[ 2009 May - August | 2009 January - April | 2008 September - December | 2008 May - August | 2008 January - April | 2007 September - December | 2007 May - August | 2007 January - April | 2006 September - December | 2006 May - August | 2006 January - April | 2005 September - December | 2005 May - August | 2005 January - April | 2004 September - December | 2004 May - August | 2004 January - April | 2003 September - December | 2003 May - August | 2003 January - April | 2002 | 2001 | 2000 ]
Each political note has its own anchor in case you want to link to it.
My intention is to make links only to publicly accessible, stable URLs. If you find a link to a page that requires subscription, please report that as you would report any other broken link.
How Hollywood systematically makes lousy movies.
I learned about another systematic cause in a book called "Save the Cat", whose purpose is to explain how to write scripts and sell them to Hollywood. However, without quite intending to, it also explains how the system demands stories that can be fully explained in a few words.
When the movie companies demand more power to control our computers, saying it is needed to keep them going, this is what they want to keep going.
Israel has kept Cynthia McKinney and others from the Gaza aid boat in prison after they refused to sign a statement which would have put them in the wrong.
Pharma's phony 'gift' to Health Care Reform
An Indian court has ruled that homosexual sex is not a crime.
After Israel seized the Gaza aid boat, the crew and escorts are now in prison in Israel. At least one may face long term imprisonment.
Wild sheep on a Scottish island are evolving to smaller size, apparently due to warming climate.
Honduras' government has declared an emergency and suspended basic human rights.
One of the articles I previously read said that the "unanimous" vote that named Micheletti president was made "unanimous" by excluding Cesar Ham's party. I would guess that this party is too small to have changed the outcome, but claiming it was "unanimous" based on exclusion of those who would have voted against is dishonest.
More lies by the coup-established rulers are explained here, including the phony resignation letter from Zelaya.
The right wing are condemning Zelaya for having an association with Chavez and say that he has promised to take control of Honduras for Chavez.
Those accusations seem absurd to me, but it seems that the ballots for the non-binding poll were printed in Venezuela after Honduran government agencies refused to do it.
It seems to me that Zelaya ought to have confronted that disobedience by replacing officials rather than by inviting foreign help. However, the mere fact of getting such help does not prove anything was wrong.
It doesn't prove the contrary either. Zelaya said, in exile. that if the constitution were changed to allow a president to be reelected, that would only apply to his successor, not to him. But this may not have been clear all along.
Obama has been strangely weak in opposing the coup in Honduras.
Change Congress is shaming senators into supporting publicly funded health care even though the insurance companies paid them to oppose it.
The Taliban captured a US soldier in Afghanistan.
It seems misleading to call it "kidnapping" when soldiers capture prisoners from an enemy army, so I won't use that term.
The real issue here is whether the Taliban will treat their prisoner humanely according to the Geneva Conventions. For years, US military officers warned Bush that torturing prisoners could result in retaliation against future captured US soldiers. The US must now shamefully recognize that it has not acted correctly itself and therefore is in a weak position to criticize the Taliban if it does not.
Conservatives pretend to support democracy, but they make an exception for the coup in Honduras.
Israeli is stealing boats and nets from Gazan fishermen. On one occasion Israeli navy shot at fishermen and ordered them to jump into the sea.
The fossil fuel lobby undermined the climate bill by harping on what protecting the environment will cost. This question is ignored when the right wing wants something more expensive, such as a war.
What is the cost of cities that are uninhabited, because of unbearable heat, lack of food, a lack of drinking water underground, or a layer of sea water above it?
Faisal Al-Ani was confused but not violent, until the police attacked him. He died from the way they treated him, and then they lied to cover it up.
Exxon still funds front groups to deny global warming.
Remember, the "xx" is pronounced like a hard "ch" in German or "j" in Spanish.
The "defeated" Iranian candidates have denounced the government as illegitimate.
Those who steal elections do not have legitimate governments. This applies in Iran just as it does in the US and Mexico.
As for the demand for the EU to apologize so as to restart nuclear negotiations, this demand shows that Iran has no interested in an agreement, so the negotiations are futile. If Iran is ever interested in an agreement, it will come to the table to discuss one.
It is not a good thing for Iran to have nuclear weapons, but it's not a disaster either. (The the same can be said for several other countries that have them.)
George Monbiot: No one dares study the possible effects of drug legalization.
There is a point that Monbiot did not consider, about decriminalization of use while providing a legal supply to addicts. If most of the total amount of the drug is used by addicts (since one addict uses far more per year than one occasional user), this will probably make the total size of the black market shrink considerably and reduce profits. Many drug sellers will leave the business. Those remaining will have little incentive to give free samples to try to get customers addicted. The result could be a decrease in occasional use of the drug, as well as a decrease in the indirect harms of smuggling it.
Two EPA employees whose field is not climatology wrote a report saying that there is no global warming danger, and the EPA suppressed it.
Their report is ignorant nonsense.
I can see why the EPA would refuse to be associated with this, but gagging them was wrong. They should be allowed to state their views, then used as an example to refute, and disciplined for plagiarism if they did copied without citation from Mr Gregory.
UK protestors that blocked a coal train say they were trying to preventing the deaths that result from coal-based power generation.
Among the forms of polution that coal plants emit is radioactive fallout. The radioisotopes are present in the coal, but harmless as long as they are inside it; burning the coal spews them into the air.
Krugman: climate danger deniers are committing treason against Earth.
An increasing number of Bush forces soldiers are resisting the war that they too consider unjust.
Amnesty International concludes Israel committed war crimes in attacking Gaza.
The climate bill, so weak that it is more like an excuse for giveways than a reduction in emission, has divided the environmental movement.
Environmental groups generally achieve more by criticizing bad laws than by signing their name to slightly better laws. That is what they should all do now. If not enough Americans understand the danger we are putting the world in, how do we change that? Endorsing non-solutions does not do it.
Engineers' intolerance for ambiguity makes them more likely to become right-wing extremists (though it is only a tiny fraction of engineers who do so).
Instead of demolishing 20,000 Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem, Israel now says it will only demolish 6,000.
But these demolitions are continue.
It is a step in the right direction, but it removes just part of one of the many forms of suffering imposed on Palestinians. And Israel could reverse this step at any time too.
The UK now has an Atheist summer camp.
The Bush regime tortured prisoners to death in Bagram.
Obama condemns Bush regime torture, but wants to continue taking prisoners around the world and holding them in Bagram without trial, based on evidence that often amounts to rumor, and sometimes is extracted by torture.
Neocons hope the Iranian regime's suppression of political opposition can give them an excuse to invade.
Invading Iran to establish freedom and democracy would be a good thing if (1) Iranians want this sort of help and (2) we could trust the leaders of the invasion to support and establish freedom and democracy.
Obama is not a full supporter of human rights, but maybe we could trust him to set up a real democracy. However, Iranians do not want their country to be invaded, and I expect they would loyally support their government if it were. That's what they did in the 80s when the US supported Saddam Hussein's invasion of Iran.
The neocons don't have as much influence as they used to. Still, the world is fortunate that the US army is too overloaded to invade any but weak countries at present.
Israeli "settlers" attacked Palestinian villages with guns. The army came and attacked the Palestinians too.
As the Bush forces move gradually out of Iraq, the multinational oil companies are moving in.
Bush did not exactly win his war, but the people he worked for did win it.
The Bush forces barred a reporter from being "embedded" because his reporting was not sufficiently favorable.
China has backed down on the Green Dam internet filtering program, apparently in response to a lot of opposition. Users would not have been required to run the Green Dam program on their own PCs, but users of cybercafes might well have found they had no way to avoid it. Thus, it would have censored some Chinese users, while leaving many others unaffected. However, the program has managed to crystalize opposition to all the censorship in China.
US citizens: Israel seized the Gaza aid ship "Spirit of Humanity". Call your congressmen and senators demanding they put pressure on Israel to release the ship and let it dock in Gaza.
You can also call these numbers to put pressure directly on the Israeli government.
The Israeli Ministry of Justice
tel: +972 2646 6666 or +972 2646 6340
fax: +972 2646 6357
The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs
tel: +972 2530 3111
fax: +972 2530 3367
The UK says that national ID cards will be optional, except if you want a passport.
A correction: Cesar Ham was not killed. Rather, he has gone into hiding under threat of arrest for supporting the holding of Zelaya's planned advisory referendum.
It appears that the advisory referendum was specifically about whether
to hold a later plebiscite to authorize a constitutional convention.
It is generally reported that Zelaya's aim was to change the
constitution so he could run for office again, and maybe that was what
he hoped such a convention would do.
See also here.
Ezra Nawi, an Israeli who helps Palestinians' nonviolent resistance to the "settlers" that try to drive them off their land, faces another prison term, apparently framed by biased police.
Keep in mind that the "settlement" whose inhabitants call Nawi a "troublemaker" was illegal from the beginning, and that the overall purpose of these settlements was to create excuses for annexation.
A study predicts 4000 square miles around New Orleans will be submerged by the end of the century, due to global warming combined with dams that reduce sediment.
This appears to use a cautious prediction for how much sea level will rise. If Greenland really starts melting, it could be a lot worse.
India plans to impose national ID cards.
If the idea is to help people by giving them a new form of identification, there is no reason to make it mandatory. So that reason is bogus. This will not help much against guerrilla groups, because when they are fighting nobody can ask them for ID, and when they are not fighting, they look just like everyone else.
I hope that people will fight this plan.
Drug company influence leads to falsification of medical studies and to suppression of those whose results show problems.
The only fix is to greatly reduce private funding of drug research. If the obstacle is the fact that drug companies have more money to spend on research than the Federal Government, why does the obstacle exist?
Because they have too much patent power.
Because of direct-to-consumer drug ads.
Because they corrupt doctors with freebies.
Because they would rather develop palliatives (which you would take over and over) rather than cures (which you only need once).
Because their taxes are too low.
These things can be fixed.
A prisoner in Abu Ghraib suffered, in effect, death through crucifiction.
France is trying to co-opt the new International Renewable Energy Agency to make it support nuclear power.
The US and Egypt are making progress towards a partial peace deal including the PLO, Hamas, and Israel.
Iraqis celebrated the mostly-withdrawal of Bush forces troops from Iraqi cities.
Obama is talking about making an executive order for imprisonment without trial.
The military in Honduras overthrew President Zelaya, who was trying to hold a referendum on whether he ought to be able to run for reelection.
During the coup, the military killed a left-wing presidential candidate, Cesar Ham, who was allied with Zelaya.
Other branches of the Honduran government said the referendum was being done in an unconstitutional manner. However, the referendum did not purport to have any legal effect; it was just a trial balloon asking whether to hold a real plebiscite in November.
I don't know whether the proposed November plebiscite would be constitutional, but this advisory referendum in itself could not have caused any injustice, and it was no excuse for a coup.
Debunking Canadian health care myths.
US citizens: sign this petition for real reform of the financial markets.
One of the things that appealed to me was the plan to make large banks pay higher insurance premiums, thus encouraging splits rather than mergers. Banks "too big to fail" are too big to be allowed to exist!
Haiti had an election, and Aristide's party boycotted it. Around 1% of the electorate voted.
The election protests have caused a split in Iran's government at all levels.
Fishermen demamd the right to drive bluefin tuna to extinction.
It is insane to allow any fishing of stocks that are dwindling. Several times in the past the estimates for an allowable catch turned out to be overoptimistic. Why gamble with permanent loss for a few years of continued fishing?
Those fishermen will need to change jobs anyway, so let's make them do it now. All trade in bluefin tuna should be banned until the species is healthy again.
Obama is readying an executive order for imprisonment without trial.
Greenpeace condemns the House's climate bill.
Comics artist Mark Sable was arrested by the TSA for carrying the script for a new issue of his comic book. (It is about fictional terrorism.)
The TSA has no business looking at any textual or graphical material the passenger may have, because it is not a weapon. Nobody would get very far trying to hijack a plane by giving a flight attendant paper cuts.
The fact they singled him out shows that this search had nothing to do with concerns for the safety of that flight. Someone was using the TSA as an excuse for a warrantless search.
I forwarded this to an ACLU lawyer I know.
The UN's inquiry into Israel's attack on Gaza is being carried out remotely since Israel has barred the team's entry to Gaza.
US citizens: sign this petition to congressional leaders to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act which denies equality to same-sex marriages.
The ACLU is fighting Pat-Riot act gag orders in court, and the FBI responded secretly with arguments that the ACLU's lawyers are not allowed to see.
I do not trust the FBI to respect human rights, and I don't trust Obama to do so either.
A UK commission including retired high officials warns against anti-terrorist methods, such as control orders and condoning foreign torture, that "subvert the rule of normal law".
I wonder whether the report criticizes laws that also subvert established principles of justice, such as the UK law that makes it a crime to be the object of "reasonable suspicion".
A Brasilian law to legalize squatters in the rainforest seems likely to encourage dangerous deforestation.
Letting squatters own the land they have occupied is often a good thing. But letting them sell it again defeats the purpose — they will only become "landless" once more, and have to occupy another part of the forest.
The real solution is to reduce population growth and help the poor in other ways, while at the same time penalizing anyone owning large amounts of land. This will result in selling already-farmed land to the poor.
An appeals court in Sweden denied a retrial to the Pirate Bay, ruling that the judge's conflict of interest was unimportant.
The copyright lobby's propaganda machine exposed: it creates and funds multiple organizations that cite exaggerated claims from each others' reports.
Exaggerated claims are one part of their system. Propaganda terms, such as calling copying "piracy" and "counterfeiting", and calling copyright "intellectual property", are another part. To repeat those terms without denouncing them as invalid gives the copyright lobby support.
The ACLU asked the UN to investigate the case of Abou Elkassim Britel who the CIA handed over to Morocco for torture. He was tortured
Everyone: participate in protests on Sep 12 against internet surveillance of people who are not criminals.
The Bush regime took prisoners from other countries to Bagram in Afghanistan where were imprisoned for years and tortured. Obama continues to deny these prisoners the chance to see a lawyer.
Sarkozy has proposed to ban women from veiling their faces in France.
I think people should have the right to conceal their faces in public if they wish. In particular, they must have the right to do this when protesting. If they do it because of religious conviction, that too is their right.
However, Muslim women face pressure to conceal their faces, pressure from adherents of a form of fanaticism that can turn violent. Making women hide their faces is an insult which paves the way for worse attacks such as genital mutilation and "honor killing". If some eventually decide to surrender to this pressure, that does not alter the fact that they were more or less coerced. We must search for some way to neutralize and defeat the pressure.
But Sarkozy's response would not help these women. The pressure on them comes mainly from their own families. Trying to "protect" them by prohibiting them from wearing veils will not decrease the pressure or help them resist it. On the contrary, this ban combined with the family pressure to wear a veil could result in their never leaving the house. This would isolate them further from anyone who is not the source of the pressure, and push them further into the trap.
I don't think I know the right solution, but it occurs to me to look for ways to require recent immigrants to spend a substantial amount of time, over a period of weeks or months, in an indoor activity where they get to know people with various lifestyles and views, and in which veils are not allowed. At the same time, women could organize to firmly oppose pressure to hide their faces.
The Shah's militiamen seem to target women protestors specially for killing.
A weak climate bill with giant give-aways to business is all one can expect from the corrupt US political system, where business own's Congress.
Obama is trying hard to pass a climate bill that has already been substantially weakened by business pressure.
Iraqi Kurdistan is asking citizens to vote on claiming terroritory from Iraq, in effect acting as an independent state.
Health insurance companies' goal is to minimize their "medical losses", i.e., the benefits they must pay to their subscribers out of the premiums they get.
I disagree with one point in this article. The fact that insurance companies seek to make a profit is the one main cause of the problem, and the other is the idea that it is acceptable for businesses to seek profit and only profit no matter what the social cost.
The Pentagon says it has learned its lesson and will not describe protests as "low-level terrorism".
The Bush regime repeatedly attacked journalists in Iraq, but didn't admit it. Now a neocon openly calls for war against journalists. Any state that "wins" a dirty war against journalists would possess both the conditions and the inclination to do great evil.
Farid Hilali was tortured in various countries, apparently on instructions from the B'liar regime, then spent the rest of a decade in prison on nebulous terrorism charges.
The censorship-mad Australian government now plans to censor games.
What must be changed in the TSA to make it respect basic civil liberties. I disagree on one point: we must not accept as perpetual and inevitable the pointless security measures now in place. The right of anonymous travel must be restored.
US citizens: sign this petition from Jewish Voices for Peace to make a freeze on construction of its colonies in Palestine a condition of further US aid to Israel. This does not go far enough; the US should demand that Israel agree to hand over the buildings of these "settlements" to Palestine as part of a peace deal. But it goes in the right direction.
A major group of US rabbis has condemned Israel's extension of settlements. Since the purpose of the settlements was to make an excuse for annexation, Israel has no excuse for keeping them at all. It should hand them over to Palestine as part of a peace agreement.
Wendell Potter, former health insurance PR executive, quit his job to campaign for publicly funded health care.
Everyone: sign this call for countries to denounce the repression in Iran.
An Israeli soldier has gone to prison rather than participate in oppressing Palestinians.
He said that the actions of soldiers in his unit reminded him of stories of how antisemites in Russia treated his progenitors.
700 doctors have demanded that Yoram Blachar resign as head of the World Medical Association on grounds that he condoned Israeli doctors' participation in torture of Palestinian prisoners.
Neda Soltan's family was forced to move so neighbors could not talk to them.
I wonder if they are in something tantamount to a prison. That would be the "safest" place for Shah Khamenei to put them.
A security camera proved that undercover cops tried to frame people for a drug deal, but the judge was reluctant to believe what he saw,
The War on Drugs corrupts police and officials. It exposes citizens to the danger of dangerous and violent raids, which have killed people who were raided by mistake. It has given the US the biggest percentage of population in prison of all countries on Earth. It is unjust and must be ended.
Israel's government demonstrates its contempt for peace by proposing sleazy excuses for expansion of its "settlements" (really colonies) on the territory of Palestine.
To speak of "natural growth" of these colonies is an oxymoron since there is nothing natural or legitimate about them. All of the settlements violate international law; their sole purpose was to make it hard to end the occupation.
Israel should hand all of them over to Palestine.
While Israel pleads to excuse houses already illegally built on Palestinian territory, it threatens to demolish Palestinian homes that have existed for a lot longer.
Americans may be amazed to compare the costs of bailing out US banks and investment companies with the cost of various past wars and crises.
Shah Khamenei has forbidden the standard Shi'ite mourning ceremonies for Neda Soltani, who was shot by government forces while attending or watching a protest last week.
Former Scientology leaders who have quit the church say that the leader was frequently and surprisingly violent.
The UK investigation of how B'liar decided to attack Iraq will be held in public, but with a hitch and a loophole.
I fear that the exception for testimony that might "embarrass allies" will be an excuse to conceal precisely the information that is most crucial, since the plan was made together with Bush.
In addition, the testimony will not be given under oath. If Bliar cannot be prosecuted for perjury, he will lie again.
Tell Tom Daschle to stop undermining public funding for health care.
Hospitals in Namibia are sterilizing HIV-positive women without telling them.
There is no excuse for tricking patients, but an explicit requirement for sterilization may be justified. A country which can't afford to provide necessary medical care perhaps ought to require women not to have more babies with a 25% chance of HIV infection each one.
In general, people should be free to do whatever they like, but there are some activities that create a burden society cannot handle, and have to be limited.
The US Army has changed rules for air strikes in Afghanistan in the aim of avoiding more massacres of civilians.
It is the right thing to do, but it may be too little or too late.
Militia death squads are operating in Basra. Most militias are inactive, but waiting to fight again.
If the Iraqi Army does not take sides in these fights, it might offer some hope. But it is mostly Shi'ite, so it may take sides with Shi'ites against Sunnis.
Western companies made the systems that Iran and China use to censor the Internet. Prohibiting such systems might make it harder for countries such as Denmark, Germany, France and Australia to establish censorship.
Bush and B'liar decided privately in January 2003 that they would invade Iraq regardless of whether the UN found any of the nonexistent weapons of mass distruction.
Massachusetts residents: phone your state representative to oppose the bills intended to reverse the results of the referendum that decriminalized marijuana. You can use this web site to find out your representative's phone number.
Videos show the Shah's militia shooting to death a girl who was watching a protest.
UK doctors are upset that Dignitas, in Switzerland,
helps people commit suicide
even when their suffering might last a long time. These doctors think Dignitas should only help people escape brief suffering.
I agree that anyone helping people commit suicide should first make sure they are aware of all treatment options. It would be a shame if someone rushed into escape through death without trying some treatment that might have made his life worth living.
However, the fact that one person finds meaning in life as a quadruplegic does mot mean others can, or should be forced to try.
The DOD classifies protests as "low-level terrorism."
UK police violently arrested two protestors for photographing a policeman who was hiding his identity by not showing a badge number.
When manuracturers claim that products protect the environment in some way, they are nearly always lying.
A Canadian reporter in Iran describes how police arrested him and beat him. He says that Iranian reporters are in more danger.
Brazil has begun to prosecute companies that have cut down the rainforest to grow cattle.
Shah Khamenei's police have crushed the protests in Iran, by killing ten, injuring dozens, and arresting hundreds or thousands.
With this obvious act of tyranny, the Shah has sown disgust among a large part of the Iranian people.
It often takes more than one uprising to bring down a totalitarian dictator. Four were needed to bring down the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe. Each attempt, even if it does not succeed, is a step towards victory, as the dictator can only hold on by ever-greater oppression, provoking ever greater opposition.
US citizens: sign this petition to the EPA in favor of regulating CO2 emmissions.
The civilians remaining in Swat are suffering from a lack of almost everything, including food. But the Pakistani Army seems to be defeating the Taliban. As long as the government of Pakistan followed a policy of appeasement of the radical Islamists, they continued gaining power. The only way Pakistan could avoid falling to them eventually was to go to out-and-out war against them before it was too late.
Berlusconi's multiple sex scandals are costing him support among right-wing Italians. This makes me wonder whether "starlets" really means "Star, let's". It also reminds me of a pattern common in the US: politicians support nasty policies but nonetheless remain popular, then lose support for private acts that didn't really hurt anyone. I wonder if it relates to partial control of the media. In the US, business mostly controls the media; in Italy, Berlusconi himself controls most of the media. Perhaps this control is sufficient to squelch criticism of bad policies, and only a sex scandal is too exciting for the media to neglect.
As the Clown regime plans to build new nuclear power plants (and has changed laws so that people cannot block them), it lacks enough inspectors to assure safety at the existing plants.
Two million Iraqis are still refugees in neighboring countries. They do not dare go home.
The ACLU has sued the TSA for carrying out searches that are irrelevant to keeping weapons off planes. This is not the only injustice in the TSA's behavior. The arbitrary "no fly list" and the requirement for passengers to identify themselves are also tyranny.
B'liar asked Clown to have a phony investigation into the Iraq war, fearing that a real investigation would expose his complicity. Since Obama does not want an investagation, Americans also depend on the UK to investigate the criminal conspiracy that was used to launch the conquest of Iraq. A real investigation must be able to subpoena anyone whatsoever to give public testimony.
Some of the banks bailed out last year are having great profits now and will pay huge bonuses. They should have to use these profits to pay back their bailouts. Banking practices are the result of government policy and laws. If banks tend to accept too much risk, it is because they expect to be bailed out if they lose the bet. The way to prevent this is for the owners of the bank to lose ownership if they get bailed out.
Al-Maliki says the Bush forces will withdraw from Iraqi cities by June 30 as agreed, despite
attacks in cities.
The withdrawal won't be fully honest, because they have gerrymandered the borders of some Iraqi cities to exclude Bush forces bases. Nonetheless, maybe Obama will carry out the promised withdrawal by the end of 2011.
If so, the deaths of a million Iraqis and the expendature of a trillion US dollars will have given Iraq a government which is not clearly better than that of Saddam Hussein.
The fact that the Democratic party has taken over responsibility for the occupation of Iraq, and the one in Afghanistan, has nearly eliminated the anti-war movement.
Since Obama has announced an exit strategy for Iraq, and since two and a half years is not a terribly long time, perhaps there is no need to fight to speed it up. But there is no exit strategy for Afghanistan and no sign of victory either, and the government that the US is supporting is almost as cruel to women as the Taliban.
A massive mobilization of Shah Khamenei's police crushed protests in Tehran, which were smaller than before. I hope the massive protests resume once the Shah relaxes his grip.
Jammie Thomas-Rasset was sentenced to pay almost two million dollars to the music factories for file sharing. I expect that the members of the jury were influenced by propaganda terms such as "piracy" and "intellectual property" and the claims that sharing is "theft". How people frame an issue has a big effect on what conclusions they draw. We must not allow the music factories (which the RIAA works for) and movie companies to shape people's thinking without giving them a fight over it.
The World Bank plans a project to try to prevent the extinction of tigers. I support the goal, but I mistrust the World Bank. Meanwhile, I wonder if the best way to save tigers is to spread information about modern medical remedies. Tiger parts must be getting very expensive by now, and they probably don't really work either.
The Yes Men strike again, reporting that world leaders have signed a strong pact to avert climate disaster.
Will the real leaders do their job?
Uri Avnery: Netanyahu "accepted" the idea of a Palestinian state with 7 preconditions designed to make sure it can't possibly happen.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to support the "Personal Use of Marijuana by Responsible Adults Act of 2009"; also send a message through this page.
And support the Medical Marijuana Patient Protection Act.
A suspected criminal in the UK has been denied a jury trial based on police statements that might be motivated by revenge.
Obama's package of banking reforms includes more federal oversight of companies that are "too big to fail".
However, what is necessary is to break them up into pieces that are small enough that it would be safe to let them fail.
After Clown was heavily criticized for a secret investigation into how his predecessor decided to attack Iraq, he denies it is a "u-turn" to consider making minor secondary parts of the investigation public.
He's right. To make the investigation anything but a cover-up requires a real u-turn.
Another grave flaw in Clown's plan is that the testimony won't be given under oath, and the investigation won't be able to subpoena people (such as B'liar himself).
The forecast for the UK in 2080 includes frequent temperatures over 40C (104F). And much less water to cool off with.
Obama is using bogus "terrorist" concerns to conceal the location of toxic dumps of coal power plant waste, which present a substantial danger of accidents.
As protests continue in Iran, the regime is arresting hundreds more opposition figures.
Protestors have taken Ahmadinejad's insult, that they are "dirt and dust", and turned it into a badge of pride.
I wish Americans had protested in the streets like this in 2000 when Bush stole the election.
Was Berlusconi involved in paying women to attend parties, or was he just the "end user" of them?
US citizens: sign this petition to repeal the US federal rejection of same-sex marriage.
After complaints that London police were using their power to search anyone — with no specific basis — mainly against non-whites, they set up a quota for whites to search, just to balance it out.
The real injustice in this power is not that the victims are mainly of Asian descent, but that they victims — and nearly all innocent of the crime they were suspected of. This power is unjust in the UK and it is unjust in the US.
B'liar approved a policy that led British agents to collude with foreign torturers.
Shah Khamenei is trying to crush massive protests by arresting and murdering opposition figures, paralleled by censorship.
As Germany plans to censor Internet access, freedom activists have launched a strong campaign of protests, but it has brought out of the woodwork various different interests that want to censor something or other.
Obama's plan for regulating the financial industry does half the job very well, but neglects the other half. Part of what it neglects is to reduce the power of the banks, which are so powerful that they may be able to block even this weak measure.
Support a massive poll in Iran to verify how people actually voted.
Shah Khamenei has arrested some opposition leaders and banned news reporting from the streets.
Iraqi prisoners are on hunger strike to protest torture including rape.
Hamas agrees to coexistance with Israel along the official international border.
Netanyahu will probably respond by insisting on his absurd, impossible conditions. It's not enough to "recognize Israel"; Netanyahu demands recognition "as a Jewish state", meaning recognition of second-class citizenship for Arab citizens. The US has not recognized Israel "as a Jewish state"; I expect that no country has done so.
As Netanyahu announced these impossible conditions, police attacked protestors and journalists on the street outside, seriously injuring some of them.
A few years ago, Israeli peace activists started meeting informally with Hamas peace activists. Israel imprisoned the latter to make sure this could not lead to peace.
The Israeli Army demolished Palestinians' homes, where some have lived since the 1950s, on the grounds that their village is a security threat to an Israeli colony which was illegal in the first place.
The Clown regime refuses to explain the policies by which its agents participatd in interrogation-by-torture.
The stated reason is to save the UK government from the consequences of its wrongdoing.
Tasers give police an excuse for running amok.
The Iranian Election: Sure They Stole It...Up Front and Honestly. Shah Khamenei's men have killed more protestors, as large protests continue.
Although Netanyahu gave lip service to the idea of a Palestinian state, he demanded absurd conditions before even starting the negotiation. Uri Avnery has explained the difference between "recognizing Israel" (which the US and the PLO have done) and "recognizing Israel as a Jewish state", which would be racist and which no country has done.
Jose Padilla, who was imprisoned as an "enemy combattant" for 3 years and tortured, will be allowed to sue James Yoo for authorizing the torture.
Dalits whose ancestors converted to Christianity centuries ago face constant mistreatment from the other Indian Christians in their village.
President Garcia obtained permission from his masters in Washington to cancel the two laws that he had decreed to allow oil drilling and deforestation in Amazonia. While it is good that Obama is a gentler master than Bush was, Peru deserves to be independent. Peruvians should celebrate June 5 every year as Peru's Dependence Day until Peru is independent once more.
Neo-nazis and other right-wing extremists join the US Army to get training for possible future gang violence. Regulations are supposed to keep those people out, but the recruiters disregard the regulations, because the army is scraping the bottom of the barrel.
Avoiding meat one day a week could reduce global warming, since producing meat causes almost 20% of greenhouse gas emission.
Urgent Note: Resist a sleasy management takeover at WBAI in New York ( flyer 1, flyer 2 ).
Armed militia have killed pro-reform protestors in Teheran. I don't believe that Shah Khamenei seriously intends to count the votes correctly. So the investigation he has agreed to must be intended to sap the strength of the protests for a week.
It is not forbidden to deinstall the Chinese internet-filtering application Green Dam, but it may still have the effect of tightening censorship, especially in Internet cafes, where the users cannot deinstall anything.
Argentina has launched an economic war to try to conquer the Falkland Islands.
The inhabitants of the islands have no relationship with Argentina, and do not want to be conquered.
Greg Palast: stealing oil from poor Indians is a global practice for oil companies.
Some supporting evidence that the Iranian presidential election was stolen.
The movie companies threatened to boycott digital TV if it didn't have DRM built in. It was a bluff.
Businesses always claim that laws they don't like will naturally make them fail, and we'll regrert it. This sort of claim works well as a bluff because occasionally it is true. But it's more often false. When businesses say what they "need", they have every incentive to exaggerate and distort. We must not trust them.
Antonio Castro, son of Fidel, got into an Internet romance with a prankster who pretended to be his type of woman, and in the process demontrated the fancy life of Cuba's ruling elite.
US citizens: phone Eric Garduno of the House Judiciary Committee to oppose the "Design Piracy Prohibition Act", which would establish a sort of copyright for clothing designs.
You can also send a message to Congress through this page, but a phone call has more effect. If you use the page, make sure to remove propaganda terms such as "protection" and "intellectual property" from your message. The second paragraph of their suggested message text legitimizes the general idea of imposing copyright on clothing designs, so I recommend replacing it entirely.
You can find more information in a petition but I don't think anyone should sign that petition, because at the end it describes copying as "piracy".
Support stronger protection for government whistleblowers.
Clown aims to prevent a thorough public inquiry into why Britain joined the conquest of Iraq.
North Korea has responded to increased sanctions by threatening war.
It would be a gross mistake for the US to act eager for a deal. To give North Korea anything for having made these threats would be a surrender comparable to Ronald Reagan's arms-for-hostages swap.
One response might be to visit North Korean ships on the high seas and give each crew member the opportunity to move to South Korea. If the regime has threatened to punish their families, there is a simple response: "Your family, in the prison which is North Korea, will wish to make a sacrifice so one of its members can escape. Don't let them down by wasting your chance."
300 detectives in Scotland Yard stand accused of charging large luxury expenses to the government.
The University Teachers for Human Rights, in Sri Lanka, describes how the LTTE crushed the human rights of Tamils, and how the government has taken over from them, including discrimination against Tamils as well as attcks on journalists.
The full report.
The Islamic fanatics declared themselves victors in the Iranian presidential election without bothering to count the votes. Khamenei is the new Shah, and little better than the last one. Iranians can state this by marching and chanting "Death to the Shah", reprising the protests that led to the downfall of the previous Shah.
Around the world, the megacorporations are taking natural resources from indigenous people's lands, often by force, often killing them, and often with the backing of the US.
The Clown regime refuses to say how much it harasses photographers, or where it authorizes policemen to search people for no reason.
Lawyers have sued the RIAA to demand return of the hundred million dollars it claims to have taken from music sharers.
An important Iraqi Sunni politician, who was cooperating with Shi'ites in support of human rights for Iraqis, was assassinated just after condemning al-Maliki.
US citizens: sign this petition for immediate release of the US report on the domestic right-wing terrorist threat.
US threats in 1995 made the World Health Organization cancel and bury a study which had found that cocaine was not very dangerous.
China's mandatory censorship software is full of security holes: unintended evil that accompanies the intended evil.
The UN imposed sanctions on North Korea, calling for all states to search North Korean ships for weapons.
A study by the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa (HSRC) finds that Israel's occupation of Palestine fully qualifies as colonization and as apartheid, according to the standard definitions.
Everyone: sign this petition to Peru's President Garcia to stop the violence and start talking with protestors.
Israeli politicians are telling Obama, implicitly, "Forget about peace; there's no one in Israel to talk peace with."
Stiglitz warns that the role of the supposedly democratic US in creating the economic crisis could sour parts of the world on democracy. People will only make that mistake if they believe the US has had a functioning democracy. At some point in the 70s, the control of business became almost irresistible. We need to spread the word that it was the corruption of US democracy, by the power of business, which led to the crisis.
China will require censorship malware on PCs (in addition to Windows, which is malware in itself).
What will this imply for computers with GNU/Linux?
US citizens: go to StrengthenIt.org to call for a stronger energy bill and resist the oil and coal companies.
The laws which indigenous Peruvians are protesting were decreed by the president in the name of a treaty with the US.
I admire Alberto Pizango for resisting the empire, but he should not exaggerate by calling the massacre of protestors "genocide". Tyranny and mass murder are bad enough; there is no need to seek a worse name to call them. (Later: someone suggested to me that he may have been talking about the general treatment of indigenous peoples rather than this one event. If so, it was not an exaggeration.)
President Garcia is right to blame foreign agents for this violence. He ought to know, since he is one of them. He is working for Washington, and Washington is working for the multinational companies. Expoitation is their goal, and murder is their frequent tool.
Peru should celebrate June 5 as Dependence Day, the day on which the surrender of its independence became manifest.
Did Obama vote to approve this treaty? If so, he is responsible. Will Obama tell Garcia, "Don't murder for the sake of those companies"? Or will he quietly let the empire's writ be enforced?
The French Constitutional Council vitiated the HADOPI law, the plan to disconnect people from the Internet if they are accused of sharing, on grounds that it is unconstitutional punishment without trial.
The UK Law Lords (comparable to the US Supreme Court) have ruled that those subject to "control orders" restricting their movements and communication must be shown the evidence these are based on, in order to challenge those orders in court.
This is a positive step, but not enough to make the system legitimate. Restricting specific people's activities is punishment, whether you call it that or not; punishing people without convicting them of a crime cannot be excused.
If there is probable cause to suspect these 20 people of planning serious crimes, that is valid grounds for a court to order every kind of surveillance and search, and keep it up for as long as the evidence suggests they are doing so. This will stop them from carrying out the hypothetical crime, if indeed that was their intention, while respecting their rights.
Exxon is still funding global warming denialists, in contradiction to its claim to have ceased.
The American chestnut tree may make a comeback.
As for effects on CO2, that can't hurt, but I don't think we could plant enough chestnut trees to make much of a dent in that problem.
The Obama regime, to cover up Bush regime torture, makes the argument that the greater the abuse, the more important it is to cover it up.
A Japanese man who was tortured into confessing to murder has been freed from prison due to DNA evidence.
Torture is good for extracting confessions if you don't care whether they are true or false.
Peru's army is fighting Indian protestors in Amazonia who object to logging and oil drilling that he unilaterally permitted.
China has tripled its 2020 targets for renewable electric generation, to 15% of total energy generation.
I think this has a second motive of economic stimulus, to use idle capacity and workers for something very much worth doing.
Police in the UK are being investigated for torturing suspects.
The suspects were accused of importing pot; an activity which ought to be legal, just as importation of more dangerous drugs such s alcohol and tobacco must be legal.
The head of Countrywide, a leading actor in the real estate bubble, has been charged with lying to investors about what the company was doing.
US citizens: phone key members of Congress and urge them to vote against the bill which (1) funds the occupation of Iraq, (2) funds the IMF, which imposes cruel cutbacks on poor countries, and (3) covers up torture of prisoners of the US government.
China's excuse for mandatory censorship software is "protecting children", just as in "free" countries.
Poaching by Chinese gangs is going so fast that it can wipe out the rhinos of Zimbabwe in a few years.
Shell Oil has agreed to pay compensation to killed and injured protestors that it apparently paid the Nigerian army to get rid of. This settlement is meant to avoid a trial, at which the facts of Shell's involvement in the killing would become known.
An prisoner from Guantanamo has been put on trial in the US, in a civilian court where he has a chance of a fair trial. May justice be served.
Obama's speech: What does it mean?
The Bush forces have freed a prisoner connected with al-Sadr, hoping an Iraqi militia will free one of its prisoners. The prisoners held by the militia are described as "hostages", which implies there was no legitimate reason to capture them, but that's not necessarily so. Security personnel in Iraq are doing a job that is military in nature. Perhaps the captured programmer is really a hostage.
Obama tried to sneak money to the IMF through a bill for war funds, and is running into trouble.
Bush continues to defend the torture that he ordered.
Sri Lanka has imprisoned doctors who treated wounded Tamil civilians, accusing them of helping the LTTE.
A right-wing radio personality experienced waterboarding and now agrees that it is torture.
The Swedish Pirate Party won a seat in the European Parliament.
20 years ago, millions of Chinese supported protests for democracy until the tyrants crushed them with an act of terrorism.
For the past 20 years, China's government has used economic growth to distract people from the issue of tyranny.
Chinese internet users protested the government censorship by taking their sites down for "Chinese Internet Maintenance Day".
It's interesting to note a common pattern of state-sponsored terror: stopping people from counting the dead. The Bush forces in Iraq have also done everything possible to prevent authoritative figures from existing, so that they can deny what they have done. Sri Lanka is doing the same thing now.
The terrorists want the victims to have a general idea of danger, so that they feel terror, but they want to keep the world in ignorance so as to escape the odium their deeds deserve. Thus, policies that cover up the number of casualties are an indicator of probable mass murder.
The Taliban used a suicide bomber to attack a mosque in a Pakistani town which had resisted them.
Berlusconi regularly uses air force planes to bring starlets to his casting couch.
US health insurance companies have invested lots of money in tobacco companies.
A group of MPs called on the UK to donate more to help poor countries cope with the effects of climate change.
I think the donations should go to reducing population growth, because that is crucial in the long term.
Note how it is futile to try to choose our purchases to reduce CO2 emission, because we don't have enough information to make good decisions. What we need is to enable prices to guide our decisions towards less emissions. A hefty tax on CO2 emissions would do it.
Chinese internet censorship and surveillance have been increased in honor of the massacre at Tiananmen Square 20 years ago.
The Conference Board of Canada tried to blame its dishonest report on "piracy" on a staffer who had left 10 months before, and whose last draft did not include the plagiarized material.
Governor Bush told Houston Journalist: If Elected. "I'm Going to Invade Iraq".
The media were scared to publish this because of fear Republicans would call it a lie. As a result, a million Iraqis were killed.
Obama has openly rejected Israel's policy of extending settlements, and criticized other cruelties of the occupation.
I'm favorably impressed. Earlier it looked like he would completely bow down to Israel, but now it seems he just wanted to broach the issue slowly.
Still, he has a long way to if he is to support a just policy that could lead to a peace agreement. For instance, he demands that Hamas accept past agreements, but doesn't demand the same of Israel.
Chinese police have blocked off Tiananmen Square and are keeping journalists out.
New surveillance technology makes it even easier to track and localize people.
I am skeptical that the army can get much use out of these methods in Afghanistan. Locating the tag may work well, but putting a tag on someone in the Taliban is likely to be hard. On the other hand, these methods could be devastatingly effective against dissidents, for any government which seeks to trample their rights.
Michael Moore's recommendations for restructuring GM to do what society needs doing.
Sign the petition to Caterpillar to stop selling bulldozers to Israel.
Israel uses these bulldozers to destroy Palestinian homes, sometimes on short notice, sometimes killing people.
Take action for abortion rights in honor of murdered Dr. Tiller.
Dr. Tiller's abortions saved women's lives.
Ryanair plans to charge passengers a large fee to use the toilet on a plane, and they will have to pay with credit cards.
The arguments Mr O'Leary are irrational. To remove some of the toilets does not require charging to use the remaining one. What will they do if one passenger holds the door for another?
If Ryanair goes ahead with this, male passengers should piss into a cup and hand it to the flight attendant. They can do this without leaving their seats. Women, however, may find this more difficult. They should refuse to fly Ryanair — and so should men.
Will the Senate question General McChrystal about torture under his command?
The Amazon rainforest is being destroyed by illegal farms that send beef products to rich countries.
Obama is openly pressuring Israel to stop extending the settlements on Palestinian land.
Israel has completely frozen construction in the Palestinian parts of Jerusalem, and in parts of the West Bank. It implements this policy in a very firm (and harsh) way. So it cannot claim this cannot be done.
Meanwhile, when the Israeli government removed a settlement "outpost" (built by settlers as an excuse for later expansion), the fanatics protested by attacking Palestinians.
The fanatic who murdered Dr Tiller probably murdered many women with the same shot. He was the only hope (in the US) for many women whose pregnancies had gone very wrong.
The UN Human Rights Council totally endorsed Sri Lanka's treatment of Tamil civilians, including blocking access to the ICRC.
Countries that voted in favor include Angola, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, China, Cuba, Djibouti, Egypt, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Madagascar, Malaysia, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Qatar, Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, South Africa, Uruguay, Zambia.
Shame on them.
The bankruptcy of GM will cause unnecessary pain and unfairness — for instance, to people who bought cars with defects — and could easily have been avoided. Even worse, although the US will take majority control of GM, Obama has no interest in changing the foolish priorities that landed GM in bankruptcy.
And it is union-busting worse than what Bush wanted to do.
Obama has done nothing to restrain fanatical Christians from taking over the US military.
The band Advance Patrol placed a torrent for their latest album to the Pirate Bay, to rebuke the record companies for citing their music to prosecute the Pirate Bay.
20 years after the massacre of student protestors in Tiananmen Square, China forbids any mention of what happened, trying to force people to forget it.
Obama's plan for GM's bankruptcy would raid workers' pension funds to give some banks 100% of their loans. So who is Obama really working for?
An anti-smoking senator confirmed that Philip Morris co-wrote the current weak tobacco control bill.
Bush told Chirac his planned invasion of Iraq was "willed by God" to "erase" enemy peoples. And Rumsfeld tried to manipulate him with biblical references.
My cartoon about this was meant as a humorous extrapolation from the facts, but it turns out to be almost 100% literal truth.
Obama is helping to prevent inquiry into financial connections between the 9/11 attackers and the Sa'udi royal family.
The Bush family has ties with the Sa'udi royal family, too.
I don't think Obama would give a fig for Bush, but he doesn't want the sort of radical reexamination of US policy that might come from disproving the official story of what happened on 9/11/01.
US officials are trying to control the Lebanese election by threats.
Congress is working on a bill specifically to cover up evidence of Bush regime torture, by overriding the Freedom of Information Act.
Melting permafrost threatens to make a big contribution to global warming starting in a decade or two, and getting worse.
At Latin American commission on drug policy, headed by the former president of Brazil, calls for decriminalizing marijuana and cocaine use.
This does not go far enough. To end the corrosive effects of the War on Drugs, it is necessary to legalize some kind of sale as well. As long as addicts can only get their drugs from outlaws, it will be extremely profitable for outlaws to sell drugs.
The government of India is setting up censorship of news and politics on web sites.
The right-wing Israeli government is attacking democracy and political freedom on a broad front.
Big pharma funding is corrupting a large fraction of cancer research.
In Mogadishu, after Ethiopia ended its US-supported intervention, rival factions fight for control once again.
Cruel Islamic law almost brought peace to Somalia. Thanks to the intervention, Somalia instead has cruel Islamic law and civil war.
As the UK refuses asylum to refugees from the Congo, evidence emerges that one such deportee was tortured there.
North Korea threatened to attack South Korea if its ships are searched for nuclear weapons.
Sugar-free cookies convinced an al Qa'ida prisoner to give useful information.
Obama said that expansion of Israeli settlements in occupied Palestine endangers US security -- defying the Israeli hawks' lobby.
Desmond Tutu says that the occupation of Palestine is in some ways worse than apartheid, and that if the world doesn't solve this problem, many other problems can't possibly be solved.
Although Obama said he will withdraw the Bush forces from Iraq by 2011, the army is planning to stay for a decade.
The Tamil civilians imprisoned by Sri Lanka are getting no help in making contact with their family.
A US comic collector will go to prison for owning comics that visually depict sexual abuse of children.
I understand the idea of obscenity. I considered the movie Pulp Fiction revoltingly obscene (for violence, not for sex), and I will try to avoid seeing anything like it ever again. But revulsion for a work cannot justify censoring it. Censorship on the grounds of obscenity is pure, unadulterated evil, and there is nothing more obscene.
A Guatemalan man is facing 10 years in prison for telling friends what he heard people saying about an allegedly corrupt bank.
The Taliban are fighting to hold on to Mingora, and reportedly threatening civilians too.
Classic guerrilla tactics are to melt away when facing a strong conventional army. Their decision to stand and fight could lead to a real defeat.
Jamil Rahman, who was tortured by Bangadeshi captors with the complicity of MI5 agents, is suing the UK's minister in charge.
Tell the DOD to prosecute KBR for deadly inadequate work in Iraq.
Yes, this is not as bad as killing a million Iraqis. But the reason Bush did that is to benefit cronies such as KBR.
The permanent war economy in the US undermines and militarizes every area of life.
Chomsky explains the US' long history of torture. The main change under Bush was that Americans did it directly rather than through proxies.
Chomsky's main point is to show the disparity between US ideals and US conduct. I think we should be careful to fault the conduct and not the ideals.
Israel is systematically persecuting dissidents, sometimes attacking them physically, sometimes framing them on the usual false charges police bring against protestors.
Israel's parliament gave preliminary approval to a law to imprison people for speaking against "Israel's existence as a Jewish and democratic state" in ways that might "lead to a lack of loyalty".
To stand in favor of this bill is to oppose israel's existence as a democratic state, and will inspire a lack of loyalty to that state in the mind of anyone that upholds human rights. So will all those who speak in favor of the bill be prosecuted if it passes? I doubt it. The bill is meant to censor opposition.
Sri Lanka plans to hold Tamil civilians in prison camps for up to 2 years, blocking aid and causing them to go hungry. It plans to try former rebel soldiers for murder.
Will Sri Lankan soldiers who shot Tamil soldiers or bombarded Tamil civilians be tried?
Israeli police are persistently harassing Israeli Bedouin to force them to move out of their homes.
The Iraqi government is increasingly attacking the Sunni militias that Bush bought off a couple of years ago.
Israel has blocked a team of European judges and lawyers from going to Gaza to investigate accusations of Israeli war crimes.
As long as Israel blocks the investigation, we must hold Israel to be guilty as charged.
Support the campaign to relegalize same-sex marriage in California.
The Bush forces, now under Obama's command, continue to keep Iraqi journalist Ibrahim Jassam in prison — the latest in a long series.
Children in Irish catholic schools were systematically beaten and even raped, through the 90s.
More dishonest drug marketing: Bristol-Myers pays patients to say what a great job its products do, whether it's true or not.
Obama's supreme court justice must above all uphold the bill of rights, which means limiting executive privilege and executive power.
Is Obama likely to appoint such a person?
A UK court ruled that police surveillance practices at protests are illegal.
An Italian court convicted a lawyer of taking a bribe from Berlusconi to tell lies.
Berlusconi cannot be prosecuted for giving the bribe because he adopted a law to give himself immunity. So Italy now has a prime minister who has been estabilshed by a court as corrupt and cannot be punished for it.
Last.fm says it didn't hand over customer data to the record company thugs. Strictly speaking, it wasn't Last.fm, it was CBS.
Don't trust any Internet service for accessing music or video if it requires you do identify yourself.
Smithfield Foods, whose operations provided the breeding ground for swine flu, contracts lots of farmers to raise its pigs. As a result, it avoids responsibility for the illnesses caused by its toxic wastes.
The Bush forces raped teenage prisoners in Abu Ghraib.
Obama, will you prosecute? Or will you keep the videos secret to protect these rapists?
The Bush regime paid bonuses to crony-company KBR for the substandard work that electrocuted soldiers.
The UK's system of cameras that track all car travel is already being used to persecute political opposition.
This system should not be permitted to record information about any car in the absence of a court order obtained based on evidence of a crime. And the person who was tracked must be notified within a reasonable time.
Obama now advocates perpetual imprisonment without trial, on mere suspicion.
Although he says this is for "security", that does not mean security for Americans. Nothing is more dangerous to any country's security than the abolution of human rights.
I thought for a while that Obama was somewhat less evil than Bush, but I no longer believe this. Governments that imprison people without trial are tyranny. Obama is less crazy and less stupid than Bush, and less focused on short term gain. But he is no less evil, and he is just the person to make some of Bush's damage to our rights permanent.
Sri Lanka's army finished defeating the Tamil Tiger army, and the president declared they had "liberated the country from terrorism", though other officials recognize that a military victory can't do that.
A quarter of a million Sri Lankan Tamils are in prison camps, where they are not being given enough food. Aid is being blocked on absurd excuses.
Meanwhile, Sri Lanka also faces state-sponsored terrorism, such as the murder of journalists.
Students in the UK walked out of classes, and wore masks, in protest against CCTV in their classroom.
They should protest the fingerprint scanner too, by refusing to use it.
Does anyone know what those masks looked like? I wonder if they were Guy Fawkes masks as in V for Vendetta.
The US is having peace talks with the moderate Taliban.
A few powerful companies are buying up lots of land around the world.
Amory Lovins demonstrates that nuclear electricity generation is obsolete — small renewable generating stations and improvements in efficiency are cheaper and can do the whole job, more safely and more reliably.
Interestingly, he also shows that investors know this, and refuse to invest in building nuclear plants even with tremendous subsidies.
A scientific paper which reported the drug Ecstacy is very dangerous was completely mistaken, its authors admit.
Their experiment was supposed to use Ecstacy but actually used methamphetamine.
Berlusconi has proudly ordered the Italian coast guard to take boat people directly back to Libya without giving them a chance to apply for political asylum.
A human rights lawyer aims to challenge this, but il Ducino does not care much for laws that get in the way of his power.
The US and the Pakistani government are expanding the war against the Taliban, and the US has placed a death and torture squad chief in charge.
Fighting the Taliban is not wrong in and of itself. They are murderous religious fanatics, or at least some of them are. Some have become more moderate, on the Afghan spectrum — no worse than the mysogynist warlords the US is fighting for — and just want the US out of Afghanistan. It would be better to make peace with those, and help them overcome the power of the militants.
If we must fight the Taliban, it has to be done in a way that respects civilians, or it becomes both wrong and futile. It is sad news that the US forces are just as dishonest under Obama about killing lots of civilians as they were under Bush. I can't imagine that McChrystal would honestly admit such killings; if his attitude towards torture is to deny it, he will surely deny that the corpses are civilians.
India has an opportunity now to reduce its hostility with Pakistan by offering humanitarian aid to help the million refugees.
The US congress voted to prevent the closure of Guantanamo prison.
Most of the prisoners never intended terrorism or any crime. They were the victims of lies, followed by the government-can't-admit-mistakes syndrome, and some were tortured into false confessions. The US congress does them wrong when it presumes they are guilty of anything, and it wants to imprison them for the rest of their lives.
The FCC claims the power to raid your home without a warrant if you have a cell phone or a wireless network.
Powers to inspect equipment are tolerable only if they strictly cannot be used to prosecute for anything else.
Petition the WHO to investigate the danger of pig factories.
The International Committee of the Red Cross stopped aid operations in Sri Lanka due to new government restrictions.
Three doctors who treated injured civilians have been arrested, and people fear they will be killed so they cannot talk. I fear they may be tortured.
Binyam Mohammed's attorney says waterboarding is the "tip of the iceberg".
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to demand a strong bill to control greenhouse gas emissions. And sign this petition too.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Merck employees planned to discredit and sabotage the careers of MDs who criticized the company. Merck also bullied the UK government into denying legal aid to people harmed by vioxx.
The proposal for a right-to-repair law illustrates the harm done by proprietary software in cars.
UK employers are using drug tests as an excuse to fire people and cut their unemployment benefits.
There is no reason to suppose that these victims' use of marijuana affected them in any way while they were at work. Such drug testing should be illegal. Companies that are concerned employees might be using drugs (legal or not) which interfere with their job performance should test their performance instead. There are video games designed to do this in a couple of minutes.
The US climate bill seems to be headed for real short-term cuts in CO2 emissions.
But fossil fuel companies spent $44 million in three months to lobby against it.
BP tries to present itself as "responsible" based on spending a tiny percentage of its budget on renewable energy. And it is cutting that.
Israeli activist Ronnie Barkan talks about how Palestinians came to accept him as a real supporter for their nonviolent peace movement — and about fellow protestor Bassem Ibrahim Abu Rahma, who was killed by an Israeli soldier while telling soldiers about another injured protestor.
The Bush forces freed many Iraqis who had been held (sometimes for years) without trial. Now the Iraqi government wants to arrest them and imprison them again without trial.
The CCTV cameras installed all around Britain in the name of stopping crime fail to have much effect, except in parking lots.
Danger Mouse will sell blank CDs, telling buyers to download his music and write the CDs themselves.
Nina Paley is going even further by giving away "pre-downloaded" DVD copies of Sita Sings the Blues.
A woman in Montreal was arrested and fined for not holding the handrail on the escalator.
This is not the worst thing that policemen do to act out their hostility. It is not as bad as hitting protestors and injuring them or killing them. But it is still too much.
US citizens:
Sign the petition to tell Congress: don't donate more arms to Israel since it violates the conditions on the arms it has already been given.
Sign the petition to Attorney General Holder to vacate the politically motivated charges against Don Siegelman as he recently did against former Senator Stevens.
Tsvangirai seems to have ceded the battle of wills to Mugabe, who maintains his tyrannical control unchanged in Zimbabwe.
Israeli settlers continue attacking nearby Palestinian villages in an attempt to drive off the inhabitants and take their land.
Burma is putting Aung San Suu Kyi in prison again.
Bad conditions in US factory pig farms enabled the ancestor of today's swine flu to evolve.
And scientists warned 10 years ago that this could happen.
Obama should stop dawdling and nationalize the failed banks.
The New York Supreme Court disagreed with Wisconsin; it ruled that GPS tracking requires a warrant.
US citizens: sign this petition to the senate to establish protections for credit card holders against credit card companies.
Step by step, Obama has undertaken to conceal evidence of the Bush regime's crimes, stating reasons which would support unlimited government dishonesty.
The IRF squads at Guatanamo regularly attack helpless prisoners. They blinded Omar Deghayes by spraying pepper spray into his eyes while holding him down.
These thugs remain active under Obama.
General Miller asked the Iraq Survey Group to use torture to find (i.e., fabricate) evidence of Saddam's nonexistent weapons of mass distruction.
Although the information in this article is important, the opinion in its first sentence can't be allowed to pass. There is no situation in which torturing prisoners is acceptable, or even effective for finding out the truth. What torture is good for is extracting false confessions.
Israel has turned the Palestinian village of Nuaman into a prison. Its inhabitants have been arrested at times for living there. The aim is ethnic cleansing.
Sri Lanka expelled a journalist who reported on the horrible treatment of Tamil civilians in internment camps.
Uri Avnery: Israel fans the feud between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, presenting the former as collaborators to keep it weak.
Avigdor Lieberman, who believes human rights do not apply to Palestinians, wants a law to prohibit the annual protests about losing their homes when Israel was established in 1948.
Regardless of one's position on the events of 1948, a state that prohibits protests is tyranny.
Almost 370 farms in England are still restricted due to pollution from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
Nuclear power is so expensive that no one will invest in it without a tremendous subsidy. But the big companies that build the nukes have been very effective at winning the support of politicians such as Obama for the subsidies they want.
Israelis dump toxic waste in Palestine without precautions, and the Israeli army protects the culprits them from the PA.
This shades off into the general problem of rich countries' selling waste to poor countries, where people who are desperate pick through it for something valuable to recycle. The only full solution is a fairer economy and an end to population growth. But the Israeli case is a special case, since the desperate poverty of Palestinians is as much due to Israeli occupation as to any indigenous factors.
Israel is going to destroy more Arab homes in East Jerusalem.
Obama has broken his promise to release photos of Bush regime torture.
A Sri Lankan bombardment killed around a thousand civilians in the area where the army told the civilians to go to be safe.
For criminal charges against individuals, the rule is "Innocent until proven guilty." That's because it is too easy for the state to falsely accuse. However, for accusations against the state, the rule is "Guilty until investigation permitted."
Given the Sri Lankan government's exclusion of independent journalists from the battle, we must find that government guilty as charged.
On the definition of terrorism, who does it, and why (1998).
The pre-protestors arrested for "planning terrorism" before the G20 meeting were quietly released since there was nothing to charge them with. But the arrests prevented them from protesting.
The Israeli army took Adlah Yasseen hostage to try to make her son surrender.
Everyone: send a message to the Japanese government to use its influence to stop Sri Lanka from bombarding civilians.
Thousands are fleeing the fighting in Swat.
Food is more expensive in Gaza than before the Israeli attack, due to the Israeli siege. Some families are down to one meal a day.
I won't say that the inhabitants of Gaza have absolutely none of the responsibility for this problem. They are having too many children, and that is always asking for trouble. But that is no excuse for the siege, and the siege is the main cause of this hunger.
Palm oil is grown on stolen land in Indonesia to make biodiesel fuel, but it ends up contributing more to global warming than petroleum.
Sign this petition for a special prosecutor to investigate the Bush regime's torture planners.
A blind interpreter, arrested on a plane where he was forced to sit for two hours while it taxied around, says he has nightmares of waking up in cell.
The "security theater" with its accompanying paranoia is often galling, but usually the only substantial harm it does is to the spirit of freedom. As we get worn down and accustomed to obedience, we become more suited to living in a dictatorship than in a free society. But this instance shows that it is liable also to do major harm to individuals.
Note the fundamental injustice of arresting people for criticizing the way they are being treated.
Note also how airline personnel use absurd accusations as a way to distract attention from their mistreatment of the passengers. They are trained to put the passenger in the wrong.
Israel's bombardment of Gaza destroyed 25,000 buildings. Israel's siege does not allow building materials in, so Gazans have to rebuild using mud bricks.
The Electronic Police State collects (or fabricates) tremendous amounts of evidence about nearly everyone, with which it can prosecute any chosen target. This survey rates the US among the worst.
Jesse Ventura: You Give Me a Water Board, Dick Cheney and One Hour, and I'll Have Him Confess to the Sharon Tate Murders.
I disagree with Ventura on one point: I see no virtue in having fought for the US in Vietnam. I don't blame anyone for trying to avoid going to Vietnam to fight to defend a compliant dictatorship against an unfriendly dictatorship. However, when the same person subsequently launches an equally unjust war, equally based on lies, he does open himself to charges of hypocrisy.
The Pentagon commissioned an investigation and report to whitewash the Pentagon Paid Political Propaganda Pundits Program. Then it decided to bury the report and say nothing.
Police in Canada and Scotland are offering large bribes to activists to spy on environmentalist groups.
If activists could offer police money to tell about their plans to sabotage protests and attack protestors, perhaps democracy would be able to protect itself from the police.
While Merck publishes fake medical journals, Pfizer is using another sleazy method to disguise its advertisements for drugs.
The ways to reduce the money these companies can use to gull the public include unified national drug purchase (normal in wealthy countries other than the US), reduced patent powers, and increased taxes. It is established that research into drug effects is untrustworthy when funded by drug manufacturers.
So why let them do it? The government should increase their taxes and fund the research itself.
The French national assembly voted for a law to give the media companies the power to cut off people's internet connections on mere accusation.
The same law will also require people to install non-free software in order to make their networks "secure".
US treatment of the remaining prisoners in Guantanamo contrasts shamefully with the treatment of over 400,000 German prisoners of war.
I think the article is mistaken on one point: it is too late to hope to win the friendship of these prisoners, because the US has shown them too much cruelty already. German prisoners responded well to the US because they were treated decently (as prisoners of war) from the beginning. Someone who has been tortured, or held for years in solitary confinement, will hold a grudge that can't be overcome by ordinary decent treatment. But this grudge is no excuse to continue the injustice which caused the grudge.
These prisoners deserve to be freed or given fair trials.
A Wisconsin court ruled police don't need search warrants to attach tracking devices to anyone's car.
The logic which led to this decision wasn't invented by this court. It is the usual criterion for such questions. This is one of many consequences that show it is inadequate today. If police are allowed to use computers to gather all the information that they might have obtained if they had 500 million policemen watching everyone's public movements all the time, we will have an effective police state.
I wonder if it is illegal for you or me to put a tracking device on someone's car — perhaps the car of Justice Scalia, who thinks the constitution does little to protect people from such tracking.
A Guatemalan lawyer murdered on May 10 recorded a video accusing the president of Guatemala of killing him.
A US air raid in Afghanistan killed over 100 civilians.
Uri Avnery: comparing Iran to Nazi Germany, as the president of Israel did, is trivializing the holocaust.
Although the US government has failed to help many New Orleans refugees get back on their feet, it is repossessing the trailers it gave them, in order to sell them again for very little.
It seems to be a matter of principle for FEMA that its aid be withdrawn at some arbitrary time.
Lake Mead, behind the Hoover Dam, is rapidly emptying despite some conservation measures.
China is now ready for efforts to reduce CO2 emissions now that it sees the US is willing.
The term "intelletual property" in this article is a gratuitously vague way of referring to patents.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to call for an investigation of whether Israel violated US arms export conditions when attacking Gaza. And send a message through this site.
For legislators, phone calls carry more weight than emails.
Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641, and 888-355-3588.
An MP accused the London police of sending agents provocateurs to incite crowds.
Australian government Internet censorship forced Electronic Frontiers Australia to remove a link to a political web site which is on the censored list.
Here is the article in which the link was deleted.
I think the site linked to is an anti-abortion site. I totally disagree with that position, but we (and governments) must respect the right to express whatever views and present whatever facts.
Elsevier publishes at least six fake scientific journals as advertising for drug companies.
Criticism of the way the Gates foundation spends its money.
A proposed US law would make it a crime to send emails to "cause emotional distress".
US citizens: call your congresscritter to support HR1466 which would eliminate mandatory minimum federal sentence for violating drug laws. Also send a message through this page.
You can also support this bill proposing a commission to consider reducing the US prison population.
Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641, and 888-355-3588.
A photographer on the San Francisco Muni railway was threatened with arrest for taking a photograph.
A new idea for peace in the Middle East: parallel step-by-step concessions by Israel and Iran.
It is a clever idea, but it has a limited window of possibility: until Iran has nuclear weapons. I am sure Netanyahu and Lieberman will reject it unless the US essentially forces it on them, and all they need to do to wreck it is delay.
A recent poll says most Americans favor legalization of marijuana.
A court decision may require the wholesale destruction of records about Guantanamo prisoners' trials, including the prisoners' own letters.
What worries me most is the destruction of the prisoners' letters. There is no criminal case to be made against most of these prisoners. If they are freed, they will be able to tell whatever secrets they know, which mainly means how they were tortured. Of course, Bush wanted to deny them any chance to do this, by holding them incommunicado for the rest of their lives. But if that is no longer the US government's intention, why should they not get their letters back?
The
US system of food inspection
An
Israeli peace activist says that Israel has launched a war on dissent.
The European Parliament voted to reject the punishment-on-accusation
plan of the War on Sharing, but
failed to defend net neutrality.
Human Rights Watch says US interrogators
tortured 12 prisoners to death
and killed 34 others.
Justice Scalia said he thinks privacy rights are unimportant. So
teacher assigned his class the project of
making a dossier about
Scalia.
If Scalia doesn't learn anything from this, others may. I agree that
aggregation of available data makes the problem worse. But
restricting people from aggregating data that is available to the
public is a worse threat to their freedom. So what I propose is to
restrict the systematic collection and maintenance of data — for
instance, security cameras should be allowed only if the recordings
are systematically destroyed in a reasonable time except when there is
a court order to preserve the recordings of specific events.
14 workers in Venezuela who
protested for back pay face prison
sentences of up to 10 years. The company was subsequently
nationalized, but that only caused them to lose the support
of their union.
Massachusetts citizens: phone your state representative to
oppose a
law that would criminalize erotic photos of people over age 60.
Not satisfied with imprisoning teenagers who share nude photos of
themselves, Massachusetts wants to imprison old people too.
Apparently they demand that old people be asexual.
London police
search someone on the street without probable cause
every 3 minutes.
Obama is still hiding ACTA negotiations.
Given his and Biden's past attitudes towards copyright,
Americans should feel very worried about what he will do.
Freedom House has
downgraded its rating of press freedom in Israel
from Free to Partly Free, due largely to continuing interference
with independent journalism in Gaza.
Obama is showing some signs of intention to pressure Israel to make
peace.
This is a turn for the better, but Netanyahu is determined
to reject peace and continue taking Palestinian land.
He may treat gentle pressure as a bluff.
Hamas has stopped firing rockets
to support its offer of a ten-year truce
on the 1967 borders.
This is not enough for a final peace agreement; for that, Israel would
be justified in insisting on recognition of its right to exist as part
of such an agreement. But it is enough basis for commencing
negotiations.
US citizens:
sign this petition to include Public Citizen
in Senate hearings about health care reform.
These hearings have so far excluded everyone that favors
single-payer funding.
Iraqi prisons
continue to be places of torture.
Remember when Bush said the conquest of Iraq had achieved
the elimination of Saddam's torture?
The Taliban attacked the police in Swat, sinking the peace agreement
with the government of Pakistan.
The killing (almost certainly murder) of a nonviolent protestor in
Bil'in comes after the Israeli border police have ignored orders
to investigate previous incidents of gratuitous violence.
Nigel Inkster, who was MI6 deputy director when MI6 gave the bogus
intelligence report that was used to justify conquering Iraq, says
that there
were doubts about it at the time, and that the UK was
"dragged into war".
It was dragged by Tony B'liar, who would do anything at all for Bush,
even kill.
A
UN report condemns Israel for 7 attacks on UN facilities in Gaza.
It also condemns Palestinian fighters for using "indiscriminate
weapons", i.e. rockets, one of which damaged a UN warehouse.
Peace activists protested in the AIPAC conference.
Israel is building a fenced-off "security road" through a Palestinian
village,
as an excuse to steal its land.
The combination of sugar, salt and fat causes brain changes that
crave more of the same.
Indian public schools
discriminate cruelly against Dalits, and this bigotry
leads many of them stay out of school.
Berlusconi is preemptively smearing his wife, who is divorcing him for
associating with other women, so as to protect himself from whatever
revelations of dirty dealing may come from her.
I see nothing to criticize if a man (or a woman, if so inclined)
associates with pretty, young women — or pretty, young men, or
both — or goes to bed with them. I would not reject my lover
for having other lovers. I don't believe in exclusivity as a
principle or moral obligation in love relationships, and I don't ask
for it from those I love.
However, choosing candidates for public office for youth and beauty
shows disrespect for the mission of the state.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter in support of closing US tax
loopholes for corporations that "locate" themselves in foreign tax
havens.
Also sign this petition.
The Capitol Switchboard
numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Nepal's elected Maoist
prime minister has resigned, bringing down the
government, after he was blocked from firing the army commander.
The army commander has sabotaged the peace deal that ended the civil
war. Obama's decision to call the governing party "terrorist" gave
him US support under false pretenses, and thus risks a breakdown
of the peace deal and renewed civil war.
A group of businessmen — those being
the real rulers of the
Clown regime — has joined the opposition to extending Heathrow
airport.
Warner Music had Warner Music's postings
taken down for
"piracy".
I put the word in quotes because it is a
propaganda term
that we should firmly and consistently reject.
When the Clown regime said it would not directly spy on all internet
traffic,
it was lying.
Obama has kept the democratically elected Maoist ruling party of Nepal
on the "terrorist list". This in effect encourages a military coup.
If the US "terrorist" list is used for political reasons unrelated to
terrorism, it is simply a dishonest excuse for sanctions against other
states.
Sanctions are sometimes justified, but not dishonest ones.
Arlen Spector has become a Democrat, illustrating how
both the
Democratic and Republican parties are becoming more right-wing.
If this is what a Democrat is, I am not one.
US citizens:
phone your congressman to support the National Security
Letters Reform Act introduced by Congressmen Jerry Nadler and Jeff Flake.
But don't call use the word "patriot" to refer to the unjust existing
law. In a nation based on human rights, there is nothing more
unpatriotic than to undermine them. The law's official name is the
U.S.A.P.A.T.R.I.O.T. act. If we are to subdivide that acronym with
spaces, any way is as valid as any other. I call it the U SAP AT RIOT
act.
The Capitol Switchboard
numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Here is more information about the police raids on the Israeli
nonmiitarist organization New Profile.
These Israeli organizations have carefully obeyed the Israeli law
against urging people to refuse conscription, and expected that they
would be allowed continue operating thus. That expectation was based
on the supposition that the government would honestly obey its own law
in this issue, even though in so many others it does not.
Since I am outside Israel, and safe from this threat of censorship, I
can say what any Israeli must fear to say. As long as the Israeli
Army's principal mission is the occupation of Palestine, the most
heroic thing a young Israeli can do is refuse to enlist.
Abu Dhabi's torturer prince is
implicated in 25 more attacks.
The US will be in a better position to insist other countries punish
powerful people for torturing if it does so itself. The US must
launch an investigation of Bush's personal role in torture to make
sure he does not escape justice.
Obama is convinced torture is never useful (which is true), but
declined to say it is outright wrong.
The UK dropped its plan to set up a centralized big brother database to
track
all communications. Instead it will use a
decentralized big brother
database.
This could be a small step forward, but only if police must get a
court order to examine the communications records of specific parties.
I cannot tell from this article whether that is the case. If the
police can get anything in the database whenever they wish, it gives
the citizens no protection.
Human Rights Watch says
Mexico fails to act against soldiers that rape
and kill civilians.
Tell the US govt to overturn Bush's environmental
sabotage regulations.
Merck set up a phony medical research journal and got Elsevier to
publish it, so it can give more credibility to its drug marketing.
US citizens:
Petition Obama to nominate a Supreme Court justice that will defend
everyone's rights.
The FDA has been corrupted — by Bush, it appears — into
helping companies
rush medical devices out the door without testing
them.
Part of the reason for the corruption of the FDA
is making the companies whose products are tested
pay for the tests.
A similar policy has corrupted the US patent office and the European
patent office: they regard patent applicants as their customers
and therefore try to cater to them.
The idea of "making the companies pay" is superficially attractive,
but they will pass the price along to their customers. Government
safety functions, including research into the effects of drugs,
should be funded directly from tax money so as to reduce the influence
of the manufacturers.
The
UN condemned Israel's steady demolition of Palestinian homes
in East Jerusalem.
Israel's excuse, that the homes violate urban planning rules, is no
excuse at all given that the planning policy visibly discriminates
against them.
A major Swedish ISP says it
will cease to keep IP address records
so that it cannot be used to inform on what its customers share.
US citizens:
phone key senators to support a single-payer health care
system.
Congress has held nearly 20 hearings on health care reform this year,
but only one witness has been invited to testify on a single-payer
solution. See
here
for the testimony.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121,
888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
AIPAC employees will not face US charges of spying.
If the US government intended Israel to get this information, then I
agree their activity was not spying. However, whether or not the
Israeli hawks' lobby committed a crime, the US needs to break its
power, or there will never be peace between Israel and Palestine.
Netanyahu's
condition for peace: Palestinians must endorse Israel's
delegitimation of its Arab citizens.
When the Clown regime was asked for its
legal position about Phorm, a
privacy-invading Internet advertising scheme, it asked Phorm what
position would please it.
The B'liar/Clown policy towards business is, "Give business as much as
the people will let us get away with." This is typical of the
governments serve as subalterns for the corporate empire.
Irish university students are protesting
plans to make poor students pay
tuition fees which will exclude them from education.
When the UK arrests children to be deported, it subjects them to
a wide
range of gratuitous cruelty, such as giving them just 3 minutes to pack
whatever they can.
The government spokesman says we shouldn't be concerned, because they
have made "further progress" since that inspection a year ago.
Anyone that would describe that cruelty as "progress" obviously
is not fit to comment on the matter.
An
FBI internal discussion, now published, referred to an executive
order signed by Bush himself directly authorizing torture by the
military.
No such executive order has been published, and the Bush regime denied
there ever was one. But those denials are hardly credible now.
Why does Obama continue protecting sadists?
UN:
Iraqi women suffer regular domestic violence.
160 women murdered in Kurdistan is a small number, on the scale of the
violence that Bush unleashed on Iraq; however, lesser levels of
violence — as well as the intimidation of the threat of
murder or violence — affect nearly all the women there.
Swiss citizens:
vote against biometric passports.
Vote against them for the digital fingerprints.
Vote against them for the RFIDs.
The
Green Party's report card for on Obama: small change, so far.
The US Chamber of Commerce wants "save the environment"
by eliminating the regulations that protect it.
The restrictions those companies object to are the only obstacle to
the tremendous harm that they would do.
Transparency means
nothing without justice.
Pakistan has gone on the attack against the Taliban everywhere except
in Swat,
where it made a peace deal. The Taliban claim that this
is unfair.
Sri Lanka has gone back to bombing and shelling the thousands of Tamil
civilians trapped in the middle of the battle.
The US could easily use unmanned reconnaissance drones to find out and tell
us what is really happening, if Obama cared.
The Bush forces, now working for Obama, are continuing the occupation
of Iraq. They reconcile this with the agreed-on requirements to
withdraw
by redefining words.
Krystian Zimerman, a famous pianist,
rebuked Obama in a concert for
continuing Bush's plans to station missiles in Poland.
I can't blame Zimerman for deciding not to return to the US. The US
practice of taking fingerprints of visitors is enough reason for
self-respecting person to refuse.
Israel disregarded a Palestinian peace proposal to launch its attack
on Gaza.
Apple has used the DMCA to censor discussion of how to use
Apple products to do things Apple does not like.
While we must defend the right to post technical information on the
net, the right way to deal with the iScrod and other Apple products is
don't have anything to do with them. Apple is as nasty and
vicious as Microsoft, and people should think of it as an enemy.
Obama
wants to eliminate restrictions on dealing with a Palestinian
government that might include Hamas ministers.
The Israeli hawks' lobby is already gearing up to oppose it.
The carbon lobby is using futuristic geoengineering ideas
as an excuse for inaction on CO2 emissions.
In the past, a carbon lobby climate change denial group
disregarded its own scientific advisors
when it claimed there was doubt about whether human activity
was causing global warming.
The
US is keepimg 25,000 prisoners in long-term solitary confinement,
which often causes long-term psychological damage.
Some Iraqis say that Maliki is setting up a dictatorship.
They recognize the signs.
They may be opposed to him so they may be exaggerating. Yet this
development may be given the violence and people's desire for
security, and given the corruption of Iraq.
If this happens, it will be the final absurdity for Bush's supposed
gift of freedom and democracy to Iraq. A million Iraqis were killed
— to replace one dictator with another? Maybe it's ok if Bush's
cronies get the oil?
Return to Richard Stallman's home page.
Please send comments on these web pages to rms@gnu.org.
Copyright (C) 2009 Richard Stallman
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.
