"Political Islamic groups have taken southern Iraq, are fully in power there, and are using the financial support of Iran to recruit troops and allies. The financial and political support from Iran is why the Iraqis in the south accept this, not because the Iraqi people want Islamic law."

With the new law has come the new lawlessness. Nora Hamaid, 30, a graduate from Baghdad University, has now given up the career she dreamt of. "I completed my studies before the invaders arrived because there was good security and I could freely go to university," Hamaid tells IPS. Now she says she cannot even move around freely, and worries for her children every day. "I mean every day, from when they depart to when they return from school, for fear of abductions."

A Matter of Timing
by Uri Avnery l Gush Shalom
Some weeks the news is dominated by a single word. This week’s word was “timing”.

It’s all a matter of timing.

 

The Government of Israel has insulted the Vice President of the United States, Joe Biden, one of the greatest “friends” of Israel (meaning: somebody totally subservient to AIPAC) and spat in the face of President Barack Obama.

 

So what? It’s all a matter of timing.

If the government had announced the building of 1600 new housing units in East Jerusalem a day earlier, it would have been OK. If it had announced it three days later, it would have been wonderful. But doing it exactly when Joe Biden was about to have dinner with Bibi and Sarah’le – that was really bad timing.

Lawfare Redux
by Scott Horton
As the recent attacks by Liz Cheney and her organization demonstrate, “lawfare” as a subject is not going to disappear anytime soon. Lawyers simply make too inviting targets–even when they’re working pro bono on projects that they believe are advancing the Rule of Law. A conference yesterday in New York showed just how the “lawfare” concept can be reshaped to address new situations and different facts.

The resplendent meeting room of the New York County Lawyers Association, filled with Beaux Arts details and crystal chandeliers, was a curious site for the gathering organized by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. Generations of bar leaders stared down from the walls—many of them key players in the 1949 Geneva Conventions, the Convention Against Torture, the Genocide Convention, and other mainstays of the world’s human-rights legal infrastructure–as speakers took to the podium to tell the audience that international law wasn’t all it was cranked up to be.

There was a danger of “taking international law too seriously,” as George Mason University’s Jeremy Rabkin put it. “It’s not like the tax code,” he argued; the rules are unclear and, more to the point, there is no court to enforce them. Former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton also spoke at the event, and is indeed well known for his denigrating views about international law:

    It is a big mistake for us to grant any validity to international law even when it may seem in our short-term interest to do so–because over the long term… those who think that international law really means anything are those who want to constrict the United States.

* More than 25,000 miles have been dredged for navigation

 

by TRNN
Mark Weisbrot reports back on Hillary Clinton's 6-country tour of Latin America. While seeking to repair the US image, her campaigns for the recognition of the controversial Honduran government, and the sanctioning of Iran, didn't win over her hosts.

 

urging recognition of controversial Honduran gov't

He aptly concluded: “It’s despicable, the national press corps right now.”

Sure enough, the Thursday edition of the New York Times had no room for the historic debate on its front page, which did have room for a large Starbucks ad across the bottom.

Despite the news media and the lopsided pro-war tilt on Capitol Hill (reflected in the 356-65 vote Wednesday against invoking the War Powers Act), antiwar organizing has a lot of hospitable terrain at the grassroots. National polling shows widespread opposition to the Afghanistan war effort -- a far cry from the dominant lockstep conformity in Congress.

Foreclosures Are Rising: Not Just Homeowners Are Affected
by Danny Schechter l Author, The Crime of Our Time
The financial crisis started as a housing bubble with the financial industry convinced that home values never fall. How wrong they were, even as they leveraged and securitized their investments to create a global crisis.

Now, brace yourself because not only isn’t it over until its over, but in some respects its just begun. There will be more foreclosures this year than last and as a result more suffering for American families.

Ed Harrison who monitors this industry for a website called Credit Write Downs sees a “second wave coming” — like a new tsunami in a industry that all of Obama’s horses and all of Obama’s men have not been able to do anything about. The idea of challenging fraud and deception with a debt relief plan goes a bit too far for these self-styled centrists. Writes Harrison:

    “When the crisis first developed, in February of 2007, it was subprime where the worries were, with the lion’s share of writedowns coming from mark-to-market losses in the securitisation market. However, subprime was a relatively small part of the overall market, making up 14% of loans outstanding at that time. Alt-A loans were 27% and prime loans were 57% respectively of loans outstanding according to a Banc of America Securities report.

    As the 2004-2007 co-horts of Alt-A option ARM mortgages have started to reset and prime borrowers have come under stress, we have started to see defaults in markets which are an order of magnitude larger than subprime.”

The signal importance of the region contains two factors: oil, the regional resource that enticed the British into the area in the first place; and ‘international communism’ and the rhetorically inflated fears of a grand international conspiracy to attack and dominate the world.

How Get-Rich-Quick Crime Came to Define an Era