Six In The Morning

Israeli PM Netanyahu rejects Obama ‘1967 borders’ view



Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected comments from US President Obama that a future Palestinian state must be based on the 1967 borders.

The BBC  20 May 2011

In a major speech to the state department, Mr Obama said “mutually agreed swaps” would help create “a viable Palestine, and a secure Israel”.

But Mr Netanyahu said those borders, which existed before the 1967 Middle East war, were “indefensible”.

Mr Netanyahu is preparing to meet Mr Obama for talks at the White House.

An estimated 300,000 Israelis live in settlements built in the West Bank, which lies outside those borders.

The settlements are illegal under international law, although Israel disputes this.

Intelligence experts tried to stop government exaggerating Iraq dossier, documents reveal

Papers support claims that Iraq dossier was meant to make a case for war

Chris Ames guardian.co.uk, Friday 20 May 2011

Newly released documents reveal the full extent to which defence intelligence experts fought – with limited success – to prevent the Labour government exaggerating the September 2002 dossier on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

The disclosure follows the revelation last week that a senior defence intelligence officer told the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq conflict that, contrary to the evidence of former government communications chief Alastair Campbell, the dossier was intended to make a case for war and intelligence had been exaggerated to make this case.

The new documents support these claims and longstanding allegations that the dossier was hardened up against the wishes of the intelligence community.

Death toll grows as India goes to war over cut-price land deals

Housing boom for nation’s growing middle-classes drives villagers from their farms



By Andrew Buncombe in Bhatta-Parsaul

Friday, 20 May 2011

For more than a day, nobody bothered to tell Ombati Devi that her husband was dead.

When he failed to return home on the day farmers were protesting in their village Bhatta-Parsaul, she was told he had been wounded but that he had been taken to hospital where he was receiving treatment. The following evening the police arrived at her home, revealed the truth and took her to the mortuary where she was confronted with the sight of his corpse, caked with dried blood and ruptured by three bullet wounds. “He got injured in the crossfire while he was trying to flee the trouble spot,” she said, her voice breaking off.

Why One Swedish Town Welcomes a Waste Dump

The Nuclear Sell

By Thomas Hüetlin

The Baltic Sea is still frozen over off the Swedish coast at the site of the Forsmark nuclear power plant, where a short drive up a narrow gravel road leads to a peninsula with a small, man-made lake at its tip.

The honey-colored reeds bend in a wet breeze — not exactly nice weather for taking a walk outside. Nevertheless, Stefan Edelsvärd is standing on the shoreline of the small lake, which is always at least 10 degrees Celsius (18 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the ocean. Its temperature is kept artificially high by the cooling water from three nuclear reactors, which comes rushing out of a two-kilometer (1.25-mile) tunnel and flows into the lake at a rate of 85,000 liters (22,457 gallons) per second.

Hammerl shot by Gadaffi’s forces



PRETORIA, SOUTH AFRICA – May 20 2011

A statement released by the family on Facebook said that they had been informed on Thursday night that Hammerl had been shot on April 5.

“On 5 April 2011 Anton was shot by [Muammar] Gadaffi’s forces in an extremely remote location in the Libyan desert. According to eyewitnesses, his injuries were such that he could not have survived without medical attention.

“Words are simply not enough to describe the unbelievable trauma the Hammerl family is going through,” the statement read.

Leftists across Latin America gather for Sao Paulo Forum congress in Nicaragua

The leftists that comprise this group are, in many cases, more divergent than the right-left divide in their own countries, but from the rhetoric you would never know it.  

By Tim Rogers, Correspondent    

For people whose worldviews were informed by a rigid Cold War paradigm of left versus right, sometimes it’s hard to move beyond the notions of a universe tidily divided into easily digestible concepts of good and bad, socialist and capitalist.

That’s especially true in Latin America, where political discourse is often constructed using antiquated terms, nebulous concepts, and old fears from a bygone era.

The opening of the São Paulo Forum, a Latin American and Caribbean conference of left-leaning political parties and social movements that is holding its 17th international congress this week in Nicaragua’s capital, Managua, is a case in point.