SOME STORIES FROM PRESSTV.COM
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/231327.html
Afghan eyewitnesses say US troopers have burnt nearly a dozen bodies of the Afghan victims, whom American servicemen had killed during an earlier massacre.
Early Sunday, US forces opened fire on Afghan civilians inside their homes in the district of Panjwaii in the southern province of Kandahar, killing at least 17 civilians and injuring several others. The Taliban militants said at least 50 people were killed in the massacre.
Earlier reports said the assassin was a lone US sergeant ......................................................................................... .
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says Israel will continue to launch airstrikes on targets in the Tel Aviv-blockaded Gaza Strip as long as it deems it necessary.
"We extracted a high price from them and will continue to do so," Netanyahu said at the beginning of a cabinet meeting in al-Quds (Jerusalem) on Sunday, referring to the Palestinian resistance groups based in Gaza.
"We will act as long as necessary,” he added.
Eighteen Palestinians, including a 12-year-old child, have been killed in Israeli airstrikes on the besieged coastal sliver since Friday. ..................................................................................................................................................................US assassination drone strikes have killed at least 64 people in southern Yemen during attacks in the past three days on the provinces of Abyan and Bayda.
Yemeni government officials claimed that the airstrikes in the Bayda province and the town of Jaar in the Abyan province during March 9 to 11 targeted “militants.”
However, local residents rejected the government’s allegations and said the victims were civilians.
Yemeni security officials said at least five US assassination drones were involved in the latest strike in Jaar on Sunday, which claimed the lives of six people.
According to Yemeni officials, the assassination drones also conducted major attacks on Friday and Saturday, killing at least 58 people.
The US military uses drones in Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Iraq, and Yemen. ...................................................................................................................................................................Saudi activists are planning to stage a hunger strike in the capital, Riyadh, to protest against the detention of prominent rights activist Mohammad Al Bajadi.
The hunger strike organized by the Saudi Civil and Political Rights Association (ACPRA), also aims to express solidarity with political prisoners and demanding their immediate release.
"We hope to shed light on Mohammad al-Bajadi's case and others like him because unfortunately the state does not listen to the people, so we want to alert the international community to put pressure" on it, activist Mohammad al-Qah'tani told Reuters on Monday.
According to ACPRA, so far, more than 38 activists have signed up on its website to participate in the two-day hunger strike by the end of this week. ............................................................................................................................................................. "Terrorist gangs carried out the most horrible massacre in the Karm el-Zaytoun neighborhood of Homs ... in order to incite international reaction against Syria," Adnan Mahmoud told AFP news agency.
The Syrian minister also accused Saudi Arabia and Qatar of supporting "armed terrorist gangs" operating in Syria and hold them responsible for the killings in the country.
"Some of the countries backing armed terrorist gangs, such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar, are accomplices to the terrorism targeting the Syrian people... and bear responsibility for the bloodletting," Mahmoud said.
At least 45 people, including women and children, were tortured and killed in Karm el-Zaytoun on Sunday night.
Relatives of a number of victims have announced that they were kidnapped by armed groups several months ago. ...........................................................................................................................................................------- STORIES FROM RUSSIA TODAY http://rt.com/ .......
Gruesome new details are surfacing after 16 Afghan villagers including nine children were shot in their houses by at least one US serviceman. Witnesses to the atrocity now say that several drunken American soldiers were involved.
Neighbors at the village where the
killings took place said they were awoken past midnight by crackling gunfire:
"They were all drunk and shooting all over the place," Reuters cites Agha Lala, a villager in Kandahar's Panjwayi district.
Lala's neighbor Haji Samad lost all of his 11 relatives in the rampage, including children and grandchildren. He claims Marines “poured chemicals over their dead bodies and burned them.”
Twenty-year-old Jan Agha says the gunfire “shook him out of bed.” He was in the epicenter of the horrible shooting, witnessing his father shot as the latter peered out of a window to see what was going on.
"The Americans stayed in our house for a while. I was very scared," the young man told reporters.
Lying on a floor, Agha says, he pretended to be dead. ..........................................................................................................................................................................................................................Key staff from Al Jazeera’s Beirut Bureau have resigned citing “bias” in the channel’s stance on the conflict in Syria.
Bureau Managing Director Hassan Shaaban reportedly quit last week, after his correspondent and producer had walked out in protest.
A source told the Lebanese paper Al Akhbar that Al Jazeera’s Beirut correspondent Ali Hashem had quit over the channel’s stance on covering events in Syria. "… his position [which] changed after the station refused to show photos he had taken of armed fighters clashing with the Syrian Army in Wadi Khaled. Instead [Al Jazeera] lambasted him as a shabeeh [implying a regime loyalist],” a source told Lebanese press.
Ali Hashem was also infuriated by Al Jazeera’s refusal to cover a crackdown by the King of Bahrain while twisting its Syria angle. “[In Bahrain], we were seeing pictures of a people being butchered by the 'Gulf's oppression machine', and for Al Jazeera, silence was the name of the game,” he said.
The Beirut bureau’s producer also quit claiming Al Jazeera had totally ignored Syria’s constitutional reform referendum, which saw a 57% turnout with 90% voting for change. Reports about hundreds of dead and wounded coming from Syria on a daily basis has become commonplace in Western media, while the sources of such information often are not verified properly, investigative journalist Asa Winstanley told RT.
According to Winstanley anti-Assad media willingly cite unconfirmed information from sources on the ground in Syria or Iran because the govts of each “are seen as anti-Western regimes.” But when reporting on Israeli military actions in Palestine, the same media use activists on the ground far less regularly.
“The media seem to be quite selective of the pass [of information],” Winstanley claims.
For example, mainstream channels, like BBC, Al Jazeera and CNN, were taken in by Mousab Azzawi, a man who called himself a spokesperson for a UK-based group Syrian Human Rights Observatory. After appearing on TV, Azzawi’s political views like calling for a no-fly zone and international intervention into Syria were widely quoted.. ................................................................................................................................................................................................................. The leader of Al-Qaeda has voiced his support for the Syrian uprising. He called on Muslims to join the opposition in Syria in their drive to oust President Bashar Assad.
In an eight-minute video address posted on Sunday on a jihadist website, Ayman al-Zawahri called on Muslims in Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon and Jordan to aid the Syrian rebels.
“Continue your revolt and anger, don't accept anything else apart from independent, respectful governments,” the successor of Osama Bin Laden urged the Syrians.. .........................................................................................................................................................................................................................Only days after clearing Congress, US President Barack Obama signed his name to H.R. 347 on Thursday, officially making it a federal offense to cause a disturbance at certain political events — essentially criminalizing protest in the States.
RT broke the news last month that H.R. 347, the Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act of 2011, had overwhelmingly passed the US House of Representatives after only three lawmakers voted against it. On Thursday this week, President Obama inked his name to the legislation and authorized the government to start enforcing a law that has many Americans concerned over how the bill could bury the rights to assemble and protest as guaranteed in the US Constitution.
Under
H.R. 347, which has more commonly been labeled the Trespass Bill by Congress, knowingly entering a restricted area that is under the jurisdiction of Secret Service protection can garner an arrest. The law is actually only a slight change to earlier legislation that made it an offense to knowingly
and willfully commit such a crime. Under the Trespass Bill’s latest language chance, however, someone could end up in law enforcement custody for entering an area that they don’t realize is Secret Service protected and
“engages in disorderly or disruptive conduct” or “
impede[s] or disrupt[s] the orderly conduct of Government business or official functions.”
The Secret Service serves as the police that protects not just current and former American presidents, but are also dispatched to monitor special events of national significance, a category with a broad cast of qualifiers. In the past, sporting events, state funerals, inaugural addresses and NATO and G-8 Summits have been designated as such by the US Department of Homeland Security, the division that decides when and where the Secret Service are needed outside of their normal coverage.
Mara Verheyden-Hilliard of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund tells the International Business Times that the Trespass Bill in its current form “means it's easier to prosecute under 'knowingly,'” instead of both knowingly and willfully, “which is an issue because someone could knowingly enter a restricted but not necessarily realize they are committing a crime.” Speaking with IB Times, Verheyden-Hilliard tries to lay to rest claims that the Constitution will be crippled by the Trespass Bill, but acknowledges that it does indeed allow law enforcement to have added incentive to arrest protesters who could be causing a disturbance.
"[HR 347] has been described as a death knell for the First Amendment, but that isn't supported by the facts,"Verheyden-Hilliard adds. "This has always been a bad law.".........................
