A former senior official in the Bush administration said on Thursday the use of chemical weapons in Syria might have been a "false flag operation" of Israel, meant to implicate Syrian President Bashar Assad.

"We don’t know what the chain of custody is. This could’ve been an Israeli false flag operation, it could’ve been an opposition in Syria... or it could’ve been an actual use by Bashar Assad. But we certainly don’t know with the evidence we’ve been given. And what I’m hearing from the intelligence community is that that evidence is really flakey," retired Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, told Cenk Uygur in an interview with Current TV.

UC Riverside’s student Senate this week passed a controversial resolution urging the university system to divest from nine companies that the students contend are violating the human rights of Palestinians and aiding Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.

When a civilian bus was bombed in Tel Aviv on Wednesday, many feared the incident would derail negotiations for a truce in the latest conflict between Israel and Hamas. That proved not to be the case.

The death toll from Israel’s military operation in the Gaza Strip surpassed 100 on Monday with scant evidence that an Egyptian-brokered truce is in sight, leaving Israeli leaders to weigh next steps in the six-day-old conflict.

Although few people are aware of the United States Commission on Civil Rights’ (USCCR) 2006 findings about "campus anti-Semitism", they have recently been invoked in a growing number of campaigns that threaten to curb students' First Amendment right to freedom of expression.

The USCCR findings on this issue form part of an echo chamber whereby a network of partisan, Israel-aligned organisations and activists repeat the same claims, often unchallenged, before official bodies that simply take their word as truth.

As my colleague Benjamin Weiser reported last month, a federal judge in Manhattan ruled that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority had violated the First Amendment rights of a pro-Israel group by refusing to run an ad that refers to Arabs as “savage” on 318 city buses.

Necessity is the mother of invention, and for Palestinians living on the West Bank trying to break their dependence on Israel for energy has resulted in a new solar powered vehicle.

Israel has elaborate defense systems against military attack and terrorism. Its defenses against its extremists, such as professional bigot Pamela Geller, are much more porous.

An Israeli soldier accused of killing a Palestinian mother and daughter carrying a white flag during Operation Cast Lead will serve just 45 days in prison. He agreed to a plea bargain and had his charge downgraded to “illegal use of weapon”.
The plea bargain on the reduced charge – down from manslaughter – was approved on Sunday by a military court in Jaffa.
The investigation into the killing of a 64-year-old mother and her 35 year-old daughter, shot while walking with a group of Palestinians holding white flags after their home was bombed, was opened following a complaint filed by Israeli human rights group B'Tselem.
The incident happened on January 4, 2009, during the Israeli Operation Cast Lead.
It happened when a group of Gaza civilians carrying makeshift white flags approached an IDF position manned by Givati soldiers, including the unnamed infantry sergeant, identified by Israeli media as "Staff Sergeant S”.
“S” opened fire on the group, without an order from his command

Prosecutors called it a “heckler’s veto” and a planned disruption of an Israeli diplomat’s speech at the UCI campus by 10 students with the intent to shut down the event.

Attorneys for the students on trial labeled it a carefully planned peaceful “interruption” and a “lawful expression of free speech.”

With those descriptions, opening statements got underway Wednesday afternoon in the trial of the students – seven from UCI and three from UC Riverside – accused of disrupting the Feb. 8, 20