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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.
Americans: Valero Energy has spent millions for an initiative to repeal California's clean energy law, AB 32. Tell that company you will boycott its gas stations, which operate under these names:
US voters: vote for candidates that will defend abortion rights.
Large amounts of cropland in Africa is being planted with biofuel crops to meet the EU's target. This is likely to cause high food prices and great suffering.
Some of the growers say they are using land that can't be used for crops. Surely some are, and surely some are not. It ads up to a real problem.
US citizens: sign the Pledge for Democracy and then call on your congressional candidates to sign it.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
New Orleans police say they were told to shoot looters, which would have been illegal.
Meanwhile, people were running out of food, and with stores closed, the only way they could get any food was by "looting".
The Climate Camp protests are repeatedly smeared with false accusations of nonexistent crimes.
The US is using drones to launch cluster bombs against suspected al Qa'ida supporters in Yemen. Naturally they sometimes kill lots of civilians.
The bomblets that don't explode immediately effectively become land mines.
Digital technology is reducing even skilled professionals to I/O devices who work under the direct control of a computer.
This is a massive loss of quality of life for millions of people.
Iraqis lack water, electricity, and security, and it has got worse since the election in March since there is no government.
It seems there was also record heat this summer. I suspect that is a sign of global warming.
Russians protest just about every other month for freedom of assembly. Putin, dictatorial as always, threatened the protestors with attacks by police unless they get permits.
It's as hard for a protestor to get a protest permit in Russia as for a Palestinian to get a building permit in Jerusalem.
The Billionaires Bankrolling the Tea Party... and the failure to fight back.
BlackBerry surrendered to Indian pressure and will allow the state to monitor messages.
In a world with suffering and cruelty, "liberal guilt" is another name for not being a callous jerk.
Fazel Ahmed Faqiryar was forced to retire as deputy attorney general of Afghanistan because he tried to investigate corruption among the highest officials.
It is clear that Karzai does not intend that corruption be suppressed.
Russians are getting less willing to tolerate Putin's authoritarianism as poverty settles on the country.
US citizens: tell the Department of Education to protect students and taxpayers from ripoff for-profit schools.
Uri Avnery: To achieve peace requires separating the settlers that colonize the West Bank from the majority of Israel. A boycott of the settlements can forward this; a boycott of Israel as a whole backfires.
The Gates Foundation has large investments in Monsanto, which is hardly good news for poor farmers around the world.
Handing out bags of GMO corn is effectively sabotage of farmers. Corn pollen travels a long distance in the wind, so genes tend to spread and contaminate everyone's corn. Monsanto only has to wait a few years for this to occur, and then it can sue all corn farmers in the area for patent infringement.
So if the genetically modified corn died instead, the farmers are lucky.
The Bush forces now remaining in Iraq are not labeled "combat troops", but the chaos in that country would make it hard for Obama to resist pressure to send more.
Wyclef Jean's wish to run for president of Haiti distracts attention from real issues — such as, there is no reconstruction, not even cleanup.
60 Israeli actors said they would boycott theater performances in one of the illegal Israeli colonies in the West Bank.
Obama should challenge Saudi Arabia to show tolerance for other religions.
Afghan women running for office face violence, and so do their supporters. And not only from the Taliban.
"Carbon upset" payments would reward any group that manages to lawfully shut down a large activity that releases much greenhouse gas emissions.
US citizens: support the campaign to turn off Faux News in stores, restaurants, airports, etc.
Coffee production is threatened worldwide by insects that thrive due to global heating.
The US Intelligence Science Board concluded that torture is not useful as a means of interrogation.
It's great for extracting confessions if they don't need to be true. Torturing Sakineh Ashtiani made her confess.
Bernanke quietly admits that the Federal Reserve can't prevent a further downturn in the US. That will require Congress to start spending.
With the Republican Party playing the part of Hoover, and the Democratic Party not daring to oppose this, it seems to me that Congress and Obama have already accepted the coming of a depression. Perhaps they even want one.
Al Shabab says it has launched a final offensive to defeat the "transitional government" of Somalia.
Calling it the "transitional government" is like calling a presidential candidate "the next president of the US": it reflects wishes, not certainties, let alone facts. This government was constituted by a faction of the Islamic Courts Movement. That movement broke up due to the US-backed Ethiopian intervention, and when the US realized that intervention was a failure, it tried to give power to one of the more moderate factions.
Maybe this was worth trying, but it did not work. Perhaps the foreign backing of that "transitional government" made it easy for those opposing it to recruit. In any case, there's no use pretending this government amounts to anything.
There is a way to end the fighting in Somalia: end foreign backing for the "government". It never had much support and now has effectively none.
If I could choose for Somalia to have and support a more moderate government, I would. But I am not in a position to choose that; and, it seems, neither is the US.
Julian Assange is still under investigation for "molestation", which is a Swedish legal term that does not have a sexual implication. "Assault" might be a closer English translation of that legal term.
I've read elsewhere that the two women who accused him got angry when they found he was sleeping with both of them. I do not sympathize with such possessiveness. However, if that's true, it doesn't prove whether Assange acted wrongly.
US citizens: call on the EPA to protect Americans from toxic coal ash.
Kyrgyzstan is breaking apart due to a rebellion in the south.
The rebels have carried out pogroms against the Uzbeks who live in the south.
The rebels may be financed by corrupt former president Bakiyev.
It is absurd, however, to speak of pressuring the Kyrgyzstan government, since it is surely doing whatever it can.
Police are using full-body scanners to scan cars.
It seems to me that this should require as search warrant.
The Aberdeen Airport protestors state why shutting down the airport was necessary and justified.
The pathologist who examined David Kelly's body says he looked hard for evidence of murder, but found none.
A UNEP report exonerating Shell from blame for most of the oil spilled in Nigeria was funded by Shell and was based on controversial data given by Shell.
Many girls in a school in Afghanistan fainted, and some remained unconscious for hours, possibly due to a poison attack by the Taliban.
Iraq Body Count criticized the UK's Chilcot inquiry for disregarding the killing of Iraqi civilians.
Iraq Body Count counts documented civilian deaths that can be specifically attributed to fighting. This number is useful, but only if we avoid the mistake of presenting or treating it as an estimate of the total. Since many civilian casualties were not suitably documented, the real number of civilians killed is far more than 100,000.
When you read about Iran's development of nuclear weapons, don't forget that millions of fanatical Christians in the US believe that destroying the environment and starting a war with all Muslims is the way to trigger resurrection.
Compared to these nuts, the Taliban are rational and gentle. So which is more dangerous: the possibility of nuclear weapons in Iranian hands, or the reality of nuclear weapons in US hands?
Bill O'Reilly and Faux News pressured Comcast to fire show host Barry Nolan.
This was because Nolan protested an award given to O'Reilly, by handing out a leaflet with O'Reilly's own embarrassing words.
US citizens: tell the deficit commission to cut military spending and end tax cuts for the rich, instead of cutting social security.
In Haiti, 8 months after the quake, people are being evicted from tent camps even though they have nowhere to go. Even clearing the rubble has barely been started.
Millions of Haitians won't be allowed to vote because they lost their identification. But those are mostly the poor, and their party (Lavalas) has been excluded anyway, so the people in power don't care.
Activists in France destroyed an experiment with genetically modified grape vines.
This might be a safe and beneficial use of genetic engineering, especially if it is used only for making wine, not for grapes for eating, the change is unlikely to alter the wine. The fact that grape vines are perennials, and thus the quantities of seeds people plant are far fewer and each one can be carefully chosen, should reduce the issue of unintended contamination.
However, one relevant fact I don't know is whether pollen from grapes spreads long distances. Can GMO grapes be cultivated without widely spreading the modified genes? Will all grape growers be at risk from contamination of their crops by patented genes?
India's environmental ministry vetoed Vedanta's plan to build a mine on the Dongria Kondhs' land, though the decision could be appealed.
This shows that, when foreign attention is focused, the Indian government will uphold the legal rights of the tribals. (The rights of the poor are often totally ignored in India.) But this project is but one of many that have driven thousands of them to rebel.
Iran has sentenced the leaders of the Baha'i community to prison on absurd charges of spying.
Conservatives have a very effective strategy in blocking Obama (and Carter before him) from appointing judges. It allows them to influence how courts decide all legal issues.
The UK has greatly increased the percentage of young people that get college degrees. The consequence is that many jobs now require college degrees and the attendant debt.
This might all be worth it if the increase in college education has some other beneficial effect for society — for instance, if it makes the students cosmopolitan, tolerant, and sophisticated in their approach to political issues. However, I suspect that a lot of these students attend programs that are so specialized that they have no such effect.
As global heating melts the Arctic ice, it opens opportunities for more deepwater oil drilling. That means more oil spills and more global heating. If we humans are really stupid, we will seize on this opportunity to dig our graves deeper and faster.
More information on the accusations against Julian Assange.
Iran has ordered newspapers not to mention the names of opposition leaders, including the former presidential candidates.
Iranian journalist Isa Saharkhiz is suing Nokia/Siemens for giving the Iranian government equipment to track him down and imprison him.
A US court shut down all federally funded research with embryonic stem cells.
Hari Prasad proved that India's voting machines were vulnerable to tampering, so the embarrassed government had him arrested on absurd charges.
The UK has cancelled its annual review of human rights around the world, part of a plan to put trade (i.e., business profit) above human rights.
Germany will force all citizens to carry an ID card with an RFID.
The injustice is having national ID cards in the first place. Putting RFIDs in them only makes them dangerous.
The Green Party in Australia, which opposes Internet filtering, has made major gains.
Like samurai in feudal Japan, the police in the US can murder with impunity.
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was falsely accused of rape, and then the charges were dropped.
He says this might be one the Pentagon's threatened dirty tricks.
The UK government is now well aware of peak oil, but still tries to keep its concern a secret.
Millions of girls are killed, enslaved or mutilated every year for being female.
In regard to the practice of letting female infants die, I presume those mothers would rather abort female fetuses, but they probably have no access to abortion or gender testing. If we cannot convince them to value daughters, we could at least provide them those facilities.
A book documents a Bush forces atrocity in which soldiers raped and killed a teenage girl for the hell of it.
I disagree with one point in the article: these acts were not just the consequence of a stream of bad luck. They were the natural result of a system which considered it "normal" that a soldier reported his only wish was to kill Iraqis. These acts were encouraged by the training that breaks soldiers' humanity, and the pressure to dehumanize the occupied populace. That same system led Bush forces soldiers to wantonly kill Iraqis on thousands of occasions. What's unusual about this occasion is that they were punished.
An interview with Emily Henochowicz, who was blinded in one eye when an Israeli soldier fired a tear gas cannister directly at her head.
Naturally, Israel's government lied about what had happened. That's the usual government response, in Israel as in the US, when soldiers commit violence against civilians.
Emily says that it is unfair that Palestinian protestors who are maimed or killed get less attention than she. It is partly true, in that they too deserve attention. However, she deserves all the honor she receives. There is something especially heroic about a person who protests to end the mistreatment of another people.
Police in the Philadelphia airport went through a woman's wallet and confiscated checks, supposing that she was stealing the money. All in the name of security for the flight.
The official US policy fails to address the problem it was supposed to correct. The TSA agent cannot search for evidence of possible crimes unrelated to flight security, but if she encounters any, she can invite the nearby cop to look at it and search further. If she sees some pot, for instance, the cop can arrest you.
Under these circumstances, the search is automatically a fishing expedition.
The only way blanket searches at airports can be excusable is if they are strictly limited to flight security, which means agents must not report anything they see unless it threatens the safety of the flight.
In the UK: Liberty says that plans for new "anti-terror" laws could result in condoning torture and banning many political and religious groups.
Global heating is probably responsible for a long-term increase in tornadoes in Minnesota, even if this year's record is a fluke.
If you don't want to leave it to chance, support Liberty.
Republicans dead set on impoverishing most Americans say budget cuts are needed so the US can continue borrowing. This problem is provably fictitious.
If the Democrats in Congress were really strongly opposed to this, why aren't they campaigning on it? Either they are foolish cowards, or they are working for the same business forces that the Republicans serve. The latter seems more likely to me.
In 2009, almost 120 homeless people were attacked in the US. Does that justify censorship?
Violent attacks against the homeless are striking examples of gratuitous cruelty. Indeed, cruelty must have been the main motive, since the victims couldn't harm anyone and had nothing valuable to steal. In revulsion against this cruelty, and lacking any practical way to find the perpetrators so as to punish them, one might feel the need to lash out against anything related, such as videos and a game.
That would be a grave wrong, because banning publication is censorship.
The US already has censorship based on sex, and this censorship ruins plenty of lives. Censorship of violence would be the obvious next step in limiting freedom of expression. Venezuela has already paved the way.
Next the government could censor crime news. It is well known that reporting of a crime can inspire copycats. It also makes people feel anxious, perhaps more than the real crime rate (which is decreasing, aside from crimes by corporations such as BP) could justify. They would feel so much safer if the news were censored.
In the end, 120 assaults in a year amount to a tiny fraction of the violence in the US, even if they are particularly gratuitous. Even if preventing violence could justify censorship, it would be absurd to abolish human rights for such a small reduction. Besides, this danger is a very small part of the problems homeless people face every day.
If our government wants to show compassion for them, how about giving them places to live? How about helping people not lose their homes? That wouldn't satisfy the urge to lash out. Do we want to lash out, or help people?
Global heating has reduced total plant growth on Earth, and thus has reduced the consumption of CO2 by plants.
It's true that more CO2 in the atmosphere, in and of itself, helps plants grow, but only if extracting carbon from the air was the limiting factor to their growth. And plants that are killed — by drought, or by floods, or by heat waves, or by pests that migrated towards the poles as the temperatures rose — don't consume any CO2.
Newspapers in Venezuela have been banned from publishing photos of murdered corpses and other victims of violent crime.
These newspapers seek to discredit Chavez by hook or by crook, and I am sure one of their motives for publishing these photos is the hope it will discredit him.
And it is their right to try that, by publishing true facts. If Chavez' supporters think he is being unfairly blamed, they have a right to say so — but not a right to censor.
The aim of "protecting children" is what censors usually say to justify their attacks on freedom. It is no excuse at all.
There is a big fuss that convicted airplane bomber al-Megrahi was released from prison with cancer and has not yet died. But the real scandal is that the UK government is suppressing a report that suggests he might have been innocent.
Mohamed Attaoui was summarily declared guilty of extortion, in the teeth of the evidence, because he exposed Moroccan government officials who winked at illegal logging.
Climate change protestors are targeting a large UK bank for making loans recently to the companies involved in the heavily polluting use of tar sand from Alberta.
The responses of RBS are paradigmatic examples of the usual fallacious excuses companies give for participation in harmful activities. "We didn't lend the money specifically for exploiting the tar sands." (When investigating the company that asked for a loan, they should have found out it was engaged in that business.) "The world isn't ready to entirely stop using fossil fuels." (But they could speed up the change instead of slowing it down.) "We provide support for businesses working across many industries." (If they are not selective in where to put their money, maybe they ought to be.)
We need to make these excuses derisive so that companies will stop thinking they will serve.
South Korea blocked access to North Korea's Twitter channel.
By blocking this and other North Korean sites, South Korea lowers itself to North Korea's level.
An undersea cloud of oil droplets extends around 20 square miles in the Gulf of Mexico, and is full of toxic chemicals.
David Stockman, official under Reagan, accuses the Republican Party of pervasive financial mismanagement.
US citizens: phone your senators and call on them to support the DISCLOSE act, which would make corporations identify themselves in political ads they pay for. The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Also sign this petition.
The judge who wanted a higher fine on Barclays Bank was convinced to change his mind.
Global heating is not just an environmental issue. If you're concerned about development, climate change is issue No 1. If you're concerned about war and peace, climate change is issue No 1.
The UK law that punishes anyone who is the customer of someone who was forced into prostitution has been applied very little.
It is interesting that the state admits it has trouble establishing whether a prostitute was trafficked. If the state can't tell, how is the customer to know?
The answer is, he's not supposed to know. This law was intentionally designed so that people cannot tell whether they are violating it. That strikes at the basic idea of justice.
The problem of forcing people into prostitution needs another answer, and I have a suggestion. A country should give every foreign visitor who seems to be a plausible victim of trafficking some effective and usable advice on how to ask for help if they find themselves being forced into prostitution. And give asylum to any of them who testify against the culprits, so that going for help does not imply the punishment of deportation.
Meanwhile, visitors (in the UK at least) are also forced into domestic servitude, and it is just as bad. The same policies should apply there. Visitors authorized to enter a country for any sort of job should be checked on occasionally to see if their employers have taken their passports away, or kept them prisoner. If so, whoever sponsored their entry should have a case to answer.
Several groups of scientists report that spilled oil persists and remains dangerous in the Gulf of Mexico.
Israeli expansionists are planning courses on how to slip their views into Wikipedia without triggering resistance.
A prosecutor in the Hague is being investigated after witnesses say they were tortured and bribed.
Australia is considering censoring applications for the iGroan.
Apple's power over the iGroan makes its users more vulnerable to such censorship.
A judge rejected the plea bargain with Barclays Bank, saying the punishment was too small to fit the crime.
This plea bargain was a typical example of how the US government is weak in confronting business.
A Taliban leader condemned the killing of Western doctors in Afghanistan as murder.
This is not a position statement from the Taliban, but it is a positive step.
August 21 is Earth Overshoot Day — the day on which humanity has used (since January 1) a whole year's worth of nature's capacity.
Igor Sutyagin, exchanged against his will for Russian spies, was convicted of "spying" for telling British employers information that was already public knowledge.
This happens in the US too. Earlier this year, some journalists were banned from covering the Guantanamo kangaroo courts because their articles identified a witness. That witness had already publicly identified himself. These journalists were punished for repeating what was already public knowledge.
How extreme weather events relate to climate change.
The US defense secretary has invited the government of Iraq to ask the Bush forces to remain past 2011.
Of course, the government of Iraq will ask — if it can figure out who is in charge there and can ask.
An Indian ministry committee said that Vedanta's mining plans display "total contempt for the law".
This reminds me of the contempt that Breakneck Polluter showed for US environmental protection and safety law. In the US case, the government connived at it; I expect that is just as true in India.
Yu Jie was threatened with imprisonment if he published a book abut China's Prime Minister, Wen Jiabao. Yu Jie published it anyway, saying the prime minister acts the "good cop" to the president's "bad cop".
Countries that don't protect their biodiversity now will face cultural and economic disaster in a few decades.
Stopping global heating is a necessary step for this; if temperatures keep rising, many species will no longer be able to live in the small reserves that they remain in.
The Taliban have proposed a joint inquiry into killing of civilians in Afghanistan.
Paul Craig Roberts: Deaf Dumb and Blind — US Treasury is Running on Fumes.
The US, with its real and potential wars, is driving itself to collapse.
The oil has stopped spilling, but the oil and dispersant already in the Gulf of Mexico are still causing waves of biological damage.
Various species of turtles, manatees, and birds face the possibility of extinction. Wetlands could physically disappear as oil kills the grass that holds them together; this could wipe out many migratory species.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to oppose warrantless searches of people's Internet activity records. The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
The Bill of Rights has been greatly undermined, and that is the biggest current threat to our freedom. We need to repeal parts of the U SAP AT RIOT act, not extend it.
The Prime Minister of India offered Kashmiris negotiations for everything except what they want (independence), and invited the Naxalite guerrillas to help speed up the "development" in which corporations kick them off their land in order to pollute it.
There is more pressure for an inquest into the death of Dr. Kelly, who supposedly committed suicide after expressing doubts about B'liar's phony intelligence that was used to justify the conquest of Iraq.
I think Kelly was murdered, and I hope his murderers can be found and punished.
Update (28 August 2010): It looks possible that David Kelly was not murdered, see this pol-note.
But it will be difficult to find them; the few officials who know about the arrangenements won't talk. Meanwhile, what is really important is to try Tony B'liar for the crime of aggressive war. For that, it is not necessary to identify who killed Dr. Kelly. It would be sufficient to publish the secret documents that have been withheld from the Iraq war inquiry.
The US government accepts almost 10% unemployment as normal, citing powerful economic interests supposedly too powerful to be defied.
When politicians offer such excuses, it is because they have other reasons they'd rather not admit. For instance, their campaigns have been supported by large corporations which they must obey. These corporations don't care whether Americans have work, and don't mind much if many Americans can't afford to buy from them. As long as they rule our country, we will suffer.
Mexico provides a rought idea of where this is headed.
An interview with Will Rockwell, editor of $pread, a magazine by sex workers for sex workers.
An international group has called on France to repay the ransom Haiti paid for its independence.
I am in favor of repayment; but it needs to be done in such a way that Haiti's corrupt ruling elite can't swipe it. If Aristide were president, I think he could do it.
US citizens: phone your senators to demand legislation to hold Big Polluter (and other oil companies) accountable for their pollution.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
The next step in impoverishing most of America is to turn most American workers against the public sector workers who still have decent pensions.
Everyone: sign this petition to preserve the Pavlovsk botanical reserve from destruction. It preserves thousands of food plant varieties not found anywhere else.
US Citizens: support the Just Say Now campaign to legalize and regulate marijuana.
One good thing that the US has done is to take the lead in stopping the trade in minerals that fuel massacres in the Congo.
Nepal is starting to turn back Tibetan refugees fleeing Chinese control.
The UN wants to send more troops to Somalia to prop up the "government". This "government" rules part of Mogadishu, and has no popular support. Its only strength is the foreign troops that keep it in "power".
If Al Shabab controls 80% of Somalia, that means it has almost reached the point of ending the civil war. The right thing to do is stop blocking it from doing so. Thus, the foreign troops now in Somalia, and the additional ones that might be sent, are not in fact peacekeepers; their effect is rather to perpetuate the war.
In 2006, the Islamic Courts Movement succeeded in unifying Somalia, overcoming the foreign-backed "interim government" that had little popular support and never controlled much of Somalia. This could have meant peace and some stability.
However, Bush convinced Ethopia to intervene to reimpose that "government". That didn't work, but did manage to reignite civil war.
Then the US got a little smarter and recognized one of the fragments that split out of the Islamic Courts Movement as the "government". However, the US backing did not make up for its comparative lack of support, and now it is little different from the former "interim government".
Al Shabab will not respect human rights. It will practice cruel and mysogynist Islamic law, which nobody deserves. But nobody deserves constant civil war, either, and that is the most intervention in Somalia can achieve. There is no other faction in Somalia that would govern with human rights and has any chance of governing.
I am in favor in principle of military intervention to overthrow cruel regimes, but that can only give good results in very special circumstances. One of the necessary circumstances is that the people of the country wish for such intervention.
South Africa's government wants to censor the press, prohibiting publication of anything the government says is secret. Judging by what Zuma says, that will include anything scandalous about government officials.
US Senate Candidate Alvin Greene faces imprisonment for showing pornographic pictures to a college student, and asking her to go to bed with him.
To criminalize showing pictures is an act of mad tyranny. The matter should have ended once she told him no, but fanatical prudes (probably Christians) are trying to impose their twisted morality on everyone else.
Sri Lankan general Fonseka retired from the army to run against president Rajapaksa, and was tried for (or so it sounds) thinking about those steps before beginning to carry them out. In other words, for thought crime.
Then he was convicted without legal representation by failing to inform his lawyer when the trial would be. It also wasn't a real trial, because it was a military commission.
For several years, there have been massive protests in Kashmir for independence from India. These have been met with repression; 55 protestors have been killed in the past few months.
60 years ago, India promised the people of Kashmir a plebiscite about being part of India, but never carried out the promise. India ought to hold that plebiscite now.
I read recently that most Kashmiris prefer independence to being part of Pakistan. An independent Kashmir would not boost Pakistan vis-a-vis India, but would foster peace between those two powers by removing the principal cause of tension between them. Most inhabitants of Kashmir would be Muslims, but the country could be founded with a charter of respect for religious freedom for all positions (including Atheism), and this would set an inspirational example.
Iran is reportedly going to hang the people who were scheduled for stoning.
This is a positive step, in that it is a small reduction in the cruelty of the execution. However, the death penalty is always an injustice, and punishing people for adultery is an injustice.
Torturing people into confessing any crime is an injustice, whether the torturers are Iranian or American.
Floods in Pakistan have destroyed a billion dollars worth of crops. Put this together with the heat wave in Russia, which destroyed a large fraction of the crops there, and the result will be a world-wide rise in food prices, which will be exacerbated by speculation.
There is always a chance of disaster, but global heating tends to increase the frequency of them. A double hit like this one is still unusual, but 30 years from now, we may see several large disasters each year (though where they occur will still be random).
Drug companies distort science (and threaten people's health) by selectively publishing only the studies that give favorable results.
Other research shows that studies funded by drug companies are less likely to produce a negative result, suggesting that the funding undermines the scientists' objectivity. The solution is simple: tax these companies and use the money to fund the studies.
Calderon's war on drugs provided the excuse for a war on grass-roots opposition and a war on civil liberties in Mexico.
Russia arrested 35 would-be protestors to block a protest against the state-appointed mayor of Moscow.
Big Polluter was fined $87 million for failing to fix safety flaws that caused an explosion in 2005. It got the fine reduced to $50 million just by refusing to pay it.
This should not be possible.
An Iraqi army general asks the Bush forces to remain after 2011 when they were supposed to leave.
I would not be surprised if this schedule was meant to appease the US peace movement, not meant to be carried out.
Ludicrously, General Odierno says the Bush forces troops are in Iraq to "prevent foreign interference."
Intolerance towards Muslims is raging in the US.
Intolerance is wrong; burning copies of the Qur'an is nasty, and saying Islam is the devil is just irrational. But Terry Jones is entirely right in saying that (many) Muslim countries openly deny religious freedom. Muslims, as they think about this intolerance, ought to reflect on their own intolerance too, and consider that if they practice intolerance they will inspire intolerance.
Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani confessed on TV to murder, and appeared to have been tortured into the confession.
If you have a recent model car, you need to deactivate the wireless system that senses tire pressure, both in the wheels (so they don't track you) and in the car (so it can't be used to kill you).
Four UK police will face criminal charges because of attacking Babar Ahmad — 7 years after the attack.
This is a separate issue from the accusations against Ahmad. I don't know enough to have any opinion about them. But it is true that the US practice of keeping people in solitary confinement for long periods is too cruel for any prisoners. Many people become insane after that.
17 countries experienced record high temperatures this year.
If next year is not quite as hot as this year, that will not mean that global warming has ceased. It will be a random fluctuation.
Google and Verizon made a proposal about network neutrality which has some very bad points as well as some good points.
We've wiped out the tuna in the Mediterranean, so jellyfish that give painful stings are increasing in numbers.
Don't trust for-profit schools. Of 15 that were investigated, each and every one tried to deceive its customers.
Israel returned to Turkey one of the Gaza aid ships — repainted to hide the bullet holes.
It's the beginning of the end for antibiotics, as resistance spreads globally.
Although resistance has so far been found in just one species of bacteria, bacteria frequently transfer genes between species.
We can only guess whether this would have been averted by using antibiotics more carefully — for instance, not prescribing them out for colds, making sure ill-educated people took the whole dose, and not feeding them to cattle for increased profits.
Will peak oil save us from melting Greenland?
Not if high oil prices push the world towards more burning of coal and of oil from shale.
Why don't governments seem to be doing anything to reduce the economic shock of peak oil? It could just be folly. But since the US pressured the IEA to lie, that suggests it is malice. Perhaps some of the businesses that dominate the US government are planning to cause a crisis that will drive the public further into poverty.
India's repression of Kashmir led to massive protests, which India blames on Pakistan.
An Iranian reformer says that US pressure helps Ahmadinejad.
I'm sure Ahmadinejad gets some advantage from attacking the US, but I don't think it is crucial. His bloody crackdown on the opposition, while it was in the streets, did not crush it by associating it with the US, but by brute force.
Isolating North Korea has not brought democracy there. Trading with China almost without restrictions has not brought democracy there. There is no clear recipe to bring democracy to a country in the iron grip of tyranny.
Meanwhile, the Iranian government reaction to the latest sanctions suggests that it finds them quite painful. This might succeed in convincing the regime not to develop nuclear weapons. If so, the sanctions will have been worth while. But if Iran develops nuclear weapons anyway, it would be futile to maintain the sanctions.
A spokesman for Obama attacked progressive Americans who are dissatisfied with Obama, saying they must be on drugs.
I won't claim that progressives who are satisfied with Obama must be on drugs, but they are definitely out of touch if they think Obama is working for progressive goals.
Tomasky's article supposes that Obama wants to achieve progressive goals but can't get them through Congress. Why doesn't he try to pass them, then attack the Republicans for blocking them? Because he doesn't really advocate them.
Obama will inevitably disappoint progressives, because he doesn't share our goals — he just wants us to support him as if he did. Obama, like most Democrats today, has views that in 1970 would have been advocated by Liberal Republicans. He has not tried to implement most of the policies a progressive would support.
McCain might have been a little worse, but not much. I am proud to say I voted for Nader. If I couldn't elect a progressive, I could at least vote for one.
Al Qa'ida is bidding against the Bush forces for the support of Sunni militiamen in Iraq.
There is an evident discrepancy between this sort of purchase of support and the reports by Todenhofer in the book Why Do You Kill? I am not sure how to reconcile the discrepancy, but it's possible that some militiamen are ready to work for the highest bidder while others have principles. It is also possible that one or both reports is exaggerated. But I expect neither is outright false.
Part of the cause of the fatal Russian bog fires is a government that has sold out to business.
However, that doesn't let global warming off the hook. It's the two of them together.
10 more years of global warming could make the total melting of Greenland's ice inevitable.
That would imply flooding of cities around the world — not just New Orleans.
Austerity measures in the UK have knocked the economy into a further recession.
This is what the Republicans aim for in the US. If they can cause a further recession, they will channel the resulting anger at the incumbent democrats.
What I don't understand is why the democrats are playing into their hands. Of course, most of them are corporate sellouts too, but they still want to get reelected.
Civilian casualties in Afghanistan are rising, and 3/4 of them are killed by the Taliban.
In 1984, the US broke up the Bell System monopoly. Then, after the US government became totally dominated by business, it allowed all the pieces to merge, resulting in less competition than there was in 1983.
Allowing mergers between large companies is a clear sign of a government that has sold out to corporations.
Now the US government is about to sell us out again.
The Taliban murdered a group of eye surgeons in Afghanistan. They said it was because the surgeons were proselytizing for Christianity.
People are falling into a trap if they argue about whether these surgeons really were proselytizing, in addition to operating to cure blindness. People are falling into a trap if they argue that proselytizers ought to be just deported rather than killed. The trap is that these responses grant legitimacy to Muslim states which deny religious freedom to their citizens.
Instead, we should challenge Islamists to imagine if the same policy were applied in reverse. Would they like Western countries to execute anyone who preaches Islam, or merely deport him? If they don't like either one, then they should not practice either one.
A flood in Pakistan, a heat wave in Russia — while each single event isn't directly tied to global warming, the increasing frequency of such events appears to be due to global warming.
The heat wave is killing over 300 people a day in Moscow alone. Since the problem is not limited to the Moscow, I would estimate it is causing at least a thousand deaths a day, far more by now than the September 2001 terrorist attacks.
Meanwhile, negotiations on averting disaster are stuck because Obama acts like Bush III.
Raja Petra, Malaysian blogger, now has to operate from exile for fear of being imprisoned without trial.
Malaysia is democratic in form but it does not permit criticism of the government. It also tramples basic religious freedom, since it forbids people of Malay ancestry to adopt any religious position other than Muslim.
The Merchants of Doubt documents how rich right-wing foundations and stink tanks spread lies to discredit the truth about environmental protection (including protecting civilization from global warming and flooding).
Declaring violent war on drug dealers repeatedly leads to lots of killing. By contrast, legalizing the possession drugs often leads to reduction in drug use.
Louise Perrett reports that her colleagues, responsible for judging applications for asylum in the UK, frequently expressed contempt for all applicants and intended never to grant asylum to anyone.
Drawing lessons about talking with the Taliban from other insurgencies that used terror tactics.
In the US: participate in or host a rally against corruption of democracy by business.
The UK made friends with Pakistan's president by advocating a "Marshall Plan for Afghanistan and Pakistan."
In the Marshall Plan, the US provided enormous reconstruction aid to Western Europe after World War II. This was possible because there was peace then in Europe.
A similar plan of aid to Afghanistan might be a good thing, but peace is a precondition for it. So it doesn't offer a way to help achieve peace.
Meanwhile, tremendous sums have already been spent on "reconstructing Afghanistan", without a lot of benefit for the people, as humanitarian aid has been partially militarized.
I can imagine Afghans becoming cynical and looking at aid projects as a clumsy attempt to gain their support.
Colombia is spraying herbicides on illegal coca plantations, and in the process poisoning the rain forest, food crops, and people.
The government of Colombia doesn't care much about poisoning Colombians.
Obama has failed to address the injustice of Bush's US-Korea free exploitation agreement, which threatens to put foreign investors legally above the law.
The demonization of "child" pornography has endangered US national security by creating an opportunity to blackmail officials that look at it.
I put "child" in quotation marks because that word is part of the dishonesty. It is meant to suggest that only a pervert would find them attractive. Many of these "children" are old enough that they could legally get married in some states — and most normal adults will find them attractive.
The article says that downloading "child" pornography converted these people into security risks. In the past, when people could be blackmailed for being gay, the same was said against homosexuals: that their conduct made them security risks. We now understand that it was the prejudice against homosexuality which had that effect.
Note how the article calls it a "problem" that certain people could not be prosecuted because "it could not be established that the children had been abused." This shows the dishonesty of the claim that this is about protecting children. If that were their real goal, they would say, "We were pleased to discover in some cases that no children had been abused."
If people are seriously concerned not to let children have sex in making porn films, they could use the approach that has succesfully eliminated cruelty to animals in films. You have seen the statements certifying that "no animals were harmed in making this film." There could be a similar certification that "no minors had sex or were nude with adults in making this film."
The company that makes the Blackberry has surrendered to Saudi Arabia and will allow it to monitor users' messages.
Cowards!
Unconventional economics suggests that great disparities of wealth helped cause the fiscal crisis — and could cause another.
Anthony Graber faces 16 years in prison for making a videotape of a policeman waving a gun at a motorist.
CIA doctors wrote guidelines for torture, according to the Journal of the AMA.
China and India are now rivals in propping up the dictators of Burma.
The governments of China and India are both callous and unjust, even towards their own people. So neither is likely to unilaterally give up the competition for influence in Burma. I wonder if they might agree to a truce in Burma until it achieves democracy. Then they could resume their rivalry for influence there, and without being culpable for its dictatorship.
The kangaroo court in Guantanamo imposes a host of contradictory, unpredictable and almost intolerable rules on the press.
Perhaps they want to avoid press coverage but don't dare admit it.
These "military commissions" are total nonsense, and if anyone is convicted by them, we should presume him innocent as not having had a fair trial that could prove anything.
A US court ruled police must get a warrant before they can attach a GPS device to a person's car.
Everyone: sign this petition calling on Google not to make a deal to trash network neutrality.
Google says it has no such plans. The New York Times, which reported the plans, insists they are real. I don't know which one is true — and I don't need to know. I signed the petition in case this is real. Please join me.
Malta has criminalized criticism of the Catholic Church, as well as a wide range of fiction.
In Australia, the Liberal Party has rejected the internet filtering scheme (which was originally its proposal). To reject filtering is essential for freedom of speech in Australia, but Australia already has an Internet censorship system that applies to links. For the sake of freedom on the Internet, this must be abolished.
("Liberal" in Australia means supporting less regulation of business, not like Liberal in US terms.)
A right-wing group has secretly and dishonestly operated on Digg to downgrade the visibility of progressive articles.
The next Gaza aid ship will have a crew of all women.
Analysis: coal producers have sabotaged any attempt to limit global warming, condemning the world to disaster.
Global warming deniers systemically spread lies, for instance through the iGroan. Some of the liars have been funded by oil companies. I suppose coal companies fund them too.
Negotiations to follow on from the inconclusive Copenhagen meeting seem to be headed for failure. However, even if they succeeded, they would be ineffective because of all the loopholes already inserted at that meeting.
The disastrous decline of honeybees has been linked to certain pesticides.
Organic foods are no different in nutrition, but if they avoid the harm done by pesticides, that would be plenty of reason to switch to organic farming.
Wildfires caused by the heatwave have blanketed Moscow.
These fires are releasing lots of CO2 into the air. So this is an example of positive feedback, where global warming causes more greenhouse gas emission.
Some scientists say the US government is exaggerating when it says that the oil in the Gulf is no threat.
US citizens: sign this petition to repeal the "Defense of Marriage" Act which discriminates against same-sex marriages.
Part of this law was ruled unconstitutional a few weeks ago but that might be reversed on appeal. Repealing it is the right thing to do.
Bush forces troops say that Collateral Murder was nothing unusual. For instance, soldiers were punished by beatings if they expressed hesitation about killing civilian bystanders.
And they were ordered, when an IED went off, to shoot whoever was around.
Mere beatings of prisoners and civilians were standard practice too.
US citizens: phone your senators to urge them to support Elizabeth Warren for head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Wall Street wants someone pliant who won't do very much to protect consumers.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Elena Kagan's studies of Islamic finance show some interesting aspects of it. For instance, Islamic banks are forbidden to engage in the disasterous and corrupt practices that caused the financial crisis.
No wonder right-wingers hate them, and her. They want banks to be able to cheat and destroy the economy.
Ecuador asks to be paid to leave oil in the ground and preserve the Amazon forests over it.
Some US insect-eating bats face extinction from an alien fungus from Europe.
Obama is relabeling and privatizing the occupation of Iraq, and foreign oil companies are getting the prize, as patriotic Iraqis continue to fight back. In announcing this, he praised the conquest and occupation of that country.
The Bush regime's torture practices amounted to an illegal experiment on human subjects who did not consent. Physicians for Human Rights presented evidence and says this can be prosecuted.
California's ban on same-sex marriage was overturned in court.
Tom Ridge admitted in his book that he played with US "terror alert colors" for political reasons.
Greenhouse gases that trap heat cause increased temperature on the surface while cooling the upper atmosphere. This adds to the danger caused by garbage in space.
The NOAA says that the oil remaining from the Big Pollution is no longer an environmental threat, and that everything is now ok.
I hope that is true, but I am skeptical — skeptical of the claim that there are no underwater clouds of "dispersed" oil, skeptical of the claim that the dispersant is not dangerous, and skeptical of the claim that the beaches and marches have been cleaned, or can be cleaned.
The oil from the Ixtoc spill in Mexico over 30 years ago remains just slightly out of sight.
The US Chamber of Commerce now has a competitor that wants action to control US carbon emissions. Some local chambers of commerce may switch to the new organization. The US Chamber of Commerce's response, a private misleading smear campaign, is typical of that organization.
Iranian lawyer Mohammad Mostafaei has fled to Turkey for asylum.
The government of Iran has persecuted him for representing Sakineh Ashtiani.
The climate protection treaty proposed at Copenhagen has so many loopholes that the rich countries would be able to keep on increasing their emissions, while pretending to have agreed to decrease them.
US citizens: phone FCC chairman Genachowski and insist on network neutrality.
Mexico is considering legalization of drugs, because the war on drugs has caused 28,000 casualties since 2006.
Big Polluter says it has plugged the leaking underwater well.
I am glad it is plugged, but let us not let this lull us into thinking that these wells are safe.
Senators bought by the oil companies blocked an increase in liability for oil spills.
Fossil fuel consumption receives tremendous subsidies, dwarfing those for renewable energy.
In Iraq, anyone suspected or rumored to be gay is in danger of being tortured or disappeared by the police.
Prostitutes in China protested publicly for legalization.
The EPA disregarded its own scientists and others who warned about toxic dispersants.
The fallout contamination around Chernobyl has reduced biodiversity — apparently many animal species cannot tolerate even the low level radiation.
Microsoft deliberately undermined users' privacy in Internet Explorer 8 to help web ad companies track the users.
The fact that it was up to Microsoft to decide this is due to the proprietary nature of Internet Explorer. With free software, the users have control, and they can do what they wish.
Israel has agreed to an international inquiry into the attack on the Gaza aid ships.
In the US:
Boycott Target stores for paying a lot of money to support a right-wing candidate. Inform Target of your participation in the boycott with this petition.
Rwanda's President Kagame might be able to win a free election, but he can't tolerate opposition, so he has banned, imprisoned and killed his political opponents and the press.
Wikileaks revealed that UK troops systematically killed Afghan civilians, and these killings will probably now be investigated as possible war crimes.
Secretary of Defense Gates, a holdover from the Bush regime, accused Julian Assange of endangering some Afghans who cooperated with the US. Here is Assange's rebuttal.
I think his argument that it was the US' fault if any informants were identified is fallacious. The US could have prepared better for the possibility that these documents might be leaked, but it had no reason to expect such a leak. So that is not a valid criticism.
The right rebuttal to Gates' accusation is that, while concealing these documents would have protected a few Afghans, it would have endangered a lot more of them by failing to help end the war. Gates cites the smaller danger as an excuse to disregard the larger one. Assange presented this argument in connection with Kenya; it applies to Afghanistan too.
Wikileaks could have done it better: it could have obfuscated names and identifying features. That would have preserved the good effect while reducing the smaller harmful one. But that would have been a lot of work, and maybe it was not a feasible option.
Three cheers for Wikileaks!
The UAE and Saudi Arabia say they will ban the Blackberry because they cannot spy on users' communications.
Record heat, predicted by climate scientists, is killing people in the US and Russia.
But there are exceptions. Peru has been struck by record cold in the middle of the hottest year on record.
Global warming's effects are not uniform. Weather constantly creates local and temporary exceptions to the general trend which is the climate. For instance, 2009 was not quite as hot as a few recent years. We must not mistake these exceptions for proof there is no global warming.
Sgt. Zubaty's war: driving into Baghdad, the tanks destroyed every vehicle they met, all of them full of civilians.
How would you feel if someone "liberated" your country this way? Unless you are a dyed-in-the-wool pacifist, you would want to kill them. This sort of treatment, repeated for years, made many Iraqis feel that way.
In the book "Why Do You Kill", a German journalist (and former MP) reports on his interviews with members of the Iraqi resistance, from a visit to Ramadi in 2007. They were Sunnis, Shi'ites and Christians, fighting to liberate their country. They made it a point of honor not to kill civilians, and condemned terrorists such as al Qa'ida and the Shi'ite militias which targeted civilians, saying each was a form of foreign intervention.
Even if we assume they put their best side forward, it is clear they are better than the occupiers and the Bush-imposed Iraqi government.
If you buy the book, please don't buy it from Amazon.
A UK court ruled that products to jailbreak game consoles are illegal, because it can be used to run unauthorized copies of games. And never mind that it can also be used to do other things.
This is the opposite of the argument that the US court accepted when it ruled that jailbreaking as such is not illegal.
Of course, an unauthorized copy of a nonfree game is unethical. It is almost as unethical as an authorized copy.
What will happen if US troops leave Afghanistan?
Sinar Mas continues to cut down extensive rain forest areas for palm oil plantations.
Adam Keller: Is Israel singled out - and why?
The UK is systematically attacking Gypsies for camping on land that they own.
Some Hungarian Gypsies were awarded damages for school segregation against them.
The prejudice against Gypsies in Eastern Europe reaches amazing heights of irrationality. On my first visit to Romania, in the 1990s, my host was a teacher, educated enough to know that the Gypsies originated from India. And since she hated Gypsies, by extension she hated all things Indian. She refused to listen to a recording of Indian classical music, which I had brought along, saying it was because the Gypsies came from there.
In this case, her prejudice hurt only herself. However, often the targets of the prejudice are the ones who suffer.
When Jacob Appelbaum, who helps Tor and Wikileaks, returned to the US for a conference, he was "randomly" selected to have his computer searched.
Which is more unlikely — that he was chosen randomly by coincidence, or that the "authorities" lied?
Many governments across Europe are attacking Gypsies and expelling them.
The Wikileaks files disclose the working of a US death squad in Afghanistan, TF 373. It often operates by bombing houses or cars. Not surprisingly this tends to kill civilians. Sometimes the only casualties are civilians. The US government lies about the actions so as to evade responsibility.
Other US troops massacred civilians, and the investigation tried to cover it up by threatening journalists.
Massacres followed by denials have continued since December and another one happened this week.
It looks like cover-up is still the response. If NATO were serious about avoiding this sort of thing, it would hold an investigation into what went wrong and publish the results, and discipline whoever was responsible at that time and place for preventing it. The failure to do this shows that what NATO really wants to avoid is the blame, not the killing.
A US court blocked parts of Arizona's "show your papers" law pending an appeal.
I do not object to limiting immigration into the US, but I do object to measures that have the effect of harming the rights of citizens.
A cry from Louisiana about the effects of the oil spill.
The disappearance of the floating oil slick is a good sign, but it does not mean that no more oil will arrive on threatend beaches and marshes.
Il Ducino's latest project is to make bloggers register, and require them to publish corrections within 48 hours on complaints.
Some sort of requirement about posting complaints might be just, but when applied to activities that are not professional, it must not demand response so fast that amateurs will be unable to comply.
Andrew Breitbart, exposed as culpable of dishonest smear attacks, is being lionized by Republican leaders.
By doing so, they admit that their party is the party of lies.
Armies have a positive duty to prevent civilian casualties — just saying they "were unintended" is not enough.
72 former prisoners in Abu Ghraib are suing a company which helped run the prison, saying its employees tortured them.
The US government says Wikileaks has "blood on its hands" for publishing what the US is really doing in Afghanistan.
The US government is an expert on bloody hands. US embassy staff just killed a few Afghans in Kabul with a car, and set off bloody riots.
The useless and unwinnable war will kill more Afghans the longer it continues. Since the Wikileaks revelations have a good chance of ending the war sooner, they will tend to prevent more Afghan casualties than they might cause.
The war continues to go badly. The NATO forces attacked a Taliban group which melted away, as intelligent guerrillas do before superior force.
NATO is trying to present this as a success, but its only consequence is likely to be that some NATO troops get killed by mines.
The US economy is heading for another downturn.
Republicans blocked all efforts to stimulate the economy so that they can blame Democrats for the resulting pain.
The big spill has broken up on the surface, but thanks to the dispersants, it is likely to linger underground.
Oil from the Ixtoc oil spill 40 years ago, likewise in the Gulf of Mexico, can still be found on beaches it polluted then.
China has imprisoned a webmaster. He tried to censor criticism of the Chinese government, but didn't quite get it all.
That should teach anyone who thinks that faithfully obeying the tyrant's orders will be rewarded.
Bangladeshi garment workers continued their protests, because the increase in minimum wage they were given doesn't compensate for increases in cost of living.
US citizens:
Please sign this petition in favor of Elizabeth Warren to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Gasoline truck drivers in Greece went on strike, and the government reacted with a conscription order.
It is interesting to note that the government's attack on this union was not directly a matter of reducing the deficit. In other words, it is using the deficit and IMF-imposed austerity as an excuse to attack working people in other ways.
The large deficit is a real problem, but the government should make the rich rather than the working class pay the costs of correcting it.
Tens of thousands of children in Africa are imprisoned or driven onto the streets after being accused of witchcraft.
South Africa is considering a law that threatens freedom of the press.
Andrew Breitbart, who smeared Shirley Sherrod, has a long history of dishonest smears.
Oil spills and other disasters have occurred repeatedly in the US in the last decade, despite repeated oil company claims that "it won't happen again".
Air pollution kills millions of people every year, and a large fraction of it comes from burning fossil fuels.
Obama wants to extend government surveillance without warrants, attacking civil liberties of Americans.
Protests in Bangladesh have brought about a big increase in the minimum wage.
Tariq Ali: Pakistan's contacts with the Taliban are part of maintaining a complex relationsip that could be needed to negotiate peace.
Almost half of Gaza's farmland has been put off limits or ruined by Israel.
A gang of Israelis seized by force a Palestinian home in East Jerusalem.
The successor of the KGB will now have the power to imprison anyone for 15 days for "obstructing an officer's duties", which in effect means "whenever they wish".
Australians: If you don't want Chinese-style Internet censorship, support the open internet campaign against censorship.
Also support the Green Party.
The UK may eliminate ASBOs, which enabled the state to jail people for a wide range of activities that were not crimes.
The evidence for global warming, from many different kinds of measurements, has been assembled in one place.
Warming of the oceans is probably responsible for the decrease in phytoplankton, which is the base of the ocean food chain. This has reduced the amount of fish.
Many fish species depend on coral reefs, especially when young. Acidification by CO2 may kill the coral, and that will give another big blow to fish available in the sea.
Legal Sea Foods is using an ad campaign that says, "There are plenty of fish in the sea." This is a false.
Catalonia has voted to ban bullfighting as cruelty to animals.
Everyone: support the long-term diplomatic campaign for the elimination of nuclear weapons.
Health insurance companies have set aside millions to convince state governments not to enforce some of the new health insurance legislation.
The Iraqi electricity ministry has attacked the unions, in some cases seizing their offices and files.
Unions sponsored by the employer (the state in this case) are not usually zealous in defending workers' rights. Iraqi workers deserve independent unions. However, this manner of disconnecting the unions from the employer, seizing the unions' private files, is intended as intimidation and obstruction with the formation of independent unions.
The enormous military forces of the US have ceased to be a route to victory in war.
I would make the statement a little more specific. US military force can win victories over other armies, as it did in Iraq in 2003. What it cannot effectively do is defeat another people inclined to resist.
Israeli tanks attacked the al Said family home in Gaza using flechette shells, an indiscriminate weapon. Israeli troops had already stopped the al Said family from cultivating much of their land.
The Australian government has concealed nearly all of its plans for spying on the Internet, to avoid "premature unnecessary debate".
Australians, vote Green.
Anthony Graber is threatened with 16 years imprisonment for making a videotape of a policeman on a street.
Iraq's government is crushing unions and attacking union organizers, like Saddam, and prosecuting them for protests.
The Bush-created Iraqi government is becoming ever more tyrannical. It shoots peaceful protestors.
Which country will invade Iraq now to liberate Iraqis from this dictatorship?
The Bush forces are trying to find what happened to 8 billion dollars that were supposed to be spent on reconstructing Iraq's oil industry.
1500 Israeli police demolished a Bedouin village in order to plant a forest. The inhabitants were left homeless.
Israel is also demolishing a few houses built by fanatical Israeli "settlers" in violation of the construction freeze. (Other reports say there is a lot of construction; I think there are many exceptions to the freeze.) The fanatics protest this by harassing Palestinians.
While Netanyahu says the Bedouin pose a threat of rebellion, it is actually the "settlers" that do.
The strongest accusations against Pakistan's ISI may be unverified, but even if they are false, there are reasons to believe it supports the Taliban in some ways.
Wikileaks has revealed the war in Afghanistan as folly, doing nothing but harm to the states that know they cannot win it and are only doing harm.
If individuals were doing this, we would call it neurosis.
Survivors say a NATO rocket attack killed 52 civilians, and they say they think the NATO troops intentionally attacked civilians.
I am not sure that argument is valid. Malicious attacks on civilians were common in Iraq and maybe in Afghanistan, but error is common too. They may have jumped to a conclusion, ascribing to malice what might be explained by error.
If so, why did they do this? I expect, because they were already more sympathetic to the Taliban. That might be because the Taliban warn them to leave before there is fighting. Or because Karzai is corrupt and stole an election. Or both together.
In other places, the Taliban slaughter civilians intentionally. So why do they warn civilians in that village? Perhaps different tactics seem advantageous in different places. Or perhaps they are different groups of Taliban.
Philip Morris has used a toxic trade treaty to bully the government of Uruguay to back off some of its award-winning smoking reduction laws.
Swiss people should demand that their government adopt a policy that it will not enforce any trade treaties at the expense of measures to reduce smoking.
And countries such as Uruguay should terminate their free exploitation treaties.
Israeli police violently arrested protestors in Hebron, kicking them, stamping on them, even biting them.
Then the police arbitrarily banned some of them from participating in further protests.
French president Sarkozy, fresh from attacking Internet users, now plans to pick on Gypsies so as to look tough.
Participate in the "America's Got Net" competition.
Uniformed thugs in Egypt who attacked and killed anticorruption campaigner Khaled Said now face charges, but not murder charges.
Guards in a Mexican prison lend their rifles to prisoners who go out to murder.
The Afghanistan wikileaks show US military awareness that the ostensible plan to win in Afghanistan is not possible.
Interview with Jacob Appelbaum of Wikileaks about the Afghan intelligence logs.
Hackers replaced the EU's carbon-emissions trading site with a parody that explained the flaws of cap-and-trade.
This was an act of cracking because it involved breaking computer security. It was a hack because it was playfully clever (and pushing limits contributes too).
However, to "maximize the virtual damage" sounds bad to me.
USA-WMD: America's Covert Hiroshima in Iraq.
An Indian conglomerate is suing Greenpeace for copyright and trademark infringement over a game that criticizes one of its projects.
Sanctions on Iran seem to have made the regime more willing to negotiate.
With some more time we will see whether this is indicates a willingness to abandon the attempt to make nuclear weapons or just playing for time.
Leaked US intelligence logs quote informants' claims of Pakistani support for the Taliban, but those claims are unverified and could have been lies.
The logs show that the US often knowingly covers up killing of civilians. And most of these killings were not investigated.
Meanwhile, the Taliban are practicing terror against the whole population of Afghanistan.
Four al Qa'ida prisoners escaped from prison in Iraq with the help of the warden, who absconded.
India is cozying up to the dictators of Burma.
Since this is a competition between India and China, maybe they could be convinced to agree to jointly impose sanctions, postponing their competition until the dictators allow democracy.
China has imprisoned a Uighur journalist who warned that riots were coming.
CNN hypocritically attacks the social threat of anonymous statements. (That is sarcastic.)
Sakineh Ashtiani's lawyer was arrested and questioned. Then the Iranian dictatorship wanted to arrest him again, and took his wife hostage.
Iran's government is democratic in form, and for a time appeared to respect some kinds of democracy and legal rights, though tainted with the mysogyny and injustice of Islamic law. But now it is tearing up those rights, and becoming an outright dictatorship like that of the Shah.
US citizens: tell your senators to support the DISCLOSE act, which would require corporations to identify the political ads they fund.
And phone them too — a phone call carries more weight.
From now on, please put these numbers at the end of every urgent note that involves calling US congresscritters or senators. The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and say, vote against the supplimental appropriation for the war in Afghanistan.
From now on, please put these numbers at the end of every urgent note that involves calling US congresscritters or senators. The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
The Taliban have already offered to promise not to support attacks on other countries.
The Taliban offered in October 2001 to kick out Osama bin Laden if given evidence tying him to the 9/11 attacks.
In 1998 the Taliban isolated Osama bin Laden to stop him from participating from Afghanistan in attacks on the US, and even considered extraditing him to the US for the first World Trade Center bombing, but did not find the evidence of his involvement convincing.
A Federal court ruled part of the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional.
Panama's government has launched repression against union leaders, after protests against right-wing give-back laws.
In Africa, paying people for not getting sexually transmitted diseases reduces the rate of infection. Even just giving small amounts of money to girls helps them avoid it.
Iraq is considering establishing a special court to try journalists, which would extend its attacks on freedom of the press.
The banks that caused the financial crisis also ripped off US states and municipalities for billions.
US citizens: call your senators to support renewable energy and protection against climate change.
From now on, please put these numbers at the end of every urgent note that involves calling US congresscritters or senators. The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Carne Ross says the UK foreign ministry is keeping secrets from the Iraq inquiry in order to protect the lies of witnesses, and that he was personally threatened and ordered to conceal some of these secrets from the inquiry.
The Yes Men are distributing their video through Bittorrent, because the US Chamber of Commerce is trying to prevent its distribution.
Saber Kushour has been convicted of "rape" for having sex with an Israeli woman while passing for a Jew.
The judge is not on the same planet as that woman. He said she lost the "sanctity of her body and her soul" because the man she quickly jumped into bed with was an Arab. People who have sex on such short acquaintance clearly don't regard the issue in such terms. People who have sex before getting to know their lovers should not complain afterwards that there was something they didn't know.
It does seem clear that Jews won't be arrested in Israel for failing to mention they aren't Arabs.
The US is moving towards witch hunts against illegal immigrants, fueled by false accusations against them.
All Americans are victims, since we all lose our freedom. I will not go to Arizona under these conditions, because I resent the requirement to carry papers to prove I am a US citizen.
Since this hysteria helps the right wing, I wonder if some of them looked forward to the economic crisis and intentionally blocked attempts to reduce it, just in order to build the crazy spirit they can use.
The problem for NATO is how to present withdrawal from Afghanistan as a success.
In the US, the lunatic right wing always condemns what moderates do. It will surely accuse Obama of having let the US "be defeated", and never mind whether that represents the reality. The only way to overcome them is to hit them hard; but Obama has no guts in confronting them. Like many Democrats who were not elected, he takes punch after punch and does not hit back.
The real lesson of the smear attack against Shirley Sherrod is that Obama has no guts to stand up to attacks from opposition.
We have seen more or less the same thing in legislation.
The US Senate passed a bill to defend Americans from UK libel law.
Israel has announced a reform of army practices to avoid atrocities.
This has the potential to make a big difference in future fighting, but it won't change anything unless there is political will for real change.
As the US removes most of the official US troops from Iraq, it is replacing some with mercenary troops. Thus it can pretend to have withdrawn more than it really has.
Stung by protests on behalf of Sakineh Ashtiani, Iran's government has acted like a shameless dictatorship, totally censoring the press and threatening her children.
It might be useful for opponents of the regime to start distributing tape cassettes, just as Khomeini did against the repressive Shah.
The head of the EPA has no idea what around 2 million gallons of dispersants will do to marine life in the Gulf of Mexico, or to people who will eat seafood caught there.
US citizens: sign this petition calling on the US to stop heeding the dishonest accusations from of right-wing smear campaigners.
The US Senate has given up on passing cap-and-trade for CO2 emissions.
Cap-and-trade has proved not very effective in reducing CO2 emissions, because the polluters can game the system rather than reducing pollution. Its weakness is that the bought senators' accusation is false — it isn't a true greenhouse gas tax. That tax is what we need.
Massachusetts citizens: phone your state representative to support the "right to repair" law.
I suggest saying it is not strong enough; that software sold in cars should be free software.
When the oil well exploded, alarms systems were shut off so workers could sleep. They had got lots of false alarms...
Managers careful about safety would have had the cause of the false alarms fixed. But that would have cost money, and they probably gave cost savings higher priority than safety.
The lesson is, high tech backup systems intended to provide safety in an activity that is intrinsically dangerous are less reliable in practice than in theory.
Brazil has made great strides in stopping illegal logging.
A giant oil-skimming ship was unable to collect oil from the Big Spill, because of Brainless Polluter's dispersants.
A proper spirit of precaution would have required such a giant skimmer to be made available in the Gulf in case any acident happened.
Fish caught in the Gulf are being tested for oil, but not for toxic dispersant.
US women: Obama is not your friend.
The policeman who attacked and killed protest bystander Ian Tomlinson will not be prosecuted. Not even for hitting a man with a stick for no reason.
Nobody will be prosecuted, because the police have protected their own.
After they lied to protect the killer, should we be surprised that they lost evidence to protect the killer, or that they confused the issue by arranging an autopsy by someone not trustworthy?
The policeman who killed Tomlinson probably did not plan for him to die. But those who are now granting police impunity for their killings are ensuring future deaths at the hands of these thugs.
Workers saw big safety problems on Bastard Polluter's drilling platform and were afraid they would be punished if they reported the problems.
Over and over one finds this sort of business conduct at the root of diasters.
Human Rights Watch concludes Chinese police shot Tibetan protestors and tortured prisoners.
As the rich rush to take control of the world's water supplies, a proposed UN treaty saying that people have the right to water to live is being blocked by the US and a few other countries.
Bullying Polluter is trying to buy scientists by funding their research but forbidding them to publish.
Tropical forests are being destroyed to grow soybeans to feed to cattle.
Other ways of feeding cattle may be better, but we shouldn't forget that we also need to grow less cattle and eat less meat.
Eliza Manningham-Buller, former head of MI5 (Security service), affirmed that the invasion of Iraq increased support for Islamic terrorism and allowed al Qa'ida to enter Iraq. And UK intelligents reports before the invasion warned the government this would be the result.
Cindy Sheehan has proposed automatic conscription of government officials, CEOs and war advocates into the armed forces.
Obama's proposed national oceans policy can potentially prevent oil spill disasters, but it's not inevitable. Existing regulations might have prevented the big spill, if only the government regulators had demanded strict compliance. Why didn't they? Did powerful bought politicians urge them to go easy? Or was it their own initiative?
Theoretically superior future policies could equally well be nullified if they are not properly enforced. And this is why a total ban on drilling is attractive. It would be much harder for officials to find a excuse not to enforce that.
NATO is starting to realize it has to negotiate peace with the Taliban.
If Americans want to talk with the Taliban from a position of partial strength, they had better start soon. The Taliban are getting more powerful every year.
Hundreds of starved dead penguins are washing up on Brazil's beaches. This raises concern that a collapse in small fish are the cause.
Two Christians in Pakistan who faced charges of "blasphemy" for distributing Christian pamphlets were murdered outside the courtroom.
I find those pamphlets annoying, so I can't blame Pakistanis for feeling annoyed too. But the annoyance of these pamphlets is no excuse for killing their distributors, or charging them with a crime. It is a simple part of freedom of speech — something Pakistan does not respect.
Most Islamic countries do not respect religious freedom or freedom of speech. They deserve to be rebuked persistently for this.
US citizens: call your congresscritter to support the Mine Safety Act. Or send email through this page (which also provides more information), but a phone call will carry more weight.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Reportedly blogetry.com was not shut down as part of the War on Sharing, but rather because some (one?) among the 70,000 contained copies of some al Qa'ida information (or maybe just a link to it) which made death threats against specific people.
The offending material remains available in al Qa'ida's own site from which it was obtained. Copying the threat could be wrong, but would have little effect on the danger to anyone who was threatened, so there was no need to rush and take drastic measures to remove the copy. Shutting off the whole site is equivalent to arresting the whole population of a small city because of an accusation against a few inhabitants. And why tell the site owner he could not have the data from the site?
If BurstNET did this on its own initiative, then should restore the rest of the site promptly or else be penalized.
The Israeli government is destroying the authority of its judiciary by repeatedly disregarding Supreme Court decisions that recognize legal rights of Arabs and Palestinians.
In another move towards fascism, fanatics in the government (as well as fanatical gangs they support) threaten to punish, even kill, teachers that criticize Israeli government policies.
When slightly loosening the siege of Gaza, Israel said it would allow in construction materials for UN projects. But it is not doing so.
A Libyan aid ship heading for Gaza landed in Egypt after Egypt agreed to forward its cargo and passengers (including construction supplies) into Gaza.
Egypt could solve the problem of construction supplies in Gaza by allowing them into Gaza all the time.
However, Egypt would not be able to help overcome another aspect of the siege: stopping Palestinians from travelling between Gaza and the West Bank.
Noise pollution from ships makes it hard for whales to talk with each other, and that can harm them.
Israeli nuclear whistleblower Mordecai Vanunu is being kept in total isolation, says Mairead Maguire, pleading for Israel to let him leave.
Unapproved genetic modifications in rice are spreading in China and getting into the food supply.
Tens of thousands of Bengali Dalit refugees were imprisoned, killed by police, and/or dispersed in poverty around India.
Speculation by hedge funds is driving up food prices and causing ruin for the poor.
The US government shut down a site with 73,000 blogs as part of its war on Internet users.
The site was shut down without a trial, which shows total disrepect for the rights of Internet users. Whatever complaint anyone had about this site, even if it were valid, summary punishment for secret reasons is tyranny.
Tony Nicklinson is paralyzed from the neck down, and hates living that way; his lawyers have gone to court to insist on his right to die.
Everyone: tell Costco to stop selling unsustainably caught fish.
The Home Affordability Modification Program is supposed to help US home-owners keep their homes. It occasionally does so, but mostly it just helps banks make money.
US citizens: support the pledge to fight corruption in Washington.
Bullying Polluters has a consistent attitude towards safety measures: disregard them whenever possible, to save money, and make contractors ignore them too.
Professor Kletz says it takes ten years for a company to alter a bad safety culture. That's because the sanctions used are not strong enough. I think government inspectors enforcing a zero-tolerance policy could make changes occur much faster. But that would require political will in the government to defy the pressure of large corporations — something today's US elected officials fail to have.
The secondary conclusion is that we should not allow an oil company to be as large as BP is. If a contractor takes safety seriously, BP will stop doing business with it, and they are afraid of that. If BP were chopped up into 10 competing companies, none of them would have so much power.
Growing animals for meat puts a tremendous strain on the environment.
Thus, people generally need to reduce their intake of meat.
Omar Deghayes says the British government is still covering up how its agents connived at torturing him.
US citizens: sign the petition for a real investigation of the Sep 2001 terrorist attacks.
They especially seek architects and engineers, but others are welcome to sign.
Singapore arrested Alan Shadrake for writing a book criticizing the death penalty in Singapore.
US citizens: sign this petition to appoint Elizabeth Warren to police Wall Street.
You can add a message calling for Geithner should be fired; I did.
A poll shows that Afghan men in Helmand and Kandahar expect and want the Taliban in power, and want NATO to go away.
There is nothing that the US can do to change this. Women might disagree, but they are not organized to fight or defend their rights, and we have no way to enable them to do so.
NATO's strategy in Afghanistan is failing, and could be making the Taliban stronger.
Both NATO and the Taliban kill civilians, but in different ways. NATO kills them by not valuing their lives enough to avoid it (some effort is being made now to change this), but the Taliban kill them deliberately, for intimidation.
If Karzai's government were capable of inspiring loyalty and support, the Taliban's actions would make people hate the Taliban and want to defeat them. But it isn't, so Afghans can learn about many Taliban atrocities without hating the Taliban enough to want to fight them.
US citizens: tell Obama not to ban abortion coverage for transitional health insurance pools.
EU commissioner Chris Patten condemns the siege of Gaza. He also says that Israel's supposed "settlement freeze" is bogus; construction is proceeding rapidly.
People are using kites and balloons to photograph the big spill, since the US government is helping Blood-handed Polluter keep journalists away.
The Afghan soldier who killed three British soldiers told the media that he was angry at killing of civilians — but forgives the Taliban for doing likewise.
Every army in war always kills civilians. Some armies do this gleefully, some try to avoid it, and others (such as the US in Afghanistan for a long time) give low priority to the issue. But even with strenuous efforts it still happens. The civilians accept these casualties as necessary if they regard the army as fighting for them or their country/tribe/group. This soldier's answers reflect his view that the Taliban, not NATO, is fighting for his country.
When people think that, there is no way NATO can win their support.
US citizens: tell your senators to support the Refugee Protection Act.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
A comic treatment of the danger of the surveillance state.
If you want to be sure a cell phone is not tracking you, or eavesdropping on you, you need to take out all the batteries.
China's industry is producing a crushing burden of pollution of every kind.
In 2002-2008, the US gave large subsidies to fossil fuels which were over twice the subsidies to renewable energy generation. But that underestimates how bad things are, because over half the subsidy for "renewable" energy generation was for corn-derived ethanol, which drives up food prices and uses lots of nonrenewable fertilizer. So the real ratio was over 7 to 1 in favor of nonrenewable energy.
Nothing is more threatening to Israel's occupation of Palestine than the Palestinian nonviolent resistance movement. So Israel tries to deny and cover up the movement's existence.
Goldman Sachs got off easy: its .5 billion fine is just one week's revenue, and the financial reform bill will do nothing to restrain it from committing similar fraud again — or from causing another bubble and another financial crisis when it bursts.
The fascist Israeli right wing is attacking Israeli Arab members of Parliament, both by voting special laws against them and physically attacking them as they speak. The attacks threaten to spread to Jews as well.
The direct effect of the occupation/siege of Palestine is to cause suffering and death of Palestinians. Israelis are safe from this direct effect, but defending the indefensible occupation/siege leads to destruction of human rights for everyone in Israel.
The Big Pollution tentatively appears to have been capped.
So why didn't BP have this containment cap ready before drilling the well, just in case? Why wasn't it required to have this cap ready? As well as the equipment for every other method that was tried and might have worked? The failure to require these things was an instance of taking extra risk in order to cut costs.
Many countries have pledged aid for Haiti but most of them have paid nothing.
Adam Dillon says Bullying Polluter is keeping reporters away from cleanup workers and threatening to fire anyone that talks to the press.
This June was the warmest June ever recorded, capping the hottest first half year ever recorded. Greenland's glaciers are melting fast.
A record heatwave in Germany has destroyed a large fraction of the crops. Heatwaves come randomly, and Germany might not have one next year. But these random peaks start from a base that keeps rising.
The new Droid-X phone is designed to sabotage itself if users try to modify it. This should be illegal if it isn't already.
I cite this article for the facts about the phone, but I disagree with the author's general willingness to accept other, not quite so nasty practices to restrict users and stop them from changing their software. Nonfree software is always an injustice.
New Zealand has rejected software patents.
The article falls into deep confusion by talking about "intellectual property in software", a conceptual construct which does not correspond to reality.
"Intellectual property laws" is a misguided generalization that refers to a dozen or so laws that have, in their requirements and effects, nothing in common. It is a useless and distracting concept but at least it corresponds to a number of laws that are real. However, to postulate a single something, and say these unrelated laws are about it, is to take leave of reality.
The negotiation of ACTA continue in the most secretive and hypocritical manner conceivable.
If the "three-strikes" punishment-on-accusation proposal appears to be gone, it may just be disguised inside requirements about liability for ISPs.
The Taliban are carrying out a nasty intimidation campaign against women in Afghanistan.
The Taliban's oppression of Afghan women, together with somewhat looser but nonetheless oppressive restrictions on Afghan men, is why I supported the invasion of Afghanistan. The reason I no longer support it is that the government of Karzai also oppresses women, although less, and is too corrupt to inspire the loyalty to win a civil war.
Ultimately there is no force in Afghanistan that can defeat the Taliban now that the window of opportunity that started in 2001 has been squandered.
B'liar personally pushed to deport suspects to Egypt, disregarding warnings they might be tortured or executed there. Later he personally ordered the foreign office not to provide legal assistance to UK citizens imprisoned in Guantanamo.
Jack Straw, as minister, encouraged sending a UK citizen to Guantanamo; later he lied about it.
A Yes Men-style hoax web site announced that France would return to Haiti the enormous ransom that France extracted for allowing Haiti's independence.
Look at it soon, because it seems France is going to try to shut the site down.
France is more interested in avoiding attention for how it drove Haiti into poverty than in doing anything to correct the problem.
China has shut many blogs and is attacking blogging sites too.
Massachusetts citizens: call Senator Brown and insist that he support the DISCLOSE act, to make corporations identify the political advertisements they pay for.
You can find some advice here.
The world is ignoring genocide in progress in Darfur.
Argentina has legalized gay marriage.
The next cause to fight for in Argentina is abortion rights.
The senate passed a financial reform bill which makes some improvement, but fails to do address the biggest problem: banks that are to big to fail. Apparently these banks are stronger than our democracy. We have to regard them as an enemy, and aim to defeat them.
The B'liar regime's ministers actively planned to send British citizens arrested in Afghanistan to Guantanamo.
UK agents explicitly threated Omar Deghayes with imprisonment in the US, where he was subsequently mutilated.
Now we understand why the UK was so mysteriously unwilling to campaign to protect the rights of those UK citizens.
Big Polluter pours dispersants into the Gulf of Mexico; nobody knows what effects they have. The EPA's tests to determine whether they kill fish were inadequate.
Russia is trying to blame the murder of Natalya Estemirova on a Chechen rebel fighter who is dead, apparently to protect the officials whose wrongdoing she exposed.
North Korea is experiencing starvation.
This is the result of North Korean government policies, and the real solution is regime change. Every empire falls eventually unless it is propped up. So I hope that humanitarian intervention won't be designed to prop this one up.
The US and Britain broke an agreement with the Iroquois to recognize their passports.
US citizens: sign this petition telling the EPA to strictly regulate toxic coal ash.
Toxic chemicals are ubiquitous and their cancer danger has been underestimated.
New Orleans police face criminal charges for shooting unarmed people for no reason at all, then covering it up.
I wonder if there is any investigation of how the police kept a large group of refugees without cars from fleeing to safety from New Orleans.
The world is running out of phosphate rock to use for fertilizer, and will need to get it by recycling waste.
This will need energy, and unless that energy is renewable, it will increase global warming.
Indonesia Declares Partial Halt to Deforestation; Will Obama Help?
Decreasing violence in Kashmir has opened the path towards deforestation.
Palestinian legislator Abu Teir remains in Israeli prison, refusing to accept arbitrary expulsion from Jerusalem where he lived.
US citizens: sign this petition to the USDA against approving genetically modified alfalfa.
Breaking the Silence's criticism has pressured the Israeli Army to investigate a few Gaza war crimes, but it still tries to deny and cover up the general orders which systematically led to killing of civilians in Gaza.
Syrian president Assad asked for peace with trade and normal relations with Israel, if it returns the Golan heights.
15 months after an Israeli soldier killed a nonviolent protestor in Bil'in, the army has agreed to investigate the killing.
Meanwhile, Adeeb Abu Rahma, a nonviolent protest leader from Bil'in, remains in prison indefinitely after a trial that was ridiculous.
Other nonviolent protest leaders have been imprisoned without trial. Child protestors (under ten years old) have been arrested and interrogated in cruel ways.
Gush Shalom's court case against Israel's inquiry into the attack on the Gaza aid ships achieved one gain: the inquiry will be allowed to question soldiers.
I doubt however that this will affect its conclusions, since the government has set up the inquiry to be inadequate in several ways and this only corrects one of them.
Documents prove the UK conspired to send its citizens to Guantanamo.
A new method of measuring poverty shows that poverty is much more widespread in India than previously believed.
The ACLU has sued to overturn a draconian Internet censorship law enacted in Massachusetts.
Afghan troops that serve Karzai are mainly motivated by money. It regularly happens that they run off to join the Taliban, sometimes killing NATO troops as they leave.
This reflects Karzai's lack of ability to inspire loyalty. It is hard for an army of people without loyalty to win a war.
Al Shabaab, one of the factions fighting to control Somalia, has carried out a deadly bombing in Uganda, which has troops in Mogadishu.
The US brought this about when it sent Ethipian troops to Somalia in 2006, overthrowing the Islamic Courts Movement which had finally united Somalia and brought peace.
That government was hardly a good one, since it applied Islamic law. Islamic law is fundamentally unjust, and is especially cruel to women. But there was no way a better government could exist in Somalia, and it was much better for the inhabitants than constant war. It also did not try to attack anyone outside Somalia.
Thanks to the US-backed intervention, Somalia has returned to constant war and now al Shabaab exports terrorism too.
However, since the attacks were targeted at an intervention in Somalia, it might stop when the intervention stops.
Genetically modified crops designed to produce pharmaceuticals risk disastrous contamination of food.
As shown by Bare-faced Polluter's repeated disasters, caused by cutting corners on safety and preparedness, we cannot trust companies to maintain safely. The only way these genetically modify plants can be safe is if a physical system ensures they do not contaminate our food.
Separation between farms is not enough to prevent contamination. Maybe these plants should be allowed only for indoor growing. However, it is also crucial to choose plants whose pollen does not spread very far. Maize is the worst possible choice.
Israel has demolished more Arab homes in East Jerusalem.
Everyone:
Send a letter to the Wall Street Journal saying it should stop promoting global warming denial, and stop covering up the news that the leaked emails did not show any flaw in the science that demonstrated global warming.
Massachusetts residents: phone your state assemblyperson and senator saying you condemn censorship of the Internet, and that they should not vote for any law that tries to censor Internet publication or access. Protecting our freedom is more important than "protecting" anyone from material that someone doesn't like.
Shahram Amiri, Iranian nuclear physicist, says he was kidnaped and taken to the US and interrogated.
It is plausible that Amiri was kidnaped, and also plausible he defected and later changed his mind. I don't believe that the US government would be stopped by principle from kidnaping an Iranian scientist, but I am a little surprised it would risk the scandal that this could produce.
Population growth still endangers civilization and the biosphere even though the birth rate has decreased.
Sudan's president Bashir has been charged with genocide in the ICC.
The ICC needs more support from the US in order to act effectively against genocide. Dubya made many countries promise not to subject US agents to ICC jurisdiction.
UK protestors who were attacked by police for no reason won a lawsuit against the police.
However, they will not really get justice until the thug who attacked them is put behind bars.
There is new pressure for attacking Iran.
Unpleasant as the idea of Iran's having nuclear weapons is, there is no way to prevent Iran from making them. Located underground, they can't simply be bombed. It would be necessary to occupy various parts of Iran, and that would be a much bigger war than Iraq.
Tunisia has made it a crime to give information to foreign human rights groups.
The US has weakened its position to criticize this Tunisian law by making it a crime to teach groups labeled "terrorist" how to respect human rights.
Carne Ross testified in the UK's Iraq war inquiry that previous witnesses had lied or concealed crucial information.
Will they be pursued to obtain the truth?
Next time you hear people speak admiringly of Mother Teresa, show them this article.
Some large African animals have lost 60% of their population, and are thinning even in protected parks.
Sri Lanka's government is arresting and killing journalists as well as dissidents.
A journalist blows the whistle on Seed Magazine, which censored a column about Bhopal in order to get advertising from Dow Chemical.
We often suppose this sort of thing happens often behind the scenes, but it is very interesting to have eyewitness testimony.
Over and over, US police shoot innocent Black people, and say "Oops!"
Israel's annexation wall has cut off the village of Al Walaja from most of its land. Next, instead of cutting off the rest, it will build a wall all around the village, making it hard for anyone to leave.
We can expect Israel will decide that some inhabitants are forbidden to leave.
Per capita annual income in Afghanistan, around $500. Per capita bribes paid, around $150.
There are ways a government can reduce corruption, but they require firm political will — something Karzai can hardly provide.
Australia has postponed its mandatory web filtering, but this is just a reprieve, not a victory.
The NSA is making sleazy deals to increase spying on the US internet.
The US government is protecting Big Polluter by threatening reporters with felony charges if they come near cleanup sites. Which is nearly the entire Gulf shore.
Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani has been granted a reprieve from execution by stoning, but she might still be executed in some other way.
Shaming Iran for stoning people to death is effective, so don't let up the pressure.
The US also practices the barbarity of capital punishment. Just as in Iran, a substantial fraction of the people executed had ridiculous trials, just not quite so evidently ridiculous.
Afghanistan is a catastrophic failure, which our leaders refuse to admit, because admitting defeat is unthinkable. They have to promise victory around the corner.
Similar denial occurred in Vietnam too.
One additional factor not mentioned here is the way most foolish Americans bowed to the pressure to "support our troops" in Iraq. To resist this distorted idea of patriotism is why I decided to call them "the Bush forces". They started out as the armies of the US and whichever other countries Bush was able to bully, but when handed over to him, they became the Bush forces. Manifestly what Americans owed them was simply to reclaim them.
Sri Lanka is moving further into total tyranny, as government-organized "protests" shut down the UN office to prevent investigation into government war crimes.
The rulers of Sri Lanka, while totally unscrupulous and willing to kill those who criticize them, might be sensitive to trade sanctions.
The UK has abolished the special powers that let police search anyone for no reason in certain rather large territorial areas.
Those laws were mostly applied against protestors and photographers, but proved inadequate to protect the UK from democracy or from photography.
The IMF called on most wealthy countries to maintain deficit spending.
This means the IMF agrees with Paul Krugman. This is an amazing reversal from the IMF, which is famous for imposing fiscal austerity even to the expense of making children pay to go to school.
Europe could eliminate 95% of its carbon emissions and pay for it by savings petroleum.
Increased income typically makes people judge their lives more favorably, but has much less effect on how happy they are.
Medic Andrew Duffy says that the Bush forces ordered medics in Abu Ghraib to give badly ill prisoners no medical care, to cover up torture, and even to participate.
And this was in 2006, long after torture was supposedly stopped there.
Abid Naseer, considered a terrorist suspect in the UK but with no valid evidence to prosecute him, has now been accused by the US of conspiring to plant bombs.
Although he remained at large in Britain, Abid Naseer as a suspect was watched sufficiently that he was caught before he could really do anything. With all the ways the police can monitor a person's actions today, which are legitimate given a court order which they had plenty of grounds to obtain in this case, a person in such a situation has little chance of doing significant harm even if he tries.
These events appear to vindicate the principle of not punishing people on mere suspicion and not deporting people to where they face torture.
Is there any discussion of abrogating the unjust and one-sided US-UK extradition treaty? Since the US never ratified it, the UK should simply say it never took effect.
Naseer may deserve to be extradited; if so, the previous, just extradition treaty will serve. It requires an extradition hearing, but if the US has real evidence linking him to this plot, it will have no trouble prevailing in that hearing.
Everyone: Wish the Dalai Lama a happy 75th birthday.
US citizens: thank Attorney General Holder for suing to overturn Arizona's "show your papers" law.
The UK will grant asylum to refugees who show they face danger because they are gay.
I applaud this decision. As for the economic burden of absorbing future refugees, that will not be a problem if other countries adopt a similar policy.
Israel expels thousands of Palestinian residents from Jerusalem every year on various pretexts. Now it has begun doing so explicitly for political reasons.
Iraqi Sunnis continue attacking religious processions of Shi'ites. This violence is surely fueled by resentment over the expulsion by Shi'ites of Sunnis from most parts of Iraq, including most of Baghdad.
To end the violence would require reconciliation between Shi'ites and Sunnis, which won't be easy, and a government dominated by Shi'ites is likely not to try.
Fahem Boukaddous faces four years in prison in Tunisia for covering protests.
The idea that this coverage was a threat to public order reminds me of some of the logic provided by neocons to excuse their attacks on human rights in the US and elsewhere.
Several investigations show that the Climate Research Unit's science was valid, but the scientists acted too defensively towards criticism and requests for data.
Dogmatic capitalists think that giving is just stupid, even giving what you got for free.
Israeli colonies have taken control of 42% of the land in the West Bank.
The UK government plans to put legal controls on access to its records of all car travel in the country.
This is an important step forward, but not enough to make the tracking and snooping acceptable. The system should not recognize any car unless there is a court order against it.
The UK has a long history of supporting Islamic militants for various reasons, and often this has backfired.
The same is true of the US, and even Israel, which promoted Hamas in the 1980s to undermine the PLO.
I think a few points in the article are invalid, or else based on 20-20 hindsight. Some of these groups were the only choice available for a crucial job. For instance, defeating the Soviet Union (a horrible empire) was very important; Afghanistan was the place this could be done. Everyone there is a Muslim of some kind, and anyone fighting the Soviet occupying forces was likely to be rather fanatical after if he didn't start that way. So there was little alternative to what the UK and US did.
If someone grisly is going to be in the next government in a country, then unless the UK plans to try to overthrow it (which is only occasionally wise, even if it is justified), making diplomatic contact with that next government is necessary.
But these don't invalidate the overall point of the article.
Prominent Israelis accused the police of dishonestly attacking Palestinian protestors in Jerusalem.
Copyright as censorship: Nevada Republican candidate Sharron Angle threatened to sue Democrats for posting her old web pages to show the views she published a couple of months ago.
The Israeli government set up a phony inquiry into its attack on the Gaza aid ships, and Gush Shalom has sued demanding a real inquiry. The government has made a small concession hoping to relieve the pressure, but Gush Shalom will not drop the suit.
What accessing the Internet will be like in 2025.
The major US newspapers called waterboarding "torture" until they found out that Bush had ordered people to do it. Then they stopped.
Here's the study which established these facts.
Arizona plans to cope with the boycott over its "show your papers" law using the "change the subject" PR technique pioneered by the tobacco companies.
Tax-exempt charities in the US support Israeli seizure of Palestinian land in the West bank.
Some of Colombia's paramilitary thugs are helping find the corpses of the people they killed, in exchange for reduced sentences.
Among the crimes these paramilitaries committed were murders of union organizers in the Coca Cola plant. I think these murders continued past 2005. They were the motive for the worldwide boycott of Coca Cola Company.
US companies are heavily involved in China's censored search engine, Baidu.
Rangzieb Ahmed has won the chance to appeal his conviction for planning terrorism, on the grounds that he was tortured.
If crucial evidence was extracted from him through torture, it is clearly worthless. If that evidence was not needed to convict him, maybe his conviction should stand. But those guilty of conniving at his torture must be prosecuted.
Palin compared Obama to Hitler, for making BP pay for the damage of its pollution.
This is backwards, because Hitler was as kind to business as he was nasty to Jews and Gypsies.
Corporate executives who take risks with other people's lives and livelihoods should be punished like drunk drivers.
A witness who resigned from the UK foreign office testified that reports on Iraq were made by a series of distortions that added up to a lie.
George Monbiot: Conservative plans to deregulate the UK will cause billions of dollars, plus many lives, until eventually the government reregulates. But the Labour party has squandered the moral authority required to fight this through its own surrenders to business.
The Icelandic Modern Media Initiative faces threats from unjust treaties.
When I reported on the passage of the IMMI resolution, I was under the impression that it was a law, that the program was in effect. It appears that was only a decision to proceed to write and adopt laws that would actually protect freedom of the press.
The Lugano agreement seems to have made the unstated assumption that no signatory country would apply its jurisdiction to acts under the jurisdiction of another signatory country — an assumption that is false today. If the article is accurate, this treaty threatens freedom of the press all around Europe. It won't be the first disaster to human rights caused by European intergovernmental organizations.
The right fix to the Lugano treaty is to limit its scope, so that if country A issues a judgment over an act that took place in country B, to enforce that judgment in country B requires a hearing in country B to determine whether its laws would support the same judgment. This is comparable to the principle of "double criminality" that most extradition treaties uphold: country A won't extradite you to country B for an act which wouldn't be a crime in country A. (Did the unjust UK-US extradition treaty abandon this principle? Please tell me if you know.)
In the mean time, every government in Europe that values freedom — if there are any — must give freedom of the press clear priority, by declaring its refusal to recognize foreign judgments over domestic publication. In other words, "If you take issue with any publication done in this country, you must sue here under our law."
The UK is now considering libel law reform, which is overdue; but even if the UK eliminates this problem, any treaty allowing one country's laws to restrict publication in other countries is a disaster in waiting. The oil companies and MacDonalds only need to pay one government to adopt new laws under which companies could easily sue anyone that criticizes them, and they could impose censorship on all Europe.
A news photographer taking photos of a Big Polluter refinery was stopped by police and forced to show his photos to a Big Polluter agent.
Any real terrorist who wanted to photograph the refinery could easily disguise the activity, so these measures can only cause trouble for the press.
You can buy t-shirts that criticize security theater.
Talking with groups labeled as "terrorist" is necessary for figuring out which ones it is possible to make peace with.
Thus, the prohibition on "giving support" to these groups, which the insane US supreme court interpreted to include even explaining human rights law to them, tends to perpetuate rather than solve international problems. Whether intentional or not, this serves the purpose of those who can take advantage of continued conflict, even continued terrorism, by assuring them the "long war" they want.
Babar Ahmad has spent 6 years in prison in the UK, threatened with extradition to the US on bogus charges. Before Al Hamza can be extradited to the US, it has to promise to treat him humanely.
Ideally the US constitutional prohibition on "cruel and unusual punishment" ought to be enough to assure this, but it has been interpreted in a weak and inadequate way. What the UK really needs to do is discard its extradition treaty with the US, which the US never ratified anyway, and go back to the old treaty.
Lloyds of London warns it is time to prepare for peak oil.
Will the response be conservation and renewables? Or will it be oil shale to hasten the following disaster of global warming?
Libya has sent a ship of aid to Gaza.
I don't trust the government of Libya to keep arms off a ship to Gaza. Also, Libya was (and may still be) in favor of destroying Israel; therefore its attempt to aid Gaza lends itself to the interpretation that it is aimed at that goal. Gaza aid ships should come from countries which are not enemies of Israel and can be trusted to ensure that the ships carry only civilian goods.
Cuba has freed 1/3 of its political prisoners.
It is a step in the right direction. Meanwhile, Russia has placed artists on trial for art that the state does not like.
Everyone: sign this petition demanding Bullying Poisoner allow cleanup workers to wear protective gear.
Brazil proposes a law against DRM that interferes with fair use.
There are 27,000 abandoned wells in the Gulf of Mexico, and any of them may start to leak. The US government has given oil companies a pass on safety standards.
For the short term, this doesn't matter much — an additional small leak in the Gulf today would hardly be noticed. However, in the longer term, we must take the risk of future leaks into account as one more argument against further undersea drilling.
The wealthy world helped Haitians survive after the earthquake, but is doing very little for rebuilding. The people who were made homeless still live in camps.
Some economists argue that using the euro as their currency will force many years of bad times on some European countries.
A single currency for a region effectively means just one fiscal policy for the whole region. Whatever policy that is, it will be better for some parts of the region and worse for others. If the parts that gain make up the other parts' loss, they can all benefit. But the EU is failing to do that.
It looks like Israeli agents killed Ashraf Marwan in London in order to steal his unpublished memoires.
The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement really stings in Israel, and a proposed law would penalize anyone advocating a boycott. Not only statements of support would be penalized, but even publication of relevant information. Companies that manufacture products in the colonies in the West Bank have been known to lie and say these products were made in Israel. Would this law empower them to sue anyone that publshes the truth? This fascist proposal illustrates what Israeli peace activists have said for decades: that the occupation of Palestinian territory is corrupting their country at every level. Neve Gordon, one of those threatened by this bill, explains the aims of the BDS movement: not against Israel, but against Israel's occupation. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/11/israeli-academic-boycott-commentary
There are two versions of the consumer boycott: one that boycotts all Israeli products, and the other that boycotts only products made in the West Bank colonies. I've decided to support the latter one. My support is limited to words, however, since I never come across any Israeli products that I might have considered buying.
UK citizens: tell Ofcom how you think it should enforce the Dinosaur Economy Act.
Ofcom has asked a large number of rather narrow questions: it seeks suggestions about details of an activity that is fundamentally wrong. But you need not limit yourself to answers that Ofcom will consider helpful, and you need not base your answers on the supposition that the Dinosaur Economy Act's malicious intentions ought to be carried out. I suggest responding to each question in a sincere way based on your ideas of how to achieve the results that would be good for society.
You could also talk about this perverted advice on "internet safety" for chidren.
That page is full of lies; for instance, it says that copyright infringement is legally the same as theft. It then tries to blame] file sharing for various unrelated risks of internet use — like saying masturbation will make you go blind. Reputable free software for file sharing does not pose any risk of these problems.
But the dishonesty at the heart of that page is that it pretends to help you to protect your family, when its real purport is to threaten your family. It "protects" your family the way the mafia "protects" your business.
This page says how to send in your response.
It is an outrage for a government to ask people to send Microsoft Word files. In effect, this means the UK government promotes Microsoft. So send your response in email, using plain ASCII (they won't have any difficulty reading that), and explain why you diregarded a very bad suggestion.
If you email your response to mailman@lists.stallman.org it will be visible in http://stallman.org/dinosaur-economy.
Tiny floating pieces of plastic kill a million seabirds every year, and 100,000 marine mammals. And the ocean, compared with 60 years ago, is almost empty of fish.
I wonder if we could develop a solar-powered automated ship to recover these plastic pieces.
Uri Avnery: Three Palestinian residents of Jerusalem have taken refuge in the International Red Cross so that they cannot be arbitrarily expelled.
If Israel gets away with expelling Palestinians from Jerusalem for their politics, it will expel them all. It will spread the expulsions over a period of a decade or two, hoping that the world won't notice.
Everyone: sign this petition calling on Iran not to execute Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani and to end the practice of stoning.
Turks have gone to court to challenge Internet censorship.
Bradley Manning faces criminal charges for passing the Collateral Murder raw footage to Wikileaks.
I think there should be a campaign to give him the Nobel Peace Prize. He deserves it more than last year's winner.
Obama greeted Netanhayu as if begging for his approval.
Apparently the doubt in Washington about blindly supporting the Israeli hawks is still something Obama doesn't dare support.
The UK government will hold an inquiry into collaboration with torture carried out by the US, Pakistan, etc.
However, it will not prosecute anyone.
The government also plans a new law to block from the courts the evidence that revealed this torture, and thus created the need for the inquiry.
This law would grant UK agents impunity in practice, so they could safely conspire for future torture with no fear of another such inquiry. All to protect the reputation of the US.
Instead of pressuring the UK to help protect US torturers, Obama should make the US come clean about its torture activities, and end the practice once and for all.
1/4 of all species of flowering plants are threatened with extinction due to human activity. And that is without considering what global warming will do.
ATM vendors forced a security researcher to cancel a talk about security bugs ATMs which those companies have refused to fix.
100 Iraqis are campaigning for legal redress in the UK because they were tortured by British soldiers in the Bush forces.
Meanwhile, Obama has followed Bush in preventing US torture victims from getting heard by courts.
A former police chief says that the B'liar/Clown regime's attacks on human rights, carried out in the name of preventing terrorism, actually had the opposite effect.
Obama will sue to overturn Arizona's "show us your papers" law. I applaud the move, but the justification given fails to state what is really bad about this law: forcing people to carry papers and show them.
The law may well be racist in intent and in effect, but that is a side issue since it attacks the rights of everyone regardless of race.
A Sea Shepherd activist received a suspended sentence in Japan.
Nearly all Americans want a constitional amendment to limit corporations' influence on elections.
Global warming cools the ionosphere, which slows down the orbital decay of space junk, making it more dangerous.
Pakistan proposes to imprison journalists for "defaming" state agencies — essentially, for criticizing the government.
This would add to laws that impose the death penalty for criticizing Islam, producing a thoroughgoing tyranny.
Madagascar's government has eliminated restrictions on cutting down the forest, putting the island's future at risk as well as its lemurs.
The previous government was overthrown because it planned to accept foreign-directed oppression.
The ACLU published extensive documentation how police in the US systematically infiltrate and attack democratic activity.
The House of Representatives voted to cut aid to Afghanistan because Karzai has not allowed his cronies to be investigated for stealing a lot of the past aid.
Garment workers in Bangladesh have launched big protests against employers who don't pay them the meager salary they are supposed to get.
A preliminary EPA study concluded that dispersants didn't harm some mature animals. This was misreported as meaning they are safe.
If the dispersants are less toxic than oil, that would be directly pertinent if we had a choice between one and the other. However, the choice we have is between one and both. Moreover, it seems the dispersant helped the oil get under booms and into wildlife sanctuaries. Thus, in addition to its own toxicity, it extended the reach of the oil's toxicity.
Turkey has imposed filtering on the Internet for censorship purposes.
Smokers are suing a tobacco company to pay for regular scans to check for early stages of lung cancer.
The tobacco companies knew, from their secret research, that smoking caused various diseases, and concealed the results from the public while pretending this was not true.
US citizens: call on the US government to end ideological exclusion: refusing scholars and artists entry to the US because of their political views.
The US and its puppets (Peru and Colombia) are the only defenders of the coup-installed regime in Honduras.
A prominent Cuban historian criticized official corruption, and has been punished and silenced in various ways.
People who die in England may be buried in an artificial undersea reef that will provide shelter for young fish and crustacians.
This could be very important in the future. When coral reefs die due to excess acidity in the ocean, and lots of people die because there are few fish left in the sea, burying them in artificial reefs could enable fish to come back.
Climate models suggest most of the Amazon rainforest may disappear within a century, and large parts may become desert.
These models are not certain. The only way to be certain is to try the experiment and see. Who wants to risk disaster? (Megacorporations, don't all raise your hand at once.)
These senators, from states with over 10% unemployment, have repeatedly filibustered to block extension of unemployment coverage.
Undersea explorer Sylvia Earle says Blythe Polluter is still withholding crucial data from scientists, and the US government is not helping the scientists get it.
The UK government is investigating how its soldiers in the Bush forces tortured Baha Mousa to death, but refuses to answer questions about other specific prisoners also tortured to death. And there may have been hundreds victims.
The Peruvian colonial government has expelled Paul McAuley, who has helped indigenous peoples to organize to resist the destruction of their land to extract petroleum.
These peoples will be hit twice: whatever part of their forest is not destroyed by the drilling will dry up and burn due to global warming produced by the petroleum.
The US government, in ordering Peru to destroy its land this way, is keeping the world fixed on the path to destruction. A simple decision not to extract petroleum from those areas in Peru for 40 years would ensure higher oil prices and thus conservation, and then maybe the Amazon rain forest would not turn into desert.
Women in Iran are frequently sentenced to death for having sex.
This illustrates the thorough injustice of Islamic law. It is evil and nothing can excuse it.
The Supreme Court says that the fairness of company-imposed arbitration requirements can be decided by the company-imposed arbitrators.
Blind Polluter intends to draw only small lessons from the disaster it has caused. It says it will continue undersea oil drilling, and continue mining tar sands from Alberta.
The problem with tar sands is not the risk of a spill; it is the certainty of poisoning lots of water and contributing heavily to global warming. Improvements in safety precautions won't do anything about that.
US citizens: send a message to Obama against letting ACTA restrict the Internet.
There is a sentence in the page that makes me gag: "It's not because we're crypto-pirates looking to steal digital content." That sentence endorses the enemy's propaganda, referring to copying as "stealing" and people who share as "pirates". (Even referring to published works as "content" is foolish.) The second half of that sentence seems to grant legitimacy to putting shackles on the wrists of the "pirates". That's what happens when you use the enemy's propaganda terms: you start making foolish concessions.
However, this sentence is not in the message that people are invited to send to Obama, so I can still support the campaign.
When I sent a message, I changed the text. I replaced
I am discouraged by the news that around the world, different governments have been requiring ISPs to cut users off from the Internet if they are accused of infringing copyrights. Mistaken accusations have been made and innocent users have been cut off from a vital communication tool, without due process.
with
It is an outrage that some countries punish people accused of forbidden sharing by disconnecting them from the Internet. The fact that this happens without due process illustrates how the War on Sharing has contempt for the basic idea of justice.
This avoids suggesting that punishment by disconnection might be legitimate if only they held a proper trial to verify the user's "guilt".
I am discouraged by the news that around the world, different governments have been requiring ISPs to cut users off from the Internet if they are accused of infringing copyrights. Mistaken accusations have been made and innocent users have been cut off from a vital communication tool, without due process.
Police in London arrested a teenager for taking pictures of a parade.
Putting the issue of Internet pornography in context.
Despite the fuss made about porn with "extreme sexual violence", the porn I come across doesn't have it. I believe it exists, but it is just a subgenre.
If I saw it, I would probably find it as disgusting as the extreme nonsexual violence in Pulp Fiction. But disgust does not justify censorship.
Workers in China are starting to organize and strike.
So far, the opposition of the "workers'" state and party has prevented this from affecting a broad range of companies. A Chinese Communist leader famously said "some people have to get rich first", and some have done so. How hard will the party fight now, to prevent the rest of China from following them?
Forget the incompetent Russian spies in the US — the real spy threat comes from the US puppet government of Colombia.
Corporate-controlled senators have blocked any chance of legislation to try to stop global warming.
Senators who aim to prevent climate disaster should not make the mistake of dropping the issue. They should write a good bill and put the corporate flunkies in the position of blocking it, so that they can be made to pay for that in the election.
Redd is supposed to pay poor countries to reduce logging, but they have found ways to cheat and get paid while continuing or increasing the amount of logging.
The corruption of African politicians such as Kabila can't be blamed entirely on the evils of the former colonial regime.
However, the evils of foreign powers didn't stop when the Congo's independence. Since the US and Belgium supported Mobutu, their culpability continued till around 1997. It may not even have ended then. Does the US government support the companies that buy the minerals that fuel the civil war?
The US "Trusted Internet Identity" proposal is a
threat to privacy and anonymity on the Internet.
Labour in the UK is trying to move on from its invasion of Iraq,
without acknowledging or understanding the disastrous wrong it
committed there.
Some of the history behind the US Declaration of Independence
that isn't usually mentioned.
It is anachronistic to condemn anyone in 1700 for slavery or trying to
disposses another people; we have only later learned that these are
wrong. The Declaration of Independence represented an advance in thinking
about government even if it did not raise these ethical issues.
By contrast, judging the conduct of George II based on how we
once condemned George III is entirely appropriate. He can't
present the excuse that such lessons were unknown in the past.
The ACLU has
sued to challenge the US No Fly list.
Video Prison:
Why Patents Might Threaten Free Online Video.
To me, the no-cost license through 2015 smacks of a trap.
Iran is the
world leader in imprisonment of journalists. 3000
journalists in Iran cannot work because editors are afraid to hire
them.
Washington is seriously
doubting its decades of unquestioning
support for Israeli expansionism.
Syria has
imprisoned human rights activist Haitham Maleh.
A couple in the UK face a threat from the state for letting their
children bike to school for a few minutes unmonitored.
I am still not ready to ride a bicycle on a street with significant
car or pedestrian traffic, but when I was 6 years old I walked several
blocks to school in Manhattan, and didn't need anyone to hold my hand.
Unless Dulwich is a much more dangerous place than Manhattan, I think
this is a fine example of stultifying overprotectiveness.
Kurds are
starting to doubt the validity of female sexual mutilation.
The US Republican Party leader Steele faces flack from other Republicans for
acknowledging
it is foolish to try to win a war in Afghanistan.
When Steele calls it a "war of Obama's chosing", he's not entirely
wrong. Dubya started the war (which, I am obliged to acknowledge, I
supported because of the tyranny of the Taliban), then Dubya ignored
Afghanistan to invade Iraq, thus giving the Taliban a chance to come
back. Obama has no responsibility for all of that. But Obama decided
in 2009 to continue and escalate the war; now, a year and a half
later, it continues by his choice.
An official restudy of the IPCC report found several minor errors
but nothing to cast doubt on the conclusion that greenhouse gas emissions
are driving the world to disaster.
A study of world-wide climate policies says they are on track
for 4 degrees C of warming in this century, which would mean the
eventual collapse of the Greenland ice sheet.
The resulting rise in sea level would flood cities including New York
and Boston, as well as a large part of Bangladesh, Florida, etc.
Meanwhile, climate scientists in the US are
getting death threats for trying to prevent that disaster.
Is it
ethical for doctors to prescribe placebos? Although they have
no value as medicine, they do help some patients recover from real
problems.
Perhaps prescribing a placebo is acceptable when there is nothing
better to offer provided the doctor avoids claiming it is medically
active.
Israel has
eased the Gaza blockade somewhat. Most everyday use items will
be allowed in, but no exports are allowed, so what comes in will only be
deliveries of aid.
Israel still excludes building materials, with which people could
rebuild the homes destroyed by Israel's bombing and shelling in 2008.
The EU wants to
take notes on everyone's search engine use.
Here is
Privacy International's statement about this attack
on everyone's privacy.
Turkey will
break diplomatic relations with Israel unless Israel
accepts an international inquiry into its attack on the Gaza aid ships.
US citizens: phone your senators saying they should extend unemployment benefits.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
US citizens: call on the US government to end ideological exclusion: refusing scholars and artists entry to the US because of their political views.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to support H.R. 5652, which would crack down on phony abortion clinics that trick women. Or send an email through this page.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
UK citizens: use Clegg's "Your Freedom" project to call for repeal of the Dinosaur Economy Act.
The company OCTEL bribed foreign governments so it could go on selling toxic tetraethyl lead for use in gasoline. The plea bargain let it off with hardly any penalty.
Gazan lawyer Fatima Sharif, forbidden by Israel to travel to Ramallah for a course on human rights law, has gone to Israeli court to demand permission.
Israel had better change its policy, before people conclude that it is absurd to mention Israel and human rights in the same breath.
Fiji threatens to imprison journalists.
Documents show B'liar was informed that invading Iraq would be illegal, one day before he promised Bush to support the invasion.
B'liar should be put on trial, and so should Bush.
Methane coming from the leaking well is causing a dead area, with too little oxygen for a fish to live.
Protestors who sabotaged an arms factory in the UK were found innocent, on grounds they were preventing war crimes that Israel would commit using the arms it was buying.
US citizens: sign this petition for strong antitrust enforcement against concentration among milk distributors that is driving dairy farms bankrupt.
The Republican platform in Texas involves censorship, attacks on homosexuals, and punishment of anything but vanilla sex.
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