Almotamar.net, Google News - Gaza City - Shops and stores in Gaza City closed their doors Saturday for several hours as part of a general strike to protest against the Israeli siege on the impoverished Gaza Strip.
'We shut down our stores to express our rejection of the Israeli blockade imposed in Gaza since for more than six months without any move by the international community,' an owner of a shoe shop said.
Israel sealed off Gaza Strip in June when Islamic Hamas movement ousted Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah movement and took over the coastal Strip by force.
Lawmaker Jamal al-Khoudari, director of the newly-formed independent anti-siege committee, said Gaza dealers and merchants had lost about 150 million dollars as their imported goods remained stuck at Israeli seaports. Every day the commercial sector was losing one million dollars, according to al-Khoudari.
Placing a monument to victims of the siege in a public square in the west of Gaza City, al-Khoudari said the siege had killed 99 people so far.
The figure would rise, as thousands of patients were unable to travel for treatment and did not have the medication they needed.
General strike hits Gaza to protest Israeli blockade
In 2007 the opposition Yemen Congregation for Reform (Islah) Islamic oriented Party maintained its having political and media sway over the Joint meeting Parties (JMP) block, also consisting of Yemen Socialist Party and the Nasserite Unionist Organisation. 
Yemen is practically a cool green paradise, with crisp mountain air, enormous acacia trees, pristine coral reefs and verdant fields bursting with khat, a psychoactive plant that induces mild euphoria. 
Sana'a: Yemen will not be able to combat terror without regional and international cooperation, said a Yemeni official, who warned of the ramifications of letting Yemen fight terrorism alone.
Many journalists covered the funeral of the murdered Minister, Pierre Gemayel, the latest victim in a string of political assassinations in Lebanon.
Doctors use the word “crisis” to describe the point at which a patient either starts to recover or dies. President George W. Bush’s Iraqi patient now seems to have reached that point. Most commentators appear to think that Bush’s latest prescription – a surge of 20,000 additional troops to suppress the militias in Baghdad – will, at best, merely postpone the inevitable death of his dream of a democratic Iraq. Yet as “Battle of Baghdad” begins, factors beyond Bush’s control and not of his making (at least not intentionally) may just save Iraq from its doom.