[ 2009 July - October | 2009 March - June | 2008 November - February | 2008 July - October | 2008 March - June | 2007 November - February | 2007 July - October | 2007 March - June | 2006 November - February | 2006 July - October | 2006 March - June | 2005 November - February | 2005 July - October | 2005 March - June | 2004 November - February | 2004 July - October | 2004 March - June | 2003 November - February | 2003 July - October | 2003 March - June | 2002 | 2001 | 2000 ]
Each political note has its own anchor in case you want to link to it.
Congress reports that the Bush regime is blowing hot air when it talks about training Iraqi troops to fight for Bush.
What the report does not question is the basic assumption that Iraqis ought to fight for a conquering foreign empire.
After the Yes Men hoaxed ExxonMobil, the company struck back--shutting off their internet service. They could only get back partial service by deleting this hoax, and deleting all mention of Exxon. They are now seeking another ISP.
Such intimidation gives major corporations the effective power of censorship over the Internet.
Amy Goodman interviews Michael Moore about SiCKO.
The inspiration came when NBC's censors changed the outcome of his "Health Care Olympics" between the US, Canada and Cuba, because "Cuba is not allowed to win".
Four years after the looting of the National Museum of Iraq, the Bushmen have started trying to examine and preserve some of the country's archeological sites, many of which have themselves been ruined by looting.
NASA's Earth science budget is down 30% since 2000. Key satelites that are aging have no planned replacements.
Bush has already said he wants to make sure his successor cannot end the occupation of Iraq. Maybe he is trying to make sure his successor cannot do anything about global warming, either.
China is already the principal producer of CO2 emissions.
San Diego is starting to think about what rising seas will do to low-lying real estate and buildings. But awareness that beachfront property will be inundated is just starting to sink in.
B'liar, no longer prime minister of the UK, will try to negotiate peace between Palestine and Israel.
Given his slavish obedience to Bush, the Palestinians will not regard him as anything but a tool.
The president of Mexico, despite his bad politics in general, is trying to fight police corruption caused by drug trafficking.
The root cause of this problem is the high drug prices caused by prohibition, and the only solution is to end prohibition. Addictive drugs such as heroin and cocaine should be made available to addicts in doctors' offices, as in the Netherlands.
Iran has begun rationing of gasoline.
Rationing may not be the best way to do it, but higher gasoline prices are essential for conservation -- in Iran as in the US. Some European countries have prices over 6 dollars per gallon due to their taxes; before recent price increases, it was 4 dollars per gallon. Over the years, this leads to building society's infrastructure so that people use less gasoline.
The Senate has issued a subpoena for documents pertaining to Bush's decision to carry out illegal surveillance.
The medical industry is launching an organized PR effort to counter the film SiCKO.
Uri Avnery: splitting Gaza and the West bank is a strategy that Israel has practiced for many years. The probable effect will be to cost Fatah and Abbas their remaining support.
Blackstone and Capital's Scam.
Where will Iraq, its refugees go next?
Senator Gravel writes, "Why Hillary Scares Me".
US and Afghan troops tied a prisoner to a jeep and threatened to drag him (to death) if he didn't talk.
These are not isolated instances. We know that the practice of abusing (i.e. torturing) prisoners was promoted from the very top.
Will Bush use the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks to push for a troop increase in Iraq?
There is the Big Brother-- Workplace Control and Workforce Surveillance.
Kasparov is effective as a dissident in Russia, criticizing Putin's assault on democracy. However, outside of that, his politics are those of a neocon.
Support the Confederation of Immokalee Workers in pressuring Burger King to give farm workers decent treatment.
US citizens: contact your congresscritter and senators to support low-power FM radio.
An undercover journalist reports on how lobbyists (usually former government staff) corrupt politicians, academia and the press to whitewash evil governments.
UN support for the occupation of Iraq has cast suspicion over the UN, costing it the ability to act in other parts of the world.
A Washington woman says her cell-phone is being cracked remotely, and used to spy on her and to send threats.
This is one reason why the software in cell phones must be free software. If you use non-free software, the developer controls it and you don't.
Congress is investigating the practices of government agencies' inspectors general. As part of Bush's War on Integrity, they have been politicized and suppressed.
Cheney twists the law to keep secrets without following legal rules about government secrets.
Canada is considering a law to subordinate its government policies to the US, and to allow US companies to sue to overturn any regulations that get in their way.
The Bush forces have begun to label the Iraqi resistance as "Al Qa'ida".
Just as Bush tried to tie Saddam Hussein to Al Qa'ida before the invasion, now he wants to tie present-day Iraqi opposition to Al Qa'ida. It's a crude scheme to manipulate Americans' hatred.
Bush's spokesman says that killing a million Iraqis is ok because Saddam Hussein did the same sort of thing.
Saddam did kill many Iraqis, but he wasn't killing a lot of them in 2003.
Karl Rove told the Interior Department to change policy so as to get a Republican senator re-elected. This appears to be illegal.
US citizens: call your congresscritter to support HR 1246, which calls for the US military to end discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
It is not a good thing for the US military to be strong, since their strength would serve for aggression. However, the recruiting crisis brought about by the occupation of Iraq could be a good opportunity to repeal this biggoted policy.
How Donald Rumsfeld and Ronald Reagan corrupted the FDA to approve aspartame, overcoming a previous rejection due to evidence it might be dangerous to health.
Whether aspartame is indeed dangerous is an unsettled question.
Mahmoud Abbas is trying to use the sudden influx of foreign support to demand negotiations for a real peace agreement.
A review of SiCKO, Michael Moore's latest film.
Al Gore's event to raise climate change awareness is being seized on by corporate greenwashers.
Cheney says his office is not part of the executive branch, so laws about it don't apply to him.
Next he will say he's really on a different planet so Earthly law doesn't apply to him.
Tax resisters in New Hampshire vow to die rather than surrender to the police.
There are many things that the state ought to provide, such as roads, medical care, sewage disposal and treatment, inspection and enforcement of health standards, etc., and this needs money; a progressive income tax that falls most heavily on the rich is the fairest way to collect it. In a state that spent its money on these things, I would not sympathize with tax resisters.
However, it is hard for me to criticize people that refuse to hand over their money for wars of conquest, kidnaping, imprisonment without trial, and torture.
Giuliani's favorite vulture makes big profits from US debt that is going to be "forgiven" to poor countries.
Senators demanded a Justice Dept. investigation Into Tim Griffin's voter-suppression.
As former prosecutor Tim Griffin is investigated for caging voters, a path towards inculpating Karl Rove is starting to open up.
The FBI may have let Osama bin Laden charter a plane in the US after 9/11.
China has developed mobile execution vans to make executions more efficient.
They take organs from the cadavers and sell them for transplantation. You can read about it here and here
The practice of executing people to collect organs was predicted in Larry Niven's stories in the 60s, except that those stories envisioned it in the US and done with popular support from people who thought they might someday need transplants.
Shin Dong Hyok has escaped, at age 22, from the North Korean political prison camp in which he was born and lived his whole life.
North Korea provides an example of how sometimes one must work with even the most brutal dictators. Ending the North Korean nuclear program is very important, and I think it is justified for the US to cooperate with North Korea towards that end, even though that means tolerating the regime's atrocities.
But would the US care about those atrocities even this overriding concern were not present? The Bush regime doesn't imprison babies as far as I know -- well, perhaps occasionally as hostages -- and it may never have done anything as heinous as what was done to Mr Shin. But it does things in the same spirit, and the result is to disqualify the US today from being taken seriously in any moral criticism of other countries' atrocities.
The murderous and intolerant side of Islam showed itself again after Salman Rushdie was knighted by the UK. Protestors called for killing him, and so did a minister in the Pakistani government.
No one has an inherent right to an honor such as a knighthood, and if a writer's work expressed hatred towards people who hold a certain view on religion, whether it be Muslims or Christians or Atheists, I would urge governments and others not to give awards to that writer.
I have not read The Satanic Verses, but according to descriptions I have read, it does nothing of the kind. It does not condemn Muslims, or Islam. Rather, a character has a strange dream into which Mohammed enters. This is what the fanatical Muslims condemn. When intolerant Muslims think that everyone in the world should be forced to bow down to their religion, they deserve a firm and unwavering rebuke.
Furthermore, we should take the initiative in this debate, by pointing out that many Muslim countries do not respect other views on religion even to the point of permitting people to adopt them.
Psychosocial Causes for the Palestinian Factional War.
The US foreign service is destroying itself by suspending security clearances based on the vaguest of suspicions.
Bush's War on Integrity has spread to NASA.
I doubt that Bush specifically asked for this, or for the mismanagement of NASA. But it comes out of the general climate of corruption that Bush has established.
Instead of managing NASA, the Bush administration's priority is to investigate the employees more.
Despite protection of the forests where the endangered spotted owl lives, the species continues to decline. For the Bush regime, that suggests cutting down some of those forests.
Exporting industry to China increased its CO2 output even as it reduced workers wages.
Man-made soot contributes to warming of the Arctic, just by making the snow dirty. Thus, the soot and the CO2 add together to create danger of melting icecaps.
A report summarizes how the Bush forces are destroying Iraq.
A man who put a note saying "Kip Hawley Is An Idiot" (that's the head of the TSA) on his plastic bag of liquids was treated like a criminal by the TSA.
This was, in effect, perfect proof that the TSA attacks those who criticize it, even in the total absence of any legitimate reason to do so.
The TSA's response to subsequent inquiries followed the standard dishonest rule of unjust government: admit nothing, deny everything, make counterallegations.
Mugabe, effectively dictator of Zimbabwe, plans to authorize universal police eavesdropping.
Sounds like Bush.
The creation of the Department of Homeland Security made the US vulnerable to alien insect agricultural pests that can destroy architecture.
The Italian government is trying to stop the case against the CIA and Italian kidnapers of Abu Omar.
Aung San Suu Kyi, elected president of Burma, has been in prison for over 11 years.
General Taguba, who was in charge of the investigation of torture in Abu Ghraib prison, said that he was ordered not to investigate the role of higher-ups who authorized it.
Leading climate scientists predict disaster for civilization if CO2 production is not checked within the next decade.
More information here.
A wave of phony democracy has spread through the Arab world, carrying with it disillusionment with the idea of democracy. The only opposition Arabs consider sincere is Islamist.
The democratic system of the US is pretty phony too.
California is considering bills to limit use of RFIDs.
These bills do not go far enough. It should be illegal to put an RFID in any product unless its main purpose is for the purchaser to identify herself, and any RFID in packaging should be clearly marked.
Putin is guilty, as far as I can tell, of suppressing political opposition and the independent press. I certainly do not support him. However, what he says and does in dealing with Bush is right on.
Another Russian journalist was shot by an unknown assailant. The journalist wasn't killed, because the gun had a rubber bullet.
I guess this was meant as a warning to stop investigating.
Karl Rove is being investigated for violating the Presidential Records Act by deleting emails. The Bush campaign organization refuses to cooperate with the investigation, which in itself shows what Bush supporters are made of.
The people who did this may have committed crimes. In addition, since this law makes the president personally responsible for assuring compliance, he shares in the personal responsibility for the deliberate circumvention of the law.
This alone would be enough reason to impeach him, but since Congress has closed its eyes to so many bigger reasons already, I don't suppose it will do so.
Democracy in Palestine was formally suppressed as President Abbas instituted an "emergency government", setting aside the elected Hamas government.
Israel and the US have been trying to put an end to democracy in Palestine ever since the Palestinians didn't vote the way they were supposed to.
The Yes Men, posing as representatives of ExxonMobil, presented a plan to make petroleum out of corpses after coming environmental disasters.
Remember, "xx" is not pronounced like "x". It is pronounced like the "ch" in German "ach". Thus, the first syllable of "Exxon" sounds like an expression of disgust.
Rumsfeld and others lied to Congress when they denied knowledge of torture in Abu Ghraib, says General Taguba.
Isn't it a crime to lie when testifying to Congress?
Coca Cola is using vague promises of an ILO investigation in Colombia to convince universities to quash the achievements of student campaigns. The ILO is accused of not being independent of the company, and the investigation may not really be occurring at all.
Microsoft is making a sneak attack on election law in New York State.
Now that Bush has decided that Al Qassim is innocent of the charges for which he was imprisoned in Guantanamo for years, the US wants to transfer him to a prison in Libya. He is fighting this because he thinks the Libyan prison could be worse.
The US has a long history of crushing democracy in the Middle East.
This article doesn't even mention the many Arab dictators that the US has supported and continues to support.
During the cold war, the argument was made that the US could not afford to be choosy about allies against the Soviet Union. That might have justified working in some ways with some dictators that were already established, but it couldn't possibly justify installing a dictator in place of a democracy as in Iran.
Hundreds of thousands protested again in Oaxaca, and rebuilt the barricades of last year.
Here's a review of the history of a year of protest in Oaxaca -- how the police attacked the protest, and how later protestors (and mere bystanders) have been tortured in prison.
Chiquita Banana pled guilty to using death squads in Colombia to kill union organizers. Now the victims' families are suing the company.
US military chaplains published antisemitic lesson plans.
Eric Montanez was arrested in Orlando...for giving away food to homeless people.
Orlando's policy reflects the essential cruelty of a political system that puts business profit above human well-being.
Robert Fisk: Palestine -- a coup d'etat by an elected government.
A UN report criticizes the UK's movement towards a police state.
Bush is against a Congressional proposal to protect reporters (including even bloggers) from revealing confidential sources.
This from an administration constantly involved in covering up crimes.
Torture Gonzales is being investigated for obstruction of justice.
The US bullied Berkeley High School into helping army recruiters get access to its students. But the school continues to resist: it made sure that every student and every parent considered the possibility of opting out. 90% of the students have opted out already.
Every high school in the US should do the same. US military recruiters are known to lie frequently, and those recruited nowadays are more likely to serve in wars of aggression than to "serve their country" in any way.
Uri Avnery confirms that the US and Israel were directly involved in provoking the fighting in Gaza between Hamas and Fatah.
Hamas and Fatah are now openly at war. Hamas has captured Gaza,while in the West Bank, Fatah has arrested members of Hamas.
This article claims that the US directly arranged the violence through Palestinians it supports.
I don't know whether the facts stated there are accurate. In any case, it seems that the blockade by Israel the US helped bring this about. However, Palestinians can't escape their share of the blame.
Global warming has enabled mountain pine beetles to spread northward and upward, attacking other species of pine trees, which could be wiped out.
If the white pine high in the mountains are killed, that will exacerbate the water shortage that the West is going to face due to other effects of global warming.
If Jamil el-Banna is released from Guantanamo, the UK plans not to let him return, on the grounds he has "been away too long". Instead, he may be sent to Jordan where he faces torture or death.
B'liar, on TV, still pretends that his war is not unpopular.
His motto seems to be, "The show must go on."
A Pentagon report shows Bush's troop increase in Iraq has not achieved its goal.
It is absurd to blame al Maliki personally for failing to reconcile Iraq's ethnic groups and sects. Under Bush occupation, that task is essentially impossible. So he is being used as a fall guy. Well, if that leads to ending the war, that is ok. With his participation in the Iraqi government, he is hardly innocent.
I suspect that the "promises" referred to in the article include the planned passage of a law to hand over Iraq's oil to Western oil companies, presumably owned by Bush cronies. The Iraqi parliament has been working on this law for months or years. I wonder if it is doing this the way Penelope made her wedding dress.
The Somali "interim government" has been unable to establish control despite Ethiopian and US military support. As a result, the country is in chaos, making some Somalis yearn for the days of the Islamic Courts, which were the only force able to restore order.
The Ethiopian intervention was supposed to last a short time, but it is becoming permanent (as I predicted).
Somalia faces a very sad choice: between violent chaos and cruel, unjust Islamic law.
A series of murders of members of the Lebanese Parliament seems to be due to Syria, since all the victims are supporters of the pro-American prime minister.
Almost 1/3 of the shareholders of ExxonMobil voted for a resolution calling on the company to work to reduce CO2 emissions.
Even though it didn't pass, it may pass next year. It also could lead the management to start thinking;if anything can do that.
The House of Lords has made a final decision that prisoners held by British units in the Bush forces are covered by the Human Rights Act.
Since the government advised soldiers to disregard that law, it now faces an investigation that may blow the lid of part of B'liar's malice and cruelty.
Peak oil -- the plausible theory that a scarcety of petroleum will drive prices way up starting a few years from now -- has finally hit mainstream news.
Sudan has agreed to a larger military force to prevent violence in Darfur.
A secret UN report sees no prospects for peace between Israel and Palestine. It blames Israel for rejecting peace, the Palestinian Authority for being unable to stop attacks on Israel (never mind that these are not very dangerous nowadays), and the great powers for imposing sanctions against the Palestinians after they voted for Hamas.
A Bush regime spin machine has been saying that Iran supports the Taliban. The Pentagon now says it isn't true at all.
The FBI's "terrorist watch list" has over half a million names on it, making it a cause of pointless harrassment and useless for any legitimate purpose.
In Iraq, a Sunni mosque and a Shi'ite mosque were attacked. Muqtada al Sadr called on Iraqis to unite and not fight each other.
US citizens: call on your senator to say: send Scooter Libby to Guantanamo to serve his sentence, or shut it down.
In Helmand provice, life for women is no better than when the Taliban ruled.
The Islamic extremists are already fighting a war against women. I think that Afghan women should start fighting back with guns. Rather than waiting to be shot, they should take the initiative. Burkhas should make it easy to get in position for a surprise attack. They will also make it impossible to identify who the attackers were, once they have gone.
Bush plans to cut down on satellites to measure Earth's climate.
One way or another, he's determined to prevent conservation.
Spewing sulfur into the upper atmosphere can prevent global warming cheaply.
But it can't prevent the droughts which CO2 is also causing, in places such as the US.
Open warfare has broken out in Gaza between Hamas and Fatah.
A true follower of Bush, B'liar attacked the media for not giving him a free pass.
Putin has allowed some opposition protests to occur.
He probably has realized that crushing small protests is not worth the criticism it brings. Having brought the media under control by assassination, he can get away with lies even if protestors point out the truth. It works for Bush in the US, where the mainstream media, without assassination of their reporters, are nearly as subservient.
The Italian trial of Abu Omar's kidnappers (US and Italian secret agents) has begun, but Abu Omar cannot testify. Both Egypt and Italy have prevented him from going to the trial.
Professor Norman Finkelstein was offered tenure by DePaul University, but then the university changed its mind because of a campaign against his political views that criticize Israel.
I am told that more info can be found in www.normanfinkelstein.com, but I have not seen that site.
Chinese law labels many activities "state secrets", which is often the excuse to sentence political critics to prison.
The US under Bush is following a similar path of secrecy, though it has not gone as far.
MacDonald's is trying to whitewash its image by inviting mothers to visit farms that grow ingredients.
Visiting a farm of MacDonald's' choice won't give them any real information. City folk like me, visiting a farm, don't know how to tell whether the farm's food is good to eat. But suppose it is: so what? Even a thorough study of farms that grow the wheat or lettuce, or potatoes and cattle, will have nothing to say about whether burgers make people fat.
But these mothers, given a free vacation and seeing something that looks nice, will have every reason to convince themselves that they have seen proof that MacDonald's food is good.
When Banaz Mahmod told police that her father wanted to kill her (for having a boyfriend), the UK police did not believe her. Now her father has been convicted of murder.
Professor Colin Green explains the experiences in Palestine that led him to support an academic boycott of Israel. His union voted to start a year-long debate on the question. He says that Palestinians are enthusiastic about the debate, while Israel's supporters are angry that the idea is even considered.
Illegal logging in Indonesia will wipe out orangutans in the wild in 10 years, along with the forests they live in.
This is where the robot police airplanes ought to be used.
UK police are adapting drone aircraft to watch streets.
If they were only looking for ordinary criminals, I wouldn't mind this. But their focus is to catch people who do things that are slightly annoying -- as well as political opposition, of course.
The Bush forces say they are arming some Iraqi resistance groups, hoping they will fight Al Qa'ida.
I am a bit suspicious of this, because I thought there were lots of arms in Iraq. Meanwhile, the description of "negotiating" by arresting the other party's negotiators strikes me as negotiating in bad faith. Just like the Bush forces to arrest people who come out under a flag of truce.
Democrats in Congress are supporting abstinence-only antisex education, as part of a deal with the worst Republicans.
Pizza Hut fired the worker who reported mice to the health department.
Brian D. Kelly faces the threat of 7 years in prison for making an audio/video recording of a policeman who had pulled over a car. He's not the only one who has met with such threats in the US.
It is natural that police would want to stop citizens from recording what they do -- because mere eyewitness testimony isn't enough to get them convicted.
The median income of American families has declined since Bush stole the presidency.
The sectarian war in Iraq is getting worse despite Bush's increase in troops, so Iraqis are still fleeing, if they can find a place to flee to. 4.2 million are now refugees.
A jury in the UK found two protestors not guilty for trying to damage a US B52 bomber. It accepted their argument that they were trying to prevent a bigger crime, which was to be committed using that bomber.
The US and Iran have captured some of each others citizens, making accusations of spying and intervention which might or might not be fabricated.
Musharraf met with a partial setback in his attempts to gag the media in Pakistan.
Most of the US is suffering from a severe drought; in the West, this drought has lasted for many years. It is probably due to global warming, which is expected to make it get worse and worse.
The company building the US Embassy in Iraq has been accused of bringing in employees against their will. You can read about it here.
The "War on Drugs" continues ruining lives in the US. Bernie Ellis, who grew marijuana to treat an uncurable chronic illness, has avoided imprisonment due to tremendous community support. Now he faces confiscation of his home.
It must be even worse for James Burton, who is presumably going blind in prison because he can't grow pot there.
It is interesting to compare forfeiture (government seizure of assets, labeled as a punishment) in this with the case of the company that collects TV license payments in the UK. In both cases, punishments have been increased so as to collect more money. In one case, a company does it; in the other, a government agency does it; but what they do is the same.
However, most government agencies don't have a motivation to act this way. That's because the usual government agency is not terribly interested in collecting more money for the general treasury. That won't give the agency more money to spend.
The fact that forfeited assets directly enrich the police agency that collects them creates a special situation where there is an incentive for abuse. The point here is that privatization of collections can create the same special situation, and the same risk.
When Bush admitted using secret prisons, he said they had been closed. But he appears to have been lying, as usual. Human Rights Watch reports on 39 people that the US appears to have disappeared.
In some cases the US taken young children hostage, and reportedly tortured them too.
Musharraf seems helpless against spreading Islamic fundamentalism
in Pakistan. You can read about it in this web page.
Hank Silver, an American Jew who helped build Israel in its early days,
went there again to observe the occupation of Palestine.
The Hebrew University appointed a former head of the security service as
its director of external relations, despite a petition signed by many
professors saying that this would contradict the humanistic mission and values
of the university.
Academics in other countries have already proposed a boycott of cooperation
with Israeli universities, and there is an argument about whether it is right
to have such a boycott. This appointment will strengthen the argument in
favor.
An Israeli argues that
the fundamental reason for various boycotts of Israel is that it is not a
democracy. It rules millions of Palestinians, who are not allowed to vote to
control the policies under which they are ruled.
Another Israeli recognizes the legitimacy of the boycott.
The Jews of Israel don't have to admit the Palestinians as voting citizens of
Israel. But they must respect the Palestinians' right to be voting citizens
of a sovereign, democratic state: if not Israel, then Palestine.
Blackwater is suing the families of four mercenaries who were killed in
Iraq. These families want information about how their relatives were killed,
information that might embarrass Blackwater. The company now aims to both
bankrupt them and gag them.
While fighting in in Iraq, these mercenaries were participating in an unjust
occupation. They were helping Blackwater do Bush's dirty work--something that
I would guess their families refuse to recognize. However, that is no excuse
for what Blackwater is doing to those families today. Following Cindy
Sheehan's path, their personal loss is leading them into opposition to the
empire. I hope they will not crack as she did.
The resolution to impeach Cheney now has seven sponsors.
That they are so few is a measure of the cowardice of Congressional Democrats.
US presidential candidates get away with lies in the debates, because the
mainstream media don't comment on the truth of what they say.
In the spirit of Krugman's point, we should note that Dubya did not get within
"chad-and-butterfly range" of winning the 2000 election. As Greg Palast
discovered and published, Katherine Harris stole the election for Bush by
disenfranchising tens of thousands of Black voters in Florida.
Krugman doubts that the US can survive four more years of Bush-quality
leadership. I don't think that the US has survived 6 years of leadership with
Dubya's level of patriotism. The US is not a collection of people, nor its
physical infrastructure. The US is a system of government based on human
rights. When Bush crushed basic human rights, with the support of most
Democrats in Congress, he destroyed the US. The question now is whether the
US can be resurrected.
I see little hope for it. The Republican candidates gloat about the
destruction of human rights, while the Democratic candidates -- aside from
Kucinich -- pay little attention to the question.
Religious
freedom vs fundamentalism.
China has evicted over a million residents of Beijing to demolish their
homes for the Olympics. They have to move to distant slum suburbs, from which
it is expensive to get to work.
In the US, gentrification does the same thing, but more slowly. It would be
acceptable if there were adequate housing for poor working people.
Uri Avnery:
40 years as an occupying power have corrupted Israeli society and
government, and made violence normal.
The law allowing members of parliament to be expelled for criticizing cabinet
ministers or army commanders will effectively abolish the representation of
Isreali Arabs -- and anyone that seriously wants peace. Their representatives
will either gag themselves, becoming ineffective, or be expelled.
This review of Satanic Purses: Money, Myth and Misinformation, by R.T.
Naylor, makes me want to read a copy.
US citizens: phone your congresscoward and say, "Support resolution 333 to
impeach Cheney! He's a criminal, and you have a responsibility to recognize
this by launching his prosecution."
One of Mugabe's conscripted torturers has escaped, and
explains how the system is organized for atrocities.
B'liar endorsed South African President Mbeki's gentle approach to
Mugabe's tyranny. (Mbeki has blocked most sorts of action against Mugabe for
years.)
It is interesting to contrast the attitude of B'liar and Bush toward Mugabe
with their attitude towards Saddam Hussein. Hussein's past atrocities were
used as the excuse for a war of conquest, but Mugabe's present and increasing
atrocities get only verbal criticism -- and now, not even that.
Bush wants to pardon Libby, but faces pressure from Republicans not to
do so.
We need a constitutional amendment that would deny the president the
power to pardon crimes that relate to working closely with high
government officials. I suggest that pardons for such crimes
be possible only for a president who took office at least 3 years
after the end of the administration that the crime was connected with.
Here's a way to educate the public about what global warming can do:
erect poles in coastal cities, showing heights above sea level. Each
pole could be graduated in meters, with a big label "If Greenland
Melts" on a line at the appropriate height (around 6 meters above
current sea level).
The IWW is organizing workers at Starbucks, which treats them
worse than Wal Mart.
Due to overfishing, jellyfish are proliferating in the Mediterranean
and regularly invade Spanish beaches.
The drought that exacerbates this problem is likely to get more severe
and more frequent in the future, due to global warming.
An Israeli court is hearing a Palestinian challenge to practices
that exclude Palestinians from a road running through the West Bank.
Restrictions like these have divided the West Bank into small enclaves,
making it difficult to travel between them.
Bush continues to oppose meaningful action against climate change.
At the G8 summit, he committed only to "consider" taking steps.
We can imagine the result this consideration will reach.
Thus, B'liar's claim to have influence over Bush is once again shown
false.
There is a time in diplomacy for patience, but there is also a time
for pressure and denunciation, and this is it. Other countries must
tell the truth about the Bush regime: that its policy is driving the
Earth to disaster.
While the G8 summit didn't achieve much good, protests against the
meeting were very effective.
Is inundating another country an act of war? If so, countries whose
coastal regions face inundation (if Greenland or Antartica melts)
could justify a pre-emptive attack on US and Chinese fossil fuel power
plants, oil refineries, coal mines, and other CO2-emitting facilities,
in the name of simple self-protection.
Taking the absurdity of software patents to its insane logical
extreme, a new company's business plan is to patent security fixes.
Mainstream Australian media companies accuse the government of
endangering the freedom of the press, and of practicing too much
secrecy.
US citizens: sign the petition demanding no pardon for Libby.
US citizens: sign the petition against the US plan for liquid coal, which would increase CO2 emissions.
The arms trade from the UK to Saudi Arabia involves payment
of bribes to a Saudi prince, authorized by the UK government.
B'liar blocked investigation into this corruption, which as much as
admits that the accusations, saying that this corruption is
"strategic". What he means is that "What's good for BAE arms sales
is good for the UK."
The Senate Armed Services Committee plans to investigate psychologists'
work in researching torture techniques for the US Army.
The rigging of the PENS report by people who concealed or hedged their
military affiliations reminds me of the way Communist infiltrators
used to take control of political opposition groups.
Cheney continues to repeat the lie about Saddam Hussein and al Qa'ida.
MIT economists confirm that US workers' income is not
increasing as their productivity rises -- and the reason is
due to changes that give bosses more power and workers less.
Congress is planning new farm subsidies, which seem likely
to favor large companies.
The Iraqi Parliament is trying to end the occupation
by blocking the UN approval for it. But Maliki, Bush's
Iraqi prime minister, plans to veto the bill.
The WWF has accepted a lot of money to advertise Coca Cola Corporation.
The UK company that has the commission to collect taxes for television
sets has tried to increase profits by demanding payment from people
whether they have television sets or not.
Politicians often argue for privatization of government functions,
claiming that businesses will run them more efficiently.
But businesses do not necessarily achieve higher profits through
doing the right job more efficiently. They are just as likely
to raise profits by doing the job wrong.
Glaciers in Antarctica are flowing faster into the ocean. This means
the danger of catastrophic flooding of coastal areas is worse than we
thought.
The US antimissile system which provokes Putin is being
imposed on an antagonistic Czech public.
The Czech leaders who support this are working for the US,
not for their own people.
B'liar is making one last try to influence Bush on climate change. I
wish him luck, but he has never succeeded in changing Bush's course
before.
What 40 years of occupation has done to Palestine, and to Israel.
The UK faces the threat of legal restrictions on abortion.
Yelena Tregubova says:
Putin is turning Russia into a dictatorship, and now wants to threaten
neighbors, so don't appease Russia.
I agree with her overall position, but I see the nuclear weapons issue
differently. Putin can't possibly threaten other countries as much as Bush
does, and it is Bush that wants to abandon arms control and destabilize the
nuclear balance. So I think it is right to interpret Russia's development of
advanced missiles as a response to Bush's provocation. If Russia did this in
the absence of US provocation, it would say more about Russia.
Since Chavez's opposition likes to compare him to Putin, it is informative to
contrast them. Putin has suppressed oppostion journalism by assassination of
journalists who investigate corruption, and has frightened opposition media
into silence. Chavez cut off the radio broadcast of one opposition TV station
which supported a military coup against his government, but even that station
continues cable broadcasts (since they don't require a TV transmitter license).
Meanwhile, there are plenty of other opposition media outlets in Venezuela.
Iraq veteran Adam Kokesh is protesting the war with clever nonviolent
stunts, and has been arrested for this.
Now the Marine Corps wants to punish him for protesting, even though he's
not in the Marine Corps any more.
Kokesh's arrest was for a protest inside a Senate office building. He was
charged with "unlawful assembly, loud and boysterous"
although he had not uttered a sound.
Congress is starting to look at Greg Palast's
evidence of felonious disenfranchisement of voters in 2004.
The CIA warned Bush of many of the bad things that might result from
attacking Iraq. Bush ignored this.
A Pakistani Christian was sentenced to death for insulting Muhammad. He
seems to deny that he did so, but whether he did or not is a side issue; to
make it a crime to express such opinions is an offense against human rights.
It is for policies like these that Pakistan is one of the countries that I
simply refuse to visit.
The US health care system, despite its high technology, kills insured
people because of bureaucracy, while other die because they can't get
insurance.
The UK's national health care system has problems too, but those problems are
mainly caused by something very simple: underfunding, which reflects the New
Labour party's priority of catering to the rich.
Islamic extremists in Gaza have threatened to kill women TV presenters
unless they cover their faces. The women are defiant.
The Eritreans presumed drowned at sea (because Malta waited 6 hours to
send a ship to rescue them) may have survived and washed back to Libya.
I support Europe's right to control immigration, but that is no excuse to let
people drown. And if these people have a valid claim they face persecution in
Eritrea, and they are already in Libya, Libya ought to give them asylum.
Libya's government is a dictatorship, but at least it has no reason to
persecute these people.
It appears that the
UK is considering removing most British troops from the Bush forces within
a year. Maybe.
Not long ago I linked to a report of a statement by a British Bush forces
division, which gave an earlier exit date, but that seems to have been an
error.
Reports about the Democratic candidates' debate confirm my support for Dennis
Kucinich. He said he would get rid of the U SAP AT RIOT act and take the US
out of the treaties (NAFTA, WTO) that subordinate democracy to corporations.
And he refused to support the invasion of Iraq when most Democratic officials
chose to go along with it.
(The dishonesty of Bush's demand for war was quite obvious, even though there
was, at the time, no proof to put him on trial with. Democrats who endorsed
his lies did so because they lacked the courage to resist the pressure.
Kucinich has that courage.)
I did not see debate, but my impression is that no other candidate supports
those positions. (Obama did oppose the invasion, but he doesn't support the
rest.) If any other candidate does support these positions, please let me
know.
Meanwhile, a bit of kudos to the candidate who pointed out that rising US gas
prices are good, because they promote conservation. Trying to push prices
down is evidence of a lack of statesmanship. What we should do is tax away
the oil companies' windfall profits, and spend the money promoting mass
transit and other good things.
B'liar's attorney general encouraged troops in the Bush forces to
disregard the human rights of Iraqi civilians.
Neocons in the Defense Department were encouraging Taiwan to declare
independence even as the State Department opposed it.
While it is ridiculous to have two parts of the government pursuing
contradictory foreign policies, I disagree with the presumption that everyone
must kowtow to Beijing's demand to swallow Taiwan (or Tibet).
The British troops in the Bush forces will be withdrawn in December.
What the heck is vote caging, and
why does nobody care?
The Department of Homeland Security was justified in the name of
preventing terrorism, but that seems just to be a front.
Bush told friends that he was trying to make it as difficult as possible
ever to remove the Bush forces from Iraq.
Real opposition in Congress would cite this publicly as a reason to stop
giving whatever Bush says the benefit of the doubt.
A report about Baghdad on a Friday night.
Andrew Bacevich, whose son was killed in Iraq,
has received insane accusations saying that he caused his son's death by
opposing the war. This is absurd, since if Bacevich's efforts had succeeded,
his son would not have been in Iraq.
Although soldiers in the Bush forces may wish to believe they are "serving
their country", whichever country it happens to be, we must not pander to this
fiction. The occupation of Iraq does not serve any country, only Bush and his
cronies. And the only support these troops deserve is pulling them out.
Republican presidential candidates are trying to propagate Bush's lie
connecting Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks.
Another Guantanamo prisoner has escaped into death.
Bush's climate change plan -- do nothing but talk for two more years --
met with nothing but derision, except from toadies like B'liar.
President Chavez has proceeded with the announced plan to close the
station RCTV, which directly supported the attempted coup, by not renewing its
license.
I don't think this is dictatorship, but it wasn't necessary. If this develops
into a general policy of blocking private opposition TV, then I will be
concerned.
This article gives more information about how RCTV participated in
supporting the coup attempt.
"
US 'Exaggerating' Iran Threat For Military Intervention", says
a think tank report.
A book review of The United States Since 1980--a study of how corporations
have taken power away from democracy.
Lina Joy, a Malay living in Malaysia, has been formally denied the right
to cease to be legally regarded as a Muslim.
Most Muslim countries have similar policies; some make it a capital offense to
convert. Hardly any of them respect the human right of religious freedom.
Whenever Muslims condemn others for criticizing their religion or making fun
of it, we should throw this in their faces.
Firing union organizers is illegal, but it's standard practice in the US.
There's a report -- I don't know the source --
that 10,000 Iraqi women are in prison, and that most of them have been
raped.
Turkey is considering giving the police broad powers to collect
information and save it, to search people, and to shoot people.
McCain opposes net neutrality, and wants to put a Microsoft executive in
the cabinet.
He misses the point of democracy, which is that the non-rich can join together
against the power of the rich, and by acting jointly achieve what they
couldn't get by dealing with the same rich one by one. To advocate "no
government interference" is to advocate that the non-rich fail to use this
weapon.
Who will be the president of the World Bank is a side issue. What really
matters is to change its harmful policies.
A commentator on the BBC last night mentioned that some criticize the World
Bank as inefficient; that it has too many employees for the lending it does.
Then he mentioned that some people say World Bank loans are harmful -- and
assumed that satisfying these criticisms would require adding more employees,
as if the harm were due to mere mistakes.
This technique is commonly used in the mainstream media to sabotage
consideration of an issue: raise it in a confused way, so that the audience
believes it has considered the issue, and dismissed it for what appears to be
good reason. Few will find out that the reason was a red herring.
The ACLU has sued Jeppeson Dataplan, a Boeing subsidiary, for providing
support to CIA torture flights.
Plastic has covered 40% of the ocean's surface with garbage, and the
chemicals that leach out of plastic are poisoning us and other animals.
Bill Clinton is planning to accept an award from Colombia's President
Uribe, who has been tied to murderous paramilitaries.
Scientists criticize the EPA's planned program to screen for endocrine
disruptor chemicals, saying it is as good as designed to miss most of the
problems.
US citizens:
Tell the FCC not to sell off lots of the radio spectrum dirt cheap to
phone companies.
Inuit, already experiencing damage due to global warming, sent a representative
to England
to testify against airport expansion.
The Bush forces are coming to recognize that they are fighting for no
good cause, as they see that the soldiers in Bush's "Iraqi army" are
fighting against the occupation.
The article ends with an absurd reason for continuing the occupation: for the
sake of the local auxiliaries that have been recruited to mainain the
occupation. We see these absurd excuses over and over, and since major US
media treat them as legitimate, they achieve a political effect.
Why did Congressional Democrats cave in on Iraq war funding? Because most
of them aren't committed to ending the war at all.
As B'liar talks about reducing UK carbon emissions,
he wants to destroy one of Britain's few ancient forests to expand an
airport.
Greg Palast:
Monica Goodling testified that Torture Gonzales' chief of staff lied to
Congress. He denied his knowledge of a feloneous Republican scheme that
disenfranchised many Black voters in 2004. And Palast has proof of it all.
The debate over internet neutrality has been nearly ignored by the US
mass media, along with other vitally important issues.
Even the network neutrality campaigners ignore one vital aspect of network
neutrality: whether network facilities and servers use free protocols that
everyone can implement. If they don't, they tend to impose the use of
specific non-free programs or systems.
Costa Rica will stop sending police for training in the US at a school for
torturers.
This school, formerly called the School of the Americas, has spent decades
teaching Latin American soldiers to overthrow democratic governments and/or
torture the opposition.
Bush isn't satisfied with surveillance in the US. He is
funding Mexico to increase surveillance, too.
I am suppose they will say this is for catching drug dealers. And they will
probably use it some of the time to catch those drug dealers who didn't pay
off the police adequately. However, they will also use it to catch political
opposition.
The drug problem in the US today is mostly due to prohibition, and further
enforcement of prohibition does not make it better. So it cannot justify
measures like this.
Haifa Zangana:
The entire Labour party shares the blame for Iraq's horrors.
The Bush regime illegally turned immigration judgeships into political
patronage.
Another Bush achievement in Iraq: growing opium.
Russia is protecting the probable murderer of Mr Litvinenko.
Amnesty International says, the UK's "politics of fear is eroding human
rights".
For the full report:
http://thereport.amnesty.org/eng/Download-the-Report.
Political leaders of many Iraqi factions, and neighboring countries,
find it useful for fighting in Iraq to continue.
It is only the Iraqi people that suffer more and more.
B'liar's government has published a blueprint for new nuclear power
plants, while denying it is one, after a sham consultation with the public, so
they can pretend they had one.
Colorado Progressive Jews calls for an end to the occupation and a just
peace with Palestine.
The Israeli Army blocked the latest nonviolent Bil'in protest with barbed
wire, then attacked the protestors.
The Bush administration has bent over backwards to let oil companies cheat
the treasury of billions.
Amnesty International says
most Palestinians killed in Israeli raids are civilians.
Cheney directly attacked the Geneva Conventions in a speech at West Point.
What Cheney said about "the terrorists" is just as applicable to the Bush
regime when it conducts wars of brutal aggression. I hope West Point
graduates realize that.
After Bush forces troops murdered civilians in Haditha,
a cover-up was intentionally ordered at higher levels.
Note how they regard the facts of the case as "propaganda". That reflects the
attitude that the truth has no importance, an attitude that flows straight
from Bush and his supporters.
Bush wants to let nuclear arms control treaties expire.
A small boat with 53 illegal immigrants sank in the Mediterranean because
the Maltese coast guard decided not to rescue them.
Neither Malta nor the European Union has an obligation to admit unwanted
immigrants, but they do have an obligation to rescue people from sinking boats.
Bush arrogantly says "expect more bloodshed" after making the Democrats
surrender on Iraq.
Israel has arrested many Palestinian elected officials, in effect wiping
out any chance of Palestinian democracy.
The statement by Michael Williams that "legislators cannot be immune from the
law" is peculiar because, in many countries including Israel, legislators have
exactly that immunity. However, when on country's army arrests another
country's legislators, that is normally called war.
The UK has subjected several men to house arrest without trial. Several of
them have run away. The B'liar/Clown regime proposes to make this
an excuse to declare a state of emergency and abolish human rights
officially.
The Guardian published a story, attributed to someone in the Bush regime,
saying that Iran is working with al Qa'ida and the (mostly Sunni) Iraqi
resistance.
When I read that, I thought, "
This is nonsense -- but Bush would sure like us to believe it." I'm not
the only one.
Bush is quietly planning another troop increase in Iraq.
I am confident that the Iraqi Resistance will outlast the Son of Surge, but
only after Bush makes life into hell for Iraqi civilians.
Azmi Bishara, an Arab member of the Israeli Parliament, has fled into
exile after the police accused him of treason because he met with members of
Hezbollah. Bishara says that no one gets a fair trial in Israel's "security"
courts, because they use secret hearsay evidence.
Democrats in Congress have caved in to Bush, giving funding for continued
occupation of Iraq, but only for 3 months.
Television now teaches the public to legitimize torture.
There is a campaign in the UK parliament
against cooperation with Bush regime torture flights.
The expelled inhabitants of the Chagos Islands have won a court victory
over the B'liar regime, which had tried to set aside the previous court
decision which said they could go home.
The B'liar regime did this because it didn't want any civilians anywhere near
a big US base.
A company that wants to pay schools to play ads (with music) in school
buses has run into resistance.
That people can start such a company and not expect to be laughed out of every
school department's office reflects the extent of corruption of our society by
business. When cities sell names of stadiums to businesses, they set an
example of corruption that promotes corruption in every area of life.
A strict curfew in Samarra, turning the whole city into a prison, is
making it hard for residents to find food and fuel. At least 10 people have
died in the hospital as a result. Others have died because they could not get
to the hospital.
This is what Bush means by "freedom and democracy in Iraq". As usual, the
Bush forces refuse to accept responsibility for what they have done.
The Pentagon is reducing the McClatchy reporters' access as punishment for
negative coverage of the Iraq war.
I wouldn't say this is wrong in and of itself. I too decline to give some
reporters interviews (though, unlike the Bush regime, I don't try to hide it).
What is noteworthy is that this method is fairly effective at making most of
the mainstream media give positive coverage.
Palestinian rockets
finally killed an Israeli civilian.
The Israeli army and air force have been pre-emptively retaliating for this
casualty for weeks, killing many Palestinian civilians in the process. Both
the Palestinian and the Israeli attacks against civilians are wrong, but the
Israeli attacks kill many while Palestinian attacks rarely hurt anyone.
20 years after the publication of Manufacturing Consent,
the Internet has changed the landscape for corporate propaganda, but has
not eliminated the problem.
We find out about corporate-funded phony activism when it makes mistakes.
However, professionals don't make mistakes all the time. We need to be
suspicious of organizations that lobby for something corporations want -- and
we need to develop rules to make it easier to distinguish real activism (which
occasionally cooperates with companies) from fake corporate-funded activism.
A BP memo shows how it manages the agencies that are supposed to regulate
it, with a carefully planned series of personal relationships between
particular executives and regulatory officials.
A Conoco representative says his company has been "luckier" in avoiding
spills, but we know that
BP's oil spill wasn't due to mere luck.
The Pope is trying to overcome the anger caused by his praise of European
colonization and its effects on indigenous peoples in the Americas.
Bush has appointed himself total power in "emergencies", in an apparently
unconstitutional plan to "ensure constitutional government".
Everyone: sign
this petition supporting some Iraqi members of parliament in opposing the
plan to hand over the oil to foreign companies.
The US Attorney for New Mexico was fired on the excuse he was "absent
from the job" -- when, as a military reservist, he was on active duty.
The real reason is that he didn't cooperate with Republican plans to
undermine the 2008 election with fake charges of individual voter
fraud.
Uri Avnery: The Israeli inquiry into the "failure" of the invasion of
Lebanon disregards the most important issues: there was no legitimate
reason for the war, and the offered justification was a lie.
Bush is planning to continue the occupation of Iraq for decades.
More about the dishonesty at Guantanamo, how Matt Diaz tried to
protect the Constitution, and how his trial was rigged.
Lebanon is on the verge of a civil war between Islamist extremists and the
goverment.
Malalai Joya, a member of the Afghan parliament,
had bottles thrown at her there when she stood up for women's rights.
When she criticized this, the men took such offense that they suspended her
from parliament.
Many butterfly species have appeared a month early in the UK, a measure of
how much global warming is affecting the Earth.
The question now is whether we are wise enough to take action to save our
endangered space-ship, or whether greed as channelled through global
corporations will destroy it.
Brazil's Atlantic Forest has the highest biodiversity on Earth. But it is
being cut down because Brazil doesn't appropriate enough money to protect it.
Gordon Clown wants a law to make it easy to ram through any sort of
development over local opposition. He is hoping to fool opposition by making
this apply to wind-farms as well as nuclear plants and supermarkets.
Governments often use this kind of "one step forward and ten steps back"
tactic; we have to be on guard against it.
The environmental organizations in the US have become ineffective, because
they have lost the fire of activism and don't dare talk about the danger of
population growth.
This is why I do not support the cause of people who want to move to the US
for economic reasons. Letting millions of people move from overpopulated
countries to the US is not a solution to population growth. What we need is a
committment by the US and other wealthy countries to fund contraception and
abortion in the rest of the world.
The Bush forces made a plan before the war to turn the Iraqi news media
into propaganda outlets.
We don't know if this plan was followed, but don't say the Bush regime is
incapable of advance planning. It knows how to plan corruption and dishonesty.
The company SAIC mentioned in the story often does dirt for the US government.
A few years ago, SAIC held the contract to operate the computers of PDVSA, the
Venezuelan state oil company, which had fallen into the effective control of
foreigners. When President Chavez moved to reclaim Venezuelan control of
PDVSA, seeking to use the oil wealth to help the poor, the unpatriotic
managers of PDVSA tried to force it to stay shut down. SAIC helped them, by
shutting down PDVSA's computers.
The US Army is recruiting soldiers that need antidepressants to avoid
killing themselves, and recruiters tell them to lie about this.
The commanders deny that this happens. But lying is par for the course in the
Bush regime.
The US Senate is considering a law to make the CIA publish a secret
report about the 9/11 attacks in the US. Senator Wyden says, "The decision to
classify the report has nothing to do with national security, but rather
political security."
The UK has so much surveillance that even police are starting to
call it "orwellian".
Illegal sale of ivory on eBay promotes elephant poaching.
Missiles from Gaza continue to be basically harmless, but Israelis feel
they are not killing enough Palestinians in response.
The Bush forces tried in 2004 to kill Muqtada al-Sadr, with a fake offer
of negotiations meant to lure him into a trap.
Bush has established a climate of depravity in which there is no evil so bad
that his regime won't do it.
Does it make sense for thousands of people to fly or drive to a concert so
as to raise awareness of global warming?
The "Fabric of Life" road, which is the only exit from the Palestinian
village of Bir Naballah, is subject to constant Israeli harrassment. Arabs get
arrested for having dangerous weapons such as screwdrivers.
The "Iraqi" parliament protects itself from the Iraqi resistance by hiring
foreign mercenaries -- who are immune from prosecution for anything they may
do in Iraq. So they can terrorize the public with impunity.
President Musharraf is allowing Taliban-like religious extremists to
terrorize the city of Islamabad.
A navy lawyer, Matthew Diaz, told the Center for Constitutional Rights the
names of the prisoners in Guantanamo, so that it could represent them in
court. For defying the Bush regime's illegal policies, he has been sentenced
to prison.
Diaz' action was that of a hero, but he has tarnished his heroism by
apologizing for it.
The US admitted that panicking troops killed innocent civilians in
Afghanistan.
However, it does not seem to have admitted that the attempted cover-up was
wrong. (This included destroying journalists' videos.)
A probe into the possible motives of Bush and B'liar's lies about Iraq.
The World Bank pretends to help the world's poor, but its projects are
designed to help global business, while the conditions it exacts hurt the
poor. Wolfowitz' coming departure creates an opportunity for possibly
changing these policies.
China wants to legalize the sale of tiger parts, which could hurry the
tiger into extinction.
A court case accuses Bush forces troops of taking an Iraqi man hostage to
try to make his brother surrender.
Hostage-taking by the Bush forces has been documented many times.
Israeli troops killed and wounded around 100 Palestinians -- mostly
bystanders -- in "response" for Palestinian rocket attacks which apparently
did not hurt anyone.
Since the rockets were the Palestinian response to the constant oppression of
the Isreali occupation, I think Israel has no need or excuse to "respond" by
making the occupation even worse.
The Southern Ocean, whose absorption of CO2 has reduced the effects of
past emissions, has become saturated. It can do nothing to reduce the effects
of future CO2 emissions.
Standard practice for modern dictators that have a bad image in the US is
to hire a PR firm. This enables them to get the US population to like them,
or get support from the US govermment.
This practice is not limited to foreign tyrants. The US government does it,
and companies do it -- US mass media are usually putty in the hands of
well-funded PR campaigns.
How could they become trustworthy again? One approach would be to design a
code for how news media deal with PR announcements, and launch a campaign
pressuring news media to sign up. I will not try to write such a code,
because I can't do the job right: I don't know PR practices well enough to
design an effective obstacle against them. But if people who do know the
matter set their minds to it, maybe they can find a solution.
Verizon and AT&T pay hundreds of "citizens groups" to lobby for
deregulation of cable licenses in many US states -- and these groups disguise
their nature, pretending to be merely citizens with an opinion.
The BBC dares to report on the Church of Scientology.
The Church of Scientology uses copyright law to suppress information about
their secret tenets (such as, about Xenu and the Thetans). Those who try to
reveal the sacred texts are sued.
To make these practices more effective and dangerous, Scientology also directs
its pet congressmen to vote for increases in copyright power. This makes the
Church of Scientology the direct enemy of your fredeom whether or not you ever
have dealings with it.
BP's Alaskan oil spill in 2006 was caused by skimping on maintenance. In
effect, BP's talk about respecting the environment is just greenwash.
The powerful landlords of Para in Brazil, who have for years murdered
workers who got in their way, may have finally come to the end of their
impunity.
The State of Massachusetts, and environmental groups, have sued the DOE
for failing to upgrade energy efficiency standards.
In another setback for the War on the Environment, Julie MacDonald
has been forced to resign. She was used by the Bush regime to pressure
scientists to minimize the danger of extinction to various species.
The Bush forces have blocked soldiers from accessing web sites
where users share information.
Perhaps this is meant to stop them from posting photos and videos
of atrocities committed by the Bush forces against Iraqis.
CBS says it fired General Batiste for "engaging in advocacy" by
criticizing Bush's war, but it doesn't mind when other commentators
engage in advocacy in support of Bush.
Perhaps that's because CBS supports Bush. After all, CBS pays Nicolle
Wallace to make statements in support of Bush, it labels the former
Bush regime employee as a "political consultant" to disguise her
background.
Opposition parties in Pakistan called a strike which shut down the
country's main cities. They had tried to hold rallies, which were
overrun by violence; they say this violence was fomented by President
Musharraf.
The Iraqi resistance has captured a few Bush forces soldiers, which
has driven the Bush forces nuts.
Americans react irrationally when a few Americans are taken prisoner.
When some were captured by Iran, the media made it seem like a
national emergency. Some say that Reagan to make a deal with Iran, to
assure these prisoners would be held until the election, and that this
enabled him to defeat Carter, who had at least tried to send a
military force to rescue the prisoners. Later, when some Americans
were captured in Lebanon, President Reagan ransomed them with missiles
for Iran.
I hope that this coup for the resistance, while minor in objective
terms, makes stops Bush from continuing the war.
Bush's "Iraqi" government will forbid press coverages of bombings.
Whatever they may say, the reason is clearly so that Americans won't
know about the bad news.
An Israeli officer was video'd attacking civilian protestors, and now
faces possible punishment -- because it was recorded, and because the
protestors were Israeli.
This is the exception -- the normal case is that soldiers get away
with violence up to and including murder.
Deforestation is one of the main causes of global warming.
I've heard that a lot of the deforestation in Brazil is for growing
feed for cattle. The cattle produce methane, which also contributes
to global warming. Thus, eating less meat (and cutting subsidies for
its production) is an important way to reduce the problem.
Around 2 million Iraqis have fled to other countries.
This article interviews many of them, presenting a picture
of how horribly Iraq has been destroyed by Bush.
The Israeli Army has announced a plan to wipe out the Palestinian
village of Aqba, by declaring 80% of its land a "military zone".
As the G8 try to propose action to reduce climate change,
the Bush regime is trying to sabotage it.
If the other countries involved have any courage, they will make the
text sharper and dare the US to walk out.
The draining of wetlands in South Korea that are used by migrating
birds now threatens two species with extinction.
This shows what happens when environmental impact statements are not
required. It also shows why human overpopulation spells disaster for
the natural world.
In the weekly Bil'in protest, Israeli troops shot a nonviolent protestor
with rubber bullets from 10 feet away. He was seriously injured and needed
to be operated on.
The government of Afghanistan increasingly bans journalism,
and attacks or kills journalists.
A survey in late 2006 found that half the Bush forces troops say they
would not report anyone in the Bush forces for killing innocent
Iraqis, and a third of them are in favor of torture. And 1/10 of
the troops surveyed said they had actually mistreated civilians during
a 5-week period.
What General Petraeus is saying about this is what Bush and everyone
working for him should have said all along. But it is too late now,
because the Bush forces have already given Iraqis plenty of reason
to hate them. Furthermore, I don't think he has any chance
of changing the soldiers' views of this unless Bush starts to
back him up.
Sooner or later, humans on Earth will have zero population growth.
The question is -- how bad will things get before that happens?
Bill Clinton is promoting efforts by countries such as Brazil and
India to set aside patents so as to make AIDS medicines affordable.
The WTO's patent rules are unjust, but do allow an exception when
needed for public health. The US government, acting on behalf of the
drug companies, pressures poor countries not to use this exception.
The Clinton administration did this when in power, and the Bush regime
does it now.
It is interesting that both Clinton and Gore are showing much more
concern for the public good now that they are not in office. This is
a sign that they felt compelled by the political system to knuckle
under to the corporations -- that the megacorporations have so much
power that democracy is impossible. Sad to say, Clinton's "free
trade" treaties gave them this power. To reestablish democracy, we
have to take away the megacorporations' power, split them up, and
abolish these treaties.
Russian journalist Yelena Tregubova says that Putin has destroyed
freedom of speech in Russia. She is seeking political asylum in
London after escaping a bomb that was meant to kill her.
In response to complaints about unofficial and quiet attempts to gag
scientists, new rules have been imposed on NOAA to officially gag
scientists.
Presidential candidate Giuliani seems to have tried to block the DEAs
investigation into Oxycontin addiction, acting on behalf of the company that
made it.
To restore democracy in the US would require making all politicians scared get
involved in defending any company.
Halliburton drives empty trucks through the Iraqi desert, risking the
drivers' lives, because it is paid per trip.
Although he denounces corruption, Greenwald insists on praising the troops in
the Bush forces, who wish to imagine they are "serving their country". Thus,
he considers the resulting demoralization of Bush forces soldiers a bad thing.
In a just war, it would be a bad thing. But the corruption of Halliburton is
part and parcel of the greater corruption of launching a war of aggression.
The ring-leaders of the combined scheme, Bush and Cheney, ought to be in
prison.
Recent elections in Scotland and France may have been affected by
electronic voting machine fraud. However, in Ohio, the people who stole the
2004 presidential election have been forced to resign and are being
investigated.
B'liar's regime illegally delayed publishing bad news about increasing
costs for his tyrannical ID card scheme.
A Chinese freedom activist is challenging China Telecom in court for
blocking access to large parts of the Internet (here is a
link to the same story in Chinese).
New Bush regime regulations impose total email censorship on soldiers'
families as well as on soldiers.
Bush is trying to forbid troops from speaking to members of Congress, too.
And soldiers have been told to treat reporters like spies.
The target of this secrecy is not the Iraqi resistance, which knows all it
needs to know about what the Bush forces are doing. It is the public and
political opposition.
A comment unintentionally highlights the absurdity of the excuse offered for
this policy of cover-up. "Soldiers don't own this information -- the American
people do". Strange justification for keeping it secret from us.
Michael Moore faces the threat of imprisonment for bringing some Americans
to Cuba for medical treatment. These people developed chronic illness from
air pollution while saving people during the attacks on the World Trade
Center, but they could not afford medical treatment in the US.
NASA predicts that by 2080, typical summer temperatures in the US
Northeast will be around 90 degrees Fahrenheit, and 110 degrees won't be
unusual.
International pressure is making China start to pressure Sudan to stop the
fighting in Darfur.
A Bush forces soldier says he watched his commander shoot five Iraqi
civilians who were trying to surrender -- and then was ordered to lie about it.
This sort of thing must have happened on a smaller scale hundreds of times, but
without prosecution because there was no evidence or the coverup was
successful. That is what an occupying army does, and that's why those
responsible for the occupation itself are the main culprits. They are the
ones who established the climate that led other officers to think they should
order Captain Stone not to investigate.
Congressman Kucinich is starting an investigation of conflicts of interest
in privatized government scientific measurement and testing.
Kucinich for president!
The Bush regime deported illegal immigrants caught working in New
Bedford, but
Luis Posada has been spared prosecution for entering the US illegally.
He's special because he is a terrorist.
If Castro were to handle this the American way, he would send agents to kidnap
Posada and deliver him to a third country to be tortured.
NATO troops have been lilling lots of Afghan civilians, and
this is generating resentment; meanwhile, each time this happens, NATO is
reluctant to admit it, and that generates more resentment.
Truck drivers in Afghanistan say they would rather be ruled by the Taliban
than by the corrupt police of the current government.
The Taliban are horrible, but I can understand why Afghan men would prefer
them to chaotic violence.
Al Qa'ida's religious extremism is making enemies among Iraqi Sunnis.
The only thing that enables Al Qa'ida to retain some power and influence among
Iraqi Sunnis, despite all the trouble it causes them, is that it also fights
the occupying army. Thus, the best way for the Bush regime to defeat Al
Qa'ida in Iraq (supposing it really wants to) would be to withdraw the Bush
forces.
The UK's program to support renewable energy in houses was so successful
that they reduced the grants.
It's a rational way to economize, if you'd rather save money than save the
planet.
Frank Lund has been convicted of murder after cooperating with his
incapacitated wife's stated wish to commit suicide.
The purpose of a jury trial is so that juries can prevent such outrageous
results. Jurors in trials of people accused of assisting a loved one who
wishes to die, of people accused of carrying out abortions, of people accused
of sharing music or software, should
ignore the judge and vote "not guilty". This is called "jury
nullification".
B'liar has sentenced two government employees to prison for trying to
expose some of B'liar's dirty dealings with Bush. Even worse, the information
they tried to give us has been suppressed.
If you get some important secret information about how Bush and B'liar lied to
the public, you had better not trust someone in Britain or the US to pass it
on to the public. I recommend sending it anonymously to Telesur.
Greg Palast: Naked neo-cons:
Perjury and the Big, Bad Wolfowitz.
Israeli forces attacked Israeli and Palestinian protestors who joined
together for the non-violent removal of a stone roadblock. Then they kept
ambulances from picking up the people they had wounded. Nonetheless, the
action was a success in that the roadblock was removed.
"The Christian Taliban Is Running the Department of Defense", according to
Michael Weinstein, whose sons have been subject to anti-semitic harassment at
the US Air Force Academy.
Thousands of US soldiers and vets complain that their commanders pressured
them to convert to Christianity. This pressure is applied even in the
hospital.
The Wolfowitz scandal may lead to permanent changes in appointing World
Bank presidents.
Whether that would convert the World Bank into a force for good in the world
is to be doubted, but at least the organization is currently demoralized and
unable to do much harm.
A World Bank committee has found Paul Wolfowitz to have violated
its ethics rules.
Americans who hunt and fish are keenly aware of how climate change
is harming wildlife, and they want action right away.
A TV program that denied the reality of global warming
doctored supposed scientific data.
A power-struggle is developing in Basra, as people increasingly
support larger Shi'ite nationalist parties rather than the local
regime that collaborates with the Bush forces.
President Correa of Ecuador says that he will move beyond ineffective protests against Colombia's military incursions into Ecuador.
I read recently that he ordered the airforce to intercept
US drug-spraying planes if the enter Ecuadorian air space.
Ecuador is also moving to aid the Colombians who have
been forced to flee
by the civil war in Colombia and by paramilitaries.
Islamist fanatics attacked a school in Gaza which was having a party
with boys and girls together.
The Iraqi resistance is stepping up its attacks on the Bush forces,
and the Bush forces themselves warn of increased casualties in the
future.
When these increased casualties happen, they will say "Don't judge the
results yet -- wait another month, another year."
China is forcing rural Tibetans to leave their villages and move into
towns.
It is reminiscent of the "strategic hamlet" policy that the US tried
in Vietnam, but the aim seems to be even worse: to destroy Tibetan
culture.
US citizens: phone your senators and congresspersons and say you want the next
version of the Iraq war funding to be _firmer_ than the previous one. Show
Bush that each veto gets him more of what he doesn't want!
How Hillary Clinton made her money -- from Wal Mart and payoffs.
Republican corruption shows its face in the Army's purchase of drainage
pumps for New Orleans.
Even if performed honestly, this task is futile -- New Orleans must be moved
to high ground.
So much plastic garbage, including plastic bags, is floating in the
ocean that it is killing albatross chicks, sea turtles, dolphins, and
seals. This has inspired a campaign to end the use of plastic bags by
stores.
The campaign may help -- but we need to do something about the other plastic
garbage too.
The RIAA claims to collect royalties from Internet radio on behalf of
musicians, but that is a lie. The fact is, the RIAA (acting for the big
record companies) demands payment even if the musicians have said their
recording is freely sharable. And the musicians don't get this payment unless
they join the RIAA -- and give an impression of supporting it.
This law is one more illustration of how the US government takes the side of
big business over and against US citizens.
Middleman have forced down the price of cashew nuts for farmers in
Guinea-Bissau to the point where they are likely to starve
Police in the UK arrested 32 animal rights activists.
Most of those arrested have not been charged with a crime, but that wasn't
necessary. Since their computers, phones, and even copiers have been seized,
their activities have been wiped out.
I do not agree with the animal rights movement, and in particular, I am in
favor of experiments on animals for the sake of scientific advances. However,
I do support human rights -- and these activists' human rights have
been violated by an unjust government.
The Bush regime has censored web postings by soldiers -- and veterans --
threatening to punish anyone that makes statements the Bush regime disapproves
of.
US citizens: call or write your congressperson and say you want Bush and
Cheney impeached, and with no delay.
An Israeli commission's report condemns the government's leaders for folly
in launching war against Hezbollah last summer.
This is less important, however, than the continued occupation of Palestine.
A UK civil servant on trial for publishing memos that give the lie to
B'liar asked the jury to consider that he had acted with courage for the
public good.
The Irish government is blocking a teenage girl from going to the UK for
an abortion. These religious fanatics want to force her to have a baby which
would immediately die.
Occidental Petroleum, in Amazonia, has been
callously polluting the water that native people drink.
Bush's plan for security in Baghdad, which is to wall off many
neighborhoods and block travel, is making life more difficult but does little
to prevent death.
Half of all species on Earth are likely to be driven to extinction in this
century by human activity, unless unprecedented large wildlife reserves are
established to preserve them.
Venezuela has quit the World Bank and the IMF.
Venezuela's decision has no immediate consequences for Venezuela; instead it
is meant to inspire world-wide opposition to those organizations. They have a
habit of imposing nasty "structural adjustment" conditions on the countries
they "help", conditions such as making poor children pay for elementary school.
Around a million Turks protested against the likely next president and his
intent to turn Turkey more or less into an Islamic state.
US citizens: phone or write your congresscritters to save Internet Radio. You
can communicate and get more info through
this site.
But a phone call or paper letter carries more weight than an email.
Britain's moth population is down by 30 to 50% since 40 years ago, a trend
which endangers many plants and also animals.
Wal-Mart's union busting profits from weak US labor laws, but Wal-Mart
doesn't hesitate to break these laws over and over.
Cuba has freed a number of political prisoners, but this doesn't
necessarily mean a real change, as many more remain in prison.
Everyone:
sign the petition for firm action to prevent climate change.
A B'liar regime minister's aide is accused of leaking an impending arrest
of terrorist suspects, trying to play it for political benefit.
Doctrines of multiculturalism have led courts in Germany to treat Muslim
women as second-class citizens, who can be beaten freely by the men in their
family because "that's their culture".
Whatever culture is in a person's background cannot excuse subjecting the
person to violent abuse. And anything "Islamic" should be kept away from all
contact with law, because it is sure to be an influence for cruelty to women.
New estimates suggest the Arctic Ocean will have no ice in the summer as
soon as 2050. The lack of ice means the ocean absorbs more heat, so this will
increase the danger that Greenland melts and raises sea level by 23 feet.
A rationally based ranking of drugs by the harm they cause shows that
today's prohibition policies make no sense.
In Darfur, some of the Arab groups that were fighting for the government
have switched sides, making things more complex.
Bush vetoed the Democrats' war-funding bill. The Democrats seem to be
determined to continue their opposition, but they may remove the deadlines and
focus on "milestones"--such as permanent theft of Iraq's oil. That would make
it all worthless.
Bush's "Iraqi" government sent to its parliament the law to hand over
Iraq's oil wealth to foreign companies.
If Congress wanted to end the war, it could pass a bill offering funding for
the war on two conditions: that the "Iraqi" government not hand over
its oil wealth, and that the US government award no contracts for the war
without competitive bidding. If Bush signed that bill, he would lose all his
motive for continuing the war. But if he refused to sign it, that would be
tantamount to admitting his real motives.
Sea turtles are threatened with exinction due to human hunting of turtles
and their eggs. Efforts to protect them run into trouble with armed drug
traffickers.
In effect, the turtles are yet another casualty of America's insane "war on
drugs." This war is so intoxicated, by the drugs it is on, that it doesn't
realize it is killing turtles.
As patents on drugs kill millions in poor countries, the major big drug
companies try to justify the patent system by saying that it is the best way
to fund research.
This study shows how bad a system it really is, and discusses some
proposed alternatives.
The elections in Nigeria were brazenly rigged.
Greg Palast says: Bush's firing of prosecutors is part of an
attempt to bias the 2008 elections.
The Bush regime wants to make it almost
impossible for Guantanamo prisoners to meet with their lawyers.
Mordechai Vanunu has been
convicted of the crime of speaking to foreign journalists. Not that he
told them any secrets (he says he doesn't know anything which is still secret)
-- the mere fact that he spoke with them is his crime.
This is reminiscent of the Soviet Union and China during the cold war, when
people were afraid they would be punished just for speaking with foreigners.
Former CIA director Tenet now directly accuses Bush and Cheney of twising
intelligence findings to support their pre-formed intention to attack Iraq.
We already knew they had done this, but having the accusation come from a
witness who clearly knew what was going on may help the pressure for
impeachment.
Republicans in Congress are feeling the pressure to stop supporting Bush
on Iraq.
Bush's invasion of Iraq, if looked at from an amoral point of view, is indeed
a fiasco. Let that not distract us from the fact that it is also a monstrous
crime.
Doctors say the UK's
system of free health care has become a sham, since the care provided
free is inadequate and patients regularly have to pay to supplement it.
Saleh Nizar, a gardener of age 58, was arrested and tortured by the
"Iraqi" government on behalf of the Bush regime. The torture has injured him
permanently.
Nizar was fortunate to have gardened for a "senior official" who was able to
get him released after 6 months. Most Iraqis wouldn't have such connections.
They'd have to suffer for longer.
Uri Avnery: Comparing Israel to South Africa -- despite the similarities,
they call for different solutions.
A superficial reaction to violence in US schools tends to inspire harsh
"safety measures" that tend to increase alienation of students -- and that
tends to encourage violence.
Sheikh Hasina, former prime minister of Bangladesh, has been
accused of murder because police killed her supporters in a protest rally.
Then she was forbidden to return to her country to stand trial and clear her
name of these charges.
More recently,
the government reversed the latter decision and decided to allow her back
in.
As far as I can tell, the trumped-up murder charges remain.
Two US citizens were exiled to Pakistan for 6 months by the FBI.
A distinguished British ambassador, on retiring, blasted B'liar for
screwing up British foreign policy. He sent this message private to the
government as a farewell message. The B'liar regime responded by abolishing
the practice. Now it has been leaked to the news.
B'liar does not value truth, not even in private from people working for him.
That may be rational. B'liar does not tell ambassadors his real goals; for
instance, he won't say to them that "We will do whatever Bush says, and
pretend to the public that we have an influence on him; what suggestions do
you have?" Since their advice would be based on his public facade rather than
on his real position, it is useless for him, and he knows it.
The Irish struggle against a dangerous Shell refinery plan is growing.
China has become the world's leading emitter of CO2, ahead of previous
predictions.
Any hope of avoiding environmental disaster depends on convincing China to
stop building coal-powered electric plants.
Congressman Kucinich has introduced articles of impeachment
against Dick Cheney.
Democratic party leaders refuse to support the effort.
Shame on them!
The TV show
Supernanny teaches that parental dictatorship is good, but
doesn't measure the harm it does.
Fighting between Ethiopian troops and Islamists continues in
Mogadishu.
Since this article says nothing about the departure of Ethiopian
troops, which they previously said would happen very soon, I wonder if
Bush has convinced them to make their occupation of Somalia permanent.
Sunni-Shi'ite killings
are back in Baghdad.
Note that the Al Qa'ida attacks described in this article are not
terrorism. "Iraqi" soldiers and police are collaborators, working
for the Bush forces, and attacking them is attacking the occupying
army. It happens that most of these collaborators are Shi'ites.
Mugabe is systematically rigging the next election in Zimbabwe,
even as his thugs arrest and attack the opposition.
Attacking opposition leaders and activists is
not a new thing
for Mugabe.
Since the white colonizers took the land by force, I don't think they
have much of an argument to make for retaining it. But there are good
and bad ways to nationalize an enterprise. Zimbabwe's way wrecked
them.
The Iraqi government has started to withhold figures on civilian deaths.
Apparently it was ordered not to show that Bush is lying.
The African force which is supposed to protect the people of Darfur from
the Janjaweed is so undersized that it can barely protect itself.
The Bush wants
army news announcements to cooperate with propaganda operations, just as
they did in the Vietnam War.
Of course, the "facts" provided for army news announcements are often
pre-cooked for propaganda purposes. The US government systematically
ordered troops to lie about the death of Pat Tillman from friendly
fire, just as they systematically lied to make Jessica Lynch out as a
hero. Now the Democrats are
showcasing these lies.
How Bush's "military tribunals" will treat confessions obtained by torture
as evidence.
This means they are designed to function as part of a system for torturing and
"convicting" people regardless of the facts.
A bomb was found at an abortion clinic, designed to kill.
It surely was been planted by Christian theocratic fanatics. Other such
fanatics are suing the University of California for refusing to recognize
creationist "biology classes" as filling the lab science requirement.
The Panchen Lama, imprisoned by China at the age of 5, is now 18 (if
indeed he is alive), and is still in prison.
Al Qa'ida successfully attacked Bush forces troops in Iraq.
This will enable Al Qa'ida to win more support among Iraqi Sunnis, nearly all
of whom want to fight the occupiers of their country. They don't all support
Al Qa'ida's other mission, which is killing Iraqi Shi'ites. But even those
who dislike sectarian war may give Al Qa'ida more support if it conspicuously
fights the Bush forces.
UK troops returning from the Bush forces have spoken out to denounce the
war. Their base in Basra is under siege by the resistance.
Large supermarket chains are so powerful that they are driving down wages
for farm laborers in India.
This article refers to the UK, but I'd expect it is even more true of the US.
Summing up the US'
movement toward a police state.
I have not checked all of these references, and some could be mistaken, but I
know that most of them are accurate.
The fighting in Mogadishu has driven 300,000 people to flee the city.
The Ethiopians, and the US-constructed "provisional government", have little
popular support, and thus no chance of defeating the Islamists.
A brief history of fake news in the US.
Tens of thousands protested in the US to demand reductions in greenhouse
gas emissions.
Sunnis protest against Baghdad's 'prison wall'.
Bush is using skewed statictics to prove that Iraq is safer.
But car bombs are not the only form of killing that Bush omits from these
figures. Aerial bombardment by the Bush forces kills lots of Iraqis, and they
systematically underreport it.
Mongolian herder Tsetsegee Munkhbayar launched an environmental movement that
made many mines stop polluting.
The UK's national health service won't pay for drugs to treat
macular degeneration until the victim goes blind in one eye.
However, privatized medicine is no solution. The private sector won't
treat most of these victims at all (they can't afford it).
Bill Gates gives some of his money to charity, hoping thus to persuade
society to overlook the harm he does to get that money.
But how good is this charity really?
Pacific leatherback turtles are headed for extinction, wiped out by human
fishing and habitat destruction. A migration "race" with turtles as
competitors is trying to get children interested in their fate.
The threats that these turtles face can be found in the "threats" section of
this page.
A part of Greenland is revealed as a separate island after the ice shelf
connecting it to Greenland melted away.
The Greenland ice sheet is melting faster and faster, threatening to raise sea
level by 23 feet and inundate many major cities.
Nigeria's ruling party rigged the elections there.
The opposition has denounced the elections as fraudulent and calls for a
new election.
The US elections in 2000 and 2004 were also rigged, and Greg Palast says they
are working on rigging the next election already.
Everyone: on May 3 the US will meet with Syria and Iran to discuss what to do
in Iraq.
Sign the petition calling for diplomacy involving all parties.
In the US:
join the rally in Washington on June 10/11 to end the occupation of
Palestine.
The Sunni inhabitants of a Baghdad neighborhood don't think that
building walls will make them safer. (Perhaps because the death squads
that kill Sunnis are Iraqi police and can go where they wish.)
Iraqi prime minister al-Maliki says that the construction should stop,
but he can't do anything to stop it, showing how powerless he is.
Mugabe has threatened to expel western diplomats unless they stop meeting
with opposition figures and going to their trials.
It is better to have the ambassadors expelled than have them remain while
neutralized. However, what this shows is that diplomacy is useless. Only
armed intervention will save the people of Zimbabwe.
As a dictator and a murderer, Saddam Hussein was no worse than Mugabe. Yet
Bush, who called for an attack on Iraq because Hussein was such a tyrant, has
no interest in liberating Zimbabwe from Mugabe. Perhaps Zimbabwe has no oil.
US voters: phone or write to your congresscritter in support of the Freedom of
Choice Act, which would repeal the federal ban on some abortions and endorse
abortion rights.
B'liar has abandoned Iraqi interpreters who worked for the Bush forces in
Iraq, and now need to flee for their lives.
I don't have much sympathy for Iraqi collaborators, who are rightly being
attacked as traitors by their countrymen. But this policy shows the moral
corruption of B'liar — the same moral corruption that led to his
participation in the attempt to conquer Iraq.
Many Iraqis hold the Bush forces (which they think of as the US)
responsible for the violence in their country.
B'liar is trying to undermine public schools with a system of
company-run publicly-funded schools. Popular opposition has blocked
one of them.
Iran has made progress in uranium enrichment, but is still a
few years away from having the uranium needed for a bomb.
I share the suspecion that Iran is planning to make nuclear weapons,
but since they seem to be the only thing that can deter an attack by
the US, I can't be very critical of this. Iran might use them for
attack, but so might the US. The US refuses to promise not to be the
first to use nuclear weapons, even against countries that don't have
any.
After a 6-year drought, Australia is about to ban irrigation, essentially
wiping out agriculture. This drought is unpredecented and is probably due to
global warming. Howard, who had ignored warnings that global warming would
reduce rainfall in Australia, now reluctantly recognizes that global warming
may be real.
The European Union took a small step towards political censorship by
making it a crime to deny that various genocides took place, when done in a
way that constitutes "incitement to racial hatred".
The added second condition makes the step smaller, but it still goes in a
dangerous direction. Even Nazis have the right to advocate their views, and
to make "incitement to hatred" a crime is dangerous censorship in itself.
B'liar's recipe for winning hearts and minds away from Al Qa'ida is to work
harder at propaganda. However, it is
hard for propaganda to overcome setting a bad example.
Chinese political prisoner Wang Xiaoning has sued Yahoo! for giving the
Chinese government information that led to his being imprisoned and beaten.
If there is no way for companies to operate in China without
supporting torture, then they shouldn't operate in China. (The same
applies to the US.)
Uri Avnery: Why Israel should release its Palestinian prisoners.
A well-known Palestinian non-violent activist was raided at night by
Israeli troops who sought to intimidate him into stopping.
The mother of a Palestinian prisoner was imprisoned and shackled so as
to put pressure on her son.
An Israeli sniper shot a Palestinian teenager, and then shot another
Palestinian who went to rescue him. The teenager died.
Nobel peace prize winner Mairead Corrigan joined in the weekly
protest at Bil'in and was injured by a rubber bullet and tear gas.
Another non-violent protest, near Bethlehem, was able to break up part of
the annexation wall under construction.
The Bush forces are getting so desperate that they are
sending seriously injured soldiers into combat.
Bush and B'liar called for stronger sanctions against Sudan, for massacres
in Darfur.
They can't actually do anything, because their armies (and their international
prestige) have been worn down by Iraq.
Bush's appointees on the Supreme Court upheld the ban on a specific
late-term abortion procedure, even when it is the best way to protect
the pregnant woman's health.
In effect, they have found a way to make Roe v Wade meaningless while
pretending to uphold it. (Dishonesty from the right-wing is normal
practice.) The law is vague enough to be stretched to cover all
abortions after 12 weeks.
The neocons who planned the invasion of Iraq are not the leaders of the
plot. Others more powerful than they asked them to plan it, and made the
decision to carry it out.
The US news media systematically and intentionally slanted the news to
support Bush's invasion of Iraq. Opposition to the war was labeled
"unpatriotic", and talk show host Phil Donahue was fired for not looking
"patriotic" enough.
I would like to know more about the "patriotism police" — how it
operated, and who organized it.
In Bangladesh,
Aralia Island is gradually being drowned as global warming makes sea level
rise.
Iran officially encourages vigilantes to kill people who don't obey
Islamic rules. The Supreme Court just ruled that vigilantes that
killed 18 people-- for crimes such as having sex-- can't be executed
as murderers. They may however face imprisonment for the killings.
I don't criticize the outcome as such, since I think the death penalty
is wrong. But it comes from a combination of two wrongs (having the
death penalty, and supporting lynching). They cancelled each other
out in this case, but that isn't usually so.
Both of these wrongs come out of Islamic law, which is just another
name for brutal tyranny. Respecting individuals' religious freedom
does not mean tolerating Islamic law.
Demand for merbau wood for floors is destroying the forests of New Guinea.
In 35 years, this will stop, because that species will all be all but gone.
Four million Iraqis have already become refugees,
and more are trying to flee, but they are
finding it increasingly hard to gain admission anywhere (even in other
parts of Iraq).
Large explosions in Baghdad killed many civilians, and showed that the
Bush forces cannot bring security to Iraq.
My proposal for restoring peace in Iraq is to pull the Bush forces
out, cancel all actions to steal Iraq's oil and privatize its state
assets, and give both the Sunnis and the Shi'ites armed help-- in the
form of troops from Islamic countries they can trust-- in maintaining
defensive perimeters around their parts of Iraq (and their parts of
Baghdad).
US citizens:
sign the petition to US Congress to take strong steps against global
warming.
In Ecuador,
78% voted to endorse President Correa's plan for a new constitution.
US telephone companies are corrupting many consumer groups
into lobbying for them.
As Bush wins favor among Americans by bemoaning the massacre of some
30 people, Americans mostly do not hold him
responsible for massacring 600,000 Iraqis.
Last year, the Bush forces pointed to Tal Afar as a picture of
success. This year
it fell apart into sectarian bloodshed.
Muqtada al Sadr has pulled his party's ministers out of the Iraqi
coalition. He has also recently called for protests against the
Bush occupation of Iraq.
In Kandahar,
ordinary citizens prefer the Taliban to NATO for simple safety.
They might be happy with a strong secular government too, but they
don't see any possibility of that.
A dispute about electronic voting has become an issue in the French presidential election.
It is utterly foolish to use electronic machines for elections. The practical advantages are insignificant compared to what we lose: confidence in the outcome of the election.
After US marines in Afghanistan wantonly killed civilians, they seized journalists' cameras to cover it up. The US government continues to defend their destruction of evidence.
Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein has been imprisoned for a year by the Bush forces in Iraq, with no charges filed.
It's too bad that the AP won the Pulitzer Prize, rather than Bilal himself. If he had won such a prize, the heat on the Bush regime might
be enough to make them release him.
Democratic leaders seem to be standing firm against Bush regarding their flawed but useful bill for Iraq troop withdrawal.
The Bush regime has turned disinformation through the mainstream meda into a weapon, and the world has become aware of this. Now it is trying
to disinform the Internet as well.
Fake drugs are sold in large quantities, and have taught the malaria parasite to develop resistance to the real drugs.
Former Republican Congressman McCloskey left the party, saying "A pox on their values", and became a Democrat.
While this is good news in the short term, it is partly a reflection of the fact that today's Democratic Party largely has adopted values and policies that once belonged to the Republican Party. As people who sincerely support the former Republican values become Democrats, we who sincerely support the former Democratic values become Greens.
B'liar has done
one good thing: a campaign to win control of the
International Whaling Commission away from Japan and maintain the controls
on whaling.
A court decision in the US, made in the name of copyright law,
will
shut down Internet radio unless it is reversed. Its retroactive
application will bankrupt the netcasters.
The UN as well as Ecuador recognize that human activities are
threatening the ecology of the Galapagos islands.
I think that controlling the human population of the islands must be
part of the solution.
Bush plans to turn Baghdad into a semi-prison to end the
violence (and the resistance). It is not likely to work.
Tens or hundreds of thousands of Iraqis heeded Muqtada al Sadr's call
and protested peacefully, calling for the Bush forces to leave their
country.
Courageous ex-Muslims in Europe have founded an organization to
oppose
religious bullying by Muslims. The death threats they have received
illustrate the evil they are trying to oppose.
British MP Norman Baker is assembling evidence that Dr Kelly
was murdered by the British government. He already has plenty
of evidence to disprove the official story of suicide.
11 retired US generals say: cut greenhouse gas emissions
today, or fight wars tomorrow.
The B'liar regime is
letting Sudanese government officials interrogate
Darfuri refugees in the UK.
A federal law that violates the Roe v Wade decision by prohibiting
abortions in many circumstances will
soon be considered by the Supreme
Court. Bush's appointees there were most likely chosen for their
willingness to take away abortion rights.
An
article in a major Canadian newspaper denounces the US "war on terror"
as a fraud for stealing oil, and says Canada should pull out of it.
Why Israel has no grounds for rejecting the
Arab peace offer.
Israeli soldiers attack Jenin refugee camp every day, just to be
cruel. When they took over the family of pharmacist Ahmed Hourieh,
they admitted that nobody in the family was to be arrested. So they
just made the family stay out in the cold half the night, while they
trashed the house.
In Qalqilia, Ali Shukri was wanted for arrest. Since he wasn't
home,
police shot some of the women in his family, then blew up
their home, damaging the neighbors homes. That'll teach them not
to live near anyone who is a suspect!
Members of the Palestinian Parliament have been in prison for
a year, charged with the crime of having run as members of Hamas.
Hamas was built up by Israel in the 1980s so as to undermine
the influence of Arafat's secular Fatah organization.
In Nablus, Israeli troops following their usual practice of taking
civilian hostages and using them as human shields were caught on
video. This led to a scandal, which surprised them, because they
normally expect to get away with this.
Oxfam International calls for an end to the financial blockade
of Palestine, because it is causing starvation.
Police in Baltimore arrested a 7-year-old child for riding a motorbike
on the sidewalk. Then they handcuffed him and took him to the police
station.
I shudder at the thought of what they would do to an adult
caught riding on the sidewalk.
Police in Pittsburgh attacked peaceful protestors, then arrested them.
One protestor tried to photograph a policeman who had just made a
nasty remark and the policeman beat him up. Others who tried to
photograph the attack on the first one were then attacked and
arrested. This is part of a long-term systematic campaign of violence
and sabotage against antiwar activity in Pittsburgh.
The police are probably right-wing extremists who believe that dissent
is treason. This is par for the course, for police, but Bush is also
responsible since he created a climate of disrespect for human rights
and dissent.
A suicide bomber attacked the Iraqi parliament, having
penetrated
8 lines of Bush forces security checkpoints. It is a dramatic indication
that Bush's troop increase has failed to crush the resistance.
Gordon Drown arranged for reports to exaggerate the success of doing
government activities with private financing (and private profit).
A
UN campaign aims to make "sacred" sites double as wildlife preserves.
Bush has systematically appointed the graduates of a school for
theocratic Christians, many of whom are incompetent or dishonest. And
they are already planning to keep this up after Bush is gone.
Garry Kasparov, chess champion turned dissident, was
arrested
in Moscow for a peaceful march to criticize the antidemocratic
policies of President Putin.
Leading Democratic candidates have refused to debate on Faux
News.
Several
Serb nationalists have been found guilty of killing
Bosnian Muslim prisoners in Srebrenica. Bush forces soldiers who have done
similar things have mostly gone unpunished.
How did Iran treat its British prisoners? Some of the ex-prisoners
describe treatment that is rather nasty, though not as bad as what
Bush does.
However, there is
some reason to think the ex-prisoners were pressured
into by the B'liar regime into making false accusations.
I don't find this evidence conclusive. I would not be surprised if
the Ahmadinejad regime abuses prisoners, nor if B'liar made the
ex-prisoners lie. In any case, we should focus our criticism on the
bigger and worse offender: the Bush regime.
Uri Avnery:
the Israeli Shin Bet now considers democratic political
dissent from the definition of Israel as a "Jewish state" as a
security threat.
Police in India
tortured Choles Ritchil to death. Mr Ritchil was a
leader of the Garo indigenous people.
Evicting people to make a nature preserve is sometimes necessary,
but India
needs above all to do a better job of protecting
its existing nature preserves.
Bush forces casualties this month are going at the
highest rate in the
four years of the occupation.
The
prosecutor firings was part of a scheme to cover up
Bush's rigging of elections by distraction. And the cover-up
resembles the Watergate cover-up.
Everyone:
sign the petition demanding that Wolfowitz be fired
from the World Bank.
Massachusetts citizens:
Call your state representative and state senator, and say you want
them to reject implementation of the federal REAL ID program, because
it would turn drivers' licenses into national ID cards and that is too
much government power.
(Implementation would also be expensive, but make it clear that's
a secondary reason.)
Bush's wars have so drained the army that he hijacked to
conquer Iraq that he has decided to extend tours of duty.
That will not help morale.
Lots of West Point graduates are leaving the army as soon as they can
--
the highest rate of leaving since the Vietnam war.
The weakening of the US Army is a good thing. It is far stronger than
it needs to be to face any actual military threats to the US, and any
additional strength it has is used for unjust wars on behalf of the
corporations our government serves.
There are a number of places in the world where governments oppress
people so badly that they justify a war of liberation. They include
Darfur, Zimbabwe, and Uzbekistan. (Afghanistan was one of them, but
Bush failed to follow through because he really wanted to attack Iraq
instead.) But there's no chance Bush would use the army for such
a worthy cause. What he wants to do is attack Iran.
Bush has a new plan for sabotaging federal agencies whose job is to
regulate business. It seems to authorize the OB to rewrite reports
produced by agency scientists.
A PBS program by Bill Moyers shows how the US press
systematically went along with the lies Bush told
to justify his conquest of Iraq.
Bush's new
spy chief wants even more power to do surveillance in the US.
I have a suspicion that "monitoring foreigners...by tapping phones and
email accounts" includes tapping the phones and email accounts of US
citizens that the foreigners talk with, or might talk with. In other
words, absolutely anyone.
Iran is increasingly selling its oil in currencies other than the US
dollar. This may puncture the power of the US.
If the US loses its ability to borrow from the rest of the world
through commerce conducted in dollars, the full weight of the US
economic weakness will come home to roost, and the burden will
probably fall on ordinary Americans, as the rich people who benefited
from the policies which caused this weakness will evade it. Injustice
after injustice.
Wolfowitz,
installed by Bush as president of the World Bank
and disliked by nearly everyone there, is now in trouble for having kept
his girlfriend on the payroll.
I don't think the initial situation was actually wrong; I think it is
unfair to fire someone because "Your lover just became head of the
organization." On the other hand, the World Bank / State Department
shuffle that they set up to disguise the situation cannot be excused
at all.
The FBI's focus on terrorism leaves it
short-handed for dealing
with swindlers.
How convenient for Bush's cronies.
A group of scientists and 9/11 victims' relatives
have asked the NIST to for corrections in its report
on the collapse of the WTC towers.
John Pilger:
Iran may be the greatest crisis of modern times.
Iranian diplomat Jalal Sharafi, who was kidnaped early this year and
released just before Iran released the British Bush forces personnel,
says that while a captive he was tortured by CIA agents.
His body
bears witness to this.
Speaker Pelosi's visit to Syria
threatens to undermine Bush's desire
to isolate Syria just as Speaker Wright's discussions with Nicaraguan
President Orgeta brought an end to Reagan's policy of arming the Contras
to try to overthrow him.
Jimmy Carter praises her visit.
April 28,
National Impeachment Protest Day
April 23-27, wear clothing, buttons, stickers that say
"Impeach!"
Tigers are
on the way to extinction, because the government of India
has failed to protect them.
Iran announced that it has begun large-scale nuclear
enrichment. President Ahmadinejad says that if Iran is threatened
it will pull out of the treaties that block it from producing
uranium for nuclear weapons.
Iran is not close to building a nuclear bomb -- and due to the
IAEA supervision it has accepted, it can't even start preparing
uranium to make bombs unless it first rejects that supervision.
If it is true that Iran trains Iraqi resistance fighters, that is not
surprising, since the
CIA funds groups that carry out terrorist
attacks in Iran.
If Bush is serious about punishing terrorists and their supporterds,
he should start with himself.
The antivehicle mines used by the Iraqi Resistance produce
shock waves that
can cause brain injuries in people who are not visibly
injured.
One can compare the unseen effects of TBI from the resistance's
IEDs with the unseen effect of radiation from the Bush forces' DU (dirty
uranium) weapons, or the unseen effect of standing in "stress positions"
for hours or being denied sleep for days.
The official story is that Martin Luther King Jr. was killed by James
Earl Ray, acting on his own for no particular reason. King's relatives
do not believe this story, and in 1998 they won a wrongful death suit
against others who admitted to conspiring to kill King.
Supporting evidence about this conspiracy.
In the US: participate in the
national day of action against climate change.
Find
local actions near you.
Citizens of the EU:
Phone or write your members of the European Parliament to demand
changes "Intellectual Property Rights" Enforcement Directive #2, which
threatens to criminalize many sorts software and deputize
entertainment companies as enforcement police.
You can tell that this directive is bad just from its name. The term
"intellectual property" lumps together laws that have very little in
common, and views all of them from the wrong perspective: that of
privilege holders, not that of the public. If a law is written based
on such confused goals, only monumental luck can make it good.
See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html for more explanation.
Rejecting the directive outright would be even better than changing
it.
Bush's "war on terrorism"
includes releasing terrorist Luis Posada
on bail. Venezuela is seeking to extradite him so as to try him
for the bombing of a Cuban airliner.
Legal scholar and professor emeritus Walter Murphy
has been placed on the "no fly" list
for criticizing Bush.
The "authorities" will probably not admit that that was the reason
for putting Murphy on the list. But since they refuse to justify
what they do, we are entitled to judge them based on surmise.
Proposal:
put a warning on ads for air travel: "flying causes climate
change".
Al Jazeera stands firm for freedom of the press,
despite murder and imprisonment of its correspondents
by the Bush regime.
Israeli prisons
regularly torture Palestinians 16 years old,
and sometimes down to 14 years, just the way they torture adults.
Over half of the tropical coral reefs for which data is recorded are
being
degraded by overfishing.
Cheney is trying
once again to claim that Saddam Hussein worked
with Al Qa'ida.
B'liar is
planning to keep troops in the Bush forces for 5 years.
A substantial new nature reserve established in Indonesia provides
hope for preservation of hundreds of bird and mammal species.
However, this is a small fraction of Indonesia's forests, and the
overall forest situation in Indonesia remains bleak.
The porbeagle shark has been so nearly wiped out by fishing
that the
EU decided it could not deserve to be protected.
Ecuador's President
Correa has won a confrontation with Congress,
permitting the referendum for a new constitutional convention
to go forward.
A coming UN report will detail the many threats to humanity and the
natural world if we don't cut the CO2 emissions.
Israel took a Palestinian mother hostage to pressure her sons into
making a confession.
If they do make a confession, we won't know whether it is true or false,
but Israel will surely present it as truth.
Israel's retired chief interrogator
proudly discussed his torture techniques in an interview. As he pulled
the life support tubes out of a wounded Palestinian in the hospital, the
doctor willingly turned his back.
Bassam Amin is a Palestinian nonviolent activist. His 10 year old
daughter Abir was shot and killed from behind by an Israeli soldier
this year. The Israeli "authorities" lied about it in the usual way.
This article is by Bassam's Isreali colleague.
300 residents of a Palestinian refugee camp near Jerusalem have been
made refugees a second time; Israel has declared their homes illegal.
This is a common practice of the occupation.
As violence rages in Darfur,
the B'liar regime wants to deport Darfuris back to Sudan. A judge blocked
these deportations, but the government plans to appeal the decision.
The Bank of Credit and Commerce International, set up by the CIA
under Bush I, provides the missing
link between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. It funded them both, in
the 1980s.
For Bush,
sabotaging prosecutors who are willing to apply laws
that hurt Bush's cronies is nothing new. He did it as governor of Texas.
The Guardian gives the story behind the Iranian capture and release of
British sailors in the Bush forces, and the negotiations involved.
Amnesty International says
the prison in Guantanamo is even nastier than before.
A whole town in Australia was poisoned by a lead mine, but even after all
the birds died, the authorities insisted nothing was wrong.
This sort of thing happens when governments value big businesses
above the citizens, which is common with today's sick democracy.
Making ethanol fuel from straw instead of corn may be on the verge of
commercial feasibility. But it is not quite certain.
Bush told the EPA to claim that it has no authority to regulate
CO2 pollution. The Supreme Court ruled that it can.
However, as long as Bush is in charge, he will probably not let the
EPA really do anything.
Canada, Eritrea and Sweden are pressing Ethiopia for information
about their citizens among the hundreds that Ethiopia holds prisoner secretly
on behalf of the Bush regime.
At least one US citizen is believed to be among these prisoners, but
his government won't do anything for him.
Democrats in Congress decided not to refer to the "war on terrorism" in
the military budget.
This change is both correct and important. Since terrorism is a
tactic, not a movement or a people or a nation, the idea of fighting a
war "against terrorism" is basically absurd. It is not good to endorse
absurdities, in laws or anywhere else.
Meanwhile, Bush uses that expression to keep Americans scared, so that
they will support measures that hurt themselves or others. Cutting
down this practice is very important.
Thailand has "banned" Youtube for a video that insults Thailand's
king. So Youtube (a product of Google) says it will implement a
special feature so Thailand can block just those videos.
That's not what I would call resolute defense of freedom of speech.
A setback for theocratic Christians: Bush's
anti-birth-control appointee to family-planning post has resigned!
Mugabe's thugs are killing and maiming journalists --
including the
one believed to have smuggled out footage of opposition leader Morgan
Tsvangirai.
The
US Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal of the
Guantanamo prisoners who have been denied due process -- for now.
It left open the possibility of hearing the case later.
MoveOn's founders
explain why they supported the flawed Democratic
bill that sets a time limit for removing the Bush forces from Iraq.
It's not what they really want, but it is progress.
Veterans for Peace is organizing US military personnel (some of whom
have actually participated in the Bush forces) to call on Congress to
end the occupation.
The
US-backed Afghan government is preparing a press censorship law.
Continuing the War on Integrity, Bush wants to appoint three officials
to control pollution who have represented the polluters they would
be supposed to regulate.
The Iraq withdrawal bill passed by Democrats in Congress states
various conditions for the Bush forces to remain for more than a few
months.
One shameful condition is passage of the law that would hand
over Iraq's oil to western oil companies.
An Australian who briefly fought for the Taliban in Afghanistan, and
was held in Guantanamo and described by the Bushmen as "the worst of
the worst", is to be
sent to Australia for 9 months imprisonment.
This proves that the US does not really consider him much of a threat.
Part of the deal is that
he cannot tell what was done to him in
Guantanamo for a year. This is to help the Bush-supporting government
of Australia in the next Australian election.
Bush and the US Congress are going to fight it out
over pulling the Bush forces combat troops out if Iraq.
The Democrats in Congress are in a weak position because they don't
dare criticize Bush as he deserves to be criticized.
The UK has some 4 million TV cameras watching people in public. Most
of them perform surveillance, but some are used to scold people
immediately for fighting and littering.
I don't much mind TV cameras when the limit of what they do
is enable someone to watch for fighting, littering or theft.
They become a threat to freedom when they are used to make
permanent records of where people go. Many of the cameras
in the UK are doing just that: the police aim to record all
car travel.
UK resident
Mahmoud Abu Rideh has won a court battle against a
"control order" which greatly denied his freedom even though
he was never charged with a crime.
I would like to find out what the new control order says.
Everyone:
sign the petition to Bush to close the Guantanamo prison,
and give every prisoner either freedom or a fair trial.
The Bush forces
tried in January to capture Iranian diplomatic
envoys that had gone to Iraq to meet with Iraqi and Kurdish officials.
They captured only underlings, but angered Iran enough to spur
retaliation.
Iran's retaliation showed restraint, since it captured military
personnel that had arguably entered Iranian waters without permission.
Iran said recently that the Bush forces will allow its representatives
to meet with the Iranians captured in January.
The EU's carbon trading scheme is
failing to curb emissions from big
polluters.
It seems to be yet another case of the subservience of government to
business.
If our governments don't find the will to stand up to business and
impose major cuts in their emissions, the rich people that own the
large businesses will buy their way out of the resulting problems --
but that will be impossible for everyone else.
New Mexico has passed a law saying that the state must supply marijuana
to sick people that need it.
In other states, which have authorized sick people to grow their own
marijuana, the federal government sometimes arrests them. I wonder
what it will do in New Mexico.
US citizens:
send a comment to the Fish and Wildlife Service
in support of listing the polar bear as an endangered species.
Henry Kissinger says that victory for the Bush forces is impossible.
He also hints at a solution along the lines previously suggested
here, in cooperation with neighboring countries.
No plan that is based on establishing permanent control of Iraq will be
accepted by the Iraqi people.
Iraq veterans who oppose the war showed Americans what it's like
to be occupied by the Bush forces --
with street theater in Washington DC.
The Taliban executed three Afghans for giving information to
NATO forces. They want Afghans to regard those three as traitors.
If Afghans do see it that way, NATO cannot possibly win.
The Maoist rebels have joined Nepal's government, to
prepare for a vote
on abolishing the monarchy.
Hussam Shaheen, a Palestinian nonviolent peace activist, was arrested
by Israel for a protest chant, and
faces 24 years imprisonment.
Participate in the world-wide demonstrations June 5
for and end to the occupation of Palestine.
"Two peoples, two states, one peace."
A
former prisoner in Guantanamo is now running for parliament
in Australia, to spread awareness of torture.
Uncivilized Iran humilliates its Bush forces prisoners,
because it
fails to apply the latest Bush regime norms. (By Monty Python.)
A
report perhaps coming from Russian intelligence says that
Bush is planning to attack Iran on April 6.
There is speculation that the Iranian capture of some British members
of the Bush forces may have been intended to prevent an attack.
A foreign resident of Thailand has been sentenced to 10 years in
prison for
spray painting over pictures of the king.
Nobody has a right not to be criticized -- not a king, not a prophet.
Nobody.
Heavy fighting has broken out in Mogadishu between the Ethiopean
troops and the Islamists.
Lots of people predicted this would happen.
After the US released some Russian citizens from torture in
Guantanamo, it sent them back to Russia,
where some have been tortured into
confessing crimes.
Russian officials gave diplomatic assurances that it wouldn't do this,
but I am sure they knew that the Bush regime would wink at
noncompliance. This is why diplomatic assurances that "we won't
torture them", coming from a regime that regularly practices torture,
are worthless.
San Francisco is moving to ban plastic shopping bags from supermarkets
and drugstore chains. Paper bags are made from cutting trees, it is
true, but these trees are renewable resources.
US citizens:
express your opposition to "fast track"
authority for new "free trade" agreements.
Also please phone or write your senators and congresscritter
about this.
The UK's CO2 emissions are soaring,
showing that
all of B'liar's talk about reducing them is just
B'lies.
B'liar's government plans to reverse its US-imitating policy of more and
longer prison sentences, and
aim for rehabilitation instead.
Remember the cute baby seals that were killed in Canada for their fur?
Thanks to global warming, all the baby seals in the Gulf of St
Lawrence died this year. This problem, together with several years of
unsustainable hunting, has devastated the population.
But
Canada will allow hunting there anyway.
The other populations of these seals are not yet affected by the
warming, but they will be in the future. Global warming is leading to
the elimination of permanent ice in the arctic, and this could cause
the species' extinction -- along with that of polar bears.
In Denmark, anyone found near a protest can be arrested, and is
considered guilty unless proved innocent.
As the Amazon rainforest is cut down for soybean production, often
illegally, the shutdown of an export terminal
could be a substantial
victory, if it is not reversed.
RFIDs are being
secretly snuck into many products,
including credit cards. You can detect them with an
RFID detector,
and
you can smash them with a hammer.
Bisher al-Rawi, who has been imprisoned in Guantanamo for 5 years
despite having worked for British Intelligence,
may be released to
return to the UK.
The UK government for a long time refused to even try to get him out.
A joint committee of MPs concluded that the
UK's asylum system is "inhumane".
Mugabe's police are arresting large number of the opposition in
Zimbabwe, and beating them up just out of spite. Others in his own
party seems to be looking for a way to get rid of him.
The US mass media repeatedly and systematically
attacked Gore using false and distorted quotations. They accused him of
"lying" for words he didn't say.
I don't support Gore, and I didn't in 2000, because he bows down to
big business almost as much as Republicans do. He supports
antidemocratic "free trade" treaties. When he was vice president, he
tried to pressure South Africa not to authorize licenses for generic
medicines for AIDS -- acting, in effect, on behalf of the drug
companies. (Nowadays the Bush regime does the same thing.)
However, Gore's real faults don't make the media's dishonest campaign
against him any more excusable. It was in no way based on Gore's real
shortcomings. It was simple character assassination. I would expect
it was planned by the executives of the media companies, who know
which candidate they favor.
Gore is not the only victim of this. Remember how Howard Dean was
attacked, when he was the front runner for the Democratic nomination,
by playing his shout of victory in a distorted way? He had recently
criticized media concentration, so the media lied about him
nonverbally.
I can testify myself to the arrogance of reporters. Many of them
insist on calling the GNU system "Linux", and present the shallowest
of reasons to justify this unfairness -- and then they expect me
to be desperate for their attention.
Many US sources support Iran's contention that the
US is already engaged in acts of war against Iran.
Massachusetts residents: contact your state senator and state representative
to support SB 1011, SB 944, and HB 2247. These bills would reduce penalties
for possession of marijuana.
As the Amazon rainforest is cut down for soybean production, often
illegally,
the shutdown of an export terminal could be a substantial victory-- if it
is not reversed.
The US Senate joined the House in passing a requirement to remove
the Bush forces from Iraq. But it lacks the binding deadline
of the House bill.
These bills are not what ought to be done. What ought to be done
is to pull out all the troops, without delay. Nonetheless, they are
much better than nothing, as evinced by Dubya's reaction.
It is interesting to analyze the fallacious Bush responses -- all
based on trying to confuse the issue.
B'liar says the captured Bush forces marines and sailors
were in Iraqi waters.
This article argues that, although no one can be sure, it is more
plausible that that location constitutes Iranian waters.
However, the Iranians could have just told those Bush forces personnel
to leave. That they did something more serious might be a response to
threats of war, undercover forces infiltrating, terror attacks, etc.
Former Congressman Bob Barr, former extreme prohibitionist, is
now lobbying for the Marijuana Policy Project to end federal
anti-marijuana activity.
Bangladesh is being affected by climate change in many disastrous ways.
Darfur aid relief 'close to collapse', UN chief warns.
When businesses face criticism for mistreating the environment or
the public, they have a
large toolbox of arguments they use,
whether valid or not, to deflect pressure for regulation.
Japanese Prime Minister Abe made an inadequate apology to the
women that the Japanese Army used as prostitutes. not recognizing that the
Army forced them into this.
In Indonesia, the Japanese occupiers convinced families to send their
teenage daughters for "education in Japan", but the ships took them to
military zones where they were forced to act as prostitutes. After
the war, those who survived were too ashamed to try to go home.
Pramodya Ananta Toer encountered some of them while a political
prisoner, and later collected testimony which shows how widespread and
systematic this practice was.
Everyone:
Sign this petition asking Israeli and Palestinian leaders
to make real peace their goal.
The Bush regime has decided to reinterpret the Endangered Species
Act
so as to negate much of its effect.
A
highly respected Spanish judge who has been involved with the trials
of many important terrorists, has called for war crimes charges to be
filed against Bush, B'liar, and their former Spanish supporter, Aznar.
The Bush regime intentionally sabotaged the DOJ's
case
against the big tobacco companies.
Native groups from Alaska have joined many others to
ask
Congress to put limits on CO2 emission.
A large coal company is lobbying to replace that with research on
"clean coal"
technology--research which might, perhaps, provide
an acceptable alternative. An absurd idea.
What it is like for Iraqi refugees fleeing to Syria.
The New York Times published a picture of threatening message from a
wall in Baghdad.
This article claims that the message must have been
written by someone that didn't really speak Arabic.
The
EU may try again to write a constitution (without using that
name).
With current political leadership, no good can be expected from this.
The proposed constitution enshrined the power of business, and they are
likely to try that again.
A US
lawsuit accusing Rumsfeld of presiding over the torture
of prisoners was thrown out on the grounds that the prisoners
have no right to sue.
A system that refuses to hold officials that allow torture
responsible for their actions is a system that endorses torture.
After The Lancet published a study estimating that the invasion of
Iraq had caused the violent deaths of 600,000 Iraqis, B'liar's
scientific advisors told him that the study's analysis was valid.
B'liar and his men
then told the public that the report was invalid.
The B'liar regime has still not admitted the truth. I have read
elsewhere that the BBC used the Freedom of Information act to find out
what the advisors said. No wonder B'liar wants to destroy the Freedom of
Information act.
For more information see here.
In Ulster, the
leaders of the Catholics and Protestants have
made real peace, and now will go into government together.
The Bush forces use around 50,000 private mercenaries in addition to
the soldiers who are officially soldiers. Around 800 have been
killed, but they are not included in the casualty lists. Since
military regulations do not apply, it is hard to get any information
about them.
Mugabe has imposed a state of emergency, sending police hit squads
against opposition leaders.
Somalis who fled to Kenya were interrogated by the US and then
flown to secret prisons in undisclosed locations.
Iran captured some Bush forces marines and sailors who were inspecting
a civilian ship.
Iran says they were in Iranian waters, while B'liar says no.
Neither side can be trusted, though.
International double standard: Iran and the US.
The government of Iran is no champion of human rights either; it
arrests people without trial and sometimes tortures them. However, it
has not started wars of aggression.
Iran's democracy is rather limited, since elected officials can be
overruled by the mullahs, and candidates cannot even run without their
approval. The US' democracy is rather limited, since elected
officials can be overruled by the "free trade" treaties that transfer
power from the state to business, and candidates have little chance of
winning national office without support from business.
Former Bush forces Sergeant Provance, who was gagged when he tried to
push the Abu Ghraib torture investigation to the higherups that
instigated the torture, reports on what he saw at a screening of
"Ghosts of Abu Ghraib": Senator Lindsey Graham openly endorsed
torture.
The governors of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, Republicans of course,
are planning to rob the treasury by privatizing the turnpikes.
After opposition activist Tendayi Goneso fled Zimbabwe,
the police killed his wife because they couldn't get him. Now,
as Mugabe's rule heads for absolute cruelty,
the UK seems to be preparing to deport him back to Zimbabwe.
That site has badly designed HTML; you may need to go to
the 18th article by hand.
Uri Avnery: Palestinian school textbooks don't recognize
Israel and its frontiers. And Israeli school textbooks don't recognize
Palestine and its frontiers -- so they are even.
Genetically modified crops could be responsible for wiping out bee
populations. They don't kill bees directly, but seem to destroy their
immune systems.
Dr. Hansen testified to Congress about
how NASA gagged him.
The orders were given verbally so as to be able to deny they were given.
It appears that Khalid Sheik Mohammed was tortured into false
confessions--like many other Guantanamo prisoners. Even worse,
Senator Lindsay Graham knew about the torture of Khalid Sheik
Mohammed, and did nothing to stop it.
The US House of Representatives approved a law requiring combat troops
from the US to be withdrawn from the Bush forces, by September 2008.
But this doesn't include all the troops in the Bush forces, so it
doesn't really require a withdrawal, or an end of the occupation and
colonization of Iraq.
The Israeli police had arrested a Palestinian, without charges of
course.
To put pressure on him, they humiliated his family and made
them pretend to be prisoners.
Congressional democrats have backed down on plans to block
Bush from attacking Iran, thus in effect consenting to a war
at any time.
US citizens: Sign Public Citizen's
petition to restore the right of
Habeas Corpus.
Congressional democrats have backed down on plans to block
Bush from attacking Iran --
obeying AIPAC over the objections
of most American Jews.
Belgium has passed a law banned Dirty Uranium shells and armor. After
two years, the US will not be allowed to bring such weapons into
Belgium or ship them through Antwerp.
Dubya's War on Integrity continues
one that was started by Reagan.
One point that this article does not mention is Reagan's destruction
of anti-trust law, which was only partly reversed by Clinton. This,
together with the transfer of power to large companies brought about
by Clinton's "free trade" treaties, has made the general politcal
situation much worse for progressives in a long-term way.
US voters: write to your congresspeople and senators to
oppose the
Feinstein's PERFORM act, which is intended to impose mandatory DRM
on music on the internet.
In the Siria Valley of Honduras,
a gold mine takes all the water,
so that poor people have to buy water to drink. The government
hardly taxes the mine at all, so they get very little in exchange
for the loss of their water.
Birds in the US are
staying north for the winter -- possibly due to
global warming.
An Italian journalist,
held by the Taliban as a spy for two weeks when
he sought an interview, tells a story of bloody cruelty alternating
with hospitality. Before the Taliban decided he was a journalist and
let him go, they beheaded his driver.
Later it was revealed that the journalist had been
exchanged for Taliban prisoners.
The
occasions when FBI has got personal information beyond even the
weak limits of the U SAP AT RIOT Act may number 3,000, and 600 of the
cases may be flagrantly illegal.
This does not count the times when the U SAP AT RIOT Act
legally authorized the FBI to trample our rights. They number
almost 1000 a week.
Gordon Drown announced plans to cut taxes on some low-paid workers,
but increase taxes on the lowest-paid workers.
What poor people need is not a tax cut (assuing their taxes are fairly
low already), but rather increased social services paid for by taxing
the rich.
Uddhav Bhandari, who fled to the UK from Nepal after exposing police
corruption there, went to a hearing that could have decided to deport
him back to Nepal. Rather than plead his case, he set himself on fire
and died.
Refugees like Bhandari should not have to fear deportation.
Shame on the UK!
Proyecto Varela is a campaign for human rights in Cuba. Oswaldo
Payá obtained more than 10,000 signatures on a petition for a
referendum for basic freedoms, such as freedom of the press and
association, and release of political prisoners. According to the
Cuban constitution, that means the referendum must be held -- but it
has not been.
Payá seeks peaceful reconciliation among Cubans, and wants to
preserve the achievements of the Cuban revolution (health care,
education, elimination of extreme poverty, and independence from the
US and multinational business). As a result, the right-wing Cuban
exiles in Miami don't like him either.
Most reports say that Castro regime holds 284 people prisoner without
trial in Cuba, but the last reliable figures are from late 2005: 70
political prisoners.
The bulk of the prisoners held without trial in Cuba -- almost 400 --
are not held by Castro's government. They are prisoners of the Bush
regime, in Guantanamo.
All of these prisoners, whichever government holds them, deserve to be
freed, or given fair trials.
A Bush official who came from the oil business made hundreds of
changes in US government reports,
all to deny global warming.
Even more disgusting,
some Republicans in Congress support it.
I disagree, however, with the accusation that Cooney acted out of
loyalty to Bush, who had appointed him. I would say that Cooney
continued was working for the oil companies once he was nominally
working for the US government -- just like Bush and Cheney.
Four years after Bush's invasion, Iraq is a blood-drenched disaster.
A rare journalistic visit outside Baghdad shows the level of violence
in the rest of Iraq, and how little the Bush forces (whether nominally
American or Iraqi) can do about it.
Congressional democrats are
trying to reverse part of the Bush
regime's policy of secrecy.
Supermarkets in Venezuela have been
pushing up prices of basic
foodstuffs--doubling them in some cases. Chavez told them that if they
do this, they will be nationalized.
Price controls have a tendency to cause shortages, so they may be part
of the cause of the problem. However, businesses that take advantage
of such situations with speculation are not innocent. Nonetheless, I
would probably prefer to break up the big supermarket chains,
introducing more competition, rather than control prices.
Zimbabwe's dictator is arresting opposition leaders as they try to leave
the country.
US citizens: call your congresscritter to ask him/her to support a binding
time limit for removing the Bush forces from Iraq-- and the sooner the limit,
the better. Also say you support the proposed Lee Amendment to shorten the
timetable.
Everyone: sign the petition for
stronger sanctions against Mugabe.
The
opposition has walked out of the Egyptian parliament in protest
against new laws to suppress political opposition.
Professor Zimbardo,
past president of the American Psychology
Association, says that torture in Bush's prisons resulted from
a system that encourages it, and that Bush should be tried for
war crimes.
Hear, hear!
A secret Bush regime plan, written for the State Department by oil
company executives, called for using the occupation of Iraq to raise
the price of oil, so as to make a windfall for the oil companies.
A high oil price promotes conservation, so in itself it is good. But
it ought to be accompanied by a windfall profits tax, so that the
windfall goes to the treasury and not to Bush's cronies. However,
that's not what Bush would want. Enriching his cronies is his aim.
Tony B'liar may someday face trial in the International Criminal Court for the crime of starting the war in Iraq.
A court ruled in favor of prosecution on drug charges
of a sick woman, whose doctors say only marijuana can keep her alive.
If she is convicted and sentenced to prison, it would amount to a death
sentence with a very painful method of execution.
Two activists who vocally supported Palestinian rights in the 1980s
have been persecuted by the US government for 20 years. When judges dismiss
charges, the US government files new charges.
They have just won dismissal of the charges against them, but will
Bush allow that to stick?
The nuclear power industry has hired
spokesmen formerly
associated with the environmental movement, and presents them
as environmentalists for nuclear power.
The
Bush regime says that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has confessed
planning the 9/11 attacks in the US and other terrorist attacks.
Since this confession was presented in a secret trial, we have no way
of telling whether he really confessed at all. If he did, we cannot
be sure the confession is true. Torture will make people confess to
crimes they did not commit, and we know he was tortured.
Beyond general suspicion, there is evidence that this confession is
not true: he confessed to planning to bomb a bank which was founded
only after he was captured.
Bush regime continues to torture prisoners, in Iraq as well as in
Guantanamo.
Bush deserves a fair trial before he is imprisoned for this.
And he should not be tortured.
Police in Pakistan rampaged through a newspaper and TV station's
office,
to stop them from showing videos of protests.
A statement by the organization attacked.
The old Union Carbide plant in Bhopal is poisoning the public again.
The Indian government is ignoring its own laws and court judgment by
failing to supply them with potable water.
A new Palestinian national unity government might end the fighting between Hamas and Fatah. It has also won recognition from Norway.
The conditions that the US and EU demand of the Palestinians would be fair if they were demanded also of Israel. Israel must recognize the existence and territorial integrity of Palestine in exchange for a similar recognition from Palestine. And it makes no sense to demand that Palestinians end their rather small level of violence without demanding that Israel end its much greater level of violence.
Halliburton is planning to move to Dubai, apparently so as to thwart investigation of how it robbed the US treasury with Cheney's help.
Zimbabwean opposition leader Tsvangirai points to the injuries from his beating in prison to galvanize opposition.
Chiquita Banana funded paramilitaries in Colombia, and shipped arms to them. They killed union organizers, which Chiquita must have found useful. Eventually Chiquita informed the Bush regime, and continued supporting the paramilitaries for almost a year after.
The article says Chiquita sold its Colombian subsidiary, but I wonder what relationship they continue to have. Perhaps it is enough relationship that Chiquita remains morally responsible for its current conduct, though I do not knoow.
Compare this with the world-wide boycott of Coca Cola Company for
using paramilitaries to kill union organizers in Colombia.
The US is now spending over a trillion dollars a year on security, defense, and offensive war.
UN investigators place the responsibility for massacres in Darfur
squarely on the government of Sudan.
Torture Gonzales is in political trouble for the political firing of
US attorneys that had too much integrity.
Gonzalez was operating on orders from Harriet Miers, a close aide of Bush.
It seems plausible that Miers discussed this with Bush, even though we
have no proof yet. But even if he did not specifically approve this
plan, he is responsible for it, because it comes out of the general
climate of corruption created by his
War on Integrity.
A Sikh faces jail in India for 'singing about human rights'.
In a wealthy area of Sao Paulo, poor squatters who live in an abandoned
building wait to be evicted.
They are squatting because they are poor, not on principle. They would surely
be happy to be bought out for a price that would be small potatoes to the rich
people that want to use the site. Their refusal to pay that amount just
reinforces the nastiness of their greed.
An Iranian blogger who was arrested for reporting on a police raid
has been freed -- but other human rights activists have been arrested.
I've seen reports that the US does support violent separatist groups in Iran.
And the US does have a practice of feeding money to opposition groups even
in democratic countries, for motives that have nothing to do with human rights.
This is a disaster for human rights workers, since it means that US funds
are tainted.
Bliar has put forward a bill setting up a framework for
major reductions in CO2 emissions in the UK. However,
it
lacks the penalty provisions necessary to make sure it is
enforced, and doesn't spell out policies to reach the targets.
Pakistan's ruler
Musharraf has arrested the chief judge, who was
taking his job too seriously in a case about hundreds of human rights
activists that have been disappeared, Bush-style. Lawyers protested
this, and were attacked by policemen, receiving the treatment usually
reserved for poor and unprestigious people that protest.
B'liar's callous response to
greater poverty in the UK
compared with the rest of Europe is to reduce aid to the poor.
The Bush forces
soldiers accused of beating prisoner Baha Musa to
death have been all acquitted. No one will be punished for his
murder.
A colonel was acquitted based on evidence that higher officers
had approved the forms of violence that killed Baha Musa.
"Just following orders" is not supposed to be an excuse!
Another Bush forces soldier testified that
his commander ordered him
to kill prisoners, then create fake evidence of a struggle.
What this means is that the Bush forces can murder civilians with
impunity, and can establish policies that encourage such murder with
impunity.
Amnesty International reports on how the paramilitaries
of Colombia have built corrupted much of Colombian society.
These paramilitaries were supported by the Colombian government which
was in turn supported by the US government.
Companies are paying thousands of bloggers to promote products
and not admit it is paid advertising.
Australian mining companies are using copyright law to suppress
satirical criticism of their policies.
Rite Aid drugs works closely with the tobacco companies and lobbies
against measures to reduce smoking.
So when the American Heart
Association cooperate with Rite Aid, is that honest?
To me, it is an instance of the systematic corruption of
civic institutions in the US by corporate money.
Serbs were not the only ones to commit acts of brutality in
Kosovo. After the Albanian Kosovars won,
they more or less chased out the Serbs.
The former leader of the
KLA is now accused of ethnic cleansing.
(I think that it was less bad to have the Serb minority chased out
than to have them oppressing the Albanian majority. So the de-facto
independence of Kosovo was a good thing. But this does not justify
mistreating unarmed Serbs.)
We all know how Wal-Mart mistreats its own workers, but that's just
the tip of the iceberg of the harm it does. Through its size, it
almost
compels producers to run sweatshops,
making Wal-Mart a substantial producer
of poverty world-wide.
As captive women raped and used as prostitutes by Japanese troops
increasingly speak out to condemn what was done to them,
the Prime
Minister of Japan is lying to deny it.
China's report on human rights in the US.
The first section, about levels of violent crime not committed by the
government, seems like a side issue to me; go past that to see the
real meat of the report.
Isn't it a shame that the US has sunk so low that it is no longer
in a position to criticize China?
Indians like Harriett Nahanee aren't the only people
trying to stop
British Columbia from building a new highway and destroying rare
ecosystems.
Police in Tacoma violently attacked a nonviolent protest against the embarcation of army combat vehicles to join the Bush forces in occupation of Iraq. The protestors are undeterred.
Police in the US must decide whether to serve the people or the traitor in the White House.
Please do not look at the videos on Youtube, because you would have to install a non-free program (the Flash player) to do that, and installing non-free software is not ethical. I am unhappy with the fact that some of my speeches have been posted on Youtube, where they act as inducement for people to do exactly the thing I believe they should not do.
I hope to write to the people who run the indybay site and ask them to post videos on their own site rather than on youtube.
Bush's "Iraqi government" has arrested the woman who accused three "Iraqi
policemen" of rape.
This reflects the junction of the civil war with the Islamic attitude towards
women: that they are men's property. It is the same attitude that shows itself
when women are murdered by male relatives who believe the woman has damaged
her value to them by choosing her own lover.
The latest UN treaty, the International Convention for the Protection
of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, commits governments not to
keep prisoners secretly or in secret prisons. Of course, such bastions
of liberty as
the US and the UK did not sign it.
The FBI has often misused the warrantless surveillance powers that
were given to it by the U SAP AT RIOT Act, says a DOJ investigator who
reviewed FBI practices. That law gives the police power that cannot
be allowed in a democracy, but even that wasn't enough to satisfy them.
The Bush regime tried to avoid having such reviews,
so that we would not find out about this.
Iraq's ancient minority groups are being
systematically driven into exile.
Israel planned last summer's invasion of Lebanon in advance, and
planned to use the capture of some Israeli soldiers (whenever that should
happen) as an excuse. Avnery draws an interesting conclusion: that these
events refute the theory that Israel controls US foreign policy. However,
lobbyists are pretty effective at stopping US politicians from criticizing
the occupation.
Many US citizens are being denied Medicaid payments due to a new
requirement to prove one's citizenship.
The Taliban claims the kidnapped Italian reporter was spying for
Britain.
I wonder if they tortured him to get this confession.
Bush is touring Latin America --
mostly countries whose
goverments are subservient -- hoping that promises to "pay more attention"
to the region will win support.
Note the deception embodied in presenting the issue as one of how
much attention the US pays or will pay to Latin America: it
assumes that such attention is beneficial, which is contrary to the
facts.
But the
people of these countries are not fooled.
Another Russian journalist has been murdered (though it's
supposed to
be suicide, if you believe that).
Global warming is causing many animals in the UK to be born weeks
too early, which can endanger them.
And this is just the beginning of what will happen.
Human production of CO2 is not just heating up the atmosphere. It
also makes the ocean more acidic, and this has unpredictable effects
on life and chemistry in the ocean.
Bush's "temporary surge" is turning into a permanent increase.
Who would ever expect Bush to tell the truth?
Turkey's liberal intellectuals have been silenced by a nationalist
campaign of prosecution and murder.
The city of Copenhagen evicted and tore down a youth center
which was originally a squat, but later was authorized.
The city cannot justify this on the fact that the building had been
sold to a church, because selling it and providing no replacement was
the initial wrong, and it was the city's fault.
American life directs most Americans into permanent debt that they
will find it hard ever to escape from.
As part of Bush's plan to reduce US attorneys to slavish obedience,
he appointed a man who helped Bush steal the 2004 election, using a
scheme to systematically disenfranchize Black voters who are homeless,
away at school, or in the armed forces.
Greg Palast argues that this scheme was a felony: this man should be a
defendant, not a prosecutor.
Amnesty International denounces the UK for deporting people to
deporting people to countries where they are likely to be tortured.
B'liar justifies this on the strength of formal assurances from those
governments that they won't torture these people -- but those
governments are well aware that B'liar would rather help them cover up
such torture than take them to task for it.
Scooter Libby, Cheney's former aide, has been convicted on several
charges, taking the fall to protect Cheney from something (and conceal
from us what that something is). People suspect that Bush will
eventually pardon him.
The US needs a constitutional amendment to prevent presidents from
pardoning people that commit crimes on their behalf.
US forces tried to bomb Taliban fighters in a village, and killed
a family instead.
Yes, it was dirty of the Taliban to retreat into a village, but the US
forces have to learn that, unfair as it may seem to them, they must
not bomb the village when that happens.
Hamas removed a book of Palestinian folk tales from Palestinian schools
because it talks about sex. Other Palestinians have protested this.
The success of Hamas is due to its refusal to accept the occupation.
The harm done by Hamas' imposition of strict religious standards is
therefore indirectly due to the occupation. (Hamas was originally
built up by Israel in order to weaken the PLO.)
The
UK Royal Society for the Arts condemned drug prohibition
as "driven by moral panic", based on a prejudice against drugs
other than tobacco and alcohol which often are safer than them.
The Bush regime has a
pervasive policy about journalists talking with
soldiers: positive stories only!
10 ways that US-style sprawl development is harmful.
I could add that low-density living makes it hard
for buses and trains to work well, condemning people
to dependence on cars, which means more energy use,
more likelihood of wars over oil, etc.
Some environmental-minded investors
bought out a company that
was planning to build 11 new coal-fired power plants,
and killed 8 of them.
Only 4% of those arrested under the UK's "anti-terror laws" has been
charged with anything.
Clearly the laws are being used for fishing
expeditions (as well as to suppress protests).
Bush would have pushed that percentage up higher, by framing the
people arrested by mistake, or kidnaping them and not reporting it.
A
major international campaign is starting to study the
melting of ice in the Arctic and Antartic.
Several
men arrested filming the attacks on the World Trade Center
appeared to be Israeli spies. It looks like they were part of a
network that was monitoring the hijackers, and that maybe they knew
about the attack in advance.
Bush had them released and shut down the investigation into what they
were doing.
While Germany issues arrest warrants for the CIA kidnapers of
Khaled El-Masri, a US appeals court rejected his lawsuit on the grounds
that
the relevant evidence is a state secret.
The court explicitly said that the regime can protect any sort of
injustice, no matter how egregious, and need not even explain why. It
adds up to carte blanche for kidnaping and torture, even murder.
A reporter for Al Jazeera, who has been
held prisoner in Guantanamo
for 5 years without charges, is being force-fed through the nose
after two months on hunger strike.
He says that the Bush regime's agents tortured him when he refused to
incriminate Al Jazeera, and that they threatened to harm his children.
Standard tactics for tyrants.
The NIH makes reports on chemicals likely to damage human reproductive
systems, but outsources this to a
consulting company that mostly works
for other businesses. Its other employers may be influencing the
reports.
There is a
systematic pattern that studies of drug effects
are less likely to show any problems when the studies are funded
by drug companies.
Is this because the funding corrupts the investigators, or is it
because the drug companies study "safer bets"?
One approach that might make it unnecessary to answer this question
is to put a tax on the sale of patented drugs, and use that money
to fund studies of drugs that drug companies want to produce.
An
African army is arriving in Somalia, but it doesn't
seem to be able to prevent the violence there.
The leader of neighboring Djibuti says that
things are no safer in the
region after the defeat of the Islamic Courts government.
A mysterious disease is killing honeybees in the US. It has already
killed most of them. This can be a disaster for agriculture.
Iraq's ancient minority groups are being
systematically driven into exile.
Augustin Aguayo, who was sent to the Bush forces as a medic, was
forced into combat duty despite being a conscientious objector. So he
refused to go to Iraq again. Now he faces 7 years imprisonment.
(He was convicted, I read later.)
I do not agree with Aguayo's belief that war is never
justified. For instance, because the occupation of Iraq is a crime,
fighting against it is justified.
However, the treatment of Mr. Aguayo is a different issue. US laws
recognize that people with his views have a right to conscientious
objection, and he ought to be allowed that status.
What we are seeing is yet another instance of the Bush regime's
pattern of denying people their legal rights.
Harriett Nahanee, an Indian in Canada who protested against plans to
sell off tribal land for a highway, received a two-week prison
sentence. As
she was old and sick, this was a death sentence.
This article does not say what Harriett was accused of, nor whether
she actually did it, nor give us a basis for judging whether it was
right or wrong if she did do it. However, sentencing a sick person to
prison without what's needed for that person's health cannot be
justified by any possible crime.
Killing people this way is done in the US too.
France has passed a law making it a crime for anyone but a
professional journalist to photograph an act of violence. This means
that police who want to attack someone on the street, perhaps a
protestor, are protected from video recordings. If someone does
catch them in the act, that someone probably won't dare testify.
And anyone making a video of a protest, when the police start
attacking the protestors, will also be in danger of imprisonment.
France needs a hero who will defy this law -- and then dare
the French government to prosecute him, because by doing so
it would prove how evil it is.
Bush is starting diplomatic contacts with Iran over what to do in
Iraq.
Maybe it is a step forward.
Measuring
how the Iraq occupation has stimulated Islamist violence
around the world.
Substituting ethanol for gasoline is
creating grave environmental
destruction in Brazil, where environmental laws are not enforced. And
it is driving up the price of food. People could starve to fill your
car's ethanol tank.
US troops in Afghanistan panicked after an attack, and fired at cars
and pedestrians just passing by. This has led to big protests.
Such events happen in every war, and especially when a foreign army is
involved. The local people will tolerate it if they feel that army is
fighting for their cause and doing its best. Otherwise they will tend
to turn more and more against the foreign army. It is a dynamic that
is almost inevitable.
When Afghan journalists took pictures of the civilian cars that US
troops had destroyed, the
soldiers destroyed the pictures. Then Bush
spokesmen denied that this had been happening, trying to destroy the
news of the destruction.
This follows the general Bush policy towards unfavorable press: block
it.
Israel has blocked Palestinians from fishing in from boats
for most of a year. This exacerbates food shortages in Gaza.
The excuse of blocking communication with Egypt is absurd,
since it would be just as easy to patrol further off shore instead.
Harassment of civilians, with an excuse that covers it when you don't
look very hard, is standard practice in the Israeli occupation of
Palestine.
Prominent British Jews who oppose Israel's treatment of the
Palestinians have
formed a new organization, Independent Jewish
Voices.
This breaks the apparent monopoly of an old organization that supports
Israel 100% and claims to represent all British Jews.
As the Army Secretary resigns, the Bush regime has decided to go to the
root of the veterans care scandal:
the ability of wounded soldiers to
talk to the press.
Student protestors in Iran were
punished by being expelled and drafted
into the army.
Faced with an outcry against road taxes based on surveillance,
the UK now proposes: "we won't track which street you are on,
only which part of which city you drive to."
That is still too much surveillance.
US citizens: write or phone your congresscritter to support
the bill, H. R. 1184, to repeal the law that kicks students
out of college for one marijuana cigarette.
The US canceled a deal for North Korean nuclear disarmament in 2002
based on an incorrect US assessment of North Korea's nuclear weapons
program.
Everyone makes mistakes, but given Bush's propensity to pressure the
CIA to tell him what he wants to hear, I have to wonder whether this
was something worse than a mistake.
Israeli troops invading Nablus arrested and brutalized lots of young
men --
without bothering to check who they were.
The raid also seized a tiny quantity of weapons.
Israeli Idan Landau
comments: "We also target civilians".
US citizens:
sign the petition to Democratic Party of Nevada saying "Don't
deal with Faux News."
In the UK: renew your passport, or get a passport, before April,
so as to avoid participating in the national ID scheme.
16 million Americans now live in severe poverty, and the number is
growing rapidly.
These statistics say that extreme poverty increased by 1/5
from 2000 to 2005.
Elephant poaching in Africa, formerly under control, has rebounded to
the point where it threatens the survival of some elephant
populations.
Bush plans to make new nuclear warheads, although labeled as
"modernization", could encourage other countries to work on them too.
Australian Prime Minister Howard "welcomes" Bush's plan to subject an
Australian citizen to an unjust military tribunal.
Which shows how important Australian citizens are in his mind,
compared with the US.
A UN ship delivering aid to Somalia has been captured by pirates.
For once, here is an action against piracy which deserves support.
A proposed law in Nigeria would make it a
crime to advocate gay rights.
US war resistor Kyle Snyder was
arrested by Canadian police, who said
they were obeying the US Army. He was freed after appeals to the
Canadian government, which had to recognize that the US Army does not
have authority there.
Virginia becomes first US state to apologize for slavery.
For Women's Day,
Iraq will execute some women prisoners
who are accused of connection with the resistance.
They were not allowed to have lawyers in their "trials".
Human Rights Watch has identified 38 prisoners that were held in
secret CIA prisons, and are now missing. In effect,
the US government
has disappeared them.
Disregarding arguments that Lt Watada cannot be prosecuted again on
the principle of double jeopardy, the Army intends to try. Meanwhile,
other soldiers are imprisoned for refusing to fight for Bush, and
8,000 other soldiers have run away to avoid the evil of fighting in
Iraq.
These are the troops that deserve our support.
The Colombian foreign minister has
resigned due to ties with
paramilitaries.
A Sudanese minister has been
named by the ICC as a suspect for
massacres in Darfur.
The US message to Sudan is undermined by the US's own example,
since the US has pressured many countries to agree to exempt
US personnel from the ICC.
The planned British pull-out from Iraq may be a deception,
since it
depends on conditions that quite likely will not be met.
An Egyptian blogger has been
sentenced to four years in prison for
insulting Islam and President Mubarak.
No person, no idea, and no religion deserves to be illegal to insult,
not even the Church of Emacs -- and certainly not Islam.
Return to Richard Stallman's home page.
Please send comments on these web pages to rms@gnu.org.
Copyright (C) 2007 Richard Stallman
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.