Stung by the de facto recognition of Palestinian sovereignty in a UN General Assembly vote last month, Israel announced it would expand settlements in the occupied West Bank including East Jerusalem.
An Israeli interior ministry planning committee on Monday gave preliminary approval for 1,500 new homes in the Ramat Shlomo settlement.
The panel will now start discussing plans for another 4,500 homes in two other settlements, Givat Hamatos and Gilo, in back-to-back sessions that could run into next week, ministry spokesman Efrat Orbach said Tuesday.
Israel counts the three settlements as part of its Jerusalem municipality even though they are on West Bank land seized in the 1967 Middle East war.
Palestinians see the settlements as obstacles to achieving a viable state with a capital in East Jerusalem.
"Settlement activity is unilateral and is completely adverse to the continued viability of a two-state solution and the possibility for our people to continue to exist. It's an attack on our people's right to life, essentially," Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad said Monday.
The United States and European Union condemned the plans.
"We are deeply disappointed that Israel insists on continuing this pattern of provocative action. These repeated announcements and plans of new construction run counter to the cause of peace," US State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told reporters.
"Israel's leaders continually say that they support a path towards a two-state solution yet these actions only put that goal further at risk.
"So we again call on Israel, and the Palestinians, to cease any kinds of counterproductive, unilateral actions and take concrete steps to return to direct negotiations," Nuland said.
British Foreign Secretary William Hague called the Israeli decision "a serious provocation and an obstacle to peace."
"If implemented, it would make a negotiated two-state solution, with Jerusalem as a shared capital, very difficult to achieve," he said.
"We urge Israel to reverse this decision and take no further steps aimed at expanding or entrenching settlement activity."
Netanyahu deputy defends
The settlements are illegal under international law and Western powers have been especially troubled by Israel's declared intent to build in E-1, a wedge of land between East Jerusalem and the West Bank where it had previously held off under US pressure.
Israeli Vice Prime Minister Moshe Yaalon said the expansion of the Jerusalem-area settlements was a resumption of plans put on hold while Western powers tried to persuade Abbas to abandon the Palestinians' UN status upgrade.
"We said, 'We won't build, so as not to give Abu Mazen (Abbas) an excuse to go to the UN and an excuse not to come to the table,'" Yaalon told Army Radio, "After he did what he did ... we removed these restrictions from ourselves."
He dismissed the international furor. "The world automatically condemns any construction over the Green Line, and then moves on," Yaalon said, referring to the West Bank boundary.
"We will continue to build in accordance with the state of Israel's strategic interests," he added.
Critics in Israel have suggested Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is pandering to the right-wing electorate as he prepares to run for re-election in a Jan. 22 ballot.
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/imeu/fromTheMedia/~3/7G-__KRrJ1Q/ViewDetails.aspx
whitney houston funeral video tyler perry whitney houston r kelly r. kelly macular degeneration whitney houston funeral judi dench
It’s official: Europe is fast approaching a point at which broadband is becoming ubiquitous among consumers, and with it is coming a surge of popularity for online news, social media, and e-commerce. Today the European Commission released details for how European countries have been adopting broadband, and what they are using it for. The top-line figures: in 2012 72% of households now have a broadband connection. And in a survey of what it is that people do online, the most popular activity is newsreading, at 60%. The stats were released just as Neelie Kroes, the VP of the European Commission, prepares to give a speech in which she lays out priorities for the next year in European digital policy. Topics she’s she’s expected to cover include a 10-point plan for broadband growth; plans for copyright actions; and a new initiative for designing and manufacturing hardware — described informally as an “Airbus for chips” — to rival countries in Asia and North America. (You can watch that speech yourself here.) The stats were compiled by Eurostat, the Luxembourg-based directorate of the European Commission that provides statistics to EU institutions and also a unified measurement framework across the different member states. Europe on average has come a very long way in broadband penetration. Whereas in 2006 only 30% of the population had broadband access, now that figure is at 72%. Some countries like Denmark and Finland are now at 85% and significantly no country is at less than 50% penetration. Social media is one of the most popular categories for online activity. Some 52% of European residents with broadband connections use them to post messages to social media sites. Even more popular is reading: more than 60% of consumers use their broadband to read online news. But, in a sign of how “lean-back” is the order of the day, only 9% of them are creating their own blog or other website content. The figures also speak to platform consolidation online — people are increasingly going to sites like Facebook and Twitter to express themselves, and less so trying to create their own spaces online for the same purpose. Kroes today is laying out a seven-point plan for Europe’s digital agenda in the next year, which we’ll detail below. But one striking takeaway from Eurostat’s figures is that although we are laying the groundwork for basic broadband connectivity, when it comes to services