Egyptian police shot and wounded two Africans, from Mali and Kenya, who tried to slip over Egypt’s desert frontier into Israel on Sunday, security sources said.

Escalating police violence at the Egypt-Israel border has left 11 would-be infiltrators dead since the start of the year, while scores of others, mostly from Africa, have been detained. Police killed an Eritrean migrant at the border on Thursday.

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BEIRUT: Nearly 300 people have been killed or injured in South Lebanon by unexploded ordnance dropped by Israel just before the cease-fire that halted the 2006 summer war, and more than half of the areas originally contaminated by cluster bomblets have yet to be fully cleared, according to the United Nations Mine Action Coordination Center for Southern Lebanon (MACC).

The results of a new MACC overview of its functions in Lebanon were released to the public Friday in order to mark, in part, International Mine Action Day. MACC field officer Dalia Farran discussed the results of the study, noting that “since the 2006 [summer war] cease-fire, 965 locations contaminated by unexploded ordnances have been identified throughout the 39 million square meters that constitute South Lebanon.”

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Diana Ralph grew up in a progressive Jewish family in postwar America. Her father’s work as a lawyer at the Nuremberg war crime trials, when she was still an infant, cemented his support for the state of Israel.

But when his daughter, as a young woman, questioned Israeli policies after the Six Day War in 1967, she saw a side of her father she hadn’t witnessed before.

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L’ambassadeur d’Israël au Canada, Alan Baker, était venu parler hier des 60 ans de relations entre les deux pays et plaider pour leur approfondissement dans les domaines économique et culturel. L’intervention d’environ 25 manifestants l’a cependant obligé à aborder aussi des questions plus politiques, dont, évidemment, le conflit israélo-palestinien.

L’ambassadeur Baker venait de rappeler que le Canada est un des 30 États membres des Nations unies à avoir appuyé la création de l’État d’Israël, en 1947, lorsqu’un petit groupe d’activistes a réussi à pénétrer dans la salle de conférence de l’hôtel du centre-ville de Montréal où il prenait la parole, lançant des tracts et criant: «Israël hors de Palestine!» et «Non à l’apartheid israélien!»

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The General Labor Confederation (GLC) on Monday called a one-day general strike in Lebanon for May 7 because of the government’s refusal to raise the minimum wage from LL300,000 to LL960,000 per month. While an economist labeled the minimum wage “atrocious,” the GLC’s strike call also has political overtones, as GLC chief Ghassan Ghosn organized a series of sparsely attended demonstrations last year in front of various ministries. He has long been a vocal critic of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora’s government, while the minimum wage has sat at LL300,000 for more than a decade.

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L’article de La Presse, paru samedi, le 8 mars 2008, page A24, sur la situation à Gaza, contient une affirmation erronée qu’il est nécessaire de corriger. A la fin de l’article, le collectif montréalais Tadamon! est qualifié par M. Elharrar, porte-parole du Comité Québec-Israël, de “groupe pro-Hezbollah”. A deux reprises, il utilise cette unique formulation pour appuyer, semble-t-il, l’accusation que le collectif ne voudrait pas la paix, alors que celui-ci participait à un regroupement d’ONG et de syndicats québécois s’étant réunis pour demander au Canada de dénoncer l’attaque israélienne contre Gaza.

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Every once in a while Ibrahim Hawash, 42, calls his wife Noha from his nightshift job to make sure that she has followed the treatment course prescribed by their family doctor for the involuntary urination of their four children, who are in primary school. The doctor says that the four children lost their ability to control urination due to the fear they underwent when Israeli army jets bombed a home near theirs in the Jabalya refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip during the “Warm Winter” military campaign three weeks ago. The four children still remember the terrifying night when they woke frightened up to the sound of a thundering explosion in the area and found that the glass of their home’s windows had fallen onto their bed.

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BAGHDAD: While the number of US troops killed in Iraq since the 2003 invasion stands at 4,000, up to three times as many Iraqi soldiers have died – and the number of civilians killed runs into tens and probably hundreds of thousands. The icasualties.org Web site, based only on published reports, shows that around 8,000 members of the Iraqi security forces have died since the March 2003 invasion. Last year, however, the Iraqi government put the figure at 12,000.

There is no agreement when it comes to civilian casualties, particularly as many deaths are never reported in the media.

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JERUSALEM: A United Nations panel voted overwhelmingly this month to condemn Israel for a recent armed incursion in the Gaza Strip that claimed more than 120 lives, many of them civilian.

Thirty-three member countries of the 47-seat UN Human Rights Council endorsed the resolution, which accused Israel of war crimes in its ongoing battles against Palestinian militants in Gaza.

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Quand il a quitté Montréal, en avril 2007, pour aller passer quelque temps chez sa mère, dans la bande de Gaza, Marouane Aboudraz croyait faire un voyage de trois ou quatre mois, question de présenter ses deux derniers-nés à leur grand-mère.

Mais ce voyage s’est transformé en cauchemar. En juin 2007, le mouvement intégriste Hamas a pris le contrôle de ce territoire palestinien dont les frontières ont été hermétiquement scellées par Israël. Et la famille Aboudraz s’est retrouvée coincée en enfer.

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