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Each political note has its own anchor in case you want to link to it.
Comcast paid people to fill up the waiting line for an FCC hearing on network neutrality, thus blocking its critics from attending.
Russia's government closed a prestigious university after it gave advice to all the political parties about ensuring an honest election. (The government had already pressured the university to drop the project.)
A former U.K. soldier accuses the U.K. army of handing over prisoners for torture.
U.S. citizens: phone your congresscritter and say, "Don't give the telephone companies immunity for illegal spying."
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Also, sign this petition.
Joseph Stiglitz estimates that the attempt to conquer Iraq has cost the U.S. at least 3 trillion dollars, including killed and wounded Americans fighting in the Bush forces.
You can be sure that rich people will try to escape from this cost by pushing it onto poor and working Americans. In fact, that could be what's happening already.
Ethically speaking, we cannot judge the morality of a war of conquest in terms of cost and benefits for the conquerors. It's simply wrong.
Resistance activity is increasing in Iraq, and Bush's "surge" has turned into a permanent troop increase. Meanwhile, the situation in Afghanistan is deteriorating, and Bush's army is overstretched, and the subordinate countries don't want to send more troops.
I supported the war in Afghanistan well before 9/11, because of the cruelty of the Taliban regime. But now that the U.S.-supported Afghan government sentences people to death for blasphemy, I withdraw my support. Why fight for one set of religious crazies against another.
The Bush regime put a loophole for Iraq contractors into new anti-corruption regulations.
Alan Greenspan, formerly head of the Federal Reserve, recognizes that the invasion of Iraq was a grab for oil.
Human Rights Watch has asked the king of Saudi Arabia to pardon a woman convicted of witchcraft. She says she was tortured into signing a confession, as Bush does with terrorist suspects.
Musharraf's opposition parties now control Pakistan's parliament and may perhaps have enough strength to impeach him. But Bush is trying to pressure them to keep Musharraf's part in the coalition.
At least is shows Musharraf allowed a more or less honest election.
The U.S. Army shut down access to many nonsecret manuals that were formerly avaiable to the public.
The Iraqi resistance continues to protect other countries from invasion by the U.S. by draining its military power.
Here's another person who the TSA deceptively harrased about his shoes. The article also explains how ineffective the TSA is at catching real weapons.
The U.S. sentenced Japanese soldiers to death for waterboarding Americans.
Here's the longer article that it refers to.
A Canadian global-warming-denial group filtered money through a university to make ads that appear to have been intended to affect the last election in Canada.
U.S. soldiers crushing the Philippine independence movement in 1900 used "waterboarding" torture.
Bottled water in the U.S. is not well regulated. It is not only wasteful, it can be unsafe. It may show a picture of a mountain on the bottle, but that doesn't mean it comes from one.
If you want to drink clean water, use a filter, and refill a bottle with water that you filtered.
The "Iraqi" government is arresting beggers and the mentally ill.
TSA agents stole a baby's food. "You need a doctor's note," they said. The parents are both doctors, the TSA refused to accept their note or to let them contact another doctor.
Once the TSA has found an excuse to take something away from you, their policy is to be as cruel as possible.
Tobacco company money paid for a university study of how smoking affects children's brains. Will that be used to discourage children from smoking, or will it help the tobacco companies encourage it?
A US movie star tried to denounce the Bush conquest of Iraq, but the US media did not report it.
The Bush occupation policies in Iraq are planting the seeds of new conflicts.
I think any occupation will create some kind of conflicts, because people don't like foreign occupying armies and only nasty measures can stop their resistance.
Waste Management has literally greenwashed its garbage trucks to cover up its reputation as "the nation's largest polluter".
How the Bush regime disguised its coup against Aristide.
Library of Congress sells itself out to Microsoft for a mere $3 million.
Similar attitudes appear in the attempts of the Boston Public Library to justify its distribution of DRM-covered audio books. They are the attitudes of those who have sold out.
Jordan is trying to force Iraqi refugees back to Iraq.
(This was probably arranged by the Bush regime which wants to pretend they are returning because "Iraq is safe".)
The National Consumer council thinks that some proprietary software EULAs are unfair.
Of course they're unfair — it's proprietary software!
The American Psychological Association has been split after it refused to condemn psychologists for helping the U.S. government design torture techniques.
This is interesting to compare with reports that the famous experiments that tested subjects' willingness to inflict pain were funded by the CIA.
The contempt that adults show towards homeless people leads children to imitate it. Children as young as 10 have murdered homeless people.
Governments are trying to use voice analysis to see if citizens are lying.
I wonder if we can test politicans and police this way.
Both the police and army practice torture in Bangladesh.
A court shut down the wikileaks.org domain without giving it time to send a lawyer to the hearing. The site has fled into exile as wikileaks.be.
In Iraq, under the U.N. sanctions regime, 19% of children were malnourished. Under the Bush occupation, Oxfam says, 28% are malnourished.
The latest Israeli "liquidations" killed at least 9 people and wounded at least 50. Most were civilians, and many were children.
The "liquid explosive" danger is fantasy. Whe the TSA confiscates liquids, this is a gratuitous abuse.
Israeli peace activists have received permission to send their aid convoy to Gaza.
Some Finnish ISPs censor foreign "child" pornography on a government-maintained list. Recently a Finnish site which discusses the issue was added to the list, and thus censored too.
If the term "child pornography" were applied to images of prepuberal humans, it would at least be honest. But it is common to pervert the term by applying it to images of sexually mature humans, sometimes as much as 17 years old.
When baby Michael Futi arrived in Honolulu for medical treatment, he and his mother and his nurse were locked up by the Department of Homeland Security. By the time they let him out, he was dying.
There was a supposed reason to lock them up — a problem with his mother's visa. It turns out this problem was not real: the government agents made a mistake. But what if the problem had been real? (That can happen.) Even if the mother had had no visa — or if the baby had had no visa — that would be no excuse for killing either one.
This particular incident did not have to happen; its details are the work of random chance. But the general phenomenon of which this is one instance is sure to recur. The attitude of these government agencies is that the rules they write are more important than human beings. That attitude is inhumane, and we must expect it to kill people, over and over.
The same attitude radiates from airport security. If you feel there is something vicious and inhuman about the TSA, that is what you are perceiving. TSA agents would watch you die rather than make an exception to their rules.
Microsoft is facing an EU investigation for its heavy-handed attempts to buy votes in ISO in favor of OOXML.
Uri Avnery: When Israeli politicians don't have a way to deal with a problem, they "liquidate" a Palestinian and then celebrate. This often leads to bloody revenge, but the Israeli public only rarely sees the connection.
A nasty thought occurs to me. Perhaps some of these politicians do envision the bloody blowback from the liquidations, and calculate they can use it to stay in power.
Is the "Iraqi" government cooking the employment statistics?
Many parts of the world, including the U.S., are running out of fresh water and face permanent drying up. Meanwhile, governments give control of water policy to businesses whose plans can make it worse.
B'liar killed an investigation into bribery in arms sales to Saudi Arabia after that country threatened to stop warning about Saudis that might perhaps go to the UK to set off bombs.
In effect, the Saudi state made a terrorist threat. Should the UK keep selling arms at all to such a country?
How the Democratic Party surrendered to Bush on Iraq and co-opted the anti-war movement.
The mainstream news media pay much less attention to Iraq now than they did a year ago. I wonder why.
Russia and China proposed a treaty for demilitarizing space.
It speaks ill of the U.S. that it is not the leader in this effort.
Steven Spielberg has resigned from working for the Beijing Olympics as a protest against the Chinese government's support for the Sudanese governemnt.
The Chinese government also mistreats lots of Chinese people in China, and too ought to be corrected.
Meanwhile, it is interesting to note that the estimated number of people killed in Darfur is 1/5 that of Iraq, and the estimated number of refugees is half that of Iraq.
Utah proposes to keep police misconduct records secret so that the public will believe what the police say in court.
I think the public needs to be less trusting of what police say in court. Police in New York used to speak of "testilying" because lying in court was habitual with them.
Beating up and abusing adults is normal for cops. This one was caught doing it to a 14 year-old boy.
Other cops brutalized a man in a wheelchair who can't walk because he did not stand up when ordered to do so.
While these incidents highlight the cruelty of police, let us not forget that violence towards a helpless prisoner is unacceptable even if the prisoner is a healthy adult.
Please don't use non-free programs to watch the videos referred to by those articles. For instance, if you view Flash videos, please use the free/libre program Gnash, not the proprietary secret Adobe flash player.
US citizens: phone the leaders of the House of Representatives and say, stand firm against retroactive immunity.
You can also say this electronically through the following page:
http://act.credomobile.com/campaign/fisa_house/.
But a phone call carries more weight. The Capitol Switchboard numbers are
202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Israeli settlers (or should we call them colonists?) are digging tunnels under Palestinian houses to destroy them.
Israeli troops took large sums of money from money-changers in Palestine.
That sort of thing can destroy the economy.
The authors of The Israel Lobby answer questions, refute criticism, and detail how their speeches have been canceled by pressure against speaking venues.
U.S. women reporting rapes in Iraq remain in limbo.
It is not particularly scandalous that mercenaries in Iraq commit rape, since that happens everywhere. What is a special scandal is that Bush has given them immunity for any and all crimes, including rape of American women, and murder of Iraqis.
The U.S. Senate voted to give telephone companies immunity for illegal spying on Americans.
What cowards we depend on to defend our freedom, who can't stand up to the threat of a veto.
Injustice Scalia reaches for strained fallacies to excuse torture.
What is the boundary of torture? Torture is anything that hurts so much that the subject is unable to carry out an intention not to confess. Such treatment makes the suspect confess — whether guilty or not. It is good for extracting confessions if you don't care whether they are true. It is not good for justice.
I presume that, for most suspects, a single slap in the face won't have that effect. Thus it isn't torture, merely churlish cruelty.
For that very reason, cops that have decided to force a suspect to confess are unlikely to stop with a slap in the face. They will keep increasing the pain until they achieve the effect of torture: forcing a confession. Which means they will have committed torture.
US citizens: call your senators and say "Don't let Richard Honaker become a Federal judge". Honaker wants to ban abortion entirely.
You can also say this by email but phone calls count more.
The UK government is considering harsh new laws against file sharing,taking the side of megapublishers against its citizens.
Since ISPs have complained, it makes sense for citizens to try working with them to oppose the measures. But don't depend on them for organizing, since the government will look for a way to satisfy them while still shafting you.
Malls in the UK use a device that emits high-pitched soundthat is painful for people under 25, including babies.
Mr Lowman's response is absurd, considering how far the UK goes to control and punish activities that merely cause distaste in others.
Saudi Arabia's nasty theocracy extends to place a ban on Valentine's Day.
The Bush regime proposes to hand over the prisoners in Guantanamo to other countries, if only those countries will promise to imprison them without trial. Thus it goes about sapping respect for human rights around the world.
The Bush regime plans to try 6 of these prisoners in kangaroo courts ("military tribunals").
The defendants will have their day in the kangaroo court, where the "jury" is composed of soldiers that depend on Bush and his generals for promotion. This is the cause of the biggest injustice in the military "justice" system: command influence over the verdict.
The "Iraqi" government is in the grip of disputes over who gets to sell Iraq's oil.
Some of the Guantanamo prisoners that face fake trials were tortured into confession.
John McCain supported the conquest of Iraq since the beginning and still does.
The UK will protect police from accusations of racism by not keeping records of who they search on the street (or why).
And if they shoot someone, they will be able to prevent a public investigation of his death.
In a concession to business over survival, the UK's new coal-fired power plant will not have carbon-capture equipment to reduce emissions.
The British Olympic Committee is making athletes sign contracts promising no political demonstrations.
In effect, the BOC has become an enforcer for Chinese censorship, like Yahoo. For shame!
Uri Avnery says that the Israeli occupation of Palestine is futile.
I'm not so optimistic, however. While the occupation of a resisting people may be impossible to win, taking their land and kicking them off is a lot more promising.
Is the US Navy cutting undersea cables in the Middle East?
Canadians: Take action now against plans to impose US-style oppressive copyright laws in Canada. Your government wants to sell you out to Hollywood!
Israel is driving Arabs from their homes in Jerusalem by digging tunnels that undermine the buildings.
It appears the Bush regime is offering business executives special privileges in the event of martial law, including the privilege of shooting people.
It makes sense for the FBI to establish contacts with the people that run critical infrastructure facilities, and the private security guards that guard them. But why include business executives?
If attacking infrastructure endangers people's lives, shooting someone trying to make such an attack would be justified on general principles — so why is there any need for a special exception for certain people?
After Gujarat riots, 90 Muslim suspects have been stuck in legal limbo for years. Meanwhile, little has been done to punish those5D who killed thousands of Muslims in Gujarat, because the state government is on their side.
US agents are confiscating laptops at airports.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Asian Law Caucus have sued the DHS for this.
There is a disturbing similarity between "Department of Homeland Security" and "Committee for Public Safety". The latter was headed by Robespierre and its activity was called "terror".
Amazon is trying to abolish the French law that protects independent bookstores. Please sign this petition to uphold that law.
Some 9/11 victims' relatives renew their demand for a thorough and honest investigation of what happened on 9/11. They criticized the honesty of the process in 2004, and some of their accusations have been confirmed.
US government scientists gagged by the Bush regime have leaked emails which give the lie to Bush regime claims about drilling for oil in the Chukchi Sea.
The number of Iraqis who have fled the country is increasing again.
Dalit students are persecuted in many Indian schools.
The president of Canada's Nuclear Safety Commission was fired after shutting down a reactor as unsafe.
People who talk about threats to public health in France face lawsuits for defamation.
Under the regime Bush imposed on Haiti, the poor eat dirt to fill their stomachs, while the corrupt rich control everything with UN and US support.
Verizon says it will not try to control its customers' internet traffic.
If you use AT&T, print this article, write on it "Don't you dare try to filter me!", and snail it to the President of AT&T.
Babar Ahmad, a UK citizen, faces the threat of extradition to the US for running a web site in the UK.
The UK should defend its citizens against attemps by other countries to legislate what people may do in the UK.
Bush has all but admitted that the conquest of Iraq was for oil, with a "signing statement" that he will not obey a law's requirement not to spend funds to control Iraq's oil.
The Southwest is heading for disaster as warming, drought, fire and infestation all increase each other.
On some Finnish roads, people must identify themselves just to use public toilets. And the toilets are off limits to people like me who do not have cell phones.
If I couldn't open the toilet, I would piss on the outside wall.
The Great Firewall of China is facing increasing opposition and resistance.
The clumsiness of China's censorship helps inspire opposition, so that it may eventually be defeated. The engineering of consent by the biased US corporate media is harder to overcome, because it is often invisible and fools us.
Historical note: the Great Wall of China was not a fraud or a waste. Of course it had to be manned by soldiers. It was useful because it helped those soldiers to resist the barbarians, who were great mounted archers but had no cannon. The barbarians could climb over the wall, but they could not easily get their horses across it.
Iraqis accuse the police chief of Baquba of working with militias that kill and kidnap.
The Bush regime wants to hold a fake trial for a prisoner who was 15 years old when he allegedly fought in Afghanistan.
If the accusations against Khadr are true, they mean he was fighting for the Taliban. That would justify holding him as a POW, but it would not justify putting him on trial — nor, of course, torturing him.
After a train explosion, the Russian government tried to scapegoat anarchists. But the protests were bigger they expected.
A US prosecutor admitted deleting 2000 emails that he had been ordered to turn over to a court.
New Zealand imprisons asylum seekers without charge, sometimes for years. One went on hunger strike for weeks to obtain release on bail.
Israel has resumed its strangulation of Gaza.
90 sick people have died in Gaza because Israel would not let them travel for medical care.
Meanwhile, Israelis plan to demolish Palestinian homes in Jerusalem and build new houses in their place.
A study provides strong evidence that Louisiana judges can be bought with campaign contributions.
This is no real surprise, but the study will make it harder for judges to deny this.
The stress caused by participating in Bush's occupation of Iraq has driven the suicide rate of US soldiers to a record.
We should be careful, as we think of the suffering of these soldiers, not to ignore the much greater suffering of Iraqis, of whom probably over a million have been killed and several million driven from their homes. Iraqis are as human as Americans, and Bush must be blamed for the suffering of both.
A student in Afghanistan faces the death penalty for circulating an article from the net which criticized the views of Muslim fundamentalists. This reminds us that "Islamic law" is another name for barbarous cruelty.
As the Afghan government sinks into evil reminiscent of the Taliban, we must reevaluate whether it is worth supporting.
Nearly all Islamic countries show broad contempt for religious freedom. In most of them, Muslims are forbidden to convert. Semi-democratic Malaysia is better than most: instead of executing such people, it just orders them to remain Muslims.
Once Again, Drug Companies Caught Data Doping.
Oil companies fund university research on climate change, and get the ability to block publication of the results.
Something suspicious happened before and after the "accidental" flight of several nuclear weapons on air force planes that August: multi-level security systems that should have prevented such an occurrence either had multiple simultaneous failures or else were intentionally tricked. Which was it?
When celebrities die due to smoking, the press downplays the role of smoking.
The "Iraqi government", obeying the World Bank (which mostly obeys the US), has decided to end food rations that keep millions of Iraqis alive.
There are ways to control corruption without canceling aid programs. (See the book Controlling Corruption, by Klitgaard.) However, they may be difficult when a government does not have effective control of its activities.
Iraqi oil revenue cannot be spend on reconstructing Iraq because the government is mostly nonfunctional.
I am disappointed that oil exports are increasing, because that represents a victory for the Bush forces. Bush will steal this money one way or another.
In the US: pledge to drink tap water rather than bottled water.
If you do drink bottled water, don't buy it from Coca Cola Company.
The CIA uses the U SAP AT RIOT act to spy on Americans.
Life in the US is getting steadily worse for most Americans due to right-wing government policies.
Clown's government has a sneaky plan to start making ID cards mandatory.
Copyright: distinguishing between cultural use and commercial use.
This is a step in the right direction, but we need to go further. We must legalize noncommercial sharing of exact copies over the Internet, whether using specialized P2P software or not. Only thus can we make copyright cease to be tyranny.
Thousands of Israelis tried to bring humanitarian relief supplies to Gaza, but the Israeli army blocked the convoy.
Opening the border with Egypt relieves some of the pressure on Gaza, but does not solve the problem.
The people of Gaza can now spend money on goods from Egypt, but in order to keep doing that, they need to export. That requires investment, which requires reliable ability to export the results.
It is a hopeful sign that Egypt and the EU may reopen the Rafah border crossing.
Sweatshop workers are suing Wal-Mart, which sells the products they make.
Courts are starting to rule that defendants have a right to examine the source code of breath testing machines.
This does not, unfortunately, mean that software becomes free. It is delivered under an unethical nondisclosure agreement.
Iraqis say Bush's claims to be making things better in Iraq are just as false as ever.
Around 1.2 million Iraqi deaths are on Bush's hands, according to the latest estimates based on scientific methods.
That estimate is uncertain; it is based on various kinds of extrapolation. But there is no better way to estimate these deaths. The best way would be to count the deaths, but the Bush regime says it does not keep track of Iraqi civilians killed.
US citizens: call your senators AGAIN to say you're against giving immunity to the telephone companies that spied on us.
Congressman Kucinich, the only candidate for president that I would wish to see as president, has dropped out of the race.
His campaign was opposed by the media at two levels: first, by omitting him from coverage and debates, and second, by focusing on "electability", which comes down to a self-fulfilling prophesy that only a Democrat who might as well be a Republican can win.
The blockade of Gaza: a crime, and a collosal blunder.
New York police don't want to let citizens have unregulated gieger counters or anything with which to monitor air quality.
The British Army has not punished its soldiers for murdering prisoners when they served in the Bush forces, but it does seem to recognize a responsibility to make sure such things do not happen in the future.
Giuliani, as mayor of New York, made practice of punishing anyone that got in his way, and didn't hesitate to do it with lies.
The Black Mustang Club can print its calendar.
Burma's dictators have imprisoned a poet who snuck a message of criticism into a love poem.
Il Ducino may return to power in Italy.
Contraceptive pills protect women from cancer, even 30 years later.
Will a treaty with Iraq give the US the power to set up a prison like Guantanamo in Iraq decades from now?
As newspapers turn into blog sites, they provide an opening for paid PR personnel to gain the legitimacy of newspaper coverage.
Perhaps this problem could be solved with a standard of conflict of interest disclosure, if it can be enforced with sufficient strength.
The Bush forces took a routine minor incident and spun it as a naval confrontation with Iran. Reportedly top Pentagon officials made the decision to twist the truth.
Israelis plan to protest the blockade of Gaza by sending humanitarian supplies in defiance of the government. The supplies will include water filters, because most water in Gaza is dangerously polluted and Israel will not allow filters to be brought in.
Tobacco companies' "social responsibility" programs are cigarette ads in disguise.
Mercenaries continue to shoot Iraqi civilians with impunity, making orphans.
Drug companies support lots of studies about the effects of drugs. In the case of antidepressants, at least, they only publish the favorable ones.
Palestinians poured across the border into Egypt to bring back necessary goods that Israel has excluded for months.
I am not impressed by Israeli protestations that some might bring in weapons. They could only bring in small arms this way. There are plenty of small arms in Gaza already, and a few more won't change anything. Besides, we're told that Palestinians already bring in arms through tunnels under the border.
However, there's an easy way to exclude arms from surface traffic. Just open the regular border crossing between Egypt and Gaza for people and goods to cross in the usual way.
The Senate seems to be leaning towards retroactive immunity for telephone companies that spied on us.
In the first 11 months of 2007, there were 128 murders in Israel. In all of 2007, 3 Israeli civilians were killed by Palestinian fighters. Those 3 are the excuse for the repression of the occupation of Palestine. Isn't it absurd?
How Republicans and Democrats have imposed right-wing policies on the US since 1980, hurting the citizens in many ways.
So many countries have recognized the evil of the IMF, and stopped borrowing from it, that the IMF is in financial trouble. (Its income came from interest payments from poor countries.) Now the Bank of the South, founded by several Latin American countries, offers a fresh challenge to the IMF and other right-wing lenders.
Selling out Grandma: as big chains take over nursing homes, they increase profits by cutting the care.
The occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan is producing a new generation of homeless veterans.
In Iraq, the awareness that just about everyone hates them, and wants them either out or dead, must exacerbate the problem. The war crimes, systematically encouraged by the officers, must also contribute. They undermine the soldier's ability to convince himself that what he is doing is justified.
Beware the term "economic freedom" — it is a codeword for "put business above people".
Senator Clinton repeated Bush's false claim that Saddam Hussein cooperated with al Qa'ida.
She will surely claim that she trusted Bush to be accurate. But only a fool would have trusted Bush, and a fool should not be president.
US citizens: call your senators AGAIN to say you're against giving immunity to the telephone companies that spied on us.
Bush and his top officials made over 900 false statements about Iraq in order to bring about the crime of invading of Iraq. This data base contrasts those statements with the facts that they knew.
In Gaza, even bread is now not easy to get. And the UN can't get fuel for the vehicles that distribute food aid.
Some of Gaza's sewage treatment plants had to be shut down, releasing raw sewage into the Mediterranean.
The people of Gaza took matters into their own hands by blowing holes in the wall between Gaza and Egypt. Then they went into Egypt to buy food and take it back to Gaza. The Egyptian government first tried to block them, but then changed its policy and to let Palestinians through.
The US vetoed security council humanitarian action on behalf of Gaza, citing its concern for the rocket attacks on Sderot which killed 2 people in 2007.
How Kibaki stole the Kenyan election.
The continuing low-level conflict in the Congo causes 45,000 people each month to die of treatable diseases.
The only opposition candidate in Russia faces criminal charges of falsifying signatures in his nomination petition. The investigators are practicing intimidation tactics.
Apparently Putin is not satisfied with rigging the election — he seems to wish to declare openly that Russian elections are a sham.
The Canadian government removed the US and Israel from its list of examples of torture. Although both countries practice torture, Canada does not want to admit it.
Sarkozy panders to fishermen who want to sweep the seas clean of fish. Read more here.
Bush censored an international scientific report so that it won't interfere with plans to drill for oil in the Chukchi sea. Since this drilling could wipe out one of the few intact polar bear habitats, Bush wants to get the drilling started quickly, before polar bears are declared an endangered species. That way he can assure their demise despite all efforts to protect them.
How the US government caused a financial crisis by being too subservient to business.
The investigation of the firings of US attorneys is getting hotter.
Greg Palast says these firings were part of the Republicans' plan to rig the 2008 election.
Resistance attacks are increasing in the south of Iraq, a Shi'ite area.
A scientific study finds that using a mobile phone an hour before going to sleep interferes with sleep.
Iraq Veterans Against War say that officers in the Bush forces encourage war crimes against civilians.
A European Parliament committee rejected three proposals to oppress the public in the name of copyright, in response to public pressure.
The EU Parliament has adopted several such directives in the past. I think this is the first time they have said no.
Because of a harmless photography project, Ramak Fazel faces a life of harrassment.
In Australia: write to the Attorney-General to extend your freedoms under copyright law.
UK citizens: tell your MP you demand a referendum on the EU constitution, and no pretense that it isn't the same old constitution.
US citizens: call your senators once again and tell them not to give retroactive immunity to the telephone companies for their illegal spying.
Also, if you support Clinton or Obama, tell them you expect them to be present for a filibuster.
US citizens: call your congresscritter and senators, and tell them to pass a stimulus package that gives money to working Americans, not tax breaks for businesses and wealthy people.
US citizens: phone or snail mail your congresscritter to oppose the "Campus-Based Digital Theft Prevention" provision in the education bill. Say that sharing isn't theft, sharing is good, and there shouldn't be any laws against it.
Israel cut off the fuel to Gaza's electric plant, as collective punishment of everyone in Gaza.
1/3 of all species of amphibians are endangered, due to a fungus promoted by global warming. This project will attempt to protect 10 of the most unusual endangered amphibian species.
Sgt. Mendenhall suspects his many diseases were caused by exposure in Iraq to poisonous uranium from Bush forces munitions. When he asks for help, officials give him a runaround.
Congress isn't deadlocked when it comes to helping big business.
Israel is now blocking UN aid vehicles from Gaza.
The number of Israelis and Palestinians killed by the other side's fighters declined in 2007. Palestinians killed 13 Israelis, and Israelis killed 373 Palestinians.
That figure of 373 probably counts only those killed by fighting, and thus does not include the 60 sick Palestinians who died because Israel did not let them leave Gaza for medical treatment. Their deaths were "retaliation" for the Qassam missiles aimed at Sderot, which killed two people last year.
Israel now admits that its blockade of Gaza is intended to cause suffering for the population as a whole.
FBI buries docs showing US officials stole nuke secrets? Read more about this here
Israeli PM Olmert has formally adopted what was once Uri Avnery's political program.
Fanatical Christians have obtained government funds for "crisis pregnancy centers" which try to stop women from having abortions with a long series of dishonest tactics.
The US government plans to track all farm animals — except on factory farms — supposedly to stop "terrorists".
I guess they couldn't use "child" pornography as the excuse for this program.
The US prison in Bahram, Afghanistan, is twice the size of Guantanamo. Some of the prisoners were shipped there from Guantanamo.
The RFID Guardian selectively jams RFIDs in your vicinity.
For full information read here.
Unable to arrest Brian Haw for protesting outside Parliament, the UK police attacked and injured him, then arrested him for "threatening" them.
The police are the most heavily armed gang in the country. Any attempt to reduce the level of violence in the UK should start with them. Instead, the UK instead plans to imprison thousands more non-police. To make room for them it will implant RFIDs under the skin of other convicts...and perhaps others waiting for trial.
I am not, in general, against making convicted criminals wear tracking devices. However, injecting them into the person body is a new level if invasion, more dangerous precisely because it would be easy to apply to all the rest of us.
Greenland's ice melt hit a record in 2007.
This is parallels measurements in Antarctica. Start thinking about moving to high ground.
The head of US intelligence said that near-drowning constitutes torture. This puts the CIA agents who did it in legal jeopardy.
CO2 emissions could wipe out all the world's coral reefs in a few decades, causing extinction of thousands of species and destroying the livelihoods of 100 million people. The problem is not just the warming, but also the increasing acidity of the oceans as the CO2 dissolves in them.
Destruction of the Amazon rainforest is speeding up despite commitments to protect it. The whole forest could be gone in 20 years, with disastrous effects on life on Earth.
I think that Brazil needs a strict policy of confiscating any land on which the forest is cut down, and whatever was grown on it.
Kenya's opposition leader has called a general strike. His demand for new election seems like the only solution when the head of the election commission says he cannot tell who won.
Police in Minnesota killed an unarmed man with a taser shot, then claimed the taser wasn't responsible. They refuse to say why they shot him.
Part of the Canadian government listed the Guantanamo prison as a suspected torture site, but Canada continues to do nothing to help a Canadian citizen who has been tortured there.
Tobacco companies operate programs for "youth smoking prevention", but their real effect is public relations and market research for selling tobacco.
Drug companies say they need high prices (not to mention patents in poor countries that amount to mass murder) to cover the cost of research. However, the drug companies spend 24% of their money on advertising and only 13% on research.
Opium farming is taking off in Iraq, under the control of the militias.
The Bush invasion of Iraq was responsible for this development, but I expect that Bush, and his successor, will present it as an excuse to continue the occupation until it suppresses the drug trade. That means forever — which is what they want anyway.
Radiohead released an album on the Internet, saying "Pay what you wish" and allowing free redistribution. Estimates are they made millions of dollars.
Christian fanatics in the US congress are pushing resolutions to misrepresent history and establish their religion.
Microsoft wants a monopoly on software for employers to monitor workers' bodies.
The defense minister of the "Iraqi" government says he can't expect to end the violence in the country until 2012.
Since the US occupation is an obstacle to ending the violence, in effect the "solution" is also the cause of the problem.
I don't know whether US trademark law would actually support Ford's claim. But if Ford's actions are not illegal, they ought to be.
Once Ford's executives notice the PR problem their lawyers have caused, I expect they offer the fans some sort of deal to permit publication of the calendar. But that shouldn't be enough, because there's a bigger issue at stake. Nobody should have the power that Ford is claiming to have.
Finland is building a nuclear reactor with a new design that is supposed to ensure safety, but many parts were badly built.
The flaws in production by subcontractors are the overall builder's fault, for failing to give priority to proper construction. But such mistakes are not unusual. If Europe allows many companies are allowed to build such reactors, it is nearly certain that at least one of them will build them badly.
Japanese whalers captured and imprisoned two conservationists who came on ship to give them a message.
The UK rejected a move to ban research on hybrid embryos.
The right way to deal with these issues is to ask, "Which person's rights are threatened?" A person that never exists cannot be the victim of an injustice.
Hundreds of British doctors say they will defy government orders to deny health care to refugees.
Wei Wenhua made a video of policemen beating up protestors. The police beat him to death.
The US public has developed a nearly total distrust for big business, and supports many proposals for increased regulation.
The fact that the government does not implement these proposals reflects the fact that business has more political power than the vast majority of the citizens put together.
Antarctic glaciers are moving faster than expected, meaninmg the ocean will rise faster than previously predicted.
Bush is still trying to bash Iran — perhaps he still wants to start another war.
His accusation that Iran supports "terrorism" in Afghanistan is surely wrong. Iran and the Taliban were hardly friends.
Meanwhile, Iranians remember that when they got a democratic government, in 1954, the US helped impose the tyrannical shah.
Dubya is now under pressure to support the cause of imprisoned dissidents in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, after he talked about "freedom of speech". Oops!
Sign this petition calling on US TV journalists to ask candidates about their stand on global warming.
Huckabee wants to amend the US Constitution to endorse religion and conform to religious standards.
What worries me even more is that other candidates with a bigger chance of winning, such as Clinton, are also trying to boost religion.
The Mexican army appears to be preparing to attack a Zapatista community.
100,000 protestors denounced the presidential election in Georgia as rigged.
Not everything Clown does is bad. He proposes to consider organs from corpses as available for transplantation unless relatives explicitly say no.
That's a step forward. I have an organ donor card in my pocket, but in the US I cannot be sure it would be honored. But why not go further? Why cater to irrational relatives at the cost of other people's lives?
Human Rights Watch says the Kenyan police had a "shoot to kill" policy in dealing with protestors.
Israel barred international peace activists from entering Palestine.
Index On Censorship's new issue on "cyberspeech".
Nonviolent protests continue in Bil'in, where Israel has ignored the Supreme Court's decision to move the annexation wall. And soldiers cheer after shooting protestors in the head with rubber bullets (which can cause permanent injury).
A US appeals court ruled that Guantanamo torture was "incidental", and that the prisoners don't count as "persons".
Thus the Bush regime denies the humanity of anyone it captures and imprisons.
The UK has so many surveillance cameras that it is looking for citizen volunteers to watch them.
Clown plans to "harmonize" the laws restricting protests near Parliament with the laws governing protests elsewhere. That could mean extending some of these restrictions to the rest of the UK.
Environmentalists in Bahrain protested Bush's visit.
Al Jazeera reportedly has been ordered by Qatar to be nice to Sa'udi Arabia.
Business interests exert similar control on the major US media such as the New York Times, as Chomsky has shown.
As a few refugees return to Iraq, often into internal exile rather than home, Bush claims this is a sign that he is getting Iraq under control. But most Iraqis believe that the Bush forces' occupation is the cause of Iraq's problems and that ending the occupation is crucial to ending these problems.
Over the past few years, I've written that it was impossible to avoid the fragmentation of Iraq. I still think that is likely. The writer of the article sees more hope.
The decrease in killings reported by the Bush regime is exaggerated.
Giuliani worked as a paid lobbyist for Purdue Pharma, protecting it from accusations about its promotion of the drug Oxycontin. Purdue's executives later pled guilty to charges they lied about it.
I have no basis to claim that Giuliani personally lied in this activity, but he used his famous name to suppress criticism.
Republicans hope ID requirements will block millions of poorer citizens from voting in 2008.
Yet another network-organized debate excludes Kucinich.
Maybe Bush was hoping to manufacture a reason for war.
Republican voter ID laws are designed for discrimination against minority groups that often vote Democratic.
This, combined with a systematic plan to challenge minority voters, is the Republican plan to win the 2008 election regardless of what the citizens want.
The UK decided to build new nuclear power plants.
It is true that nuclear power plants avoid emitting CO2. But they are dangerous the waste is extremely toxic and when made safe, they are very expensive.
A new car in India costs under $2500.
This car is fairly fuel-efficient as cars go but if it greatly increases the number of cars, it will increase the total fuel consumption. However, sufficiently heavy gas taxes could prevent that problem.
Bush called on Israel to end the occupation of Palestine.
Those are good words, but carrying them out will take determination and clout. Bush may not have either one.
Swedish MPs call for legalized file-sharing.
Even better, they denounce the anti-sharing special interests.
The US government released the details of its national ID card plan, REAL ID.
Fortunately, some states have already rejected the plan, and it can still be defeated. If you're a US citizen, talk with your state legislator about rejecting REAL ID.
Diebold voting machines are vulnerable to being rigged by people who get access to them before the election.
Such people could be allowed in by election officials, or they could say they work for Diebold. What if they really do work for Diebold? That won't stop them from rigging an election.
French journalists face the threat of execution in Niger for covering Tuareg rebels.
Editors of Stars and Stripes, the US military newspaper, object to the secret use of their paper to launder funds for propaganda efforts.
AT&T mulls adding copyright censorship at the network level.
Sharing copies isn't wrong. Prohibiting sharing is wrong.
Canadians: join your local chapter of Fair Copyright for Canada.
One source of the powerful major drug companies' power is that their salesmen know exactly how much each doctor prescribes of any given drug. They get this from records kept by pharmacies.
Why you should run an open wireless network.
Schneier sused the word "hacker" to refer to security-breakers, but that's a misunderstanding.
When Meijer, a retail store chain, was denied a permit for a new store, it funded a phony "grass-roots" recall campaign to remove town officials.
Privacy International and EPIC accuse the US of "endemic surveillance", like Russia, China, and Singapore.
Robin Ingle says he resigned from the Consumer Products Safety Commission because it had become so thoroughly captured by the industry it regulates that his work achieved nothing.
TSA searches, detains 5 year old because his name was on no-fly list
Obama won in New Hampshire districts that count votes by hand, but lost in those that count by machine. This analysis argues that the pattern is due to demography, and that the difference is much less when districts of comparable demography are compared.
Whether or not computers were used for cheating this time, they could be in the future. We should not entrust our elections to them.
Those who claim psychic powers have just two more years to prove them and claim James Randi's two-million-dollar prize. After that, his foundation will use the money for other purposes.
Iraqis resort to selling children -- for adoption, or forced prostitution.
A US court ruled that defendants have a right under the 5th amendment not to tell a PGP passphrase.
By contrast, the UK adopted a law making it a crime not to give the police your passphrase, and it is a crime to tell the public that you were abused in this way. This was the start of B'liar's assault on the Magna Carta.
The UK is accused of deceiving youths in order to recruit them as soldiers.
I've heard similar accusations in the US.
Iraq Body Count says that killings in Iraq remain high.
An Israeli plane fired a missile to destroy a Palestinian home. His owner had already been assassinated, but they wanted to punish his family even more.
The home was empty, but people on the street were wounded by shrapnel.
Meanwhile, Palestinians in Gaza are dying of cancer because Israel will not allow them to travel for treatment.
Meanwhile, Israeli settlers continue trying to push Palestinians off their lands.
There are cases where surveillance recordings can be good for justice.
I often talk about the danger of surveillance of citizens by the authorities, because that surveillance tends to be systematic and total. But I agree with Elgan about these cases.
Ways to reform the algorithm of US voting.
No matter what it means to vote for a certain candidate, that won't give us good elections if certain groups are systematically blocked or intimidated from voting.
Saving the mountain gorilla by building efficient stoves.
A police chief in the UK called for legalization of ecstacy, saying it is safer than aspirin.
But most public figures still won't dare to admit that prohibition is more harmful than the drug.
The Bush regime wants to start oil drilling off the Alaskan coast, ignoring the danger of oil spills.
Using "balance" as the criterion is a recipe for approving every drilling project sooner or later no matter how dangerous it is. The increasing oil price will keep pushing down one side of the scale, until it eventually counts for more than the danger.
I propose a different solution: wait 15 years. By then, all the sea ice may be gone, the polar bears may all be dead, and the oil will be worth a lot more money than it is now.
The UK plans to ban the distribution of many programs that can be used to probe computer security (either to break it or to maintain it).
Adding insult to injury, they also use the term "hacking" to refer to security breaking.
Sign this petition urging other governments not to recognize the "outcome" of the election in Kenya until it has been independently reviewed.
A couple was banned from a mall in the UK for taking photos of their grandchildren.
It's not enough to laugh at this photo bans infringe the public's rights, so we should resist and defy them, and refuse to accept the stupid "terrorism" excuse.
(I'm sure the mall itself takes plenty of pictures.)
"Intelligent design" is the nexus between politics, religion, and stupidity.
There is a crash program to breed amphibians in zoos, before fungus wipes them out in the wild.
The CIA faces a criminal investigation for destruction of evidence of torture.
Saudi Arabia arrested a blogger who wrote about the unjust accusations against other human rights supporters.
Supporters of the opposition candidate who probably won Kenya's election have started butchering supporters of the government.
The occupation of Iraq costs the US 16 million dollars per hour. (That's after excluding the fraction for Afghanistan.)
Painful as this is, it is not the principal reason to oppose the occupation. It is the result of an unjust attempt to conquer another country to steal its oil. So even if it could be made profitable, as Bush hoped, it would still be wrong.
The chairman of Kenya's election commission admits he does not trust the election results.
1/4 of the population of the UK is in debt trouble.
Amazingly, "excessive Christmas shopping" will push many people over the edge. Perhaps schools should teach teenagers how to resist this pressure or teach them to celebrate Grav-mass instead.
Naomi Wolf talks about the reaction to The End of America. When Bush withholds from Congress the emails about the US attorney scandal, is he hiding a systematic plan to rig the 2008 election?
The UK gave a girl the order to report to the airport for deportation to Nigeria, where she has never been and has no citizenship. But she can't read the order, because she's 3 years old.
The past few monts have seen decreased resistance attacks against the Bush forces, but there are reasons why this lull may not last.
Meanwhile, it should be noted that reports of Iraqi refugees' return are exaggerated — the "Iraqi" government counts every Iraqi that crosses the border as a "returning refugee" &mdash and that distaste for practicing prostitution might be more of a reason for those that really do return.
10 significant 2007 victories against the corporate empire.
There are mass protests in Kenya after the presidential election was apparently rigged.
