Did 100s Die In BanglaDesh Factory Fire? - Deen

By Morris: Although the factory fire was on Nov 24, clashes between protesters and Police continue: http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2012/12/03/275914/bangladesh-police-textile-work... Source

Israel needs some tough love + Foreign countries summon Israeli ambassadors over settlement controversy

By Avaaz Team: There used to be a saying in certain diplomatic circles that "the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity". It meant that Palestinian leaders often seemed more interested in making pronouncements and spouting anti-Israeli slogans than in negotiating a peace deal. But given Israel's petulant and short-sighted reactions to the overwhelming support for Palestinian statehood in the UN last week, it's clear that this time it's the Israelis who are missing the opportunity for peace.

The world speaks

Last Thursday, despite threats from the US and Israel, the UN general assembly voted to recognise the state of Palestine. The numbers were conclusive: 138 nations voted for the motion, 41 members abstained and only nine voted against upgrading Palestine to non-member state status. Given the strength of that global mandate, it would seem to make sense for the Israeli government to back off its strident rhetoric (foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman claimed in August that Palestine seeking UN recognition was "diplomatic terror") and try to meet the Palestinian Authority for serious negotiations.
Instead, the Netanyahu government has responded to the UN general assembly vote by announcing plans to build 3,000 more settlement housing units in East Jerusalem and the West Bank,

Banksters gone wild

By Avaaz Team: Remember when greed-crazed Wall Street bankers used absurdly complicated "financial instruments" to make themselves insanely rich? And then – when their speculative bubble burst, triggering the worst recession in 70 years – they required massive government bailouts so they wouldn't take the entire global economy down with them? Yeah, so do we.
Unfortunately, bankers seem to have forgotten all this already – and now they're busy investing all their time, energy and brain power into trying to squirm out of following the new rules coming down the pike.

Rigging the game ...

First, Wall Street did everything it could to keep new laws that would prevent a repeat of the Great Meltdown from being passed. Then, when the laws their lobbying helped weaken were passed, big banks did everything they could to weaken them further during the rule-making process. And now that the already watered-down rules are about to go into effect soon, they're coming up with creative new ways to avoid having to obey them at all.

The West Can't Pay Syria's Price - Syrian Girl

By Morris: SyrianGirl shows an objective view that the Syrian conflict will go on a long time, thanks to the UK and France etc. We also speculate on what Putin will be saying to Erdogan in Turkey today ... Source

Zionist DisInfoWars: Taking Alex Jones to the Wood Shed + Follow up

By Ry Dawson: Faked even handedness in a conflict that is not even at all is not neutrality it's deception. Jones often goes to crazy town as a way of intentionally avoiding a zionist role in anything. He left israel out of 911 for 6 years and never connected them to Iraq or said a word about the anthrax lies or the fact that Palestine is occupied. He's talked more about school/theater shootings than the destruction of entire nations.
The follow up>

Cut media empires down to size so that no one owner or editor can grow too powerful!

The Prime Minister wants to ignore Leveson and leave the media to clean up its own mess. The Murdoch mafia is pulling all the strings it can, but so far they haven’t convinced the Lib Dems. So if MPs hear our voices today as they debate in Parliament, Cameron will have to cut the media down to size, for fear of splitting the coalition. Sign the petition now!

In hours the House of Commons could begin to free our country from the Murdoch media mafia. But we need to move fast to stop hacking, bribery and corruption in their tracks.

David Cameron plans to abandon hacking victims and ditch Lord Justice Leveson's plan, leaving the media to clean up its own mess. But Nick Clegg has so far defied the media bullies. So, if we strengthen the resolve of the Lib Dems and some disgruntled Tory MPs, Cameron will know he can get voted down, forcing him to agree to change the law.

If Parliament asserts itself in today's debate, we can get begin to free our politics from the moguls’ grip. Let's call on MPs and the leaders of our three main parties to agree to a law implementing Leveson’s recommendations and imposing a 20% cap on media ownership to cut media empires down to size so that no one owner or editor can grow too powerful. Sign the petition, then write to your MP, and get lots of your friends involved:

George Papandreou's mother 'linked to €550 million Swiss bank account'

The 89-year-old mother of a former Greek prime minister has been reportedly linked to a Swiss bank account containing more €550 million (£446 million). 

The Telegraph: Margaret Papandreou, whose son George served as the country's prime minister during the height of the Eurozone crisis, is said to be on the "Lagarde list" of Greek citizens with fortunes hidden in Switzerland.

The list of alleged tax evaders, named after Christine Lagarde, the head International Monetary Fund (IMF), has caused deep resentment as Greece struggles with austerity.

Mrs Papandreou, whose late husband was also a prime minister, denied the allegations reported in two Greek newspapers yesterday. 

"Why such lies? Why such attacks? Perhaps because my family never served this country’s interest groups," she said in a statement.
Mr Papandreou, who stood down as prime minister in 2011 but remains a member of parliament, said the stories were "rumours without facts" and were part of a backlash against his anti-corruption battles while in office.

Europe successfully tests its first stealth killer drone, ‘nEUROn’

By Madison Ruppert: The first European stealth drone built for combat, dubbed the Neuron or “nEUROn,” made its maiden voyage from Istres, France on Dec. 1.
The nEUROn is a technology demonstrator for a European Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicle (UCAV) and represents just one of the many ways in which drone technology is progressing in leaps and bounds.
Indeed, drone technology is progressing so quickly that some of what is currently being used is simply hard to believe. Pile on the fact that drones are already being used in the United States with more to come in the near future and you have an ugly picture.
Furthermore, the prospect of widespread use of fully automated weapons systems, also called “killer robots” by some, has actually become so concerning that Human Rights Watch recently penned an extensive report calling for bans on such technology.
It seems that Europe is joining the fray with their nEUROn, first flown out of the Dassault Aviation company’s flight test base, according to the Aviationist.
The report was also reiterated in a press release from Dassault Aviation stating that the test was completed successfully “in collaboration with the flight test personnel of the French defense procurement agency (DGA).”
“The nEUROn was launched in 2005 by the customer, DGA, and involves France, Italy, Sweden, Spain, Greece and Switzerland,” states the release. “It defines a future for the aeronautic excellence of Europe.”

Next Up For A "Recovering" Europe: A 30-50% Collapse In Wages In Spain, Italy And... France

Submitted by Tyler Durden: Several weeks ago Europe officially entered a double dip recession, and based on various secondary economic indicators, even Europe’s primary economic powerhouse, Germany, is on the verge of negative economic growth. The reasons for Europe’s woeful macroeconomic state are numerous, but boil down to two primary ones: i) massive external imbalances among Eurozone nations (think soaring peripheral debt) coupled with the inability to devalue the common currency as that would mean a failure and collapse of the joint currency union, ii) a desperate need for the periphery to regain price competitiveness (via wages and labor costs) with Germany in order to arrest and collapse an unemployment rate (general, but especially youth) that not even the most optimistic pundits dare claim is sustainable.

Said otherwise, most European countries (including France) face a desperate need for external devaluation, which is impossible under a monetary union, leaving only internal devaluation as an option. This is where the much maligned concept of austerity comes in:  from a macroeconomic perspective, austerity is not so much an exercise at moderating the pace of debt increase (as neither Spain nor Italy have reduced their rate of debt issuance), but of gradually becoming more price competitive with Germany: a key outcome that will be needed for the Eurozone to have any chance of survival, i.e., lowering sticky unemployment rates from levels that virtually assure social "disturbances" in the months and years ahead.
And herein lies the rub: because while protests against “austerity” (which as we observed recently has still not been truly implemented in Europe, and certainly not in Portugal or Spain) are a daily event in most PIIGS nations, “you ain’t seen nothing yet.“

Ten Big Fat Lies To Keep The Euro Dream Alive

By Wolf Richter: Every country in the Eurozone has its own collection of big fat lies that politicians and eurocrats have served up in order to make the euro and the subsequent bailouts or austerity measures less unappetizing. Here are some from the German point of view, gleaned from the Wirtschafts Woche.
1999: “Can Germany be held liable for the debts of other countries? A very clear No!” said a multi-colored piece of propaganda issued by the CDU, the party of Helmut Kohl who was Chancellor at the time, and of Angela Merkel who is Chancellor now. It explained: “The Maastricht treaty forbids explicitly that the EU or the other EU Partners are liable for the debts of any Member State.” Sounds like a bad joke today.
But fear not: because of the 3% deficit limit in the Maastricht Treaty, “euro Member States will therefore be able service their debts over the long term without any problems.” Thus, the big fat euro lies started before bank notes had even been put into circulation.
January 2001: “This money will have a great future,” said Kohl during a speech celebrating the introduction of the euro that he’d pushed through with all his corpulence. For a while, it worked. Euros were growing on trees. Even Greece had access to cheap euro debt with which to buy votes and fund the Olympics. Everyone was happy. Until it didn’t work anymore.

Iranian medicine saving American lives: Report

Press TV: Iranian medicine has been saving the lives of Americans while the illegal US-led sanctions against the Islamic Republic have been adversely affecting the lives of many Iranian patients.

A Sunday report on the website of the Wall Street Journal said the US Defense Department needs Iranian-researched and -produced medicine to treat the foreign forces in Afghanistan who get bitten by “Oxus cobras, Haly's pit vipers” and other snakes peculiar to southwest Asia.

“Medical guidance issued by US Central Command says drugs made by Iran's Razi Vaccine & Serum Research Institute ‘should be the first line of antivenin therapy,’” the report cited a US officer as saying.

“The Iranian antivenin is the best,” said Colonel Rob Russell, the medical director of the pharmacy at British-run Camp Bastion hospital, adjacent to the Camp Leatherneck US Marine base in southern Afghanistan.

The report highlighted the fact that antivenins produced in the US and approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) “won't work on Afghan snake bites.”

This comes as the US-engineered sanctions are putting the lives of Iranian patients in jeopardy.

Flying into trouble? Drones to use US airspace as safety record questioned

RT: A newly-released internal investigation by the US Air Force has shown a plague of non-mission-related accidents involving drones in its foreign operations. Meanwhile, Washington is pushing ahead with plans to allow drones into US civil airspace.
The report shows Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) crashing consistently and unpredictably due to a wide array of failures from technical malfunction, to complications in dealing with air traffic controllers, to downright incompetence. The documents, obtained by the Washington Post, number several thousand pages, and show that at least seven drones have crashed near airports in the past two years.
One account from April describes a sub-contracted operator launching an $8.9 million MQ-9 Reaper from the runway at the Seychelles International Airport without getting the go-head from the control tower. The same operator then accidentally switched off the engine without noticing and then tried an emergency landing, but did not release the wheels.
The aircraft was a write-off. It was the second similar accident at the site in just five months.
“I will be blunt here. I said, ‘I can’t believe this is happening again,’ ” the report cites an Air Force official present at the scene as saying. He later adds, “You go, ‘How stupid are you?’”.