The guardian: Martin Chulov in Beirut. UN to Withdraw non Essential Staff from Syria!

The United Nations is preparing to evacuate all non essential staff from Syria, citing the "prevailing security situation" amid growing fears in Washington that the beleaguered regime is considering using chemical weapons. The European Union also announced it was cutting back its activities in the country and on a fast moving day of diplomatic and military action the Syrian government's foreign ministry spokesman, Jihad Makdissi, was reported to have defected. The UN's undersecretary for safety and security, Gregory Starr, announced that the organization had also cancelled all missions to Syria from abroad, and suspended its activities inside the war ravaged country. The decision marks the final step before a full scale evacuation, a move that has not been ordered at any point during Syria's steady descent into chaos over the past 20 months. Up to 25 of about 100 foreign staff may leave this week, it said, adding that more armored vehicles were needed after attacks in recent weeks on humanitarian aid convoys and the hijacking of goods or vehicles. Some convoys were caught in crossfire between government and rebel forces, including an incident near the airport, in which two staff were injures, it said. The UN deploys more than 1,000 national and international staff in Syria, but movement and communications have become more difficult due to intensified fighting near the capital and a 48 hour internet blackout last week, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said. While there has been intense fighting on the ground, particularly in Damascus, in the past few days, there is also growing concern that the Syrian regime is contemplating using chemical weapons. Syria on Monday denied it planned to use its chemical weapons stockpile, after reports that the US has observed officials moving some components of the program. "Syria has stressed repeatedly that it will not use these types of weapons, if they were available, under any circumstances against its people," the foreign ministry said.  

Prof. James Petras: Legal Imperialism and International Law!

By now we are familiar with imperial states using their military power to attack, destroy and occupy independent countries. Boatloads of important studies have documented how imperial countries have seized and pillaged the resources of mineral rich and agriculturally productive countries, in consort with multi national corporations. Financial critics have provided abundant data on the ways in which imperial creditors have extracted onerous rents, royalties and debt payments from indebted countries and their taxpayers, workers, employees and productive sectors. What has not been examined fully is the over arching legal architecture which informs, justifies and facilitates imperial wars, pillage and debt collection. While force and violence, especially through overt and covert military intervention, have always been an essential part of empire building, it does not operate in a legal vacuum: Judicial institutions, rulings and legal precedents precede, accompany and follow the process of empire building. The legality of imperial activity is based on the imperial states judicial system and its own legal experts. Their legal theories and opinions are always presented as over ruling international law, as well as the laws of the countries targeted for imperial intervention. Imperial law supersedes international law simply because imperial law is backed by brute force, it possesses imperial colonial air, ground and naval armed forces to ensure the supremacy of imperial law. In contrast, international law lacks an effective enforcement mechanism. Moreover, international law, to the extent that it is effective, is applied only to the weaker powers and to regimes designated by the imperial powers as violators. The very judicial processes, including the appointment of judges and prosecutors who interpret international law, investigate international crime and arrest, sentence and punish guilty parties, are under to the influence of the reigning imperial powers. In other words, the application and jurisdiction of international law is selective and subject to constraints imposed by the imperial and national power.   

Veterans Today: Top 10 Veterans Stories in Today's News!

These are compiled from the latest sources. 1. Walter Reed to rename cancer treatment unit to honor Murtha. When a group of military wives approached John Murtha in the 1990s concerned they couldn't get mammograms in military hospitals, the late congressman said, "That just can't be." If we are going to have women in the military, then we're going to provide mammograms," his widow, Joyce, told the Tribune Review. 2. Truman grandson plants seeds of Hiroshima reconciliation. In October, a visitor delivered a small plastic bag, containing several tree seeds to the Truman Library in Independence, Mo. The seeds had fallen from trees, still standing, that survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945. 3. JBLM soldiers return home, adjust to life away from war. Spending the better part of a year under the Afghanistan sun has a way of making gray skies look lovely. "It's nice to see clouds and rain, said Army Capt Benjamin Meier, just back last week from a mission leading a Stryker company in a tough part of Kandahar province. 4. Pentagon to expand Defense Intelligence Agency's network of spies. The Pentagon will send hundreds of additional spies overseas as part of an ambitious plan to assemble an espionage network that rivals the CIA in size, US officials said. 5. Schools for children of military families hurt by looming sequestration. In one tiny Texas school  district, that serves the children of active duty and retired military parents at Randolph Air Force Base, sequestration is not some future abstraction or political game. 6. Ex Guardsman Copes With Help Of Service Dog. Paragould AR Daily Press. Jason Dowdy, who did not come back as the same man he once was after serving an 18 month tour of duty in Iraq from 2003-05 with the Arkansas National Guard." An IED explosion "left him with three skull fractures, deafness in his right ear, no sense of smell or taste," and "a left ankle broken in two places," yet he found PTSD "was what had affected him the most since coming home. Dowdy, who once remained in his house for nine straight months, now gas a service dog, a blue Doberman named Charger, courtesy of "Sherri's Project, a non profit organization that trains service dogs for wounded and injured veterans."

Larry Beinhart: Three Things You Have to Know About the "Fiscal Cliff". l

Obama won, Romney lost. That is a crisis averted and a very good thing, but the contest is hardly over. The election was essentially an intermission in a long drama over economics. What's going to happen in the upcoming act? A sharp change? Muddled compromise? A new stalemate? According to the coming attractions, the episode up next is a really big action scene: The Fiscal Cliff! Here's the action. Three vehicles, plus some scooters along for the trip, are all racing straight toward a cliff! They have no brakes! If any of them go over the edge, according to promotional videos on the action news, it will hurt the whole economy, slow our growth and plunge us into a recession. If they all go over together, it will be really, really, super bad. The biggest one, visualize it as Tony Soprano's Cadillac Escalade, is the expiration of the Bush tax cuts. Vehicle number two has less than half the weight. It's the expiration of Obama's Social Security tax cut, an everyman's sort of car, call it a Ford Taurus. The third is a pick up truck. A simple one, a bit smaller than the Taurus, But! What you gotta worry about is the payload in the back! Tanks of propane! If this baby hits the ground it blows up in everybody's face. Especially the face of your local congress person. The bomb is sequestration. That's a misappropriated term, but in this case, it means that the failure to reach a deficit cutting deal launches an instant spending cut of approximately $100 billion. Like the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland, shrieking "off with their heads," it lops 8 percent off the top of all discretionary spending. Discretionary spending is the money we spend inspecting food, testing drugs, running federal courts, running the FBI, DEA and the Border Patrol, supporting education, doing research, maintaining national parks, keeping airplanes from colliding, and collecting taxes. Roughly 9 percent will also be cut from military spending. These cuts will not be done surgically. No thought, planning, care, or precision will go into the process. It will be done Grim Reaper style, swing the scythe and slash everything in the way. Those are the big three. The other financial events on the same schedule include the Affordable Care Act, aka Obama-care, which can be regarded as a new tax, "other" tax provisions that come to an end, the unemployment benefits extension ends, and the rates Medicare pay will go down.

The Economist: Asia: Diplomacy with North Korea!

North Korea's announcement on December 1st that it will attempt for the second time this year to put a rocket into space is likely to have landed like a bombshell on the capitals of South Korea, America, Japan and even China. There have been reports, based on satellite imagery, that a launch was under preparation at the Sohae space center on the west coast, but few were inclined to believe the worst, until they had official notification from Pyongyang. Even in the highly unlikely event that the regime of the young Kim Jong Un were sincere in declaring that the launch, which is scheduled to go off sometime between December 10th and 22nd, is an innocent attempt to put a satellite into orbit, the timing could hardly be more explosive. The technology it takes to push a rocket into space is uncomfortably similar to the technology that could send a nuclear warhead flying on a ballistic missile. The window for the launch, which diplomats in Washington, Seoul and their allies regard as a violation of a UN ban on North Korean nuclear missile tests, overlaps with the first anniversary of the death of Mr Kim's father, Kim Jong II, which is to be marked on December 17th. But it also covers December 19th, when South Korea holds a presidential election in which relations with the North were bound to be a big bone of contention, and on December 16th, Japan, which is always twitchy about the trajectory of North Korean rockets, takes to the polls. The proposed launch will come just weeks after the recent re-election of Barack Obama, and probably scuppers any chance that he will re-engage quickly with the North, a failed launch in April ended hopes of a food aid deal from the Americans, and finally the move coincides with the emergence of China's new leader, Xi Jinping. Only one day earlier, a senior Chinese envoy had visited North Korea on behalf of Mr Xi. Whether or not the missile launch was discussed is not known, but China has long sought to impress on Pyongyang its desire for peace and stability on the peninsula. South Korea was swift to warn its neighbor against what it deems a serious provocation. It is likely to be seen in the south as a misguided attempt to influence the outcome of their tight presidential race.          

Chris Hedges: Iceland's Leaders!!

One country refused to bail out its derelict banks and slash social spending amid the financial crisis, and guess what? Unlike the euro-zone and the United States, it's making a sturdy comeback. Iceland's stock market plunged 90 percent in 2008. Inflation reached 18 percent, unemployment shot up nine-fold and its biggest banks failed. This was no recession. It was a full blown depression. Since then, the country has steadily improved. By September of this year, it repaid its IMF rescue loans ahead of schedule. Unemployment dropped by half, and its economy will have grown by roughly 2.5 percent by the beginning of 2013. So what's Iceland's secret? According to the editors at Bloomberg News, it's a refusal to do what virtually every other nation that was pummeled by the crisis did: Adopt policies of economic austerity. Iceland's approach was the polar opposite of the US and Europe, which rescued their banks and did little to aid indebted homeowners. Although lessons drawn from Iceland, with just 320,000 people and an economy based on fishing, aluminum production and tourism, might not be readily transferable to bigger countries, its rebound suggests there's more than one way to recover from a financial meltdown. Nothing distinguishes Iceland as much as its aid to consumers. To homeowners with negative equity, the country offered write offs that would wipe out debt above 110 percent of the property value. The government also provides means tested subsidies to reduce mortgage interest expenses: Those with lower earnings, less home equity and children were granted the most generous support. The International Monetary Fund's mission chief to Iceland has sung the nation's praises too. "Iceland has made significant achievements since the crisis," Daria V Zakharova told Bloomberg in August. "We have a very positive outlook on growth, especially for this year, and next year, because it appears to us that the growth is broad based."  

Chris Hedges: Katrina, All Over Again!!

Argi Tzenis, 76, is standing in the hall of her small brick row house on Bragg Street in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. She is dressed in a bathrobe and open toed sandals. The hall is dark and cold. It has been dark and cold since Hurricane Sandy slammed into the East Coast a month ago. Three feet of water and raw sewage flooded and wrecked her home: "We never had this problem before," she says. "We never had water from the sea come down like this." Hurricane Sandy, if you are poor, is the Katrina of the North. It has highlighted the inability of utility companies, as well as state and federal agencies, to cope with the looming environmental disasters that because of the climate crisis will soon come in wave after wave. But, most important, it illustrates the depraved mentality of an oligarchic and corporate elite that, as conditions worsen, retreats into self contained gated communities, guts basic services and abandons the wider population. Sheepshead Bay, along with Coney Island, the Rockaway's, parts of Staten Island and long stretches of the New Jersey coast, is obliterated. Stores, their merchandise destroyed by the water, are boarded up and closed. Rows of derelict cars, with the tires and license plates removed and the windows smashed, line the streets. Food distribution centers, most of them set up by volunteers from Occupy Sandy Recovery, hastily close before dark every day, because of the danger of looting and robbery. Storm victims who remain in their damaged homes, often without heat, electricity or running water, clutch knives against the threat of gangs that prowl at night through the wreckage. This storm, amid freakish weather patterns such storms will become routine, resulted in at least $71.3 billion in property damage in New York and New Jersey. Many of the 305,000 houses in New York destroyed by Sandy will never be rebuilt. New York City says it will have to spend $800 million just to repair its roads, and that is only the start. The next hurricane season will most likely descend on the Eastern Seaboard with even greater destructive fury. A couple of more hurricanes like this one, and whole sections of the coast will become uninhabitable.