Earlier this week, Israel ordered Palestinian farmers in Deir Istiya, a major West Bank olive producing village, to uproot 1,400 trees by the end of this month. By comparison, this order is 400 more trees than the total number uprooted in all of 2011.
Since the Mamluk period, Deir Istiya has been one of the largest olive producing regions in the West Bank. But, even with 10,000 dunums of agricultural land, the village's full farming capacity is weakened by Israel's military and civilian occupation. Nearby, eight settlements are built on, or adjacent to, a total of 15,000 dunums of Palestinian land. "From my parents' house we can see were they built a settlement on our land," says Amal. And from the outposts, wastewater seeps into and is illegally dumped into a natural spring used by Palestinians producing olives. Amal says the wastewater flows down from the settlements like a river, "but it isn't a river." At times, the wastewater overflows from the dumping site to onto Palestinian orchards. Last fall, over 100 trees in Deir Istiya were destroyed by flooded wastewater.
A Catholic priest who "inadvertently" showed pornographic pictures during a presentation at a primary school in County Tyrone has released a statement in his church bulletin.
A senior UN official in Geneva last week listed Israel among the countries that she says are restricting the activities of human rights groups.
Some experts now questioning whether disease should even be called cancer
PM and defence chief not fit to lead Israel and are misleading the public over Iran, warns former Shin Bet boss Yuval Diskin
After experiencing the traumatizing death of her daughter to kidney failure just three days after her daughter was born, Sofia Gatica from Argentina became determined to find out what killed her daughter. Her conclusion? Monsanto’s genetically modified soy fields that surrounded her neighborhood, laced with damaging insecticides negatively affecting nearby neighborhood children and adults alike. Gatica began to detail how her small town was plagued with astronomically high birth defect rates, respiratory disease, and even infant mortality. What she didn’t know was that she would later receive an environmental award for her efforts to make change.
Apple, the world’s most profitable technology company, doesn’t design iPhones here. It doesn’t run AppleCare customer service from this city. And it doesn’t manufacture MacBooks or iPads anywhere nearby.
One of the activists that were called over brought a history book, out of which he started reading out loud the names of villages demolished by the Nakba, on which the city of Tel Aviv was built. Policemen warned him that if he keeps on reading he will be arrested. After a moment or two they fulfilled this threat. As he was dragged to the police van he kept on reading. "Shayka Muwannis, Abu Kabir, Salama...." The reading continued, though, from the cards held by those inside the blockade, one by one the names were read, repeated by everybody "Ijlil Shamalyyia, Sawalima, Yazur..." When a couple of dozens were reading out the names the cops stood helpless.
Findings released today showed that infant monkeys given vaccines officially recommended by the CDC and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) exhibited autism-like symptoms. Lead investigator Laura Hewitson of the University of Pittsburgh and colleagues presented study results at the International Meeting for Autism Research (IMFAR) in London. Safety studies of medicines are typically conducted in monkeys prior to use in humans, yet such basic research on the current childhood vaccination regimen has never before been done.
