra Leone, and the Congo. Zionist diamond tycoon Dan Gertler recently purchased stakes in several mining projects in the Congo, according to reports. Natalie Behring/Reuters Enlarge //  ]]> By Jason Stearns, Guest blogger / June 22, 2010 Zi...

NOVANEWS IRAQ, AFGHANISTAN: American casualties total 500,000, counting injury and disease, writer claims June 24, 2010  Here's an eye-popping number: A blogger and writer claims American military casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan now exceed 500,000.  That's if you count certain injuries and diseases including mental illness that he alleges the Department of Defense doesn't include in its official combat-related casualty toll in an effort to soften U.S. military losses in the wars and win funding for them from the Congress. For example, cases of traumatic brain injury and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, as a result of serving in Iraq and Afghanistan are excluded from the official list of casualties.  "Under this scheme, chronic injuries and many acute internal injuries such a...

NOVANEWS Adam Shatz reports from Egypt On 6 October 1981, President Anwar al-Sadat attended a parade to mark the anniversary of the crossing of the Suez Canal in the 1973 war with Israel. It was also an occasion to display the American, British and French aircraft Egypt had recently acquired: symbols of its realignment with the West after more than two decades as a Soviet ally. Sadat wore a Prussian-style uniform but no bullet-proof vest: it would have ruined the line. Rumours of a plot were in the air, and his vice president, Hosni Mubarak, had warned him not to go. Sadat brushed this off, but when he stood to receive the salute, he was killed in a hail of grenades and bullets, fired by a group of Islamist soldiers in his own army. ‘I have killed Pharaoh, and I do not fear death,’ the l...

NOVANEWS Arab leaders pay lip service to Palestinian rights – except when it comes to the rights of domiciled refugees in their countries I moved to Beirut from New York nine months ago and began looking for an apartment. After 10 continuous years in America, I wanted to return to the Arab world – and returning to my family's roots in Palestine wasn't an option. I knew that in Beirut, I likely wasn't going to be renting from a faceless, impersonal property company; real people mostly own the real estate here – and often, they are interested in knowing their tenants personally. That's how I learned, to my dismay, that being a Palestinian in Beirut is mostly a liability; anti-Palestinian racism is a fact of life here. During my second month in Lebanon, I responded to an ad for an apartment i...