Variously...

Unlivable lives. Water is a key weapon in the Israeli war against the Palestinians...

A report from the United Nations found that the average Israeli settler consumes 300 liters of water per day — a figure surpassing even the average Californian’s 290. But thanks to Israeli military action and legal restrictions on access, the average Palestinian in the occupied West Bank only gets about 70. And for the tens of thousands of Palestinians who live off the water grid altogether, daily consumption hovers at around 30. That’s just 10 percent of the Israeli figure.

Both figures are well below the minimum 100 liters per day recommended by the World Health Organization. While Israelis are watering their lawns and swimming in Olympic-sized pools, Palestinians a few kilometers away are literally dying of thirst.

Their new home. The intent, I now believe, is to push the Palestinians into making a "reverse exodus" across the Red Sea. In an earlier post, I discussed the insane plan of Tarek Bin Laden (Osama's brother) to build two huge cities in Yemen and Djibouti, bound together by the world's longest suspension bridge, which would span the Red Sea.

Not long ago, the Bin Laden Group confidently predicted that Noor City would have 2.5 million residents by 2025 -- and that its Yemeni counterpart would have 4.5 million.

(Right now, the entire population of Djibouti is somewhere around half a million people.)

These cities are meant to provide low-tax (or no-tax) havens for mega-corporations and the filthy rich. As for the workers...well, I doubt that labor will have many rights. The developers have announced that they want Noor City to be "the Dubai of Africa." Since Dubai was built on slave labor (and many of the slaves were Palestinians), we can hazard a guess as to how Tarek Bin Laden's megaproject will proceed.

A mega-project needs workers, and those millions of inhabitants will have to come from somewhere. Meanwhile, Israel desperately wants to expel millions of Arabs. It's a match made in hell.

You should take a look at the official Al Noor City website, which is a testament to megalomania. If you sift through the site, you'll find that this seemingly-bizarre project has attracted an impressive list of partners, including SAIC, Lockheed (or a division thereof called PAE), the public relations firm of Hill & Knowlton (the people who gave us the "baby incubator" fib), and the once-ultra-powerful law firm Dewey & LeBoeuf (whose partners were recently indicted for fraud: How hath the mighty fallen!)

Those are just a few of the noteworthy names that popped out at me. I invite further research.

Why Christie must never be allowed anywhere near the presidency. Republicans do not see a sorry record as an impediment to their dreams of glory. Bobby Jindal, for example, cannot comprehend why being one the least-liked governors in the nation should disqualify him from the presidency. As for Chris Christie...

His tax cuts for corporations, totaling $2.1 billion, have crippled the economy in New Jersey. In the decade before Christie, those tax breaks totaled only $1.2 billion. All of this while New Jersey suffered NINE credit downgrades, more than under any other NJ governor. The state has the second lowest credit rating in the country. In fact, New Jersey is very often ranked as one of the worst states for doing business (pdf). Economic growth has been slow; NJ ranked 46th for growth last year.

New Jersey, under Chris Christie, has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country. Add to that his budget mess, under-estimating revenues by $1.5 billion in 2014. To try to fix it, he slashed pensions for public employees to help pay for the shortfall. This, after he’d agreed in 2011 to increase state contributions to the pension fund in exchange for workers giving up some of their pension funds. Then, he had the gall to try to declare that very law unconstitutional when he couldn’t honor it. Now it will go to the Supreme Court.

Consider: If Jerry Brown were to attempt another run at the presidency, the Republicans would scream about his record, even though he is the guy who cleaned up a seemingly-impossible financial mess left by his GOP predecessors. But Christie's pension fund burglary is considered forgivable.

A tale of two headlines. The NYT: "New Trove of Hillary Clinton’s Emails Highlights Workaday Tasks at the State Department." The Daily Mail: "Email bombshells from Hillary's secret account show she didn't know when cabinet meetings were held, was dumbfounded by a fax machine and emailed aides to fetch her iced tea."

"Bombshells"...!

Both stories are guilty of trying to make mountains out of anthills. But the tone of the New York Times piece is uncharacteristically reasonable -- this time around. Whoever wrote that hyperbolic headline for the Daily Mail ought to consider the advantages of a meth-free lifestyle.

You want a real Hillary scandal? While the mainstream journals push fluff, the indefatigable Robert Parry has the goods. His topic is the chaos wrought by Hillary's policies in Libya.

One could argue that those who devised and implemented the disastrous Libyan “regime change” – the likes of Hillary Clinton and Samantha Power – should be almost disqualified from playing any future role in U.S. foreign policy. Instead, Clinton is the Democratic frontrunner to succeed Barack Obama as President and Power was promoted from Obama’s White House staff to be U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations — where she is at the center of other dangerous U.S. initiatives in seeking “regime change” in Syria and pulling off “regime change” in Ukraine.

In fairness, however, it should be noted that it has been the pattern in Official Washington over the past few decades for hawkish “regime change” advocates to fail upwards.

Presumably, the “Clinton Doctrine” would have been a policy of “liberal interventionism” to achieve “regime change” in countries where there is some crisis in which the leader seeks to put down an internal security threat and where the United States objects to the action.

Of course, the Clinton Doctrine would be selective. It would not apply to brutal security crackdowns by U.S.-favored governments, say, Israel attacking Gaza or the Kiev regime in Ukraine slaughtering ethnic Russians in the east. But it’s likely, given the continuing bloodshed in Libya, that Hillary Clinton won’t be touting the “Clinton Doctrine” in her presidential campaign.

When are this nation's newspapers going to start giving us actual news?