Palestinian police deploy near Jerusalem for first time

18 hours ago
Source: Yahoo News

Ramallah (Palestinian Territories) (AFP) - Palestinian police have for the first time been deployed in three areas of the West Bank near annexed east Jerusalem, Palestinian and Israeli sources said on Thursday.

"For the first time, members of the Palestinian police wearing uniform and carrying weapons have been deployed in Abu Dis, Al-Ram and Bido," Palestinian police spokesman Louay Erzikat told AFP, saying the deployment had begun on Wednesday.

"This deployment is intended to target criminals and is the result of coordination" with the Israeli authorities, he said.

The Israeli army confirmed that Major General Roni Numa, head of the military's Central Command, had agreed to let the Palestinians open police stations in all three areas.

"The purpose of these stations is to address criminal matters as well as to maintain public order for the Palestinian population in area B surrounding Jerusalem," a spokeswoman said.

Under Oslo II, the second phase of the 1993 Oslo peace accords, the West Bank was divided up into areas of civilian and security control, known as areas A, B and C.

Area A, which covers the eight major towns and cities in the West Bank, is under full Palestinian civil and security control, while Area B, which accounts for roughly 22 percent of the West Bank, is under Palestinian civil control but Israeli security control.

Area C, which covers more than 60 percent of the occupied West Bank, is where the vast majority of Israeli settlements are located and is under full Israeli control, both civilian and security.

US funded anti-Morsi protests last year: Documents

Apr 02, 2014
Source: Press TV


Newly revealed documents show senior Egyptian opposition leaders who called for the overthrow of Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically elected president, had the financial backing of the US.
US President Barack Obama had claimed that Washington did not take sides in the Egyptian political crisis that ousted Morsi in July last year.

According to Aljazeera TV channel, a review of dozens of US federal government documents obtained by the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley shows that Washington quietly funded opposition groups in Egypt that worked against the Morsi government.

Washington channeled the funding through a State Department program which is part of a wider effort to try to stop the retreat of pro-US secularists and defeat the Islamic movements in the Middle East.

The program was dubbed by US officials as a "democracy assistance" initiative.

The move is in contradiction to the US government regulations that ban the use of taxpayers’ money to fund foreign politicians and activists that target democratically-elected governments.

The Egyptians launched a revolution against the pro-US regime of former President Hosni Mubarak in January 2011, which eventually ended the 30-year dictatorship of Mubarak in February 2011.

In June 2012, Egyptians voted in the country's first free and fair presidential election, electing the Muslim Brotherhood’s Morsi as their leader.

But about a year later, the Egyptian army toppled Morsi, suspended the constitution and launched a violent crackdown against the Muslim Brotherhood.

On December 25, 2013, the military-appointed government listed the Brotherhood as a “terrorist” organization over alleged involvement in a deadly bombing, without investigating or providing any evidence.

In January 2014, Amnesty International criticized Egyptian authorities for using an “unprecedented scale” of violence against protesters and dealing “a series of damaging blows to human rights.”

According to the UK-based rights group, at least 1,400 people have been killed in the political violence since Morsi’s ouster in July 2013, "most of them due to excessive force used by security forces."

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Link:  presstv.ir/detail/2014/03/30/356515/us-sponsored-coup-against-morsi-report/.