INTERNATIONAL

The Ministry of Truth was how George Orwell described the mechanism used by government to control information in his seminal novel 1984. A recent trip to Europe has convinced me that the governments of the world have been rocked by the power of the internet and are seeking to gain control of it so that they will have a virtual …

ALL IN THE NAME OF PRINCE OF PEACE. The military is denying it allows its soldiers to proselytize to Afghans, following the release of footage showing US soldiers in Afghanistan discussing how to distribute Bibles translated into Pashto and Dari. We speak to Air Force veteran and former Reagan administration counsel Mikey Weinstein, founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, …

  It is time that our big brother India practises towards its own minority of around 150 million Muslims throughout the country in general and Kashmir in particular what it preaches to Sri Lanka on   minority rights.   Time and again Indian government officials from Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to other top officials insist Sri Lankan government of the need …

  The Israeli occupation of the West Bank is widely acknowledged to be unsustainable and costly to the country’s image. But one more blunt truth must be acknowledged: the occupation is morally repugnant. On one side of a barbed-wire fence here in the southern Hebron hills is the Bedouin village of Umm al-Kheir, where Palestinians live in ramshackle tents and …

United States: Victory as protesters and union block Israeli ship unloading at Oakland Port. In a historic action and unprecedented action today, more 800 worker and community activists blocked the gates of the Oakland docks in the early morning hours, prompting longshore workers to refuse to cross the picketlines where they were scheduled to unload an Israeli ship. From 5:30 …

Blockade ‘eased’ as Gaza starves more slowly  By Jonathan Cook in Nazareth As Israel this week declared the “easing” of the four-year blockade of Gaza, an official explained the new guiding principle: “Civilian goods for civilian people.” The severe and apparently arbitrary restrictions on foodstuffs entering the enclave – coriander bad, cinnamon good – will finally end, we are told. Gaza’s …