The Israeli parliament has passed a law in effect banning citizens from calling for academic, consumer or cultural boycotts of Israel in a move denounced by its opponents as anti-democratic.

The “‘Law for Prevention of Damage to the State of Israel through Boycott” won a majority of 47 to 38, despite strong opposition and an attempt to filibuster the six-hour debate. Prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu did not take part in the vote.

Under the terms of the new law, an individual or organisation proposing a boycott may be sued for compensation by any individual or institution claiming that it could be damaged by such a call. Evidence of actual damage is not be required.

The new law aims to protect individuals and institutions in both Israel and the Palestinian territory it has occupied illegally under international law since 1967. It in effect bans calls for consumer boycotts of goods produced in West Bank settlements, or of cultural or academic institutions in settlements. It also prevents the government doing business with companies that comply with boycotts.

A coalition of Israeli human rights groups immediately issued a letter of protest over the new law.

Hassan Jabareen of Adalah, a legal centre for Israeli-Arab citizens, said: “Defining boycott as a civil wrong suggests that all Israelis have a legal responsibility to promote the economic advancement of the settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories. This means that Israeli organisations opposing the settlements as a matter of principle are in a trap: any settler can now constantly harass them, challenging them to publicly declare their position on the boycott of settlements and threatening them with heavy compensation costs if they support it.”

Hackers and trouble-makers Anonymous have attacked Booz Allen Hamilton (a company with quite a background in supporting American imperialism) and released the following statement:

Hello Thar!

Today we want to turn our attention to Booz Allen Hamilton, whose core business is contractual work completed on behalf of the US federal government, foremost on defense and homeland security matters, and limited engagements of foreign governments specific to U.S. military assistance programs.

…

For the Lazy we have assembled some facts about Booz Allen. First let’s take a quick look of who these guys are. Some key personnel:

* John Michael “Mike” McConnell, Executive Vice President of Booz Allen and former Director of the National Security Agency (NSA) and former Director of National Intelligence.

* James R. Clapper, Jr., current Director of National Intelligence, former Director of Defense Intelligence.

* Robert James Woolsey Jr, former Director of National Intelligence and head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

* Melissa Hathaway, Current Acting Senior Director for Cyberspace for the National Security and Homeland Security Councils

Now let’s check out what these guys have been doing:

* Questionable involvement in the U.S. government’s SWIFT surveillance program; acting as auditors of a government program, when that contractor is heavily involved with those same agencies on other contracts. Beyond that, the implication was also made that Booz Allen may be complicit in a program (electronic surveillance of SWIFT) that may be deemed illegal by the EC.

Yet anther mainstream story, this time in the Guardian, glosses over this detail. Don’t believe the hype:

One work-around that seemingly nullifies the concerns over range and charging is the brain child of the world’s most prominent electric car advocate, Shai Agassi. In his native Israel last year, he launched a startup called Better Place that allows electric-car users to swap their drained battery for a new fully charged one at a network of “switch stations” at the same time as it would take to fill a car with petrol. And because Better Place owns the batteries, the owner of the car need not worry about the deteriorating condition or high price of the battery.

If the idea gains traction – Agassi is already in talks with the Chinese government, which promised last year to invest $15bn in seed money to kickstart its own electric car industry – then it could seriously challenge not just our perception of electric cars, but also the interests of oil companies with their vast global network of petrol stations.

Medical records disclosing that Gordon Brown’s infant son had cystic fibrosis were illegally obtained by The Sun newspaper as part of a News International campaign against him and his family, friends of the former prime minister claims.

Mr Brown was a repeated target for investigators working for the tabloid and its sister newspapers, The Sunday Times and the News of the World, it was alleged.

The newspapers obtained highly personal medical and financial information about him and his family.

The most emotive claim relates to Mr Brown’s son, Fraser, diagnosed with cystic fibrosis in 2006, soon after his birth. His condition was disclosed on The Sun’s website in November 2006, when he was four months old.

Mr Brown and his wife, Sarah, had only recently learned of their son’s condition, which often leads to a shortened lifespan. They were dismayed the paper had details of his illness.

Mrs Brown said she was sad to learn about the alleged invasions of her family’s privacy. She wrote on Twitter: “It is very personal and really hurtful if all true.”

NINTH OF JULY TWO THOUSAND ELEVEN TEASER from PIXELATE PICTURES on Vimeo.

Rupert Murdoch’s takeover of BSkyB appeared to be dead in the water last night after proof emerged that executives at his British newspaper empire mounted a cover-up of the full scale of alleged criminal wrongdoing at the News of the World.

In another extraordinary day in the phone-hacking scandal, Downing Street sources confirmed that Government lawyers were drawing up a strategy to halt the £9bn deal which looked a certainty only a week ago.

As Nick Clegg threatened to split the Coalition by siding with a Labour plan to block the takeover, a senior Government source said last night: “We are working on a plan to suspend the deal while the police investigation is taking place. But we have to ensure it doesn’t get thrown out by judicial review.”

The U-turn came after one of News International’s own papers revealed that an internal report carried out in 2007, after the News of the World’s royal editor Clive Goodman was jailed, had found evidence that illegally accessing voicemails was more widespread at the paper – and that payments had been made to police officers.

An anonymous executive was quoted as saying that the report had been like a “ticking time bomb”. The report suggests there was a deliberate cover-up by unidentified executives at News International, which had told Parliamentary inquiries in 2007 and 2009 there was no evidence journalists other than Goodman had been involved in phone hacking, nor that it had attempted to suppress evidence of illegality.

One from today’s Australian (to its credit, the only serious newspaper tackling this question regularly):

The company running Australia’s immigration detention centres has acknowledged the work is traumatic for staff following the death of a young guard troubled by the hanging of a teenage asylum-seeker.

Kieran Webb died while holidaying with his family last Wednesday after working for six months as a security officer at the Curtin immigration detention centre in Western Australia’s far north, according to a memo to all staff from government contractor Serco last Friday.

There were no suspicious circumstances, Serco Immigration Services managing director Chris Manning wrote in the memo.

“If you feel the need for emotional support arising from the work you do, please consider speaking to someone,” he said.

“It is important we acknowledge that our line of work can at times place us in difficult and traumatic situations as we manage vulnerable people in our care.”
Five detainees have killed themselves in immigration detention centres since last September. Self-harm and threats of self-harm occur daily, and a psychologist is employed full-time by Serco to help guards deal with the fallout of acts such as lip-sewing, slashing and attempted hangings.

The Australian has been told detainees are taking increasingly dramatic steps to draw attention to their grievances. On Christmas Island last Thursday, a detainee sewed his lips together and had a friend tie him to the compound fence in a crucifix position.

On March 28, Mr Webb was among guards who cut down a 19-year-old Afghan detainee who hanged himself in his room.

Mr Webb was deeply affected by the death and by the unrest that followed, according to guards who worked alongside him at the time.

Two from United Voice, a union that represents workers:

A month after Villawood Detention Centre was burned to the ground, Serco was pushing to reduce staffing on key shifts.

Oddly, he [Murdoch] never appeared the ogre of evil, darkness and poison that he’s been made out to be these past few days. Maybe it’s because his editors and sub-editors and reporters repeatedly second-guessed what Murdoch would say. Murdoch was owner of The Times when I covered the blood-soaked Israeli invasion and occupation of Lebanon in 1982. Not a line was removed from my reports, however critical they were of Israel. After the invasion, Douglas-Home and Murdoch were invited by the Israelis to take a military helicopter trip into Lebanon. The Israelis tried to rubbish my reporting; Douglas-Home said he stood up for me. On the flight back to London, Douglas-Home and Murdoch sat together. “I knew Rupert was interested in what I was writing,” he told me later. “He sort of waited for me to tell him what it was, although he didn’t demand it. I didn’t show it to him.”

But things changed. Before he was editor, Douglas-Home would write for the Arabic-language Al-Majella magazine, often deeply critical of Israel. Now his Times editorials took an optimistic view of the Israeli invasion. He stated that “there is now no worthy Palestinian to whom the world can talk” and – for heaven’s sake – that “perhaps at last the Palestinians on the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip will stop hoping that stage-strutters like Mr Arafat can rescue them miraculously from doing business with the Israelis.”

All of which, of course, was official Israeli government policy at the time.

Then, in the spring of 1983, another change. I had, with Douglas-Home’s full agreement, spent months investigating the death of seven Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners of the Israelis in Sidon. It was obvious, I concluded, that the men had been murdered – the grave-digger even told me that their corpses had been brought to him, hands tied behind their backs, showing marks of bruising. But now Douglas-Home couldn’t see how we would be “justified” in running a report “so long after the event”.

In other words, the very system of investigative journalism – of fact-checking and months of interviews – became self-defeating. When we got the facts, too much time had passed to print them. I asked the Israelis if they would carry out a military inquiry and, anxious to show how humanitarian they were, they duly told us there would be an official investigation. The Israeli “inquiry” was, I suspected, a fiction. But it was enough to “justify” publishing my long and detailed report. Once the Israelis could look like good guys, Douglas-Home’s concerns evaporated.

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These past two weeks, I have been thinking of what it was like to work for Murdoch, what was wrong about it, about the use of power by proxy. For Murdoch could never be blamed. Murdoch was more caliph than ever, no more responsible for an editorial or a “news” story than a president of Syria is for a massacre – the latter would be carried out on the orders of governors who could always be tried or sacked or sent off as adviser to a prime minister – and the leader would invariably anoint his son as his successor. Think of Hafez and Bashar Assad or Hosni and Gamal Mubarak or Rupert and James. In the Middle East, Arab journalists knew what their masters wanted, and helped to create a journalistic desert without the water of freedom, an utterly skewed version of reality. So, too, within the Murdoch empire.