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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.
US citizens: oppose the US/Colombia free exploitation treaty.
Support repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act, which discriminates against gay couples.
Microsoft admits that the US government can collect data about users from any Microsoft subsidiary, anywhere around the world.
The Supreme Court rejected a crucial provision of public funding election laws: giving candidates funds to compensate for the excess spending of a rich opponent.
This seems to be part of the right-wing campaign to block every means of resisting the power of the rich to buy public opinion.
Everyone: demand that Hamas allow verification that Gilad Shalit is being treated humanely.
Israel is not the only party that has the obligation to respect human rights.
What the NRC's report on nuclear power plant safety won't mention.
Israel has withdrawn the threat to punish journalists on the Gaza aid ships.
Due to global heating, in 100 years there may be no Joshua trees in Joshua tree national park. Or maybe none at all.
As global heating accelerates, plant species will have to move faster and faster to survive, and many of them cannot move very fast.
The Greek parliament voted for the austerity plan, and police launched a massive toxic teargas attack on the protesters outside.
Boeing charges the US $644 for a small helicopter gear that normally sells for $12.51.
This shows what is likely to happen when the government uses private contractors. The cult of the Invisible Hand says that this has to be cheaper, but apparently its credo does not fit reality.
Orlando, Florida, has arrested 21 people for handing out food to homeless people in a park.
Food Not Bombs has faced repression in other parts of the US, from city governments who find homeless people unpleasant and wish they would go off somewhere and die.
The Mexican congress passed a resolution rejecting ACTA.
According to movie studios' creative accounting, the latest Harry Potter movie "lost money" despite being a big success.
Make sure it doesn't get any of your money! Boycott Harry Potter books, and films too!
Internal documents show that the TSA ignored cancer clusters that might be caused by body scanners, refusing to give its staff dosimeters which could determine whether in fact they are exposed to too much radiation.
It also lied and said that NIST had "affirmed the safety" of the scanners, which NIST denies doing.
The Israeli Parliament is considering a law to ban the boycott of products made in the Israeli colonies in the West Bank.
Global heating skeptic Willie Soon has received a million dollars in research grants from oil and coal companies.
The headline says he "received" the money, but the text seems to show this is a matter of research funding rather than personal payments to him. Nonetheless, it is an ethical issue.
I am not surprised Exxon (remember the "xx" is pronounced like "ch" in German "ach") funds "hundreds of organisations". Funding just one wouldn't achieve the purpose of distracting humanity from the disaster it needs urgently to avoid. Exxon, yexx!
How Corporations Award Themselves Legal Immunity.
Refuting absurd claims that wind power generators would cause a climate disaster.
Haitian farmers protested for more support from their government, which has allowed subsidized US farm products to crush local agriculture, and is now accepting poisonous US gifts of seed treated with toxic chemicals.
Major Australian ISPs have agreed to censor Internet connections "voluntarily" — but it's not voluntary for the users.
The excuse is "child pornography", one of the standard excuses for crushing civil liberties on the Internet. Once filtering is set up, they can extend it to whatever else they wish.
The MPAA is trying to impose Internet filtering on the UK through a lawsuit.
A rebuttal of the claim that thorium reactors make dangerous waste products which was the point of a previous political note ("Making nuclear reactors use thorium instead of uranium does not make their waste safe").
However, there is one error in this article: it claims that existing nuclear reactors did not need a public subsidy.
The "child pornography" witch-hunt has made a possession of this high-school yearbook a crime - because of what two students in the background of a photo are doing.
Imagine if the photo had been published in a newspaper. That could turn thousands of people into criminals.
Doing foreplay in a dance is a little daring - it must have been fun. It suggests those two students are normal teenagers with a normal interest in sex. If there was anything harmful, wrong, or shameful about this photo, it wasn't them. Yet (according to an article on a site not suitable to link to) they might face prosecution, with the danger of being listed as "sex offenders", effectively "perverts", for being normal and hurting nobody.
These laws are the perverted intersection of two irrational hot buttons: "sex is dirty" and "we must protect the children". Remember this when Internet filtering is imposed in order to block "child pornography".
The charges against Emily Good were dropped, and the Mayor of Rochester condemned her arrest and the police harassment of her supporters.
The TSA says it didn't require an old woman dying of cancer to remove her diaper. The woman's daughter, who was with her, insists it did.
People suspect the TSA is playing a dishonest word game to evade responsibility for its actions. Whatever the TSA demands, they pretend it is "not required" because you have the option of missing your flight. These lies won't fool anyone who pays attention, but they hope to fool many people who listen to a soundbite.
Fracking may be limited in many regions by lack of water.
This issue is a pertinent one for technologies that consume water. However, this presentation tries to generalize the idea too far. It is ridiculous to talk about the amount of water needed for hydroelectric generation, because people build dams where water already flows downhill - and the water that flows through the generator is not used up in the process. It remains available for other uses.
As for growing crops for biofuels, that is a wasteful practice in every respect, and should not be treated as a serious option.
A Syrian soldier defected when he was ordered to shoot protesters and told, "The men with guns are ours."
Canada is blocking a treaty to ban export of asbestos, which causes lung disease.
The US has tried to smear the activists on the Gaza aid fleet by mentioning that "aiding Hamas" is illegal.
Of course, the US government knows that that is irrelevant, since bringing humanitarian aid to Gaza is not aiding Hamas. It is engaged in evident dishonesty comparable to what Bush used to do to defend his lies about Iraq.
A new USGS report shows how much we don't know about the dangers of undersea oil drilling in the Arctic.
Israel is trying to prevent press coverage of the Gaza aid fleet by threatening to deny journalists entry to Israel and Palestine for 10 years.
A letter from a naive peace activist (on the Gaza aid ships) to an Israeli naval officer.
Ray McGovern is on the ship too, and explains an inconvenient truth that the US tries to suppress: US support for the occupation of Palestine and siege of Gaza are crucial motivating factors for terrorists that attack the US.
Craig Murray, a former naval attache who knows the relevant law thoroughly, explains why an Israeli attack on these ships would be illegal, as is the siege.
However, far from acting to protect US citizens on the high seas, Obama would be glad to see them killed in an illegal Israeli attack against a US ship.
We already know that Obama thinks it is ok to kill Americans abroad if he does not approve of their views.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to sign Rep. Chris Murphy's letter calling for a hearing for HR 862, which would deal with the unethical activities of Clarence Thomas. Also sign this petition.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
US citizens: send messages to your senators and representatives in favor of the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act.
This bill would limit use of antibiotics on farm animals.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to call for investigation of Clarence Thomas' unethical political dealings.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Sign Rob Zerban's petition telling Paul Ryan to stop attacking Medicare.
Republicans want to destroy the Clean Water Act.
The US has the weakest protections for workers of any developed country, but companies such as Boeing and Target are trying to crush those, with help from Republicans.
Turkey is now allowing journalists to talk with Syrian refugees and the people aiding them. Meanwhile, the Lebanese government is helping Syria by arresting Syrian dissidents and even refugees.
I disagree with Turkey's government on many issues, such as censorship, but I admire its willingness to set aside superficial political interests for human decency. If only the US were so moral.
The US has set up massive programs to spy on millions of Arabs and manipulate public opinion in the Arab world, known only from the leaked HBGary emails.
The government says it won't use this capability on Americans, but it already has.
Emily Wood was arrested for making a video of police as they were doing a traffic stop.
She was accused of "obstructing" their activities, but how could making a video possibly do that? Perhaps if they were planning to do something illegal, or lie about their actions. Such lies on the part of cops are not unusual.
Police then proceeded to harass people attending a neighborhood meeting to support her.
These thugs and bullies think that laws are their tools for hurting anyone who opposes them. That is the reason cops often lie.
Pakistan is carrying out a long term campaign of repression against Balochis, the people of a region that Pakistan conquered in 1947. Over 14,000 Balochis have been disappeared in the past decade.
Wikileaks cables show how the US government pushed business exploitation in Haiti.
20 years ago, Croatia used national ID cards for ethnic cleansing. Now they are used for illegal foreclosure without trial.
Belarus arrested 450 people who made an unusual protest: not merely nonviolent, but silent too.
Republicans are now attacking food stamps, using false accusations of fraud.
In the UK: tell your MP you oppose the dishonest scheme for "voluntary" filtering of the Internet - unless it's voluntary for you.
Venture capitalists have signed a letter opposing some of the provisions of the "PROTECT IP" act.
The term "IP" in the name of that bill is propaganda - don't repeat it in your own discourse.
We all understand that the wishes of businesses and investors carry more weight with the US Congress than the wishes of citizens. That means democracy is sick. I am glad to see investors oppose this fundamentally unjust bill, since they may be able to kill it. The same sickness of democracy gave Hollywood and the record companies the power which they are using to try to pass it.
While we can be glad that some of these non-citizens are using their power on our side, we must not let that lead us to tolerate corporatocracy.
A blogger in Taiwan was jailed for criticizing the food she ate in a restaurant.
It is very hard to speak with the precision that this court punished her for failing to use. I try to do so, but I don't always succeed. However, even if she carelessly stretched her statement, that does not justify imprisonment.
It appears that online reviews create psychological pressure to exaggerate.
If we would like to discourage exaggeration, harsh punishments against a few of those who succumb to this pressure will not do the job (in addition to being unjust). Changing the structure of the system might perhaps work.
FAIR documents bias in the US mainstream media, which often is expressed through presuppositions. Here's an example: the Washington Post presumes that withdrawal from Afghanistan should be slowed down, not sped up.
Another example: how the New York Times pushes to cut public workers' pensions, condemning unions in the process.
I see a flaw in the Times' argument that FAIR didn't point out. The article cites a police chief and a deputy fire chief as examples - but those are managers. Normally they would not even be members of the union, and their salary and pension have nothing to do with those of ordinary policemen or firemen.
The University of Michigan library is taking a small step towards making the "orphan works" in its collection available digitally.
Since their availability is very limited, this is just a first step.
If Palestine declares statehood unilaterally in September, it will be following the same path as Israel in 1948.
Foreign maids working in Saudi Arabia are effectively slaves, since they are forbidden to return home without the consent of their employer. If that employer is cruel, doesn't pay the salary, or rapes them, they have no way to escape.
Meaningful accomplishments give more satisfaction than material career goals.
So instead of trying to make money from proprietary software, it is wiser to become a free software activist.
In Egypt, the youth wing of the Muslim Brotherhood has broken away to form a new party which is more secular.
In the US: tell AT&T and Comcast you object to the three-strikes punishment plan they intend to impose on their customers.
Al Gore, blaming the US for the failure of the Copenhagen climate talks, has recognized that US democracy has been corrupted and that Obama is weak.
Republican laws in 8 states are designed to cause more abortions - by obstacles to contraception, and cuts in prenatal care and education.
Even more nasty, they are prosecuting women who had miscarriages.
This is the War on Women.
Making nuclear reactors use thorium instead of uranium does not make their waste safe.
Thousands of village women in India have been trained as solar engineers to set up solar power systems in their villages.
If this small operation has saved over a million liters of fossil fuel a year, imagine what could be achieved by a full national effort in India. All that is missing is the political will.
The House of Representatives refused to authorize the intervention in Libya.
Syria's protests have spread to Damascus, where protesters were shot dead.
Ai Weiwei's associates remain disappeared even though he himself has been released.
No matter what crimes a person may be guilty of, disappearing him is never justified - and the fact that these people have been disappeared, and that Ai Weiwei has been gagged as a condition of parole, is grounds to believe the worst accusations against the Chinese Government.
The TSA is selling the "dangerous" snow-globes that it takes away from surprised passengers.
It cost a lot of money for the US to occupy and destroy Iraq, so some politicians want Iraq to pay for the service.
Nine blackwhiting words that define the US idea of war.
California is considering a bill to require disclosure of chemicals used in fracking.
Political prisoners in Iran say the prison guards are encouraging prisoners to rape them. I would guess that Islam considers homosexual rape a grave crime, but no hypocrisy is too much for the Islamic Republic.
There is a bill in the House of Representatives to end marijuana prohibition (leaving it to states to decide).
Police in Denmark want to ban anonymous access to the Internet.
France already has such a law, which makes it effectively impossible for me to use public internet sites in France (since I refuse to identify myself). Will anyone in Denmark campaign against this?
Cutting the US deficit makes no rational sense in terms of the US economy.
I suspect it makes rational sense for whoever paid US politicians to push for deficit reduction.
Toronto police have promised never again to besiege protesters.
The biggest ISPs in the US are planning to punish their customers extrajudicially for sharing.
This is possible because in large parts of the US there are few choices of ISP for broadband.
It is Obama's fault. Obama is practicing divide-and-rule on behalf of the corporations he serves.
This article uses the propaganda term "piracy" (for sharing) and uses the propaganda term "intellectual property" in a twisted way to refer to works of authorship. Don't make the mistake of repeating their propaganda.
UK representatives of the copyright industry proposed a rapid-response web filtering system that China would envy.
There is a high level of birth defects in states where mountaintop mining is practiced.
To establish whether mountaintop mining is responsible would require further experiments. It is important to carry out those experiments.
Renewable energy offers the chance to decentralize and democratize electricity production.
Obama raised the official US troop strength in Afghanistan from 34,000 to 100,000, and this is not counting the 100,000 contractors or mercenaries. Thus, withdrawing 33,000 would still leave more forces than Bush had there.
3,000 nurses protested on Wall Street for a tax on financial transactions to fund health care.
Everyone: sign this petition to Brazil's president Rousseff to protect the Amazon forest, and reject the bill that would weaken forest protections.
Ai Weiwei has been freed on bail in exchange for agreeing not to talk about how he was treated.
If Ai Weiwei is really guilty of tax evasion, that would justify arresting him — but not holding him incommunicado. And I think they would not have done so. Thus, the Chinese officials are lying.
Likewise, requiring a released prisoner to promise not to talk about prison conditions is evident and inexcusable tyranny.
HBGary and other countries apparently set up a system for the US to secretly manipulate "public opinion" on the Internet.
It is the automated equivalent of the astroturf campaigns and media bias that corporations use to twist US politics.
Dissidents and human rights defenders in Bahrain were sentenced to life imprisonment in a military court, based on false confessions extracted by torture.
Sounds like Guantanamo. Bahrain must respect human rights, but it is far more important to make the US respect them.
Iranian women's rights campaigner Maryam Majd has been arrested and disappeared.
Tyranny in Iran has reached the point where anyone that wants a change is considered an enemy, even if the change would not alter who holds the power.
A man is on trial in France for making anti-semitic insults to strangers in a restaurant.
Insults are not nice, and racism is disgusting, but prosecuting people for speaking insults is even more disgusting. It sounds like this man was (and maybe still is) a prize jerk, but that should not be a crime.
Russia has banned an opposition party.
This resembles the previous election, where would-be opposition candidate Kasparov was blocked from forming a party to run.
Facebook's identify-your-friends feature is facing a challenge in Connecticut.
Oil companies are funding an astroturf campaign to demand cheap gasoline.
Such a campaign could not achieve its supposed goal except by reducing the taxes that help discourage gasoline use. But it might have other benefits for the oil companies.
Obama is trying to disregard the War Powers Act with a wacky claim that the intervention in Libya is not "hostilities".
By Obama's logic, firing ICBMs would not be hostilities either.
Morocco's king has announced substantial democratic reforms, but they don't go all the way to the constitutional monarchy that protesters called for.
International climate talks remained stalled: another meeting has gone by with only minor progress.
Countries are fighting for bigger pieces of mansion rather than put out the fire that is destroying it.
Wildlife populations in some African wild areas are crashing.
Naturally, human intrusion plays a substantial role in this.
Greenpeace protesters have been arrested after protesting on an oil rig.
Note the ridiculous argument that drilling near Greenland is safe because wells have been drilled in Norway's Arctic. Were they safe, or just lucky? If a well in the Barents Sea had blown up, could Norway have shut it off and cleaned up the spill?
It appears Obama supports Argentina's demand to conquer the Falkland Islands.
Many specialist doctors in the US refuse to make appointments for children with public health insurance.
Wyden and Chaffetz' bill to require warrants for police to get geolocation data seems to be better than Franken's bill, which applies only to commercial use of the data.
30 Saudi women held their drive-in, but the police responded by not taking notice.
Everyone: call on India to free environmental activists imprisoned on absurd charges.
How the empire of the corporations is using Arab revolutions as an opportunity to impose cruel austerity programs.
US citizens: the campaign to email senators against the "PROTECT IP" act is having an effect. Have you sent email yet? If not, please do it now.
US citizens: call on Clarence Thomas to resign for what would, in any other US court, be ethics violations.
Everyone: call on the US to apologize to Maher Arar for having him tortured by proxy in Syria.
The US-backed civil war in Guatemala has officially ended, but persistent violence against women is its result.
The TSA is searching trains and buses, using the imaginary danger of terrorists as an excuse to check people's persons and papers everywhere.
Obama, by renewing the PAT RIOT Act, extended Bush's war on the Bill of Rights.
UK's biggest ISPs have lost an appeal against the DEA (Denial of E-citizenship Act).
Of 6 million hectares of land stolen during Colombia's civil war, the restitution law will only restore 2 million to the previous owners. The government does not intend to return the land which was taken by companies or by the state itself.
A call to break up the US communications duopoly of AT&T and Verizon, just as AT&T's monopoly was broken up in the past.
When the Nuclear Regulatory Commission finds that an old reactor does not meet a safety standard, it changes the standard to fit the reactor.
A major Egyptian diplomat calls for negotiating a ceasefire in Libya.
In the US, the way to get medical treatment is to rob a bank.
The conference of US mayors approved a resolution for speeding up withdrawal of US troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has gone very easy on US nuclear reactor operators.
The campaign to protect the Grand Canyon from uranium mining was successful.
However, even to have considered allowing uranium mining there shows how soft on pollution the Obama regime is.
US citizens: oppose the ban on DC funding for abortions for poor women.
Everyone: tell world leader: cut nuclear weapons, not things people need.
Scientists measuring the march towards extinction of ocean life were shocked by how fast it is proceeding.
Republicans have cut off funding for Planned Parenthood birth control services in several states.
Opposition to birth control has become part of the unofficial Republican platform, as part of their perverted War on Pleasure (they want people to suffer for having sex).
The US has long oppressed other countries, especially poor weak ones. This continues today in Haiti, Honduras, and Colombia, as well as (obviously) Iraq.
Now the oppression is spreading within the US. Future Americans will ask how the US was turned into a fear-state of poverty.
The Supreme Court ruled that Wal-Mart is too big for its female employees to sue together for discrimination.
A semi-independent report on the lessons of Fukushima shows that nuclear plants with proper safety precautions have to be even more absurdly expensive than they are now.
US state laws requiring disclosure of fracking chemicals are weak because they have catered to companies' wish for trade secrecy.
The public has no obligation to take any risk for the sake of that wish. Let's tell those companies, "Publish or perish."
A US company saves everyone's Internet postings for 7 years to show to their possible future employers.
I can't say that this company is doing something unjust. If the outcome is harmful, I would blame it on the competitivity of the job market in the US, which is caused by practices such as outsourcing, budget-cutting, and banksterism.
The head of GLAAD resigned after a scandal because he had given the group's support to AT&T's merger with T-mobile.
100,000 protested in Spain against plans to give business more power over workers all across the EU.
Sarkozi has proposed total censorship for the Internet in France.
Bad news for Wall Street companies could be good news for the rest of the US.
A reporter who wrote about his arrest and torture in Pakistan was attacked and beaten again by police.
The Bank of Kabul is almost bankrupt, and with it the Afghan state.
The bank collapsed due to corruption.
It seems that the corruption of Karzai's regime has finally got so bad that the US will no longer pour billions down that drain.
As Southern Sudan becomes independent, the Nuba people, whose territory falls in the north, are being crushed.
Michele Bachmann wants to abolish the EPA, effectively letting business pollute at will.
Libyan rebels in Misrata say they have captured documents where Gaddafi ordered his troops there to commit war crimes.
Ex-Spy alleges Bush White House sought to discredit war critic (Juan Cole)
UK police say their censorship efforts have "safeguarded or protected" 414 children in the past year, but fail to say what this means, or how the danger to those children related to the pornography. Were these children being used to make pornography? Stopping that would indeed be protecting them, but the police had achieved this, they could have stated it in a clear and concrete way. The vagueness of the statement suggests that they are stretching things. My researcher was unable to find any details.
The UK government is not greatly concerned with children's welfare in general, as shown by its other actions. For instance, closing homes for orphans. In 2010 there were around 6900 children in state-managed homes in the UK. I'm not sure how many of them would be forced onto the street by this closure.
The UK government also plans to cut benefits for 100,000 disabled children.
So did the state really protect these 414 children, and did that really relate to pornography? Or is it only trying to make censorship look necessary?
Colombia's land restitution law has a serious problem: victims are required to prove their land was taken by an armed group and that it was connected with the civil war.
US citizens: sign this petition to include no-cost birth control as part of the US health care system.
US citizens: phone the White House at (202) 456-1111 and say that Obama should firmly defend Medicare, like the Senate leadership, and block any Republican attempts to cut it.
US citizens: Tell Congress to protect whistleblowers as the founding fathers did in 1777.
The founding fathers did not subordinate the state to megacorporations.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to support the Shareholder Protection Act, which would require shareholders to approve political campaign spending by corporations. This page gives more info and other suggestions for action.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Canadians: participate in the fundamental freedoms festival in Toronto on the anniversary of mass arrests and tyranny.
US citizens: phone your senators to oppose world-wide authorization for presidents to go to war anywhere. Also communicate with them through this page.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
A UK student faces extradition to the US for maintaining a site with links to possibly illegal filesharing sites.
This is another illustration of the fundamental injustice of the UK-US extradition treaty.
As far as I know, posting such links isn't a crime in the US anyway. However, more importantly, it isn't wrong. File sharing isn't wrong. The wrong is in the laws that try to stop people from sharing.
Jimmy Carter: Call Off the Global Drug War.
Battery farms, where animals don't have space to move, endanger human lives because only with antibiotics can the animals avoid sickness.
Thus, banning the distribution of antibiotics to farm animals would benefit humans in several ways. First, they would preserve the function of antibiotics for when we need them. Second, they would make meat more expensive in the developed countries where these battery farms are, so most people in these countries would eat less meat (which is good for health). Third, it would make farming more efficient, which would help provide enough food for everyone in poor countries. Fourth, it would reduce global warming.
A study found that trying psilocybin mushrooms at a moderate dose gifted most people with long-term improvements in their family and work relationships and increased their happiness.
It may have one negative side effect: a tendency to "increased spiritual practice". However, that is very general, and whether it is truly bad depends on details not stated here.
US citizens: phone your senators to oppose S.978 which would punish unauthorized streaming with imprisonment. Also send them email through this page.
As the article explains, people who post lipsynching or karaoke videos could be imprisoned under this bill. But even if it were corrected to avoid that, it would still be an injustice.
I used the following message text:
As your constituent, I urge you to reject S. 978. Copyright law is already too restrictive for the public, and S.978 would make it worse. That's going in the wrong direction. Please represent the people, not Hollywood special interests.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Governor Walker promised to have no votes after midnight, but he's in a hurry to do as much damage as possible before the Republicans get recalled that he set this promise aside.
Obama has increased the billions being spent on Afghan "development programs", most if which can't deliver any benefit.
If the idea is simply to pour money into Afghanistan and buy support, I won't say that is necessarily bad. But why spend it on building useless things? Just give everyone in Afghanistan $100 a year.
US citizens: support the ACLU in calling on the FBI to tighten the rules for investigating dissidents not suspected of crimes, not loosen them.
US citizens: phone your senators to support S.J. Res 18 to prohibit ground troops in Libya and reassert Congress's control over war.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Facebook's face recognition demonstrates a threat to everyone's privacy.
I ask people not to put photos of me on Facebook; you can do likewise.
Many human rights organizations called on the US to end deportations to Haiti.
Colombian human rights defenders continue receiving death threats from paramilitaries.
Honduran ex-president Zelaya says the coup-installed government is cheating on the deal that allowed him to return.
However, this is less significant than the state's violence against dissidents.
How much money did each US senator get from the oil industry?
Amnesty International says that China is obliged to arrest Sudan's president for trial in the Hague.
Why do the NAACP and GLAAD support AT&T's merger with T-mobile? Why do they even care about such an issue? For the money, it appears.
Former undercover cop Kennedy offers to expose apparent selective prosecution of protesters.
Geoengineering solutions are being considered to compensate for the humanity's CO2 and methane emissions.
CO2 emissions cause two problems: global heating, and acidification of the ocean. The latter will kill off most shellfish and coral in a few decades, causing the extinction of most of the life in the ocean.
Thus, solutions that only deal with heating are inadequate.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to oppose the NAFTA-like treaty with Korea. One NAFTA is already too many!
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Kucinich and nine other congressional representatives have sued the President for violating the War Powers Act by intervening in Libya without Congressional authorization.
I support the intervention in Libya, but the president should do it lawfully.
Colombia has adopted a law to compensate 4 million victims of its civil war — including, apparently, the victims of aggression by the police, the army, and the paramilitaries.
It looks like Santos is better than Alvaro Horrible.
The Greek government is unable to pass the austerity program demanded of it. The prime minister has offered to resign as protesters demanding default on the debt battle police outside.
Greeks, take your country back from the banks!
A general strike in Greece demands an end to austerity.
The iCloud "just works" ... but in whose favor?
For the first time, a US domain name "seizure" is being challenged in court.
Civil forfeiture was invented to evade the constitutional protection against punishing you without convicting you of a crime. The government takes your property on the grounds it was used in a crime, without trying to prove you committed a crime, and says that is OK because it isn't punishment.
This is unfair when applied to domain names, and equally so when applied to physical property. To restore human rights, the US must end civil forfeiture.
The article uses the term "intellectual property", apparently to refer to copyright law and trademark law. That is a confusing practice because others use the same term to refer to other unrelated laws. They should have said "copyright law and trademark law" and avoided the term that always spreads confusion.
The US repeatedly transfers accused illegal immigrants to different prisons, cutting them off from lawyers and evidence they need to make the case they are allowed to live in the US.
Part of the motivation seems to be to move them to places where the courts are hostile and they can't find a lawyer.
I read long ago that some convicted federal prisoners are moved repeatedly from prison to prison as a way of cutting them off from their families and friends.
An oil company threatens to use CAFTA to force Costa Rica to allow oil drilling.
Costa Rica should leave CAFTA.
6 lies about health care from the Republican presidential debate.
Most US schools today are miniature police states, educating a generation of Americans to fear and obey —or react with violence.
Krugman: both parties are dominated by the Pain Caucus, which is prepared to ruin everyone else to serve the interests of creditors.
The AFL-CIO will go all out to block the US-Colombia free exploitation treaty.
New FBI rules will facilitate spying on political dissidents in the absence of any valid suspicion.
Israel will build a Museum of Tolerance on top of a Muslim cemetery.
Corpses are not important in themselves, except to the extent that studying them is useful for science. But giving offense that is easily avoided is not a model of tolerance.
A WikiLeaks document shows how US and international donors pushed ahead with the Burmese-style presidential election and imposed a choice between two right-wing candidates.
Pakistan's spy agency (which originally helped launch al Qa'ida) has arrested people who gave the US information about Osama bin Laden.
The US is "negotiating" with Karzai to keep troops in Afghanistan permanently.
I doubt that the Taliban would agree to this, so the plan implies permanent war. Karzai's corrupt government will never inspire loyalty so the US and/or NATO would have to wage that war permanently.
Syrian soldier Servet Arafat had the courage to escape rather than shoot unarmed protesters.
He also reports seeing torture of protesters, even children age 10.
Thousands of Syrian refugees remain in Syria near the Turkish border because Turkey limits the rate that they can cross.
Some US states have made abortion nearly illegal for some women.
Wisconsin Republicans considered running Democratic candidates as spoilers to delay the recall elections.
Sri Lankan soldiers took "trophy videos" of the murder of prisoners.
This reminds me of the Abu Ghraib torture photos. It seems that soldiers who get involved in war crimes have an irresistible yearning to boast about them. If they were clever, they would avoid preserving (or even making) such evidence. Maybe these soldiers, like violent street criminals, tend to be stupid.
Belarus has arrested organizers of an Internet-based call for protests.
Israeli "settlers" attacked a Palestinian mosque.
Wachovia bank laundered billions of dollars of Mexican drug money, and tried to block its own investigator from finding out about this. (It's the typical response of the arrogant and powerful to exposure of crimes.)
I believe that cocaine addicts should be able to get their drug from doctors, but I am not necessarily in favor of legalizing commercial sale of cocaine. However, maybe it needs to be legalized if only to prevent the damage that the War on Drugs does to society. Nothing is going to stop drug traffickers from finding ways to legitimize their money; they have so much to pay to whoever helps that they can corrupt people in almost any social role. The only thing that can stop them is to undercut their captive market of addicts.
Congress is considering a bill requiring police to get a warrant to get any geolocation information.
Palestinian villagers accompanied by Israelis, peacefully protesting an illegal quarry on the village land, were shot with bullets and tear gas.
Tennessee has imposed stiff censorship on the Internet, by banning the posting of images that are likely to "cause emotional distress" to someone.
Will antiabortionists be prosecuted for posting images of fetuses? (They certainly should know that these images can cause emotional distress.) Probably not — because the ban will be selectively enforced by right-wing Christians.
Interviews with Syrian refugees who were shot by the regime and tortured.
One describes tanks destroying whole villages indiscriminately. Another says that armed men who were not from his region shot at soldiers.
UK prosecutors who convicted anti-coal protesters were concealing evidence for the defense.
Syria is destroying the town of Jisr al-Shughour, burning the farms around it, and arresting all the adult men.
How is the US stretching the PAT RIOT Act? Perhaps by collecting cell phone location data without a warrant.
Terry Pratchett's film about assisted suicide in Switzerland must be effective, because the torture-till-the-end brigade is really annoyed.
Six friends of mine died in the past two years. I miss them, and I wish they were still alive and well. But I wouldn't force them to stay alive if they were suffering and death were their only way out.
General Petraeus boasted of capturing thousands of Taliban fighters, but 90% of them turned out to be noncombatants.
Miami police pointed their guns at a man who was making a video of them as they shot at a suspect in a car, handcuffed him, and smashed his phone.
Maybe that car's driver was an armed robber — I don't know. But that could not justify threatening bystanders, or trying to stop them from recording what the police were doing. The police are doing a public job, in public, so they are not entitled to privacy. If they are doing nothing wrong, why don't they want to be filmed?
Palm oil cultivation in Brazil could replace cattle ranching and help the environment in the process.
This seems almost too good to be true, and I worry that there is a hole in this argument. If the low profits from cattle ranching are enough to drive deforestation in the Amazon, won't higher profits from palm oil drive more deforestation?
Several fallacious arguments used to justify unnecessary security measures at the expense of our rights.
Many US schools use web filters that block access to queer web sites. The ACLU is campaigning to unblock those sites.
I agree with the ACLU in condemning this blockage, but I hesitate to support this campaign because arguing about what sites should or should not be blocked seems to legitimize web filtering.
A man in Thailand faces 22 years in prison for a web reference to a banned book that criticizes the king.
Due to the siege of Gaza, hospitals in Gaza are forced to cancel operations for lack of medical supplies.
Turkey has arrested people accused of participating in Anonymous protests.
The Turkish government ought to be arrested, if anyone.
Peru's stock market fell only 12% after Ollanta Humala's victory.
This is because he has agreed not to attack the base of the megacorporations' unjust power: the free exploitation treaties.
The United Fresh Produce Association boasted it had "helped block over 100 legislative proposals on food safety in Congress" in the past two years. Some of this was done using taxpayers' money.
India and Pakistan are among the five worst countries for women.
Israelis and Palestinians work together to rebuild homes demolished by the Israeli military occupation.
The patriotic millionaires tell the US, "Please raise our taxes to help the country."
The US treasury has lost 2.5 trillion dollars due to the Bush tax cuts for the rich. Here are some things the US could have bought with that money.
Jack Christie, a Toronto student, was suspended from his high school which demanded he remove his videos from YouTube.
The president of the "student government" was threatened with suspension for collecting signatures on a petition for him. The school was apparently imitating what passes for "democracy" today.
How personalized filtering driven by tremendous data bases is closing people off from knowledge and each other.
The article makes a mistake when it presents this as a change in the Internet itself. The Internet is no different, except where tyrannical states such as France, Spain, China and the US impose censorship. What has changed is that many (maybe most) people use the Internet in new ways that do tremendous surveillance.
It is possible to refuse — I do. I don't use most of the web sites that do surveillance. I fetch pages with wget so that sites know only that someone fetched the page. I don't have a spyPhone so it can't tell anyone anything about where I am.
Google and Facebook have very little data about me; I never identify myself to Google, and I use it from various computers that others use too. And if I want to visit a page that appears in a Google search, I don't click on the link (since that is set up to inform Google you clicked there). Instead I copy the address and go to it. If Google tracks me, it must think I am not very interested in most things I search for.
If you don't want to be herded, you need to do likewise.
Many US companies check the credit ratings of potential employees; the result is that anyone who becomes unemployed and falls behind on bills does not get hired again.
While this is a crowning unfairness, fixing this would at best mean that some people rotate more often in and out of unemployment. The US must do more to help the long-term unemployed and underemployed.
North Dakota's example shows that a public state bank can protect a state's economy from big bank robbery.
NATO is restraining the Libyan rebels from advancing, urging them to stay where NATO knows they are so they won't get bombed.
Peru has elected the ex-Leftist Ollanta Humala.
He probably won't make things worse, but his acceptance of the free exploitation treaties means he can't make things much better either.
In a town in Syria, some of the suppression forces apparently refused to shoot the people, and the other suppression forces fought them and the people came out to defend them. Now the population has either fled or remains in hiding.
Jellyfish are rapidly increasing in the oceans, and this makes more CO2 emissions.
Increased CO2 levels may be partly responsible for the increase, but so is overfishing by humans. We killed the fish that used to keep the jellyfish numbers down.
Jellyfish waste does not serve as food for the rest of normal marine fauna.
If jellyfish numbers increase enough, fish may never be able to come back.
Global heating is contributing to destabilizing the world's food system.
A Florida homeowner foreclosed an office of Bank of America.
Florida has passed a law privatizing Medicaid, which will profit the company owned by Governor Scott.
Thousands marched in Tel Aviv in favor of recognizing a Palestinian state based on the pre-1967 borders.
On the contradictions of the campaigns that fight for the right of gay people to be tough and be in the US armed forces, but don't fight not for their right to have some other option.
I supported and still support ending the US military's discrimination against homosexuals, but there were many campaign actions I would not sign and did not post here, because they described this as "serving their country" and we know that in Iraq they were serving the oil companies.
The Fukushima reactor meltdowns appear to have melted the inner containment vessels.
Shouldn't every reactor be equipped with sensors so that there would be no uncertainty about this?
They hope to filter radioactive isotopes out of the cooling water. Shouldn't every reactor be required to have such apparatus standing by in case it is needed?
The leakage of radioactive materials was twice the earlier estimates, and the meltdown happened much faster than previously believed.
Egypt's military government is resisting calls to investigate the use of military tribunals against protesters.
Iraq has pre-emptively arrested a dozen protest organizers and several remain in jail.
Greenpeace is campaigning to make Mattel stop buying paper made by destroying Indonesian rainforests.
To really solve this problem requires new laws; however, the WTO stands in the way. Someday we can blame the WTO for the extinction of thousands of species (and perhaps the deaths of tens of millions of people as a result).
Maliki has crushed the protest movement in Iraq with a slow campaign of beatings and arrests.
Arundhati Roy says she will not condemn rebellion against the Indian government.
Her reasoning seems valid to me.
A video message in Spanish supporting the protests in Spain in 2011. Also in webm format.
The last decade was worse, for American workers' wages, than the 1930s.
New York City police have arrested and framed minority group members a million times in recent years.
Fleeing Syrians say 'Soldiers killed all the young men in the village'.
The UK government warned that some universities are recruiting zones for Islamic extremism. However, that's not the only form of extremist cruelty that recruits in universities, as this response points out.
Pakistani paramilitaries murdered a teenager as he was begging for mercy.
Uri Avnery accuses Israeli forces of gratuitously shooting Palestinian protesters at the border — even shooting people who tried to help wounded.
Israel is entitled to use force if necessary to stop people from crossing the border, but that can't justify shooting people to make a point.
The WTO has banned the US dolphin-safe tuna labeling program.
In other words, we can either wipe out dolphins or wipe out the WTO.
The WTO operates to reduce wages by making countries compete to bow down to business. We can either have good paying jobs or the WTO.
The purpose of the WTO is to make governments serve business. We can either have democracy or the WTO.
Destroy the WTO!
The University of Nottingham had two students arrested for downloading a web publication — then did surveillance of students who protested on their behalf, and fired a lecturer who criticized the university's conduct.
Robin Hood, you're needed!
Big Oil spends more money on stock buybacks and dividends than on producing oil.
Thanks to Wikileaks, we know that oil is Obama's motive for intervening in Libya.
The intervention in Libya is necessary for other reasons. If Gaddafi had put down the insurrection, he would have used his oil to make Europe suck up to him again. However, I would not expect Obama to take action for reasons like that.
Obama is campaigning in the Supreme Court to allow states to gut Medicaid and avoid being sued for it.
US universities and hedge funds are forcing millions of Africans off their land.
The excuse is the same old trickle-down ideology that is known to fail. I suspect the real reason that African governments permit these deals is corruption.
Sooner or later the farmers will retake those lands, with guns.
Sarah Palin begged BP to build a pipeline from Alaska to the rest of the US, just a year after BP caused the biggest oil spill on land in Alaska.
A anti-gay psychologist's de-effeminization therapy was based on cruel beatings, and his prize success later committed suicide.
Australian climate scientists have received death threats for reporting the danger of global warming.
Over half the murders of trade unionists in 2010 were in Colombia.
However, the government pretends the country is now safe for union organizing in order to sign the free exploitation treaty with the US, which is designed to harm democracy in both countries.
Keeping species alive in small refuges can work as long as nothing goes wrong. But when there's a fire, it can be the end.
A US court ruled that a bank was not liable when a customer account was robbed by collecting the customer's password.
My understanding is that customers were (and still are) not liable when banks paid forged checks. The bank must absorb those losses. If so, this represents another way in which the move to the Internet has provided companies an opportunity to increase their rights at the expense of individuals' rights.
The old policy was chosen for society's good. For the client, fraud against his bank account is an unpredictable disaster; for the bank, it is a steady loss which the bank can cope with (by adjusting interest rates and feeds) and can also take measures to reduce. Thus, it is better to put this liability on the bank.
Nowadays, governments are too much under the control of business to employ such reasoning to choose good policies.
California's lower house has voted to ban trade in shark fins.
The significance of the Anthony Weiner story is only to demonstrate society's hypocrisy about sex.
US citizens: tell your congressional representatives to support the Arbitration Fairness Act, which would block companies from making people sign away their rights to make class-action lawsuits.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to oppose the free exploitation agreements that Obama wants to sign with Korea, Colombia and other countries.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Indians: oppose the plan to destroy large forests for coal mining, and support renewable energy in India.
The Dadaab refugee camp, with half a million Somali refugees, has no room for the additional refugees who keep arriving.
A slightly radical suggestion: occupy a small nearby area of Somalia for the refugees to live in. Somalia is a failed state and the local militia would not fight over otherwise unimportant territory.
Samir Feriani, a policeman in Tunisia, accused officials of crimes from destroying archives ton murder, and has been imprisoned for it.
Former European ambassadors argue that Iran is not trying to make nuclear weapons, and that sanctions are not justified or needed.
I am skeptical, because I can't see why else Iran would bother putting so much effort into uranium enrichment against so much resistance.
Ayat al-Gormezi poet was 'beaten across the face with electric cable' in Bahrain for reciting a poem that criticized the government.
That tyrannical regime says criticism is a crime.
Protests in Wisconsin against Walker's tyranny have continued for a hundred days. Activists and union organizers have taken energy from the need to fight back.
Police in Puerto Rico have attacked peaceful protesters and journalists many times in recent years.
NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake has accepted a plea bargain where he pleads guilty to a misdemeanor and won't go to prison.
With this deal, the government effectively admits it had no grounds to accuse him of espionage. But the deal is an injustice because it fails to give Drake the medal and reward he deserves for helping to inform us of government abuses.
The Canadian province of Manitoba has formally decided not to buy small bottles of water.
I too avoid buying bottled water almost completely when in countries where tap water is safe to drink. One method I use is to refill water bottles with tap water. Where tap water is not safe, I often refill a water bottle from some other supply of drinking water, such as a large bottle or purified water.
US Republicans should repeat one of the few good things Ronald Reagan did: by increasing taxes on corporations.
Some senators want to ban bitcoin, a form of digital cash, because some are using it to pay for illegal drugs.
Next they will ban cash because that too is used to pay for illegal drugs.
Israel is trying to get the US to start a war with Iran.
Just as the former Mossad head warned.
Cut Wall Street Down to Size With a Financial Speculation Tax.
Around 100,000 protested in Athens in favor of defaulting on the national debt.
Norway, where abortion is completely integrated into the national health system, is also the best country to be a mother in. The US, in which Christian fanatics create obstacles for abortion, is the worst of the developed countries to be a mother in.
This is not a coincidence. The Christian fanatics' hatred is expressed in cruelty to poor children.
The ACLU has asked the US government to declassify the Wikileaks cables and stop pretending they are secret.
Egyptians who protested say the police continue to punish them.
A host of nasty companies have supported AT&T's merger with T-mobile, including Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, Oracle, and Research in Motion.
Egypt has imposed new limits on the Rafah crossing so that the border is not much more open than before.
Russia's War on Drugs is causing lots of suffering and spreading disease, so the government proposes to escalate it.
The US has spent billions on nation-building projects in Afghanistan, but most of it is not sustainable.
In 2002 and 2003, it made sense to provide foreign aid to Afghanistan for these purposes. The country was mostly peaceful then, and such projects could have helped if properly designed and managed.
Facebook has turned on automatic face recognition on photos.
Facebook says that it only suggests identifications for faces in photos for people who are the user's friends. However, it might run the algorithm over every photo posted and not publicly announce the results.
I ask people not to post photos of me on Facebook.
Walmart will allow its workers to unionize in South Africa, and does in several other countries. If only they would do this in the US.
Walmart also illegally fired a US employee for using medical marijuana to treat pain from an inoperable brain tumor.
Wind turbines kill substantial numbers of raptors and bats, including protected golden eagles.
Fortunately there are ways to reduce the damage, but more work needs to be done. Could ultrasound generators keep bats away? Could painting the turbines or illuminating them help eagles avoid them?
The US spends billions to try to stop production and shipment of illegal drugs, but this appears to have little effect.
The drug traffickers have lots of money for bribes.
US doctors injected 1500 Guatemalans with syphilis in 1946. Some have gone untreated ever since.
German and Japanese doctors were convicted of war crimes for gruesome medical experiments. It is a shame those responsible for this outrage were not similarly prosecuted.
I am puzzled that the victims were not diagnosed and treated in the meanwhile, and likewise the children that inherited the disease. Why not?
It does not surprise me that this study yielded no useful information. That should have been obvious in advance. Plenty of people contract syphilis without medical intervention, and testing penicillin on them would be just as good an experiment.
Apple applies censorhip to iBad apps when others pressure it.
Wikileaks cables show the US, EU and UN were aware that the Haitian presidential election was totally unfair while they supported it.
And since the second round was illegal, Martelly cannot even claim to be president.
An Algerian man was denied French citizenship because he won't let his wife leave the house.
They could offer to change their decision if his wife visits a government office every day for a month — without him — to plead his case. By then he might get used to respecting her rights.
Many UK schools make students use fingerprint recognition to get lunch.
And there is a plan to give teachers the power to search students' computers at will, and delete files from them at will.
Butterflies in the UK appeared weeks earlier than normal.
This is a sign of global heating. It may be good for the butterflies, but other plants and insects may face extinction due to similar changes.
Why whistleblowers should regard the Wall Street Journal and Al Jazeera leak sites as legal traps.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to oppose the "free trade" agreement with Colombia.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
US citizens: call on Secretary of State Clinton to firmly condemn repression in Bahrain.
Everyone: tell YouTube to restore FreedomMessenger's YouTube channel, which was closed down due to false accusations of copyright infringement.
If you watch videos in YouTube, don't use Flash. Use the new Webm format. Adding &html5=True to the URL should get you this, without need to identify yourself.
US citizens: please send email to your senators to oppose the PROTECT "IP" Act.
In this case, sending an email is the best action to take, but it can't hurt to phone as well.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
US citizens: sign this petition telling Obama to stand firm against Republican attacks against Medicare.
The Koch brothers' business was crucial in a decades-long campaign to deregulate oil speculation, which is now a large part of that business.
I don't sympathize much with Americans who complain about "pain at the pump." Americans need to reduce their use of gasoline. However, to make that happen calls for a gradual and predictable price increase such as we could get with a carbon tax, not speculative price spikes.
Banning lead in gasoline and paint may be partly responsible for the big decrease in violent crime in the US in the 90s.
I wonder if it might also be responsible for the big increase in violent crime in the 60s. I think that far more Americans drove cars starting around 1950 than before. This would have meant a lot more lead in the air, especially in cities.
Nabi Saleh protest organizer Bassem Tamimi's statement to the Israeli military court.
Everyone:
Tell the directors of Caterpillar to stop selling bulldozers for Israel to demolish Palestinian houses.
Global heating is contributing to destabilizing the world's food system.
Belarus has arrested organizers of an Internet-based call for protests.
How is the US stretching the PAT RIOT Act? Perhaps by collecting cell phone location data without a warrant.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to support the TRADE act, an alternative to free exploitation treaties.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Florida has passed a law privatizing Medicaid, which will profit the company owned by Governor Scott.
Arundhati Roy says she will not condemn rebellion against the Indian government.
Her reasoning seems valid to me.
Peru has elected the ex-Leftist Ollanta Humala.
He probably won't make things worse, but his acceptance of the free exploitation treaties means he can't make things much better either.
Palestinian "protesters" in Syria attacked the Israeli border again.
Throwing molotov cocktails is not a nonviolent protest, and throwing them at an army across a cease-fire line is more or less a military operation.
The IMF, amazingly, praised a budget in Egypt that provides an increase in social spending.
I wish I could believe that the IMF has reversed its decades-long policy of pushing austerity that leads to recession, but a priori it seems more likely this is some sort of aberration. I would be glad to see an analysis from someone who understands.
Indian police violently dispersed the peaceful protest of guru Ramdev.
India censored The Economist for publishing a map showing the disputed boundaries of Kashmir.
The new face of US war: counterinsurgency means assassinating people the government doesn't like.
An Indian yoga guru has started a hunger strike demanding that the Indian goverment take certain steps to curtail corruption.
The Indian government is very corrupt; the Congress party, once that of Gandhi and nehru, has totally sold out to business. The right-wing parties that support this guru are religious bigots. Not a great choice.
A UN report on freedom of expression condemns laws that punish people with disconnection from the Internet.
The density of forests is increasing in most of the world, compensating for a fraction of the effects of global heating.
We can't count on this to save us, because it is not world-wide. Large parts of North America now have dead pine forests, killed by global heating, and their carbon will get into the air.
And if people chop down most of these forests, it won't matter how thick they might have got.
There are large protests in Senegal because most people can't afford enough food to eat.
In addition to biofuel production (pushed by the US and EU), and large harvest failures loosely related to global heating (Russia, for instance), speculation is also part of the cause. So in many countries are free exploitation treaties that mean local farmers can't compete with subsidized US farm production — but I don't know whether that applies to Senegal.
Over the long term, global heating will make the problem worse, and increasing population will push humanity against the limit. The world must make firm efforts to stabilize population, as well as stopping global heating.
Going to the airport? Print out 20 copies of scanners.odt, cut each sheet into three parts, and hand them out while you wait for the TSA insecurity check. You could give some to the person in front of you and say, "Please take one and pass the rest."
US citizens: urge New York Governor Cuomo to push for gay marriage in that state.
US citizens: call your senators to support the FRAC Act, which would let the EPA regulate fracking. Also sign this petition.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
US citizens: sign this petition for the US media to cover real news, not Sarah Palin.
US citizens: sign this petition calling on Hillary Clinton to demand that Israel not interfere with the US boat in the Gaza aid fleet.
US citizens: sign this petition to state legislators against laws that would prohibit sharing passwords.
These laws are part of the negative utopia, The Right to Read.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and say to vote against the Republican plan to cut Medicare. Also sign this petition.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
US citizens: sign this petition calling on the FCC commissioners to pledge not to work for AT&T or T-mobile later.
The point is that such employment would effectively be a bribe to approve their proposed merger.
Transit police falsely cited Patriot Act to illegally a detain man for taking pictures at a train station.
The underlying cause of Europe's deadly E. coli outbreak is the use of antibiotics in farm animals.
Greenpeace activists have shut down oil drilling off Greenland.
Syrian protesters are now condemning Hezbollah and Iran for their support for Assad's regime.
Blinded by the light: the Internet enemy within.
The House of Representatives voted to preserve funds for child nutrition, and instead undo a WTO-ordered deal to subsidize cotton farmers in Brazil.
The US agreed to subsidize the Brazilian farmers temporarily while reconsidering the subsidy for US cotton farmers, as demanded by the WTO.
The WTO decision against US cotton subsidies is a rare occasion where I agree with the WTO. However, this decision isn't enough to make the WTO a good thing for humanity. What we really need is a government not subservient to business; it would end cotton subsidies to agribusiness for the sake of the rest of the country. One obstacle to this is the WTO, which generally makes governments more subservient to business.
Anti-abortion group uses Google Ads to misdirect women seeking abortions.
Police accused of brutalizing Babar Ahmad were acquitted after a secret recording provided evidence his accusations were untrue.
I mention this because I posted about these accusations before.
100,000 people protested in Hama, Syria, and the insecurity forces killed over 30 of them.
A reward of $5000 is offered to anyone that provides evidence to destroy a nasty software patent.
There's no harm in trying this method. If it succeeds, that will be one software patent down, and hundreds of thousands to go. To make software development safe, we need to get rid of all of them.
Zelaya returns to Honduras, but justice is still not done.
Dr. Kevorkian, who helped 130 people escape from unending and useless pain, has died.
The impetus to prohibit assisted suicide in the US comes from Christianity, and this issue reveals the twisted nature of Christian morality. I agree with those Christians that murdering you would be wrong, but their reasons and mine are different. I think it's wrong for your sake, supposing you want to live. They think it's wrong because it goes against the orders of their deity.
So what happens if you are in horrible, unending pain and death is your only way out? Regardless of whether the pain is caused by illness or state-inflicted torture, I hope you succeed in escaping, but they go on following the orders of their deity, which say you are supposed to suffer and suffer and suffer. What you want is of no importance to them in either case.
It is entirely consistent that many of them think it is wrong to kill a fetus that isn't a person yet, but don't mind executing adults, and support policies of torture.
Assisting suicide must be legalized, but until it is, I salute the heroes that enable incapacitated suffering people to escape.
The right-wing former head of Israel's spy agency says the Israeli government is recklessly inclined to military aggression.
He also criticized its unwillingness to make concessions for peace with the Palestinians.
Ayat al-Gormezi, in Bahrain, has been imprisoned and tortured for reading a poem condemning the king.
US-funded "reconstruction" projects in Afghanistan and Iraq will fall apart or be useless unless millions more are spent to maintain and run them.
In other words, the plan implicitly depended on future spending.
The House of Representatives voted to criticize Obama for fighting in Libya without seeking approval.
I think this is the right decision, since I support the Libyan intervention (although I think a different kind would be better) but presidents should not be able to intervene without approval from Congress.
The ACLU is challenging a Florida law that requires all welfare recipients to take drug tests.
When private companies demand drug tests of their employees, it may not be unconstitutional, but it is unjust, and it ought to be illegal.
Even for safety-critical jobs, drug tests are not justified because there is a much better solution which is also less intrusive on people's rights: testing competence at the beginning of the workday. This is better than drug testing because it detects inability to carry out the job regardless of the cause (lack of sleep, emotional upset, sickness, or drugs).
Peruvians: celebrate Dependence Day, June 5, by voting for Humala for president.
June 5 is Dependence Day in Peru because it's the date on which President Garcia's submission to the US, and to multinational corporations, led to the killing of indigenous protesters.
It's too bad that Humala agreed not to make Peru independent again, but he is still better than Fujimori.
US citizens: tell your senators to reject the resolution to stop the FCC from defending network neutrality.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
US citizens: sign this petition calling on Obama to speed removal of US troops from Afghanistan.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
US citizens: sign this petition in support of the people's budget of the house progressive caucus.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
It's not just Dominique Strauss-Kahn. The IMF itself should be on trial.
Obama's three strikes of global heating means we'll be burned out.
Tempting new payment and banking technologies put users at risk of theft, and enable banks to circumvent consumer protection laws.
Campaigning for Congress to limit searches of laptops at the US border.
The same should be done for police when they stop drivers.
The article falls into a common kind of error when it says that "possession of child pornography is a heinous offense". It is the error of rhetorically legitimizing the previous attack against our rights in arguing against the next one.
This "child pornography" might be a photo of yourself or your lover that the two of you shared. It might be an image of a sexually mature teenager that any normal adult would find attractive. What's heinous about having such a photo?
But even when it is uncontroversial to call the subject depicted a "child", that is no excuse for censorship. Having a photo or drawing does not hurt anyone, so and if you or I think it is disgusting, that is no excuse for censorship.
The government will invent an unlimited number of opportunities to censor us and search us if we grant the legitimacy of its all-purpose excuses for doing so.
A Haitian denounces the US for using threat of revoking US visas for various Haitian politicians to control them.
According to Erzili Danto, "The US canceled visas to get the election result they wished. They canceled to force the CEP to put Martelly on the ballot and then later to force the CEP to revise the members of the Parliament who were elected."
Vermont has legislated single-payer health care, through the efforts of small businesses that are fed up with the gouging insurance companies.
Syrian police tortured 13-year-old child; the parents got a video out and it was posted.
Here's the video in freedom-respecting Webm format.
Pictures of torture might appear disgusting — which demonstrates why that's no grounds for censorship.
The US holds 1700 people prisoner in Bagram in Afghanistan, without trial, and the majority are probably innocent.
The US wants Fujimori, the right-wing extremist, to win as president of Peru.
I remain disappointed that Humala said he would respect the free exploitation treaties, because every country's future depends on eliminating those. Nonetheless, he is clearly nowhere near as bad as Fujimori.
Election day in Peru, June 5, is also Dependence Day in Peru: the day that President Garcia's obedience to US domination led to the murder of indigenous protesters.
After Lynn Szymoniak blew the whistle on Deutsche Bank's foreclosure fraud, the bank launched a spurious lawsuit against her son for foreclosure of her home.
Monterrey Bay Aquarium provided a platform to Kellogg Garden Products' toxic sewage sludge, in exchange apparently for money.
Wikileaks reveals that the US tried to block Haiti from accepting an offer from Venezuela to sell oil to Haiti at a big discount.
Internet Censorship Secret Planning Meeting.
Iranian women's rights activist Haleh Sahabi was killed by police at her father's funeral.
Republican budget cuts caused the US economic downturn; now Republican candidate Romney blames Obama for it.
An international panel including several former presidents has called for an end to the War on Drugs
When the right wing machine creates sex scandals about male Democrats, they are based on nasty insult campaigns against women they know.
This article doesn't go deep enough. The most basic flaw in these insult campaigns is that they criticize women for allegedly having sex. What's wrong with that?
Maybe they did have sex with those candidates, and maybe they didn't. I hope that they did, and enjoyed it. But either way, it's nothing to criticize.
A UN climate official called on the world to hold global heating to 1.5 degrees C, saying that even 2 degrees will cause mass disaster.
Yet it is almost too late to keep heating to 2 degrees.
Obama plans to try five Guantanamo prisoners in a military tribunal (kangaroo court).
I don't know whether Khalid Sheikh Mohammed committed terrorism. If he was tortured, he may not know anymore either.
Large plantations are being developed in Africa to grow biofuel for Europe, driving up food prices.
Important former police officials have supported a campaign to decriminalize possession of drugs in the UK.
Bahrain's government says martial law is over, but this may not make much difference to tortured prisoners.
Iraq's "democratic" government, President Obusha's vision of freedom, has imprisoned protesters and is holding them incommunicado.
Karzai ordered the US and NATO to stop air strikes on homes in Afghanistan.
He has also ordered the US and NATO to stop the tactics that Petraeus has adopted. But NATO does not seem to listen to him.
Sudan's army brushed aside UN peacekeepers to conquer the town of Abyei, whose future was supposed to be decided by a referendum.
Kucinich's resolution to end the intervention in Libya has been delayed.
It is vital for democracy in the US that Congress be asked to approve the Libyan intervention, but I don't want to end it.
The Public Patent Foundation is defending farmers against genetic contamination of their crops with patented Monsanto genes.
Geithner made a secret $30 billion loan to Goldman Sachs in 2008, almost interest-free.
They should change the name to Goldmoney Sacks.
German police training for Saudi suppression forces is supposed to be about border control, but people involved say it is teaching them how to crush protests too.
The UK is also training Saudi troops.
Meanwhile, the US School of the Americas (or whatever they call it now) has trained torturers in Latin America for decades.
The Argentine government has accused the largest grain trading companies of tax fraud for shifting their profits to other countries where taxes are lower. This is illegal in Argentina.
It should be illegal in the US as well.
The US economy is moving back into recession.
I suspect Republican budget cuts are partly responsible.
The corporate media have embraced Rep. Ryan's sabotage budget while scorning, or just ignoring, the progressive People's Budget.
Those who called Ryan's budget "courageous" have confused courage with chutzpah.
Fracking in England appears to have caused small earthquakes.
Senator Sanders has proposed a bill to replace patents on medicine with government prizes. This would allow the medicines to be sold cheaply.
Sharlotte Hydorn has sold hundreds of people simple equipment for painless suicide. The religious torture brigade is looking for some excuse to put her in jail.
Anyone who criticizes this, on the grounds that some people might use it who could benefit from treatment, should be challenged to campaign for a better system for providing these devices. In the mean time, they should leave this one alone.
Belgian protesters, including local farmers, destroyed a genetically modified potato trial by digging up the potatoes.
I don't believe that genetically modified crops are necessarily evil. But if they contain patented genes, that is evil in itself. Also, they need to be tested much more thoroughly than the company which develops them will want to permit. The testing has to include the risk of contaminating other farms in the region.
One way to avoid contamination would be to engineer a change in when the plant flowers. If the modified version flowers two weeks before or after other strains, neither wind nor insects are likely to cross-breed them.
Ecuador is making progress in its plan to obtain payment for not extracting a large field of oil, thus preserving a large rain forest and the people who live there.
If oil were the only fossil fuel, initiatives like this could suffice to avoid climate disaster. But if ordinary oil deposits are replaced with coal, fracked natural gas, and tar sand oil, it won't achieve that goal.
The UK is blocking the EU from banning importation of oil from tar sands.
The low price of fracked natural gas is pushing the world towards that and away from renewable energy. But this will exacerbate global heating, since fracked natural gas releases as much CO2 as burning coal. (Both coal and fracked natural gas are worse than oil.)
A Pakistani journalist was kidnapped and murdered, apparently by the ISI which had already threatened him.
Thanks to US attacks over decades, farm workers in Guatemala can't buy food to eat.
What Guatemala needs first is to break out of CAFTA.
Right-wingers want to blame the US deficit on Medicare and Social Security, but it's the wars that have created the problem.
That together with too little taxation.
Civil society groups jointly condemned Sarkozy's EG8 plan for censorship and surveillance of the Internet.
Ralph Nader condemns non-negotiable contracts that say "take it or leave it" and attack consumers' rights.
I don't do business with most of the organizations that use these. I avoid shrink-wrap software licenses by rejecting all nonfree software on principle. But I can't avoid all these organizations, so the issue is just as important for me as it is for you.
NATO acknowledged having target-spotters on the ground in Misrata working with the rebels that defend the town.
That is a relief, because not having them would create a scandalous risk of killing rebels or civilians.
Germany's government has bowed to public pressure by deciding to shut all its nuclear reactors by 2022.
Greenpeace protesters have boarded a drilling rig operating off Greenland, hoping to prevent drilling.
We don't need to know where Cairn Energy keeps its emergency equipment. We do have a right to demand that it answer satisfactorily the claims that an oil spill in those regions cannot be cleaned up.
It is fine that Cairn Energy tows away icebergs. I don't know whether it is possible to tow away even the biggest icebergs under all conditions. I do know that the Big Spill in the Gulf of Mexico happened without icebergs.
The Egyptian army admitted applying "virginity tests" to arrested female protesters.
The EU's data protection authority condemned the EU data retention directive.
I am not sure whether this has the ability to lead to a real change.
Oxfam says food prices will double in 20 years.
Meanwhile, Republican idiots are trying to stop women from using contraception to avoid making things worse.
Obama's war policy is Bush Plus.
The US is now prosecuting executives as well as companies when they commit health insurance fraud.
It is a good thing to hold these executives responsible if they encouraged the fraud. And if they had the authority and responsibility to prevent the fraud, maybe they are guilty. However, if underlings lied to them, maybe they had no chance to prevent it. It is hard to tell whether the top executives were duped, or whether they preferred not to know.
Everyone: sign this petition to end the War on Drugs world-wide.
When a war is on drugs, it endangers everyone.
The geography of hate groups in the US: they correlate with religion, poverty, low education, and voting Republican.
Japan has reverted its increase in permitted radiation levels for children.
Washington wants to slash funding for making walking and biking easier.
Did the oil companies pay for this, I wonder?
There were large protests in Casablanca, and police attacked protesters and journalists.
Carbon emissions jumped to a record level, effectively dooming Earth to climate disaster unless strong action is taken soon.
Would it be justified self-defense for people that are likely to be killed by global heating or ocean acidification later to destroy fossil fuel power plants and cars now?
Thousands of poor Haitians live in tent camps. The new president of Haiti wants to change that, so he is sending troops with machetes to destroy their tents and chase them away.
This president was "elected" by a tiny fraction of Haitian voters in an election which excluded the main political party.
Canada's government refused to send troops to help deal with flooding in Quebec because that "would place the Canadian Forces in competition with the private sector".
This displays plainly the callousness that today's business-adoring states practice most of the time but usually manage to disguise.
Moil, which will boost global heating and probably send Quebec more floods.
Uri Avnery: nobody in the US senate dared not to applaud Netanyahu, but the US won't be able to block peace.
NATO apologized for the latest killing civilians in Afghanistan.
If the people of Afghanistan were firm supporters of the war, they would forgive accidents such as this. But they don't see much to support in Karzai's government.
Syria sent the army, with tanks, to attack towns that have had protests.
The President of Turkey defended filtering of the Internet by saying that nobody will have to use it, even though its use is mandatory (!).
Former president Zelaya has returned to Honduras, and his supporters are celebrating.
They are closer to the situation than I am. Maybe they see a reason to believe that the oppression of dissidents will now end. I hope so.
The opposition's accusation that Zelaya was trying to arrange to remain as president was bogus, since the proposed constitutional assembly would, if approved, have been held after he had left office.
Obama's criticism of the coup was weak, just talk, while in practical terms he gave the coup government support.
US citizens: Defend Elizabeth Warren from right-wing smears.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
US citizens: File a public comment against the tar sands petroleum pipeline.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Bradley Manning was so mentally fragile he should never have been sent to Iraq, according to various confidential reports.
If Manning did indeed leak the Collateral Murder video and other documents, it shows that heroism can be found in people who seem unlikely.
The Saudi army is using UK training to crush the population of Bahrain.
Poor Indian girls work 12 hours a day, at less than the Indian minimum wage, making cotton clothing for us.
The demand for a dowry is partly responsible for this, but also to blame is the corruption of the Indian government. Don't forget the world-wide "free trade" system: the jobs that were lost in the US were replaced by these.
Sarkozy's plan to "civilize" the Internet was recognized as a plan for tyranny.
The limited life near Vulcano Island shows the void all oceans will become in a century due to acidification from the CO2 we are feeding into the atmosphere.
Acidification makes it hard for many species to make their shells. This is already destroying fisheries and coral reefs.
Gaddafi's soldiers have systematically raped Libyan women as a way of spitting at their families.
If a raped woman's relatives think of her rape as a loss to them, rather than taking her side, they don't deserve to be her family. These women need a chance to start over without the families that have betrayed them.
Corporations have set up a US-wide organization called ALEC which lobbies all states for laws to give those companies an advantage over their workers, their customers, and the public.
US citizens: call on Obama to ban political spending by companies that get most of their income from government contracts.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
NATO is bringing Apache helicopters to attack Gaddafi's troops in Libya.
Protesters dressed in doctors' coats with fake blood shut down many bank branches, accusing the banks of creating the deficits which are being used as an excuse to undermine the National Health Service.
A campaign by small stores in the UK, which said a ban on displaying tobacco would hurt them, was funded by a large tobacco company.
The Wisconsin law that triggered mass protests was overturned by a judge on the grounds it was passed in a illegal rushed manner.
Over 2600 protesters have been arrested in the US since Obama was inaugurated, and the rate of arrests is increasing.
Republicans say the US can't afford to help tornado rebuilding and has to cut something else from the budget. The underlying problem is that the US has reduced taxes too much.
The US congress has re-approved the U SAP AT RIOT act.
Senator Wyden says it is worse than we know, because the government twists the law and stretches its powers.
PBS is considering having commercials four times an hour. This would continue its drift towards being little different from television that admits it is "commercial".
However, the commercial connection viewers don't see is more harmful than the one they see. For decades, PBS programs have received substantial corporate funds, which they depend on. This gives corporations influence over their agenda.
Meanwhile, NPR is worried about how money from Soros foundation might influence the news but sees no need to worry about money from corporations.
How Wall Street is based on many kinds of lawful fraud, and what could be done about it.
Court decisions have increased Americans' vulnerability to warrantless searches and being murdered by police in their homes.
Chomsky writes about the killing of Osama bin Laden, including evidence that killing him was intended, and puts it in context.
US senators were scared not to applaud whatever Netanyahu said to them, no matter how outrageous it was.
Deforestation is on the rise in Brazil, and its government is planning to make things worse by relaxing the laws against illegal deforestation.
Egypt has opened the Rafah border crossing for people, but not for goods.
This will help Palestinians who want to leave Gaza for medical treatment; Israel will no longer be able to kill them by blocking their exit. It will also help those who wish to study or move abroad, or go to conferences, assuming Egypt does not give them trouble about visas.
But it won't end the siege.
Doctors that demand patients assign copyright to reviews of their treatment are using lies to justify the policy. Maybe they were lied to in convincing them to use it.
Even if these contracts would not stand up in court, that doesn't excuse them.
One additional problem in this copyright agreement is that by using the term "intellectual property" it claims to apply to a dozen or so other laws besides copyright. This makes the doctor's demand even broader.
A requisite for clear thinking about any of these laws is to avoid lumping them together. So we should never use the term "intellectual property". Whichever law you want to talk about, best to call it by its specific name and not confuse it with others.
See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html for more explanation.
Egyptians protested again in Tahrir Square, calling for a new constitution before elections. and criticizing the military's hasty and careless justice.
Republican officials are declaring official events "private" and ejecting Democrats and anyone that appears to disagree with them.
Yemen is sliding into civil war between the president and an important tribe.
I have no basis to believe that the other side would be any better than the president in respect for democracy or human rights.
Police attacked protesters in Barcelona, brutally, but then relented.
A US judge stretched the Citizens United decision by allowing unlimited direct campaign contributions by corporations.
Women in Sa'udi Arabia are planning a drive-in protest.
Ratko Mladic, general of the genocidal war against Bosnian Muslims, has been arrested.
An architect of the Rwandan massacres has also been arrested.
Serbia has cleansed the blot on its reputation, but the US has not, When will Bush, who ordered the invasion of Iraq based on lies, be tried for his crimes?
Some US officials are planning step-by-step establishment of China-style control of the Internet.
Republicans and coal companies don't want you to ask why there are so many big tornadoes, fires, droughts and floods in the last few years.
Hamas is no excuse of Israel to violate the human rights of people in Gaza.
Nasma Abu Lasheen died on October 16, 2010; Anas Saleh died on January 1, 2011, both killed by denying them the right to leave Gaza for medical care.
Three Fukushima reactors experienced partial meltdowns. It appears TEPCO kept this secret in order to manage public opinion.
A thousand teachers protested in San Francisco against crushing budget cuts.
Walmart Supplier Supports Torture, False Imprisonment of Labor Activists.
Most Israelis support the return to 1967 borders with some agreed-on swaps of land, if it is part of a package that amounts to real peace.
Why Wait for Congress? Enforce Net Neutrality through Local Law.
Countries that have defaulted on debts have generally gained from it. Greece should consider the option.
CBS Outdoor censored a billboard ad calling for end to Haiti deportations due to cholera.
Amnesty International accused both sides in Ivory Coast of war crimes, and Ouattara's supporters continue to commit them.
An African splinter group of al Qa'ida has shut down a long-term research project studying water availability and climate in Africa.
India's Internet censorship makes sites remove anything anyone complains about, and its monitoring of Internet cafes is worse than China.
The Indian government is using a small danger (terrorist attacks as in Mumbai) to increase its control and weaken dissent. That exposes Indians to a much greater danger. The Mumbai attacks killed a few hundred of Indians. Corrupt government farm policies have driven tens of thousands to suicide, and destroyed thousands of tribals from their land.
Web sites in India should call the government evil because of this policy — and should move out of India to a country where they will not be censored.
People in India should resist government monitoring by leaving their wireless networks without passwords.
The SEC adopted a new system to reward whistleblowers that report corporate crime, and rejected lobbying to require them to report it first to the company's management.
Criticism from the US Chamber of Commerce suggests they are doing something right.
The Republican attack on Medicare was defeated in the US senate.
State legislators are organizing a campaign against TSA abuses.
A threat from the TSA made Texas drop its anti-groping bill.
States can't be allowed to nullify federal laws, but the federal government should start listening to people on this one.
The Rapescan naked body scanners were never properly tested for safety. The supposed test didn't use the real product. The test can't be repeated because crucial data is missing — as are the names of the people who did it. The software was not checked for safety at all.
This article explains a point that makes these machines potentially very dangerous if they break. They have a high intensity X-ray beam that scans across the body at high speed.
If the scanning mechanism breaks, the beam could remain fixed on one spot in the body, causing a radiation burn.
Don't take the risk. Tell them to feel you up!
José Cláudio Ribeiro da Silva, who fought against illegal logging in Brazil, has been murdered.
Meanwhile, Brazil's legislature is working on a plan to weaken the regulations that protect the Amazon forest.
It may not matter if we go on burning fossil fuels unchecked, because the rain will dry up and much of the forest will die anyway.
Obama is putting Thomas Drake on trial for reporting mismanagement at the NSA. If he succeeds in stretching the definition of "espionage", reporters will be threatened with prosecution too.
Given the extent of the US government's wrongs in spying on Americans, it does not have clean hands to make accusations against anyone who tries to tell us anything about those wrongs.
Electronics businesses join the opposition for the new push to clamp down on the Internet.
Greenpeace is in a standoff with the Danish army and navy near Greenland.
The army is protecting a UK company's plans to cause oil spills which, as the UK government secretly admitted, would be impossible to clean up.
US citizens: phone your federal officials and tell them to vote against the Internet blacklist bill.
I suggest telling them that copyright is unimportant and can't excuse this nasty treatment of the public.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
When Netanyahu spoke at AIPAC, the Israeli hawks' lobby in the US, protesters criticized Israeli policies towards Palestinians.
I saw a mainstream news article which called them "anti-Israel" protesters, which is clearly not true, but it is what AIPAC would like us to believe.
One of the policies criticized was that of demolishing Palestinian homes. Israel continues doing this.
Gershon Baskin went to Nabi Saleh to film the weekly protest. What he saw was cruel, gratuitous, and unprovoked violence by the army, including the use of gas that causes terrible pain, against people who were not threatening anyone.
France attempts to "civilize" the Internet; Internet fights back.
This article argues that plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in one country (the UK in this case) are useless, since they do not count the emissions made in making goods imported from other countries.
The argument is partly correct: these plans are insufficient. But that does not make them useless.
To avoid climate disaster requires reducing global emissions, but the government of one country cannot do much to directly reduce greenhouse gas emissions in another country. That requires a world-wide agreement, and the obstacles to that agreement are the US and China. Plans like these are the most a country can do on its own.
Moving energy generation in one country to renewables is a step forward independent of what happens elsewhere. And it can also serve as an example for pressure on the US and China to accept the global agreement that civilization needs to stop global heating.
Why privacy should matter to you even if you "have nothing to hide".
Note that the US government does "want to hurt" lots of people who did nothing to deserve it. For instance, most of the people who have been prisoners in Guantanamo.
The policeman who killed Ian Tomlinson will face prosecution.
Hosni Mubarak has been charged with murder.
Byron Sonne faces devastating retaliation from Canada for probing the edges of security plans for the G20 meeting.
Thanks to Obama, now Democrats as well as Republicans push for increased government surveillance power.
Kentucky gave $43 million to a creationist theme park while cutting funds for education.
Both are consistent with a policy of encouraging ignorance.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to support the amendments to the National "Defense" Authorization Act to end the war in Afghanistan.
More info at http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/blog/ndaa2012-updates
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Honduras has obtained reintegration into the OAS by allowing exiled former president Zelaya to return.
It was not required to end its repression.
I hope this turns out well, but I have a bad feeling about it.
Former Gaddafi secret police are being killed in Benghazi by people unknown.
I think it is entirely reasonable to treat former secret police as prisoners of war for the duration, if it seems they might still be working for Gaddafi now. In war, that is justified. When the war is over, they can be released, or tried if there is evidence they committed crimes under Gaddafi's regime.
However, there is no excuse for torturing or murdering them.
The Palestinian Authority is willing to have peace negotiations with Israel if they start from the legitimate basis that Obama recently reaffirmed.
In other words, what the PA rejects is only Netanyahu's rejection of that basis.
Texas state agencies systematically falsified water tests to avoid a federal requirement to inform the residents of the areas.
Falungong members have sued Cisco for building censorship and surveillance equipment for China.
US conservatives are now effectively required to oppose contraception, whether or not they can offer a sensible reason.
After a Tibetan monk set himself on fire as a protest in March, China's suppression forces violently imprisoned 300 monks.
The article says this occurred in a Tibetan-inhabited part of Sichuan, put I strongly suspect it is actually part of Tibet which China annexed in the 1950s.
The US has indicted a Pakistani intelligence officer believed to have arranged the Mumbai terror attacks.
I am not sure how the US has jurisdiction over murders in India organized in Pakistan.
Environmentalists say that Indonesia's new forest protection policy is so weak that it won't change much.
If Strauss-Kahn tried to rape the chambermaid, it would be a follow-on to what he did to Africa.
Australian reporter Ben Grubb describes being arrested for a story reporting on a speech at a conference.
An 'army of hidden scribes' fabricates the scientific literature about the safety and efficacy of medicines.
Drug companies should not be allowed to fund drug trials directly; they should pay taxes to the government and the government should fund them. The experimenters should not be allowed to collaborate in this research, or its publication, with anyone that has a financial relationship with the company.
Right-wing millionaires are trying to privatize US education.
Some governments are pushing to reject right-wing French minister Lagarde as the new head of the IMF, and instead appoint a South African financial official, Trevor Manuel.
While all indications are that Lagarde would make the IMF as nasty as possible, I am not sure whether Manuel would be better. His support comes from countries that are economically strong, not countries that might be subject to IMF "rescues", and this in itself does not show us how he would treat those latter.
US banks are presenting ridiculous arguments to remain available as tax evasion opportunities.
Mississippi flood precautions are insufficient because, in recent years, the amount flooding has increased over historic levels.
The increase is so much that, since 2008. every year there has been a flood so big that it was expected to occur just once every ten years.
This is apparently due to global heating, so it will get even worse.
A courageous Saudi woman posted a video showing herself driving a car.
Businesses are trying to pressure India to drop its new privacy protection rules for companies.
The privacy rules are good, and if businesses don't like them, that's because they want to mistreat people. What is really bad in this law is the part that inflicts censorship.
Web sites concerned with controversial topics must regard India as an unsafe place.
The Palestinian Authority said that Netanyahu's unwillingness to consider the 1967 borders makes peace talks a waste of time.
Women have taken the lead in protests in Syria, and are now experiencing powerful repression.
Massive protests by young people continue in Spain.
One of the demands of the Spanish protesters is to abolish the Ley Sinde which allows the state to shut down web sites without a trial, and to impose filtering on access to foreign sites.
Indian farmers now address their suicide notes to the president and the prime minister.
US mines systematically follow unsafe practices to cut costs, and blacklist anyone who reports violations.
It would be easy to legislate solutions to this, but our legislators don't care about working people.
Unions are starting to take note of this.
US citizens: rebuke the senators that protected subsidies for oil companies.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
US citizens: tell the FCC to block the AT&T/T-Mobile merger.
US citizens: phone your senators and urge them to filibuster the attempt to extend the PAT RIOT act. The vote will be Monday May 23.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
US citizens: tell various Federal agencies to change the incentives of bankers' bonuses so as not to harm society.
Google has condemned the "Protect IP" Internet censorship bill.
Pension funds investing in food commodities are driving up the price of food, world-wide.
Someone claims he threw eggs and shoes at the man who established the Great Firewall of China.
Some environmental organizations are opposing the return of the Chagossians in the name of conservation.
In heavily populated areas, human population growth is an obstacle to protection of the wild.
However, as the first article explains, that need not be a problem in the Chagos Islands.
Walmart's supplier in Bangladesh has framed union organizers for attempted murder.
The police and business owners are morally responsible for these actions, but root cause of the problem is the system of business-dominated globalization that Bill Clinton and his friends set up.
Some Republican congresscritters are banning recordings at their meetings with constituents.
20,000 people protested in Chile against construction of large dams in Patagonia.
I am not sure where I stand on this project. I don't know how much environmental damage it will do, or how much environmental damage it will avoid. However, Pinera is a right-wing pro-business candidate, and can't be trusted to protect anything but corporate profits.
Texas passed a law requiring women to get a sonogram and wait 24 hours before having an abortion.
This is part of a general Republican policy of harassment of women who want abortions.
Paradoxically, the part of the US government most concerned about the danger of global heating is the Pentagon.
The Israeli Knesset is considering a bill that would imprison anyone that publishes "a call that negates the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish and Democratic State".
In effect, saying that Israel is not really democratic would be a crime.
This 2009 article by Uri Avnery discusses that bill and other tyrannical legal proposals.
Both Obama and Congress are mostly disregarding the War Powers Act and the question of whether Obama was authorized to intervene in Libya.
Far from insisting on its powers to be asked to authorize this intervention, Congress is proposing to authorize all future presidents to intervene military anywhere without consulting Congress.
I support the intervention in Libya, which I think will succeed because tactical stalemate implies strategic defeat for Gaddafi.
However, there is no telling what mischief Obama or some future president might do — perhaps conquering, occupying and ruining a country as Bush did to Iraq.
Obama should seek authorization for the Libyan intervention.
Some Apple addicts truly worship that company, suggest brain scans.
That must be why they allow it to abuse them so much and don't care.
German police confiscated the servers of the German Pirate Party, two days before an important election.
Finally Obama has criticized Bahrain's oppression of the opposition.
The TSA's secret "tests" of the X-ray body scanners were phony. They did not test a real scanner, and they kept important details of the test secret.
I never go through those machines; I always ask them to feel me up instead.
The UK requires some passengers to go through scanners, so I do not board flights in the UK. I leave the UK by train.
Obama took a small step to disconnect US policy from Israeli government control by reaffirming that peace needs to be based on the 1967 borders.
Netanyahu's sharp reaction was, in effect, a demand for a return to the unconditional support that Israel had previously achieved.
Dominique Strauss-Kahn was praised for making the IMF less evil, but the extent of the changes have been exaggerated.
The IMF still puts the burden on the poor, pushing countries into depressions that can improverish them for years.
US citizens: call on the State Department to condemn Israel's imprisonment of Palestinian nonviolent protest leaders.
The charges against them are based on evidence procured by torturing a 14-year-old boy.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Seven Bahrainis were sentenced to years in prison for protesting.
Several showed how they were tortured, and the court pointedly ignored this.
Several big banks that inflated the real estate bubble are now being investigated by New York State.
US justice is so soft on corporations that now they don't even get charged with a crime. They just agree to pay something instead of being accused.
A coal company made a legal threat against the coalcares.org hoax site.
25,000 people who live in homes in flood plains near the Mississippi will have to evacuate as waters flood the area.
I hope we learn the lesson and don't allow anything but throwaway structures to be built there again.
Israeli troops fired at a hundreds of unarmed Palestinians who were trying to swarm the border from Syria.
This is a different issue entirely from trying to bring aid to Gaza. The boats that sail to Gaza do not enter Israel unless the Israeli military forces them to do so. It is also unlike the protests in Tunisia and Egypt, since those protested in their own country.
These protests seem basically wrong to me because the protesters are trying to enter Israel, not the West Bank or Gaza. In other words, entering the territory which, under any reasonable peace settlement, would not be part of Palestine. In effect, the message of these protests is to end oppose the existence of Israel, not to end the occupation.
Israel has the right to control who enters its territory from Syria. Also, terrorists (they still exist) might infiltrate among the unarmed protesters. Thus, if nothing else works, the Israeli border guards must shoot. However, Israel has a duty to try to control entry without shooting. A stronger wall on the border with Syria might do the job, but would take time to construct.
If Palestinians would like peace with a state alongside Israel, they should design their protests to conspicuously support this goal. Only thus can they refute the Israeli argument that "They still want to destroy us."
Gaddafi's officials ask, why prosecute Gaddafi & co in the International Criminal Court and not the rulers of Syria, Bahrain and Yemen.
He's right: they all deserve this treatment. That doesn't mean that the ICC warrants against Gaddafi should be cancelled.
The US Congress held a hearing about repression in Bahrain, and the State Department boycotted it.
Haiti's parliament, which was elected in fraud, has written constitutional amendments that concentrate power in the president — and which most Haitians can't read.
One of the leaders of the Rwandan genocide has been sentenced to prison.
This is worth celebrating, but meanwhile Rwanda now faces a new threat from its dictatorial President Kagame.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to oppose authorizing presidents to launch military attacks all around the world.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
The IPCC shows how 80% of energy could be renewable in 40 years.
It is a matter of adopting public policies that favor renewable energy, not oil, gas, coal or nuclear.
When the UK evicted the inhabitants of the Chagos Islands, it promised to maintain their buildings and plantations.
It ignored that promise, reflecting its intention to stop them from ever returning home. A Wikileaks cable shows that the UK intended its marine conservation zone as an additional obstacle to their return.
A great new option for your spyPhone: pay for purchases with it.
If the phone company and the store exchange data, both of them know what you bought, when, and where.
The UN is investigating reports that Iran tampered with reactor inspectors' portable computers.
If these computers have proprietary software in them, others could easily have tampered with them too.
As B'liar tried to distort Iraq intelligence to justify war, intelligence experts tried to resist this. Newly released papers show their efforts.
China is starting to admit that the Three Gorges Dam has caused major problems for the Yangtze River.
Republicans are lying about their plan to attack Medicare.
Many workplaces use computers to monitor employees' every action.
Police sprayed mace at old people who were protesting at a bank's shareholder meeting.
A UK man previously acquitted of murder will face a second trial using new evidence.
Maybe he is guilty; maybe this trial will right a previous wrong. I cannot assert it won't. But double jeopardy is very frightening.
A bill that would punish Israelis for voicing support for a boycott of Israeli institutions, or even a boycott of products of Israel's illegal settlements in the West Bank.
This bill would abolish freedom of speech in Israel.
The claim that it is "in the United States it is considered illegal to boycott Israel" is the half-truth that is worse than a lie. What is penalized, though not exactly illegal, is for US entities to promise in their contracts that they will refuse to do business with Israel (or whatever country) in response to foreign pressure.
There is no law against boycotting any country, business, activity, etc., because such a law would be unconstitutional.
Senator Sanders has introduced a single-payer health care bill.
Arizona's sheriff Arpaio, who used hostility towards immigrants as the basis for his campaign, is accused of corruption amounting to 100 million dollars, as well as hostility towards Mexicans.
The record companies want warrantless searches to check for copying.
There is nothing they wouldn't gladly destroy in their crusade to maintain their parasitic stranglehold on music. These companies, which gave us the DMCA and lawsuits against teenagers, don't deserve any kind of "rights", because what they deserve is to be obliterated.
In the future, even fetuses will be sued often.
Republican bills in many states would hamper college students, minorities, old people and disabled people from voting.
Tobacco companies added appetite suppressant drugs to cigarettes.
Christopher Whitman, at a peaceful protest in Nabi Saleh, reports that an Israeli border policeman shot him in the head with a tear gas canister, after beating up and gassing the protesters.
This hit was certainly intentional; police are good shots, and they know how tear gas is supposed to be used. They also know that an "accidental" hit on a person's head can maim or kill.
Last time I was in Israel, I was told that the border police are especially sadistic. In the same protest, another person's arm was broken by a tear gas canister. Apparently shooting to maim or kill is accepted practice.
The Israeli deputy police commander of Galilee was so offended when a Palestinian lawyer asked why his men were arresting protesters that he slapped her in the face.
How dare anyone ask whether Israel respects human rights?
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Israel is destroying the main road into the Palestinian town of Al Aqaba. Next it may destroy the town.
Syrians now use donkeynet to communicate with the rest of the world.
The case against Goldman Sachs: a million or so frauds plus lying to Congress.
Panera restaurants give clients a suggested bill and ask them to pay that much, or more, or less.
There are massive protests in Spain against policies that have produced massive protests.
The uselessness of the two major parties, the Partido Corporatista and the Partido Pendular, is illustrated by the fact that they both voted to censor the Internet on behalf of the copyright industry.
The Taliban are reportedly making children act as suicide bombers by threatening them and lying to them.
This is such a vicious tactic I have to wonder whether the claim is a lie. I won't say the Taliban couldn't possibly do this; but just because they deserve to be fought does not mean they are totally without principle. NATO is not above lying.
I also wonder why Noor Mohammad, age 14, is on trial, since he never attacked anyone. Shouldn't he be in a foster home?
New Hampshire Republicans are trying to discourage voters by requiring photo IDs to vote.
The US Senate declined to abolish subsidies for oil companies.
Obama has sync'ed US policy totally behind the Israeli Hawks' lobby. MJ Rosenberg believes he is challenging those who want to end the occupation to speak louder and compete with AIPAC.
Of course, we should try to make our views heard, but does Obama care? It would be nice to think so, but I don't believe it. Obama has shown no sign of championing peace, no will to resist or even criticize the Israeli policy of slow ethnic cleansing. Our voices can hardly compete in the mainstream media with the influence that AIPAC's donors purchase. I think Obama set MJ Rosenberg an impossible challenge to give himself an excuse to obey AIPAC.
Israel permanently exiled 140,000 Palestinians from the West Bank because they travailed abroad.
Israeli private security guards killed a protesting Palestinian in East Jerusalem, and troops shot protesters directly at close range with tear gas canisters.
Israel blocked the ship Spirit of Rachel Corrie from delivering sewage pipe to Gaza by attacking with artillery.
Israel uses soldiers disguised as civilians, even for assassination.
If we consider these operations as war, they are war crimes. Otherwise, they are extrajudicial killings of suspected criminals who should have been given a chance to surrender and be arrested.
(If we consider them as war, it doesn't matter whether the Palestinian fighters we on duty or not. Do the laws of war prohibit attacking soldiers just because they are not currently fighting? I don't think so.)
Israel also lets dogs run loose to maim Palestinians who are sneaking into Israel to work.
Israel's justification, that this is a method of protecting the wall, is invalid because the wall through the West Bank is a plan for annexation.
UK plans to build nuclear reactors underestimate the availability of tidal power generators and overestimate its future costs.
One of the Fukushima reactors was badly damaged by the quake itself, before the tsunami.
Tiger farms threaten the survival of wild tigers.
In simple theory, the existence of tiger farms means that wild tigers can be protected from poaching more easily. It would be enough to make poaching a tiger more expensive than raising one. With a stable population of wild tigers, a few could be captured each year for stud without damaging the wild population. But there may be practical obstacles that make the reality not fit that theory.
The head of the IMF is in jail in the US, accused of attempted rape, and it's not the first such accusation against him.
I have no idea whether he is guilty or not, but it is right to treat the rich and powerful just like anyone else. However, I think that the IMF which he heads has done harm far bigger than anything he could do personally.
Prostitutes in Korea protested against a police crackdown.
Prohibiting prostitution is simply unjust. It also interferes with the work that the police really ought to do: making sure that the prostitutes are not being abused or coerced by pimps.
Ohio citizens: sign the petition for a referendum on the law SB 5 which attacked unions in Ohio.
Everyone: join the protests against Sarkozy's attempt to destroy Internet freedom in Europe.
In London: protest Colombia's ex-president Alvaro Horrible, who is linked with the murderous paramilitaries.
4pm-7pm, Saturday 21 May
27 Sussex Place, Regent's Park, NW1
Nearest tube: Baker Street
5pm-8pm, Monday 23 May
LSE Campus, Houghton Street, WC2
Nearest tubes: Covent Garden, Holborn, Temple
US citizens: sign this petition against S.719, which would enable US intelligence agencies to punish employees (and ex-employees) without trial by cutting off their pensions.
Also phone your senators.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Swiss voters preserved the right of foreigners to come to commit suicide.
This is a good thing. Sad we may be when someone's life is so painful that he only wants to end it, but it is crazy to express that concern by forcing him to go on suffering.
The UK government has adopted a plan for a major reduction in carbon emissions by 2027.
However, it includes hidden subsidies for nuclear power plants.
Thousands protested in Turkey against plans to filter the Internet.
Women and children made up most of the casualties of US air raids and shelling in Iraq.
David House and the ACLU have sued the US government for searching his laptop as he passed through customs.
Dropbox used to claim it couldn't decrypt users' files, but that wasn't true.
The subtle changes Dropbox has since made in its web site sustain the accusation.
The US "secure communities" program causes legal immigrants to be deported if they are accused of a crime — even if the charges are dropped.
I am glad someone had the sense to block this cruelty in the specific case at hand, but the system needs to be fixed.
Michael Moore: the SEALs are so precise — they avoided killing any of the children that were in bin Laden's compound — that they must have been ordered to kill bin Laden himself.
I suspect something a little more subtle: that they were told to capture bin Laden "if possible", and given fine print which defined "possible" as "if pigs fly."
Natural gas drilling in the US is destroying archaeological sites as well as water supplies.
The "PROTECT IP" bill amounts to criminalization of knowledge.
Anything law named "intellectual property" can be expected to be based on bad concepts.
Bahrain is torturing doctors and nurses because they witnessed the injuries of protesters who were brought to the hospital.
Banning slightly dangerous "legal highs" can endanger public health, because they can attract people away from more dangerous drugs.
It occurs to me that legal highs could also be made safer by spreading information about how to use them safely.
Thousands of handicapped people marched, and wheeled themselves, in London to protests cuts in aid that they need to live independent lives.
Drug companies are aggressively pushing doctors to prescribe demented old people drugs that are not known to do any good for their problem.
A report that Gaddafi was gaining support for an international bank for Africa that would have made Libyan currency an alternative to the dollar and the euro.
This report reminds us that a state can challenge the power of the corporate empire (good) while at the same being an vicious tyranny (bad). Good in one parameter can go with bad on another.
If the report is true, it might explain US participation in the intervention. But Obama was not eager to intervene — so I think this theory is more wrong than right.
Zaidi, who famously threw a shoe at Bush, preaches nonviolence and has set up a foundation to investigate the corruption of the US occupation of Iraq.
He says that Iraqi government torturers broke his bones and gave him electric shocks. Did they learn this from Saddam Hussein or from the Bush forces?
Police have software to correlate information about a person from a wide variety of sources, establishing a total surveillance system which they can turn on anyone.
India has imposed vague censorship on Internet sites.
The excuse that this is "based on India's criminal law and deal with blasphemous, obscene and defamatory material" is not only inaccurate, it would be no excuse anyway, since it is unjust to make any of those things a crime.
India has also followed the injustice of the USA PAT RIOT Act by allowing the state to collect information about people from companies without search warrants.
In an age where states have contempt for all human rights, every technological transition offers an opportunity to crush some.
President Saleh's troops shot at protesters in Yemen; then troops of an opposition division moved in and shot back at them.
That division's general opposes Saleh, but I have no idea whether he endorses democracy or human rights, or whether he just wants more power for himself. The situation is full of dangers, one of which is war between the factions of the army.
Facebook paid a PR agency to publish false stories against Google.
It is well established that people have been paid to spread false information saying that tobacco was safe, and that carbon emissions aren't causing global heating.
Death squads threaten community radio journalists in El Salvador.
Ugandan protest leader Kizza Besigye was arbitrarily blocked from flying back to Uganda.
He had fled to Kenya for medical treatment after Ugandan troops attacked and injured him during a protest.
That shows the danger of a no-fly list.
Police in Tunisia attacked protesters and journalists.
The interim government apologized for the attacks; perhaps the police acted in defiance of the state.
Bahrain's cruel monarch is sentencing protesters to long prison terms.
Doctors and nurses are to be put on trial for treating wounded protesters.
Shame on the US for continuing close relations with that evil regime.
New Jersey proposes to ban photography of minors.
An officer involved in making the UK's "dodgy dossier", which twisted intelligence data to support invading Iraq, said that they were explicitly tasked with squeezing an excuse for war out of that intelligence.
Is this grounds to charge B'liar with the crime of aggressive war?
James Hall refused to sign Wikileaks' internal anti-leaks contract. because he was afraid of being sued for millions of dollars over interviews already given.
Wikileaks has done a crucial job for the public. Can that job be done without ugly internal practices such as this contract? Assange seems to believe it can't be. I don't know that he is wrong, but I am not ready to conclude he is right.
Amnesty International says Colombia has made some progress in respecting human rights under President Santos, compared with former President Horrible, but not much.
As NATO increases the size of Afghan's "security" forces, they commit more crimes against civilians.
Comparing the oil company tax breaks with their profits.
Republicans want to move oil drilling lawsuits to a court full of judges with close ties to oil companies.
Ten Turkish writers and journalists have been arrested, apparently for their political writings.
France is on the way to ban fracking.
Ugandan insecurity forces attacked journalists as well as protesters who greeted Kizza Besigye's return to Uganda.
Microsoft Structured Acquisition Of Skype To Avoid U.S. Taxes.
Bill S.719 would give the US government the power to strip officials of their pensions just by accusing them of leaking classified information.
Some Democrats defended principles of justice when Bush showed contempt for them. Now that Obama has adopted Bush's opposition to human rights, Americans who defend them are being marginalized and smeared.
Israeli shelling in Gaza caused 80 casualties, mostly civilians.
Two medics were killed by shelling their ambulances.
A UN agency has analyzed the computer files, reportedly seized from the FARC, which described collaboration between Venezuela and the FARC.
The FARC are terrorists and kidnappers. Whether it is justified to support them so as to oppose Colombia's worst terrorists and kidnappers, which are the US-supported government and the paramilitares, is a difficult question. (Latest reports say these terrorists are becoming more active and dangerous.)
Ziyad Clot explains why he leaked the Palestine Papers.
These papers blew the lid off the phony "peace process" which Israel used as a cover for a land grab.
Belarus has sentenced opposition candidate Andrei Sannikov to 5 years in prison in a political show trial.
Dalits in Indian higher education face prejudice and hatred which drives some to suicide.
Others disguise themselves as non-Dalits and live a double life.
I wonder if India's national ID card will make it impossible for them to do that.
The US worked with drug companies and treacherous officials in Ecuador to try to interfere with Ecuador's policy of compulsory licenses for patented medicines.
The US government represents the corporations, not Americans.
The Conservative Party of Canada violated election laws in the recent election. Its leader, Harper, did so personally.
Although bin Laden is dead, he still serves for fear-mongering.
US citizens: submit a comment opposing Obama's plans to weaken US forest protection.
US citizens: call on Congress to investigate the conflict of interest of the FCC commissioner who voted to approve the Comcast-NBC merger, then quit to become a lobbyist for the merged company.
US citizens: sign this petition against the "PROTECT IP" bill, which would impose censorship duties on US ISPs and search engines.
The use of the propaganda term "intellectual property" shows that this law is based on mistaken goals and confused thinking.
More information about what's bad in this bill.
Israel has adopted racist laws that further penalize Palestinians as well as human rights organizations.
Gazans injured by Israeli bombing were arbitrarily denied the chance to go to court. A deadline of two years was established, and then Israel did not let them leave Gaza to plead for two years.
The Israeli government gives secret support to an organization reminiscent of the KKK.
You don't have to do anything wrong to get on the US sex offender list.
The two cases appeared at first to be hypothetical, but reading further comments shows that they belong to one real family.
The US says it will fund development of software to fight the Internet censorship of China and Iran.
Meanwhile, the US is planning its own Internet censorship, aimed at search engines, domain registries, and other parts of the net.
You can tell this law is evil in spirit because it uses the propaganda term "intellectual property", which spreads both an authoritarian attitude and factual confusion whenever it is used.
Don't be their tool — join me in avoiding the term.
NATO bombs in Afghanistan often hit civilians. In one case, US intelligence targeted a civilian, a parliamentary candidate's agent living in Kabul, confusing him with a Taliban commander through gross negligence.
90,000 Bedouin in Israel live in "illegal" towns, sometimes where they were told to live by the Army decades ago, but they now face expulsion as part of a plan to squeeze them into a small fraction of the Negev.
Other Arabs are being expelled from Jerusalem.
An NRA-sponsored Florida bill, already approved by the legislature, will ban pediatricians from asking questions about gun safety at the patient's home.
The National Rifle Association should change its name to the National Irresponsible Gun-Owners Association, given its new mission to resist efforts to teach gun owners to be responsible.
The Koch brothers corrupted Florida State University, by endowing professorships and giving themselves veto power over whoever is appointed to them.
These professors are supposed to teach that everything should be for sale.
Thousands marched in New York to protest budget cuts including the firing of 4,000 teachers.
Night-mayor Bloomberg believes these cuts are necessary because of the budget surplus.
If only the day-mayor of New York were someone other than Bloomberg.
Instead of taxing the rich, Haiti's not-really-elected president Martelly plans to tax remittances from foreign countries, which support their poor Haitian relatives.
US citizens: Congress proposes to preauthorize presidents to launch wars anywhere in the world. Phone your congresscritter to oppose it; also sign the following petition.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
US citizens: sign this petition telling Senate leadership to block the Republicans' War on Women.
Here's how far Afghanistan is from being able to set up a functioning state, police, or army.
I have doubts that the army unit declared as capable of standing on its own can really do so, that the provinces that will be "self-governing" (whatever that means) will be capable. And I am very skeptical of the claim that Afghanistan will be able to do much more with an army of 350,000 than with one of 300,000.
The officer interviewed presents all this as a reason to continue the war for many years. I think it rather demonstrates that there are better things to try to do.
A new Gaza aid fleet will set out in June, including once again the Mavi Marmara on which activists were killed last time by Israeli troops.
An analysis of NATO hypocrisy and self-contradiction about Libya.
Whether US and European leaders are being honest is one question; whether they have any ethical concern about the issue is another. What these countries ought to do in regard to Libya is a third question, separate from those two.
The West should not throw up its hands and let Gaddafi reconquer Benghazi or Misrata, but its intervention is at once too violent and insufficient. Attacking Gaddafi's family should be off limits regardless of whether Gaddafi is with them.
Meanwhile, the failure to coordinate closely with the Libyan rebels is deadly stupidity. If NATO is determined to launch weapons only from the air, that is no reason not to have forward air controllers and radar on the ground, and even small units to protect them. Gaddafi's success in destroying Mistrara's gasoline supply with bombs from light planes, and the closure of Misrata's port, were possible because of the lack of such coordination.
What the rebels really need is the support of a trained Arab ground army.
The EU's tax-scam prevention body is made up of tax-avoidance experts.
I am sure they know the subject well, but do they want to succeed?
A year after the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, Republicans are trying to hasten a repeat performance.
They got 4 million dollars from oil companies to promote global heating.
A thousand teachers protested California's budget cuts and refusal to raise taxes on the rich.
"Development aid" supports the spread of palm oil cultivation in Africa, which destroys ecosystems and communities and spreads oppressive working conditions.
It probably contributes to global heating, too.
Rule of thumb: the opposite of what the US Chamber of Commerce says is good for the US.
The City University of New York decided to give Tony Kushner the honorary degree, rebuking the influence of a supporter of Israeli right-wing positions.
Mr. Wiesenfeld should listen to what Uri Avnery has to say about these issues.
Japan's prime minister has decided to cancel construction of planned new nuclear reactors.
Osama bin Laden's sons call for the UN to investigate why their father was killed and not arrested.
Former Pakistani dictator Musharraf made a deal that the US could attack top al Qa'ida leaders in Pakistan.
I am not sure whether the US can validly stand on a deal made 10 years ago by a dictator since removed from power. What does seem clear is that the dictator was dishonest to the Pakistani people in making the deal.
Refugees from Syria fled to Lebanon, but Lebanon handed them over to the Syrian government.
Repression in Bahrain extends to systematic destruction of Shi'ite mosques, even historic ones.
It is interesting to contrast this with the uproar that resulted when Hindu fanatics destroyed a mosque 400 years old in India with the much weaker reaction when Muslim thugs destroy a mosque.
Journalist Khaled Sid Mohand was not tortured much in Syria, but he heard other prisoners' screams every day.
The US government knows all about this, which is why it handed over people to be tortured in Syria.
Morderchai Vanunu called on the Israeli government to apply a new law, meant to be punitive, and revoke his Israeli citizenship.
Holding Internet services legally responsible for what users post could be a disaster for the Internet, and for freedom of speech.
Peak floods on the Mississippi are a human-made disaster.
Foolish humans built houses in floodplains, and foolish humans poured greenhouse gases into the air which increases the chance of unusual heavy rain.
A scientific study finds that fracking frequently causes methane contamination of nearby water supplies at a dangerous level.
Sometimes you can set fire to the fast coming out of the faucet.
Human Rights Watch calls on the US to stop supporting Bangladesh's torture and assassination battalion.
Senator Schumer says Amtrak should check passengers against a no-ride list.
The movie The Longest Day demonstrates that people know how to bomb a train without riding on it. They only need access to the track. The reported tentative al Qa'ida plot involved damaging the track to derail a train. Senator Schumer's Orwellian measure would be useless against that.
I put myself on Amtrak's "no-ride" list when Amtrak started making passengers identify themselves; I'd rather take a bus anonymously. You should, too.
When corporations make threats so as to get lower taxes, the US could resist if the government chose.
But this would first require a officials who want to resist.
Turkey has proposed filtering of the Internet, and there are mass protests against it.
Ai Weiwei has been held incommunicado for a month; there is a rumor he has been tortured into confessing various crimes.
Torture is very effective for extracting confessions if it does not matter whether they are true. That is why it is just as despicable when done by China as when done by the US.
Everyone: sign this petition calling on Uganda not to adopt its bill to punish gays.
US citizens: call your senators and say, defend Medicare, and oppose the disguised plans to ruin Medicare with spending limits in a few years.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Thousands demonstrated in Marrakesh for a constitutional monarchy, and against terrorism.
Obama continues to support "free trade" with Colombia despite Colombia's increasing assassinations of union organizers.
Uri Avnery compares the apparent execution of Osama bin Laden to other executions of accused terrorists.
Muslim extremists in Egypt are picking a fight with Coptic Christians.
The details of the fight almost don't matter, since the issue is more of an excuse than anything else. But I do wonder what really happened to the woman who supposedly converted to Islam. Did she really exist? If so, is she still alive? Murdered?
Pakistan has imposed censorship on foreign journalism, and especially in Abbottabad, to impede investigation of how Osama bin Laden managed to hide there.
Babar Ahmed tells how the UK police that arrested him in 2003 beat him, then squeezed him in a headlock so he could not breathe. Medical tests support his accusations.
Babar Ahmad has been fighting the US extradition request in various courts since his second arrest in 2004.
Australia will send refugees to Malaysia, which has a record of abusing refugees.
UK policemen told their commanders they saw Tomlinson hit shoved to the ground, and the commanders concealed this information from the investigation.
Several cities in Syria are now patrolled by tanks and soldiers who shoot at anyone.
A French naval ship let migrants in a disabled boat drift and die rather than rescue them.
US war is very expensive in monetary terms. The point is that it has been made cheap in US lives; the blood shed is in foreign civilian casualties that the US government denies and pretends not to count.
Ashcroft, Bush's Attorney General who hated our freedoms, is now working for Blackwater.
The world is drowning in corporate fraud, and the executives responsible often go on to public office.
A man has been convicted of "aiding suicide" simply for talking with people that wanted to kill themselves.
This seems outrageous. I hope there will be an appeal.
This man pretended, in chat rooms, to be a female nurse. Pretending to be what you aren't is not nice, but that has nothing to do with the central issue: just talking with people about suicide is not participating in the event, no matter who you say you are.
As a separate matter, people who want to die should be allowed to get assistance (and not just advice) if they need it. They should be able to get it from people or institutions they can trust, and should not need to have recourse to a chat room. They should also have access to therapy, so that they might reconcile themselves to going on with their lives.
How the system of testing new drugs, to approve their sale, is fundamentally broken.
Chomsky comments on the apparent assassination of bin Laden — and the lack of proof he was involved in the 2001 attacks.
The New Bottom Line campaign protested in and outside the stockholders meeting of Wells Fargo Bank.
One other thing people can do is to move their money out of large banks such as Wells Fargo and Bank of America, and into local banks.
13 reasons why the New Zealand "3 strikes" law is an injustice.
A 14th reason, not mentioned in the article: the law's very goal is wrong.
Sharing is good — to attack sharing is the evil. Thus, any law designed to punish or block file sharing is evil at the root. What New Zealand ought to do is to recognize everyone's right to do noncommercial sharing of exact copies of any published work.
The reason that the government did the opposite, I suggest, is that the government is working for external powers — foreign states and multinational corporations — rather than for the citizens of New Zealand.
In the UK, women buy much more clothing than 20 years ago, and wear most of it very little, treating it as disposable. This is based on, and supports, the use of sweatshop labor to make the clothing.
I would suppose this all applies to the US as well as the UK, but I don't have any way of checking that.
The wasteful production of so much little-used clothing puts a tremendous burden on the Earth.
"Free trade" treaties surely play a role in making these sweatshops possible. In 1990, textile workers in poor countries could organize unions and get better wages; now each poor country has to compete against the rest, driving wages and working conditions down.
I don't see what can be done to stop this stupid game of competition, other than to eliminate the "free trade" treaties that are its basis.
The Wall Street Journal tried to set up a Wikileaks-style leak reception site, but did a lousy job that whistleblowers should not trust.
The WSJ later said it would fix the technical flaws, but did not offer to correct the legal shortcomings.
Many US states are planning to privatize prisons, to fund private schools instead of public schools, and to crush public sector unions.
Everyone: rebuke the CUNY board for blocking the honorary degree that was supposed to be offered to Tony Kushner, because of his political views that oppose right-wing Israeli policies.
Past recipients of honorary degrees from CUNY are returning them in condemnation of the board's action.
US citizens: phone your senators to call on them to resist Republican plans to use debt ceiling expansion to ban health insurance that covers abortion. Also sign this petition.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
This shows that Republicans are too dishonest to keep a budget deal for even a couple of months.
The nastiest part of their plan is to require women who were raped to convince the IRS of that. But it's not enough to block the nastiest part. They should not get even the tiniest bit.
Democrats in the Senate should make their own demands to reverse bad changes agreed to in March. Then there can be a "compromise" to stay with the deal of March.
Global heating has already harmed world food production and has increased some food prices, perhaps almost 20%.
The more global heating we create, the more we push agricultural systems towards collapse.
US proposals for "do not track" could backfire by requiring increased identification of users.
Donald Trump's record of racism.
Mass protests continue in Syria despite the killing of many protesters.
Foolish Australians oppose the planned carbon emissions tax because it could "make electricity cost more".
Of course it will. That is the point — to encourage efficiency.
Global heating increases flooding in parts of Australia. How much do these short-sighted people think bigger floods will cost their country?
The US reports that Osama bin Laden was directly involved in planning possible terrorist operations.
If this is truthful, it would imply that al Qa'ida, or some large part of it, has an overall organization. That does not mean that bin Laden's death is a blow to al Qa'ida. As long as such an organization can recruit, it always has new leaders who can take over from the old.
Ahmadinejad is trying to choose his own cabinet in defiance of Shah Khamenei, resulting in a power struggle within the Iranian regime's secular and clerical parts.
The UN projects a world population of 9.3 billion in 2050.
Given the damage done by global heating to agriculture we will not find it easy to feed so many.
The recent report of decreased population growth in China could mean it will be somewhat less. I hope so, because every increase makes it harder to cope.
Mozilla rejected a request to remove an add-on that helps users access domains that the US attempts to shut down.
"Seizing" domains without first convicting their operators of a crime is tyranny. Bravo, Mozilla, for helping the US to resist tyranny.
Some of these sites enable members of the public to share files non-commercially. It's not clear whether those sites have committed a crime in the US, and the US does not prosecute them. What is clear is that, if there is a law that such a site violates, the injustice is in the law, not in the site. The right to share must be respected.
Sharing is good; to forbid sharing is to attack society.
The UN has effectively acknowledged that the UN troops brought cholera to Haiti.
It has killed over 5,000 people.
Several associates of Berlusconi will go on trial for finding prostitutes for him.
Whether or not Nicole Minetti was involved in finding prostitutes for Berlusconi, he showed disrespect for Italy by giving her a political post after meeting her in a situation that had nothing to do with political ability.
Alec Loorz has sued the US government demanding it act to prevent global heating disaster.
Being 16 now, his life expectancy would take him till 2070, by which time he would experience the real dimensions of the disaster we are creating.
The Internet has given voice to Singapore's opposition, but people fear their votes will not be secret.
Former US military interrogators reject the claim that torture "worked" for obtaining intelligence about bin Laden (or anything else).
The US says that bin Laden did not shoot at US troops, and did not have an gun when he was shot.
Why then was he shot rather than captured? Supposedly the troops were ordered to take prisoners "when possible". Is their idea of "possible" so cautious that in practice they couldn't possibly have taken any prisoners? Were they really ordered to kill?
A group working for Arab-Israeli peace has been censored twice in Seattle.
The idea that both sides deserve a good life is considered too controversial.
A US official proposed taxing cars by miles driven.
To replace the gas tax (which encourages use of more efficient cars) with a milage tax is in effect a plan to encourage wasting gasoline. I suspect the oil companies are behind it somehow.
It is also an advance in government surveillance, and thus attacks all citizens.
Honduras' coup-installed and US-supported government has declared war on school teachers.
Protests against the War on Drugs are planned for all across Mexico, sparked by a poet whose son was murdered.
If the US punishes Mexico for refusing to continue this foolish war, Mexico should retaliate by pulling out of NAFTA. (It needs to do that anyway, and this is a good excuse.)
When Obama decided not to use a drone missile against Osama bin Laden, he made an exception to a general practice of bombing in Pakistan that has killed far more bystanders than targets.
The article is mistaken when it says that "no sane person would wish any harm on American soldiers". If a Pakistani feels that way, perhaps in response to the civilians killed by US attacks, that does not make him insane. Fighting a guerrilla war against the US does not make the Taliban insane. I condemned the Taliban's repressive policies when they were in power, I condemn the Taliban's policy of murdering civilians now, and I expect to continue to condemn the Taliban when the US is no longer fighting them, but it is absurd to call enemies "insane" for being enemies.
Most terrorism in the US is done by right-wing extremists, but you'd never guess that from the mass media.
Even imaginary bombs that involve Muslim fanatics get much more news coverage than real bombs set by right-wing fanatics.
Anonymous responds to Sony's accusation that Anonymous was involved in credit card theft.
The "evidence" for this accusation is the sort of false trail you find in page 20 of a mystery novel. As proof, it's nothing, but it might satisfy the desire of some politicians for an excuse to launch a crusade against Anonymous.
Biomass energy projects currently planned are renewable energy sources, but only on the assumption that the forests they chop down will grow back. That is too long a time scale; in the shorter term, these projects can drive massive deforestation.
If the forests do not regrow as supposed, perhaps due to a global heating disaster, these projects will turn out not to have been renewable energy.
Dictator Franco had 120,000 prisoners killed in the course of seizing Spain from the Republican government. The present government has published a map of 2000 mass graves of these victims.
LA is suing Deutsche Bank for fraudulent foreclosures and illegal evictions.
Many other banks have made a practice of fraudulent foreclosures. I hope they will be sued too.
Major western media condemned Gaddafi's use of cluster bombs in Misrata. but didn't condemn the US for using them in Iraq and elsewhere.
This doesn't excuse Gaddafi's use of cluster bombs; rather, it means that Bush deserves the same condemnation. Bush should be tried for war crimes and for the crime of aggressive war, just as is now planned for Gaddafi.
A former Taliban minister says the Taliban offered in October 2001 to hand over Osama bin Laden for trial to an organization of Islamic states.
Bush ostentatiously did not care and rejected negotiation. Based on Bush's supposed reason for the war, the war was gratuitous.
I supported the invasion of Afghanistan for another reason: to end the Taliban's oppression of Afghan women and men.
The UK's severe budget cuts have knocked it into a longer recession.
Peak oil has already occurred, but the world didn't notice, because it is switching to cheap natural gas and coal. The only problem with this "solution" is that they release even more greenhouse gas, Thus, instead of heading into an economic wall in the near term, we are heading for climate disaster in a few decades.
Many Ugandan lawyers asked the country's supreme court to restrain the president from attacking protesters.
The EU may pay fishermen to collect plastic at sea.
In 2007, BP was fined $20 million for a big leak in Alaska and ordered to maintain its pipelines properly. Now it has been fined $25 million more for not doing so.
The EFF reports on the FBI spyware that it sneaks into people's computers.
The EFF concludes that this obviates any reason for the proposal to require surveillance systems in VOIP and other communications systems.
Aaron's Furniture rents computers equipped with spyware that transmits photos of the user.
I would guess that these computers also contained Windows, which also spies on the user.
Dispersed oil still threatens the safety of Gulf of Mexico seafood. US government testing of the catch has several weaknesses.
Haiti's president Martelly, elected by 1/6 the voters, has friends connected with the US-arranged coup that overthrew President Aristide, and friends connected with the Duvaliers.
US media are straining to encourage belief that waterboarding "worked" for finding Osama bin Laden.
Finding him was a slow process that probably involved combining lots of information. For absolutely none of this to have been obtained from the suspects who were tortured would have been unlikely, a priori. So if some of the information did come from them, that doesn't prove torture "works".
Even if torture had "worked" in getting a clue that eventually led to bin Laden, this benefit for the US (for whatever it's worth) would be nothing compared to the harm the US did to itself by torturing ibn as-Sheikh al-Libi. He told the lies that Bush wanted to hear, and Bush used them as excuses to invade Iraq.
Torture can't "work" in general for getting information from prisoners, because what it does is make them say what the interrogators want to hear.
But even if torture did generally "work", that would not justify it. As Obama said, torture destroys the moral fiber of a nation. The US's moral fiber seems to be on the edge of tearing right open.
Bradley Manning is now held in fairly normal prison conditions, However, the US is still responsible for the way it treated him for most of a year, and Rep. Kucinich aims to the US government to account.
To punish injustice is not the only valid reason not to let this drop. Another is that many other prisoners in the US face similar conditions. Neither accused suspects nor convicted criminals deserve to be tortured.
Efforts to cut carbon emissions in some developed countries have been negated by a rise in emissions caused by exports to them from other countries.
Indian police arrested hundreds of people who were going to march to protest plans to build a nuclear power plant.
An inquest ruled that Ian Tomlinson was unlawfully killed by the policeman who knocked him down, for no reason, as he passed by a protest in London. Now the policeman may be prosecuted.
There are countless instances of unjustified police violence against protesters and bystanders in the UK — and elsewhere also.
North Korea's prison empire is full of people who don't even know why they were arrested.
The US has sued Deutsche Bank for systematic mortgage fraud in the US.
A
series of false copyright claims are being used to censor an Iranian
opposition group on YouTube.
Syrian repression forces crushed
a protest in Banias.
The discussion of arming Alawite militias suggests that Assad is also
trying to stimulate sectarian hostility.
The Israeli army sealed
off the village of Nabi Saleh and appears to plan to demolish
Palestinian homes there.
Nabi Saleh is the long-time hub of nonviolent protest.
Israel
is trying to build a railroad from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem —
through Palestinian territory.
Israeli "settlers" invaded a Palestinian village and burned a
prayer hall.
A Hamas leader says Hamas
is willing to make peace with Israel.
People
in the UK were arrested as "terrorists" for doing photography
"near" the Sellafield nuclear fuel processing plant.
The UK has a history of treating people as suspects for photography.
Protecting biodiversity is expensive, but the consequences of failing
to protect biodiversity are much
more painful.
Daniel Barenboim went to Gaza to conduct
a concert of Mozart there.
He said, "I am a Palestinian, and I am an Israeli." I hope Israel
won't arrest him for entering Gaza.
Many in the US are citing the killing of Osama bin Laden as a
reason for pulling out of Afghanistan.
The war in Afghanistan was never about bin Laden, so his death is not
a reason for the US to stop fighting there. However, removing the US
military from Afghanistan is the right thing to do, for other reasons.
If the US pulls out for a non-reason, at least that's
better than not pulling out.
Bahrain's tyrannical regime arrested
an opposition MP after he criticized the regime in an interview on
al Jazeera.
Colombian professor Miguel
Angel Beltrán was charged with "rebellion" because of his
published criticisms of the state.
If President Santos wants to show he is less horrible than former president
Alvaro Horrible, he should drop the charges against Beltrán.
In the Kyrgyz/Uzbek violence on Osh, part of Kyrgyzstan, the
Kyrgyzstan military was involved in attacking Uzbeks.
Syrian protesters and dissidents are being tortured
in prison.
The US under the Bush regime used Syria as a proxy for torture.
When Obama decided not to use a drone missile against Osama bin Laden,
he made an exception to a general practice of bombing in Pakistan that
has killed far more bystanders than targets.
The article is mistaken when it says that "no sane person would wish
any harm on American soldiers". If a Pakistani feels that way,
perhaps in response to the civilians killed by US attacks, that does
not make him insane. Fighting a guerrilla war against the US does not
make the Taliban insane. I condemned the Taliban's repressive
policies when they were in power, I condemn the Taliban's policy of
murdering civilians now, and I expect to continue to condemn the
Taliban when the US is no longer fighting them, but it is absurd to
call enemies "insane" for being enemies.
Mozilla rejected a request to remove an add-on that helps users access domains that the US attempts to shut down.
"Seizing" domains without first convicting their operators of a crime
is tyranny. Bravo, Mozilla, for helping the US to resist tyranny.
Some of these sites enable members of the public to share files
non-commercially. It's not clear whether those sites have committed a
crime in the US, and the US does not prosecute them. What is clear is
that, if there is a law that such a site violates, the injustice is in
the law, not in the site. The right to share must be respected.
Sharing is good; to forbid sharing is to attack society.
The Internet has given voice to Singapore's opposition, but people fear their votes will not be secret.
Ahmadinejad is trying to choose his own cabinet in defiance of Shah Khamenei, resulting in a power struggle within the Iranian regime's
secular and clerical parts.
Several associates of Berlusconi will go on trial for finding
prostitutes for him.
Whether or not Nicole Minetti was involved in finding prostitutes for
Berlusconi, he showed disrespect for Italy by giving her a political
post after meeting her in a situation that had nothing to do with
political ability.
Mass protests continue in Syria despite the killing of many protesters.
Tennessee is considering a law to ban middle schools from giving out any "material" that mentions the existence of homosexuality.
It does not seem to me that the law would punish students for talking about homosexuality, but it might censor their writing in class if other students are to read it.
Tornadoes cut the transmission lines from a nuclear power complex in Alabama, forcing it to shut down.
In this instance, the backup generators were undamaged, so we did not get another Fukushima disaster. I wonder what would have happened if the tornadoes had it the plant itself.
I also wonder whether the designers dismissed that danger as so unlikely that it was not worth taking precautions against.
When schools near the Fukushima reactors began to have radioactivity levels above the legal limit, Japan increased the limit.
I don't know whether the new limit is significantly dangerous. That may depend on how long this level of radioactivity is likely to last (which depends on how fast those isotopes decay or get transported elsewhere). However, dangerous or not, the decision making reflects a cavalier attitude.
Journalists and media in Sri Lanka face official censorship and intimidation.
Finally, the Open Wireless Movement is being launched.
If you put a key on your wireless network, you become an enforcer in Big Brother's attempt to control and monitor all use of the Internet.
The US government has taken its attack on Wikileaks to a grand jury.
If you know anyone in the Boston area computing community I suggest showing that person this article.
In Syria the suppression forces are arresting thousands of dissidents.
Uganda's protest leader speaks from the hospital in Kenya, where his eyes are being treated after the Ugandan police attacked him.
Gaddafi's forces are bombarding the port of Misrata to starve the city.
I don't understand why NATO does not establish better liaison with the rebels in Misrata. A few soldiers for liaison would not violate the UN resolution.
Stationing one firefinder radar system with crew in Misrata would make it easy to destroy Gaddafi's missile launchers and artillery.
If "America can do whatever we set our mind to", how about setting our mind to what the world really needs?
John Catt, inveterate UK protest participant, will sue the police for classifying him as a "domestic extremist" and systematically surveying him.
Here's more information about him and the police surveillance.
Child labor in Colombia has increased by 35% in just a few years.
The full cause may not be known, but right wing government is clearly part of it.
The US asked to write New Zealand's copyright law.
This good article would be clearer if the term "IP" were replaced everywhere by "copyright".
The term "intellectual property" spreads confusion because it lumps together a dozen unrelated laws, of which copyright is just one.
El Baradei called for a war crimes probe of Bush and his officials.
A new mobile phone uses fingerprints for security.
If police or customs agents copy the data from that phone, they get the user's fingerprints automatically.
US citizens: sign this petition for a big withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan this summer.
US citizens: tell the EPA you support limitation of toxic mercury emissions from coal power plants.
Everyone: Tell India's prime minister to listen to protesters (instead of arresting them) and reconsider the planned new nuclear plant.
US citizens: tell Hollywood to stop greenwashing LA's sewage sludge.
UK citizens: vote yes on AV.
US citizens: defend the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The banksters are conspiring with Republicans to eliminate it or make it to weak to do its job.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to oppose HR 1229, HR 1230 and HR 1231, bills designed to clear away environmental protection and allow drilling regardless of danger.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Also sign this petition.
The US government has proposed an excuse to arbitrarily deny any citizen a passport: an impossible questionnaire that hardly anyone could answer.
Oil companies are threatening to shut old wells in the UK to avoid an increase in tax.Shutting down some old wells that are almost exhausted won't make a large difference in the long term. The UK should not make long term concessions to this short-term threat.
10,000 people protested in London against unnecessary budget cuts.
Egypt will open the Rafah border crossing with Gaza.
This appears to end the siege of Gaza, launched mainly by Israel but implemented with Egypt's help.
Guantanamo prisoners' lawyers are forbidden to read the leaked reports showing there is no evidence against there clients.This is to preserve the dishonesty of the legal process.
When Obama declared Bradley Manning guilty, he denied Manning the possibility of a fair trial (supposing any military trial can be fair). Manning's judges will be soldiers under Obama's command, and they have now been explicitly told what verdict to issue.
Weeks ago, Uganda banned media coverage of protests which have since been attacked by police.
The US has finally killed Osama bin Laden. I don't consider his death any loss, but I don't expect this will do much harm to al Qa'ida. The only way this might have any important effect is psychologically: for instance, if al Qa'ida can use him as a martyr, or if Obama seizes this excuse to withdraw troops from Afghanistan. Greg Palast's book, Armed Madhouse, has the following joke.
So Osama walks into this bar, see, and George Bush says, "Whad'l'ya have, pardner?" and Osama says, "Well, George, what are you serving today?" and Bush says, "Fear," and Osama says, "Fear for everybody!" and George pours it on for the crowd. Then the presidential bartender says, "Hey, who's buying?" Osama points a thumb at the crowd sucking down their brew. "They are," he says — and the two of them share a quiet laugh.
Obama supports imprisonment without trial, pretending that the prisoners in Guantanamo are dangerous terrorists. He could hardly not have known that the supposed evidence against them is not even credible.
Some Iraqi and US officials want U.S. troops to stay past scheduled withdrawal date, but al Sadr is vetoing it.
Protests in Uganda have grown each time the police attacked peaceful protesters.
Police shot children and beat up journalists.
The government cannot make oil cheap — not sustain-ably — but it can respect people's human rights.
NATO's attempt to kill Gaddafi has provoked an international outcry. It can't be denied that Gaddafi is the head of one of the contending governments in Libya, and that this was an assassination attempt.
The current rules of war, as established by treaties, forbid assassination as a method. Some argue for changing this; some argue for assassination as a less violent substitute for war of armies against armies. I am not convinced, partly because I think assassination would be done in addition to war, not instead.
If we do change the rules of war, the change would apply to all the sides of a conflict. Should the rules of war allow the US try to kill Gaddafi? Should they allow Gaddafi's army try to kill Obama? It has to be both yes, or both no.
Green schemes are 'wide open to major corruption'.
Gaddafi's men are shelling randomly in Misrata, and tried to plant mines in the harbor.
Saudi Arabia has intensified media censorship rules.
I wonder what it means for events, being reported rather than carried out, to contradict Islamic law. Just what is prohibited by this rule? If a trial in the US gives a female witness equal importance to a male witness, is that news illegal to report in Saudi Arabia?
New Zealand's new anti-sharing law presumes people are guilty unless they can prove they are innocent.
Trashing basic principles of justice is standard practice for governments that serve the movie companies above their citizens. These companies' goal is to divide people; the means are evil, and the goal is evil too.
The latest proposal of US lunatic Christians is to require all immigrants to convert to Christianity.
Others claim that teaching evolution encourages homosexuality (as if that were somehow bad).
Hundreds of Syrian Baath party supporters have resigned in protest against Assad's killing of protesters.
Karzai's accounting is so bad that there is no way of telling how many policemen there are in the Afghan National Police.
Austria is caving to the EU and implementing a directive to record information about people's phone calls and Internet contacts.
A UK company offered Mubarak's regime proprietary software to attack dissident's computers and accounts, and tap their communications using other proprietary software.
Guantanamo prison wardens accuse Shaker Aamer of practicing "counter-interrogation", and leading other prisoners in resistance such as hunger strikes and suicide attempts.
Whatever he may have done in Afghanistan, his response to imprisonment sounds admirable. His influence over other prisoners, if it really exists outside the guards' imagination, can't be due to gang violence as it might be in an ordinary prison. It could only come from moral leadership.
"Counter-Interrogation" must refer to something like the way The Prisoner dealt with Number 2.
China's population growth has become less than expected, leading to lower predictions of energy use and carbon emissions.
The reductions are not enough to make Earth safe, but they show that efforts to reduce population growth, worldwide, can be of great help in saving Earth from global heating.
Low birth rates might cause a decrease in human population over the 21st century, which would be a good thing for sustain-ability and ending poverty. By the end of the century we should be able to greatly extend human life span, so the population will start rising again; but we will have more advanced technology to cope with the consequences of that rise.
Facebook has mysteriously closed several pages of anti-budget-cut activists in the UK.
Some brave British Muslim women publicly oppose the usual misogynist variety of Islam.
A Wikileaks cable confirms that public opposition blocked Canada's nasty copyright bill in 2008.
It is unfortunate that the article uses the term "intellectual property issues", since that term lumps copyright law together with a dozen unrelated disparate laws.
Perhaps he was quoting from the cable, but he didn't write it as a direct quotation so he did not have to use these words. And if it had been a direct quotation, the term's misguided view calls for rebuttal as I'm doing here.
Every aspect of the New Orleans "justice system" is designed for systematic injustice towards the innocent.
The US and NATO hand over prisoners for Afghanistan to torture.
The major carbon-emitting states are nowhere near making an agreement to cut carbon emissions.
They intend to continue fiddling as Earth burns.
US corporations can now tell their employees who to vote for.
They cannot (yet) verify that the employees obeyed.
UK police once again attacked peaceful protesters in Bristol.
The police say some protesters started it by throwing stones, but even if that is true. it doesn't excuse the police for attacking people indiscriminately.
Israel's Labor head called on the UN to insist a Palestinian unity government recognize Israel and accept past agreements with Israel.
That might be a legitimate demand, if suitable demands are applied to Israel as well, such as to start removing its colonies in Palestinian territory.
Martelly-Clinton Seal Deal for Next Wave of Disaster Capitalism in Haiti.
The San Francisco Chronicle faces US retribution for posting a video of a protest in an Obama fund-raiser.
US states encounter difficulty in obtaining drugs to use for executions because foreign manufacturers refuse to supply them.
Israel used force against nonviolent protests in the West Bank.
Just before the royal wedding, UK police raided several squats and preemptively arrested people who might have wanted to protest.
The police deny this was related to the wedding, and give various other excuses. Likewise, China said Ai Weiwei was arrested for "economic crimes" and not for political activity.
However, given that the police announced they would make preemptive arrests, we must conclude that that's what these are.
They also arrested people who were making a "zombie wedding" video (and were nowhere near the wedding).
A Palestinian unity government will create an opportunity for a peace agreement.
Bahraini Shi'ites have been sentenced to death for killing policemen, after a bogus trial with no defense lawyers.
Even supposing they did it — they may not even have been protesters, let alone attackers — I can't blame protesters for killing police while police were killing protesters.
US citizens: Tell the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, don't rubber-stamp reactor licenses!
Uri Avnery: Palestinian unity offers Israel the chance to make peace with all Palestinians, if it will start by carrying out the agreements it has already signed.
Author Paulo Coelho condemns the War on Sharing.
The US Supreme Court gave businesses power to impose arbitration contracts on customers, effectively denying them justice.
Gaddafi's son and some grandsons were killed by a NATO bomb apparently aimed at Gaddafi himself.
Gaddafi is not trustworthy in general, but I don't think this is a lie. I don't see any plausible scenario where this lie would fit and stand up. Nor is it plausible he would carry out a false flag attack against his own progeny. So I believe this report. It seems NATO is trying to assassinate him.
Foxconn says: if workers making Apple products work long hours, that's their choice because their regular pay is so low.
The United Arab Emirates have arrested human rights activists for posting political messages on the Internet.
The accusations against these people convict the government of tyranny.
Irina Khalip, journalist and wife of arrested presidential candidate Sannikov, is being held incommunicado in her home, and is threatened with imprisonment.
A resident of Deraa, in Syria, says that soldiers shoot anyone that goes outdoors, and they are running out of food.
US citizens: sign this petition to cut subsidies to oil companies.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and say, end subsidies and tax credits for oil companies.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Also sign this petition.
Everyone: tell Facebook not to support Chinese censorship.
US citizens: sign this petition supporting a requirement for corporations that have government contracts to disclose all political spending.
US citizens: sign the ACLU's petition to major Internet companies to protect users' privacy and legal rights.
Israel says it will not continue piece talks with a Palestinian unity government.
The piece talks have been mere theater — giving Israel cover as it grabs more pieces of the West Bank. But the Palestinian Authority refused last year to continue the theater any longer. It appears Israel has switched to a different kind of theater, "rejecting" talks that were not in the cards anyway. I think this means Israel expects international pressure to make peace and is planning in advance to reject it.
Westerners should avoid assuming that all dissidents in Iran share one goal or one political view.
The new Tea Party congresscritters have been bought by the banksters lickety split.
Both Republicans and Democrats endanger health care by blaming high medical costs on Medicare and Medicaid.
The real culprit is the cost of supporting private insurance companies.
Vermont is close to legislating universal single-payer health care.
A man accused of releasing The Black Swan on the net has been raided by the police, and could face years in prison for sharing.
Possession of a cheap Casio watch was interpreted in Guantanamo as evidence that someone was a terrorist.
In the US today, chemistry sets come without any chemicals.
Microsoft collects location data from Windows phones, too.
Tibetans held a vigil at a monestary, and Chinese police broke their arms and legs; two of them died. This is "to protect religious freedom".
Thomas Tamm, who told the public in 2004, about illegal US government wiretapping (since legalized by legislators who hate our freedoms), will not be prosecuted.
Republicans in the US actively campaign against efforts to end the bullying of gay students in school.
The UK has accused several protesters of exaggerated crimes in an attempt to intimidate dissidents.
Nauru, a state of low-lying islands that could be inundated due to global heating, hopes to use the Alliance of Small Island States to confront the larger nations that are busy destroying it.
Iran's President Ahmadinejad and Shah Khamanei seem to be in a power struggle.
Although I am not an expert, it seems to be that Khamanei has the real power. I think Ahmadinejad is trying to see how long his chain is, and now he has the answer.
A method of genetic engineering now being tested could make mosquitos stop biting humans.
To completely eliminate mosquitos, as is also proposed, would be an insane ecological risk. Many amimals eat mosquitos and could be wiped out too. The kind of experiments they are talking about would not be sufficient to measure the danger of this.
Egypt brokered a tentative peace between Fatah and Hamas which could lead to another Palestinian election.
I condemn Hamas's Islamist ideology, but Palestinians cannot have democracy by excluding a party that many Palestinians support.
There is no reason for Fatah to care what the Israeli government or the US government says or thinks about this. As Uri Avnery has explained, Netanyahu's "peace negotiations" are an intentional dead end, meant as a cover for a continuing land grab. Netanyahu's terms for peace are that if Palestinians concede everything, then Israel will give them nothing. Thus, the real choice for Fatah is peace with Hamas or nothing.
Hamas's election victory came after Fatah (which is secular) had been weakened by many years of uselessly begging Israel for peace. It has ceased to do that, so Hamas may lose some of its appeal. The success of secular resistance to dictatorship in several Arab countries, and the strength it has demonstrated in others, might show Palestinians that Islamism is not the only path that could possibly win them justice.
Massive protests convinced the French government to reconsider its decision to allow fracking.
An opposition presidential candidate is on trial in Belarus, threatened with 15 years in prison if the state says he is guilty.
If Sannikov had really received only 2.5 percent of the vote, why bother putting him on trial? It would be more effective to ignore him.
Egypt's ex-interior minister is on trial for ordering the shooting of protesters.
Women in Bangladesh are challenging the power of Islamists by supporting full implementation of a general law giving women equal rights. If that law is implemented, Bangladesh will do the US one better.
A newspaper in Belarus defies the dictator's orders to shut it down.
Why the US and NATO Fed Detainees to Afghan Torture System.
BP continues getting big government contracts even no-bid noncompetitive contracts.
Israel arrested Palestinian writer Ahmad Qatamesh after taking several family members hostage.
The plan appears to be to hold him without trial as a political prisoner.
Right-wing fanatics in Israel are trying to crush academic freedom. They especially target events about "democracy" and "human rights".
Famous brands say they require factories to treat labor decently, but it's all a lie: sweatshop labor conditions are getting worse.
The mothers of Colombian youths murdered by the army still demand justice and receive death threats instead.
A homeless Connecticut woman is threatened with 20 years in prison for registering her son in a public school in a neighboring city.
Government doctors in Guantanamo hid evidence of torture.
Wikileaks cables say that drug gangs have taken over large parts of Central America and are removing US-supplied heavy weapons from military arsenals.
Gaddafi has found ways to bypass the porous and incomplete sanctions.
In Bureaucratic Brazil, orders to demolish slums were executed even though the inhabitants were still there.
This is all for the sake of the Olympic Games, which are like an artificial disaster for whatever city they occur in.
In occupied Palestine, similar things are done from malice.
Suggestion: the outside world can support the labor movement in Iran.
Uganda may relax a death sentence for homosexual activity to mere life imprisonment.
Sai Baba invalidated his prophesy by dying before he said he would.
But his wrongs went far beyond that.
All the evidence against 255 Guantanamo prison came from just 8 prisoners, whose testimony is thought to be untrustworthy (in some cases because they were tortured).
Accusations of fraud in the Haitian elections are being investigated.
Fraud would not surprise me, though I wonder if the investigation can be trusted. But what was really wrong in the Haitian elections was the exclusion of Fanmi Lavalas and President Aristide.
Syria is now using tanks against the protesters, and has arrested and killed hundreds.
Sri Lanka will be allowed to veto a UN investigation into its war crimes.
BP had a blowout in 2008 that almost resembled the 2009 Big Spill. Because this was in Azerbaijan, BP kept it secret and was able to continue the same risky methods.
The Guantanamo prison command considered Pakistan's intelligence agency as a terrorist group. If a suspect had ties with ISI, that was considered equivalent to ties with al Qa'ida.
I can't criticize that policy. ISI has long been known to have ties with al Qa'ida, and it would be foolish to disregard this.
The injustice of Guantanamo lies in of imprisoning people without trial. Having suspicions is not an injustice.
The Libyan rebels are planting antivehicle mines and failing to keep track of them for future demining.
I don't think antivehicle mines are inherently an outrage.
The labor movement worldwide calls for an end to repression in Bahrain.
Thousands of Pakistanis blocked NATO's main supply route as a protest against drone attacks in Pakistan.
Obama's attempt to distinguish Bradley Manning from Daniel Ellsberg got the facts completely backwards.
Many religious schools in the UK fail to challenge bigotry and bullying.
It amazes me that bullying so often goes as far as death threats. Things seem to have changed a lot since I was young; bullies bothered me but never threatened to kill me. Saying "sticks and stones will break my bones" is not enough, apparently, to deal with this.
What we have learned from the leaked Guantanamo files.
The US government tries to justify torture and injustice in the name of protecting Americans. Don't you dare torture in my name!
The US government argues for keeping innocent people in prison because if freed they might seek revenge for their imprisonment. How would you feel if a callous government kept you in prison because it had done you an injustice? That is the behavior of a monstrous juggernaut that needs to be stopped.
If you have done someone a great wrong, and you don't want him to seek revenge, you ought to give him a very humble apology, together with a convincing demonstration that you won't do such things any more. Show you have learned your lesson. That is what the US must do.
Dalit students complain that their teachers force them to clean toilets and won't mark their work.
US citizens: call your congresscritter and say to oppose the War on Women (rights of abortion and birth control). Also sign this petition.
US citizens: tell Congress, raise taxes on corporations rather than cutting social spending.
A scientific paper reporting apparent evidence of precognition was published and then drew widespread media coverage. A repetition of the study, which found no sign of precognition, was refused publication.
Misrata is defended by thousands of citizens who took up arms to resist Gaddafi's attack.
Rebels in Benghazi talk about how the protests turned into a rebellion after Gaddafi's men shot protesters.
The situation in Libya has not yet reached a clear stalemate. Gaddafi's troops continue attacking because they still think they can win (whether or not they really can). If they become certain they cannot win, that they can never again dominate Libya and profit from its oil, that's when many of them will look for a way to get out.
Feathers from the endangered black-footed albatross demonstrate mercury pollution from human activity, and this could be one of the factors driving that bird towards extinction.
Dropbox says it will decrypt users' files for the government, which means they must have been lying when they said they couldn't decrypt users' files.
The article's first paragraph states misguided judgments and irrelevancies. It makes no difference how "passionate" their team is; what matters is how they treat their users. This service is not a product. No product or service can be "great" if it implements surveillance.
However, that doesn't invalidate the main points of the article. If you're going to use Dropbox, you should encrypt the files first on your own machine.
The UK needs to charge for water use, as high temperatures make water scarce. But the system needs to be designed not to crush the poor.
If the Conservative Party wins in Canada, and imposes Internet censorship, the Pirate Party of Canada will offer VPN service for Canadians to evade censorship.
Mukhtar Mai was gang-raped as a punishment for her brother. She became a women's rights campaigner and prosecuted her attackers. Most of them were freed on appeal, and now she is afraid they will kill her.
There have been mass protests in Casablanca for more democracy.
Two Syrian members of parliament resigned because of Assad's repeated massacres of protesters.
His forces shot 100 people at the funerals of others they had shot.
Given how much popular support Assad still reportedly has, despite repression, he could allow dissidents to freely express their views and still remain in power.
Five crucial questions for evaluating nuclear power.
If an oil well in the Arctic explodes, it might be impossible to cap the well and impossible to contain the oil.
Wikileaks files from Guantanamo show people were held prisoner with no evidence of guilt — in some cases, without even a suspicion!
An al-Jazeera journalist was held for interrogation about al-Jazeera.
"If you could only know what we can know, you would understand that what we are doing is right," they said, but now we know for certain it was thoroughly wrong.
Correction: The Guardian subsequently said that these files did not come from Wikileaks.
Peter Wilmshurst, MD., has apparently been saved from a bankrupting UK libel suit because the company whose medical devices he criticized has gone out of business.
I hope it is true that he is now safe, and not just a surmise. Can the creditors take up the libel suit as an "asset" of the failed company?
Robert Frost's heirs damaged his legacy by refusing to let composer Eric Whitacre publish his setting of a Frost poem.
Eric commissioned another poet to write words for the piece. In resentment, he says he will never publish it with Frost's words.
Michigan has effectively abolished the local government of a city. And all the public school teachers in Detroit have been fired.
The concrete structure over the ruins of the exploded Chernobyl reactor is just an interim step — the cleanup is just beginning.
UK police raided a squat in Bristol, triggering a protest. During the protest they ran amok, attacking protesters and passers-by at random.
Meanwhile the protest developed into a riot. I can't tell from the information in this article whether the police brutality was a reaction to the riot or its cause.
I don't see anything very bad about another Tesco convenience store. It would be better if it were independent, not part of a large chain, to increase competition and reduce concentration of wealth. But I would not feel like protesting such a store. It's the police that deserve to be protested.
The police accused the squatters of making "petrol bombs". The squatters deny those charges, and say they were not even part of the opposition to the Tesco store.
Is there any physical difference between petrol bombs "assembled" for use at a later time, and a collection of beverage bottles to be recycled? Anyway, the accusation seems implausible. Given how easy it is to break store windows, why would anyone plan to commit arson instead? Police are not known for scrupulous adherence to the truth.
Based on prior patterns, I predict that people who smashed the Tesco store windows will be sentenced to prison, while police that attacked and injured bystanders will not be prosecuted.
Japan limits public information about the Fukushima disaster. Most press conferences include only the major Japanese corporate media, which repeat what they are told and ask no probing questions. Moreover, there are new threats of censorship of others that publish "illegal information".
Various groups of armed supporters of President Ouattara began fighting in Ivory Coast.
This suggests those forces are simply a coalition of militias belonging to warlords, like the one that constituted the "government" of Afghanistan after the US kicked out the Taliban.
Yemenite Protesters rejected Saleh's plan to step down and for his deputy to preside over elections and the writing of a new constitution.
I would guess they don't trust that deputy. Also, they say they want to prosecute President Saleh; but Saleh could make that impossible by fleeing if he so desires.
Trolls are fooling jittery Chinese censors and police to arrest innocent people, block nonpolitical web sites, and so on.
This raises a nice ethical question: is it ethical to say there will be a protest at XYZ Square and cause some people strolling there to get arrested?
It has the effect of hurting innocent people, but the harm is done by the agents of tyranny, and nothing except their tyrannical goals requires them to do it. My conclusion is that if the people are only arrested, not maimed or killed, it is ethical.
European music publishers shut down the IMSLP public domain music score library with a bogus copyright claim.
That their claim was bogus made no difference because there was no trial.
Go-Daddy has participated in a number of denial of service attacks, and it seems that people should refuse to do business with it. But that will not deal with the underlying problem: that use of the Internet is precarious and anyone can be kicked off by intimidation.
Obama justifies prosecuting Bradley Manning based on an erroneous comparison with Daniel Ellsberg.
Facebook deleted a photo of two men kissing, which was used to support a kiss-in in a pub that had shown bias against gays.
The person who posted it thinks that Facebook is not anti-gay, but rather than it is quick to censor whatever someone complains about.
While it might seem that the former would be worse, I think the latter makes facebook really dangerous. Don't use Facebook as a substitute for your own web site!
Human numbers and global warming are endangering well-known migratory birds.
60 prominent Israeli intellectuals and artists have signed a call to recognize a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders.
The US continues to hamper democracy in many Arab countries, but Saudi Arabia is at the heart of the repression.
The Arab world faces catastrophic food shortages, with the population growing and aquifers being emptied.
This is a glimpse of what the whole world is heading for, a few decades from now, if we don't cut the birth rate further.
Remember that global warming will turn some inhabited areas into deserts.
Watch out for the medical insurance companies' new front group.
A Wisconsin railroad company is accused of making illegal veiled campaign contributions to Governor Walker, and it appears his campaign knew about it.
In Syria, President Assad lifted the emergency law and recognized a theoretical right to protest. But dozens of real protesters were shot.
Two Peruvian reporters say they were fired from a TV channel for refusing to slant the news in favor of the right-wing candidate.
Police looked aside as right-wingers drowned out rally in Tel Aviv for ending the occupation of Palestine.
Bahrain is now persecuting Shi'ites in many professions. A thousand people have been arrested.
It seems to me that the US has a responsibility to move its fleet on its own initiative.
US citizens: tell Senator Durbin not to consider cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
Congress is considering a law to remove the dangerous loopholes in regulation of oil and gas drilling.
How Tobacco companies use philanthropy as strategic PR to continue harmful practices.
The Gates foundation can be understood in the same light, as Microsoft PR, especially when it "donates" computers that run Windows.
American exceptionalism: how the US was exceptionally lucky, and is now exceptionally stupid. Now the US is #1 in many social problems.
"To aspire to the western model in Asia is a deadly lie."
The article's point is that rather than directing growth into an expanding middle class, with the false promise that everyone will get to join it later, Asian countries must direct some of the increase in wealth to reducing the poverty of the poor.
They must also work hard to reduce births.
Android also saves past location data, though if you're moving around the history buffer may get reused soon.
I wonder whether the code that does this is visible in the free source code of Android, and whether users have posted a patch to fix it.
The US will use drones in Libya.
This does not violate the UN resolution, but unless it is controlled in close coordination with the rebels, it creates a risk of hitting them, or civilians.
The Antarctic ozone hole could be changing the climate in parts of the Southern hemisphere — including parts of Australia which have seen disastrous floods in the past year.
The IMF "bailout" for Portugal is marginally less draconian than what the EU offered, but it is still a disaster for everyone that isn't rich.
Prenatal exposure to certain pesticides has been linked to brain damage.
Tortured Iranian protesters who sought asylum in the UK are on hunger strike because the UK plans to send them back to Iran.
The murder of Juliano Mer-Khamis, founder of the Freedom Theater in Jenin, may have been motivated by the hatred of religious prudes.
The defenders of Misrata are citizens who took up arms against an army. They are barely holding out.
With 1000 people killed by Gaddafi's shelling, and snipers who shoot at anyone they can see, it is clear that attacking Gaddafi's army is authorized by the UN resolution that called for protecting civilians.
The iPhone file that records all its movements permanently gets even more sinister when combined with the practice of police to search portable phones without warrants.
The telephone network tracks phones regardless of whether they record locations, and for me that is enough reason not to carry one. But it takes a warrant (I think) to collect that information.
Colombia's "paramilitaries", really right-wing gangs of extortionists, are still operating in 1/3 of the country, despite having been formally "demobilized".
Former president Alvaro Horrible claimed to have demobilized them, but some of his close associates were connected with them. It was also Horrible who negotiated the proposed Free Exploitation Treaty than Obama now wants to ratify.
A company is trying to use the US-Peru Free Exploitation Treaty to evade pollution laws.
The US could save many trillions of dollars by discontinuing military spending that is nearly obsolete.
What use is an aircraft carrier that couldn't sail the seas and chew bubble gum at the same time — and would pardon the nation's worst enemies?
Rep. Ryan plans to privatize Medicare, turning it into a gift to medical insurance companies. He has planned with those insurance companies a PR campaign to mislead Americans into supporting it.
A hoax press release tricked Associated Press into announcing that GE had voluntarily decided to pay its fair share of US income tax.
US citizens: sign this petition condemning BP's $13b tax break due to causing disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, and calling on BP to pay those taxes anyway.
US citizens: tell the EPA to ban methyl iodide as a pesticide.
UK police plan pre-emptive arrests of would-be protesters.
They say these will be directed at people "planning criminal activity", but those words are deceptive since many kinds of protest have been criminalized. And the police lie when it suits them.
The effects of doses of radiation are fairly well known to medical science, but the effects of consuming microscoping particles of radioactive substances are a completely different story.
US citizens: call on Obama to take steps on his own to protect our shores from dangerous undersea oil drilling.
In the US: call your senators to support S.186, Barbara Boxer's bill to require a timetable for removing US troops from Afghanistan.
Police have banned evacuated Japanese from returning to homes near Fukushima.
One person, in two hours, cannot recover much in the way of possessions. In effect, these people's possessions have been confiscated. That seems unjustified, since things kept indoors should be safe to use. Livestock, on the other hand, may have absorbed significant radioactivity by eating grass. I am not an expert, but if their meat and milk will not be considered safe to use, they ought to be condemned now.
Broad protests against fracking are spreading in France.
People fear pollution of their water that can ruin crops as well as their own health.
Here in detail is why fracking is not a way to reduce greenhouse gas emission.
The US will give the Libyan rebels communication equipment and body armor, but not weapons.
I believe they have plenty of guns, though maybe they need ammunition in some places. But what they need most is military skill.
Zainab al-Khawaja has ended her hunger strike after receiving some word about the condition of her imprisoned relatives.
The rationale for staying alive and continuing the struggle is valid, but given that she isn't going to fast to death, it would have been wiser not to say she was doing so.
Natural gas companies are dishonestly lobbying for Europe to promote natural gas instead of renewable energy.
This would be a disaster, given that fracking results in a lot of greenhouse gas. The claim that carbon emission reduction can be achieved this way is apparently pure fiction.
Radio Free Europe says students in Teheran University are protesting against a police garrison.
Everyone: call on the Georgia Board of Pardons and Parole to commute Troy Davis' sentence and not execute him.
I added a personal comment saying that with the evidence against him so flimsy, he deserves a new trial.
Michigan police search drivers' cell phones at traffic stops.
The coup-installed regime in Honduras is working with the IMF to destroy public education and public water supplies, following (apparently) advice from the US.
Although some of the protest methods involve actions that in normal times would be properly punished, they are legitimate as a response to the murderous violence and grand theft of the coup regime. Does Al Jazeera have a bureau in Honduras?
The Egyptian government says at least 846 people were killed in the protests that drove Mubarak out of power.
Saudi Arabia has arrested 160 dissidents in the past couple of months.
Kucinich has introduced a resolution calling on Congress to decide the extent of US intervention in Libya.
I support the intervention in Libya (though what Libya really needs is one well-trained division from Egypt or conceivably some other Arab country), but the US should act according to its constitution.
Police shot more protesters in Yemen.
The country is sort of split between the president's forces and those of an opposition general, but they are not fighting each other.
Just 21 billion dollars (annually, I guess) would extend birth control and reproductive health care to the world's poor. That would greatly reduce population growth and help us avoid disaster in a few decades.
There is no need to be concerned that a low birth rate will cause problems. It would be a good thing if, a hundred years from now, the human population were a mere four billion.
Besides, in that much time, if technological civilization is still around, life extension will probably make the population start to increase again. We will need to establish space or ocean habitats for all the people to live in.
Madrid's mayor regards homeless people as a nuisance, and wants Spain to force them out of sight.
Many US cities have done this sort of thing for decades. It is the ultimate in callous evil.
Facebook is considering adding censorship to bow down to China.
The US says it will improve Bradley Manning's prison conditions, moving him out of solitary confinement.
The US's vindictive stubbornness is very large, but sometimes we can overcome it.
Massachusetts citizens: phone your state rep to restore family planning funds by supprting this amendment by Alice Wolf.
The iGroan records every place it has been, in a file, forever. And carefully preserves this information when syncing from one machine to another.
What else should you expect, with nonfree software controlled by a greedy psychopath (a corporation).
One year after the big spill, oil is still washing up, and Congress is doing nothing.
The big oil companies pay 2% income taxes. If they paid the official 35% income tax rate, their taxes would be more than the proposed budget cuts.
The EU is trying to tighten up drilling regulations, but the UK is opposing it.
Gaddafi proposed ceding power to an "interim government" that would hold elections.
The idea is worth pursuing, but in the mean time, nothing has changed yet. As long as his forces keep attacking, they need to be resisted.
The US will move Bradley Manning to a different prison, which does not imply he will be treated more humanely.
Bill Moyers explains plutocracy in America: how the rich have subverted our government and turned it into a weapon against us.
US citizens: sign this ACLU petition to limit the TSA's use of body scanners.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to support the Fairness in Taxation Act. Also sign this petition.
The Fairness in Taxation Act would raise taxes to 45% on incomes over a million dollars a year. Much higher incomes would have a 49% rate.
Technological advance seems to be eliminating US jobs and not making new jobs.
I never use the self-checkout machines in stores, because I don't want the poor people who do the sales work to lose their jobs.
Despite changes in its rhetoric, the IMF continues blasting the countries it "rescues" into prolonged poverty.
The ruler of Bahrain is not satisfied with killing protesters, doctors, and journalists. He is also destroying Shi'ite mosques and shrines.
The protests were not religiously polarized, but the ruler is trying to make it a religious conflict. If he succeeds, it will probably go on for decades. Maybe he figures that will assure him external support to keep the Shi'ite minority down for however long it takes.
Zainab Alkhawaja's hunger strike for release of her arrested relatives is now in its 8th day.
5 months before the invasion of Iraq, Dubya and B'liar were squabbling over the expected oil loot.
Hungary's right-wing government has voted a new constitution that threatens the rights of atheists, of homosexuals, and women.
Iranian journalist Nazanin Khosravani has been sentenced to 6 years in prison.
The European Union is starting to enforce laws against illegal fishing.
Protesters occupied a square in Homs, but Syrian government thugs shot them.
Assad's government says it will now cancel the emergency law and make protests legal; but if they are sincere about this, why not start allowing protests now?
Although there is no evidence that Syria's protests have much to do with Salafism, that extremist sect does pose a real danger in Palestine and maybe elsewhere. But this danger spreads from Saudi Arabia, which the US treats as a great friend.
A degree in philosophy is better preparation for a career in management than an MBA.
Stephen Fry says he will continue retweeting Paul Chambers' "threatening message" even if it means prison.
The UAE will ban use of secure emails on the Blackberry. It is possible for states to do this because the software is nonfree; the company controls it, and can therefore be conscripted into serving as an enforcer for the state.
The US has similar plans.
Misrata is in siege conditions, as ships bring in limited quantities of aid supplies. The rebels ask for land troops to protect them.
The rate of teenage suicide is higher in right-wing regions of the US.
A woman in Indiana faces murder charges because she tried to kill herself while in a late stage of pregnancy.
It is inhumane to accuse someone of a crime for trying to kill herself in despair. It will teach her that she should have gone through with the suicide.
The fetus was advanced enough that it could have been born and survive. But a newborn baby, even after 9 months, is in the early stages of developing into a person, and is not yet able to have much in the way of rights. The killing of a newborn is mainly a wrong to the parents, not to it itself.
The EU wants to send a 1000-soldier force to Misrata to secure aid corridors, but not to fight unless attacked.
A UK tribunal ordered public disclosure of the UK military's cooperation with US "rendition" of prisoners.
With their protective ice largely gone, Arctic coasts are eroding at feet per year.
But in some areas it is 100 feet per year.
Poor farmers around the world are at risk from a global land grab.
Greeks are revolting against the austerity imposed by the IMF, which has put Greece into a recession in which it will never be able to pay that debt.
US citizens: sign this petition calling for solar power installations to protect wildlife.
Public health activists succeeded in blocking a plan to label sewage sludge as "compost" and use it on farms. So the proponents of the scheme called them "ecoterrorists".
The activists have threatened to sue for libel.
US citizens: if you might support Obama in 2012, pledge that you won't do so if he tolerates cuts in Medicare or Medicaid.
Normally when I recommend signing something, I have signed it myself. This is an exception: I feel I cannot honestly sign this, given that I would not support Obama anyway. Even before he was elected I considered him too right-wing. But those of you with somewhat different views might be able to sign this honestly.
Uri Avnery: Israel's government is increasingly dominated by the annexationist "settler movement".
A Firefox add-on automatically cancels out the tyrannical US domain name "seizures".
This should give the US government a seizure.
Biodigesters get rid of human waste and produce biofuel.
Egypt's military rulers sentenced a blogger to 3 years in prison for his writings.
Melting Antarctic ice is knocking down fish populations, which is making most young penguins die.
Humpback whales spread hit songs across the ocean, then remix them.
Obama has shown timidity in protecting national landmarks from gold and uranium mining.
Bahrain's regime has arrested a doctor, accusing him of treating wounded protesters.
Chinese government thugs have besieged a Tibetan monastery.
China says that it is located in Sichuan, but I presume this is Tibetan territory that China arbitrarily annexed around 50 years ago.
The NDP in Canada seems to be less bad, on the copyright issue, than the Liberal and Conservative parties.
However, the idea that copyright reform should comply with "international treaty obligations" suggests that they plan to implement some restrictions on free software that can access encrypted media. What Canada should do with the WIPO Internet Treaty is reject it, not implement it.
In addition, a "balance between consumers' and creators' rights" is conceptually misguided. Referring to users as "consumers" misrepresents the nature of using digital works, and this concept of "balance" distorts the goal copyright law.
There is also harmful bias in the word "creators".
Canadians, can you educate the NDP about these issues?
The European Union is planning to conscript ISPs into the War on Sharing.
An interview with Aung San Suu Kyi, who still calls for sanctions against Burma.
Gender-selection in India has resulted in a 10% surplus of males over females. In some localities, the surplus is almost 30%.
Some people think this is very bad, but I disagree. While I feel for the men who will not find any woman to marry (having experienced the same thing myself in the absence a social gender imbalance), it seems plausible that this will greatly reduce the births in the next generation — and that is a vital need.
Why would parents want to have a boy in a world where girls are scarce? (Apparently they have not taken account of the consenquences of the imbalance.) It is partly economic because of the pressure for dowry for girls. It also partly reflects sexist prejudice. Feminists condemn gender-selection because they resent this prejudice, but the wrong is in the prejudice; the gender-selection does no wrong to women.
Gaddafi's forces are using cluster bombs against Misrata.
While condemning Gaddafi for this, we must not forget to condemn the US and Israel for use of cluster bombs in inhabited areas.
Has the US signed the convention to destroy cluster bombs? I think it has not, but I'd be glad if it did.
Yahoo used to advertise shorter data retention, but has abandoned that policy.
The three main US TV networks have nuclear power executives on their boards.
Obama is pretending that the public wants budget cuts.
The TSA says that criticism of the TSA is grounds for special suspicion (and special harassment).
The supposed justification for searching all airline passengers without probable cause to suspect them is to prevent bombings and hijackings on the flight. Catching the occasional criminal is not an acceptable justification for searching you and me. Thus, if the TSA says it is trying to do this, that in itself makes the TSA an affront to our rights. The TSA should be strictly limited to keeping weapons off planes, and should not be permitted to show the police evidence of any other illegality.
Wikileaks reveals Israel's head of intelligence was happy Hamas took control of Gaza.
Due to population growth, plus some countries' development out of poverty, humans will need twice as much food in 2050.
It is good for more people to advance out of poverty, but we could do without the population growth. Just because it isn't as fast as it was a few decades ago does not mean it is harmless.
A few decades from now, we will probably be able to extend human life span greatly. The same birth rate that now leads to a stable or slightly decreasing population will then lead to renewed increase. So the world needs to make strenuous efforts to discourage births.
The opposition in Uganda will continue its protests despite police repression.
A convicted blackmailer who helped Putin crush independent media in Russia now owns a large stake in Facebook.
Croatian generals were convicted of violent ethnic cleansing in the 1990s war with Serbia and Serb secessionists.
Obama's planned US-Colombia trade treaty threatens a NAFTA-style disaster.
1000 economists have called on the G20 countries to enact the "Robin Hood tax" on financial transactions.
As Bahrain stifles protest movement, U.S.'s muted objections draw criticism.
Al Jazeera hardly mentions the protests in Bahrain or the atrocities committed against the dissidents.
The US "trusted identities" plan is much more dangerous than the problems it pretends to solve.
Hamas faces a challenge from murderous Islamic extremists.
It seems to be an inherent part of Islam that, even when moderate, it generates fanatical killers who think they are "better Muslims."
In the US: rebuke the mass media for giving coverage to tiny Tea Party events while ignoring large progressive marches.
US citizens: sign this petition for a criminal investigation of Goldman Sachs.
US citizens: support fines to compensate Gulf Coast residents and measures to help them control dangerous drilling.
BP plotted to control US-funded research that will study the Big Spill.
Cuba is preparing capitalist reforms.
Cuba ought to respect human rights; I hope it will not follow China into capitalism without freedom. And it would be a shame if the benefits of the Cuban revolution, such as medical care and education for all, are discarded along with the disrespect for human rights.
Bahraini students in Britain who protested for human rights now fear reprisals against them and against their families in Bahrain.
A book by Craig Murray has been kept out of bookstores by the threat of a libel lawsuit. So he published it on the Internet.
The threat appears to be bogus, because the complainant has not sued Craig Murray. He must not expect to win a real case, but just the threat was enough to deny the book widespread distribution.
I have not read it myself, I just want to inform people of its existence.
Obama is talking about an expanded war in Libya to avoid "putting the rebels at the mercy of Gaddafi".
That must indeed be avoided, but surely an expanded US war is not the only way to prevent it.
For Google, a Chrome user is a locked-to-Google user.
The People's Budget, proposed by the house progressive caucus, will balance the budget putting the burden on the rich instead of the poor.
Police in Honduras show little interest in investigating the increasing attacks on journalists under the coup-installed regime.
Kucinich says that the Pentagon is giving him a "Kafkaesque" runaround to stop him from having an unmonitored meeting with Bradley Manning.
Australian aborigines are blocking a uranium mine, citing a combination of traditional myth and rational humane concern.
A Senate committee accused Goldman Sachs of intentionally harming its investors, and lying to Congress.
If they don't face prosecution, it will reaffirm what we know: that the US government has surrendered to the banksters.
Foreign journalists in Tripoli live in a fancy hotel that is a microcosm of the police state around it. They may be expelled for what they write, but while they stay, they hardly ever see anything that would be worth writing about.
Why do they stay in Tripoli under these conditions? They could get more news in Benghazi.
The other members of the committee led by Judge Goldstone say they stand fully by the report, and reject the idea that there would be any reason to write it differently.
Fishermen from the Gulf of Mexico protested in BP's annual meeting. The US has aided BP by declaring fishing open, but fishing is not really possible since people know better than to trust seafood from the area.
A UK court ruled that the police acted illegally by besieging ("kettling") and attacking peaceful protesters at the G20 protests (in the course of which siege, the police killed Ian Tomlinson). This ruling may enable thousands of protesters to sue the thugs.
Obama has opened the door to cuts in Medicare and Medicaid. To his credit, he has also pushed to reverse the Bush tax cuts for the rich.
The US does not need to choose between Republicans' right-wing budget cuts and Obama's smaller right-wing budget cuts. The Progressive Caucus proposes to balance the budget by 2014, protect the safety net, and boost employment — by cutting the military.
A really stupid plan: charge a special fee for antibiotics to cover research and encourage their proper use.
This fee would discourage use of antibiotics, both by people who don't need them and by people who do. Maybe funding is needed, but that's a foolish way to get the funding.
The French law requiring sites to store user data for a year does not in fact require them to store plaintext passwords.
It is nonetheless an attack on Internet users' rights.
In and near San Francisco: object to the plans to record faces and IDs of everyone attending events with more than 100 people.
The Federal Reserve "bailout" program gave trillions of dollars to rich people, including the wives of some banksters.
US government "seizures" of domain names did little harm on the sites that were targeted, but great harm to human rights in the US.
New Zealand's legislators attacked the citizens with a new law to punish sharing with disconnection.
This betrayal was so urgent that they attached it to an urgent bill for the reconstruction of Christchurch.
In the European Union: Write to your MEPs to oppose extending the copyright on sound recordings. You can use this page to do it.
In the US: join a rally against unfair taxation (on the poor, not the rich). There will be many rallies around the US.
China says Ai Weiwei has confessed to various crimes.
That may well be true, but proves little. Under torture, he would confess to anything, true or not.
North Korea has arrested a US citizen and plans to try him on unspecified charges.
When North Korea does this, we understand it is because North Korea is a nasty dictatorship. Knowing what that state is like, we can expect the trial to be phony.
By contrast, the US grabs people from other countries and puts them in prison (in Guantanamo, for instance), and gives them phony trials ("military tribunals"), or no trials at all.
Zainab al-Khawaja saw her father, a human rights activist, beaten unconscious and dragged out of his home by the Bahraini regime. She is on hunger strike for her father's release.
Here she rebukes Obama for supporting the regime.
US citizens: tell Obama: hands off Medicare, and resist the Republican hostage-takers.
Craig Murray describes Ivory Coast President Ouattara's background as an Ivory Coast dictator's right-hand man, and then as an IMF economic warfare agent.
Natural gas extracted by fracking causes large methane leaks, as a result of which this gas contributes as much to global warming as coal does.
The EU advises some precautions to avoid radioactive iodine that blows in from Fukushima. Certain people should not drink rainwater or eat leafy leafy vegetables that might have got rained on.
These precautions would apply more strongly to the US.
Bradley Manning's mother, who was not allowed to visit him in prison, has asked the UK government to protest the inhumane conditions of his imprisonment.
Protests in Yemen have grown to hundreds of thousands, but it looks like "President" Saleh's men will turn to violence.
Berlusconi has passed a law to cancel his corruption trial, and 14,000 others.
In other words, his own corruption required him to create an atmosphere that favors corruption. Bush had to do the same thing in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Egypt's military has arrested Mubarak and his sons to investigate them for crimes, but this is not enough to placate Egyptians, who want Mubarak's former supporters removed from power.
Japanese evacuated from the vicinity of Fukushima protested to demand compensation.
China continues to condemn the US human rights record.
This time, China's criticisms seem to have partly missed the mark. Pornography does not violate human rights, and some of the accusations are not even true.
China could have made a stronger criticism of the US if it had mentioned the continued practice of imprisonment without trial, the prison conditions for Bradley Manning and thousands of others which amount to Chinese-style brainwashing, and the practice of the death penalty.
Israeli activists, arrested while protesting in solidarity with Palestinians in Jerusalem who object to plans to force them out of their homes, were awarded compensation for the illegal arrest.
If only Palestinians' human rights were similarly respected. A month after an Israeli family was murdered in an illegal colony in the West Bank, reprisals against Palestinians in the nearby town of Awarta continue. 71 Palestinians are being held incommunicado without charges, and raiding troops hold families prisoner at gunpoint in their homes.
This has nothing to do with investigating the killing. It is simply the taking of hostages.
Israel should support recognition of a Palestinian state.
Despite Goldstone's recent statement, most of what the Goldstone Report says about Israeli attacks on Palestinian civilians still stands and nothing has changed.
Biofuel production damages the environment and human rights, says an independent study.
This is because the biofuel is made from farmed crops. Biofuel made from plant waste would be ideal, but that technology is not usable at present.
BP and the US government try to pretend that the big spill has all dissipated, but local shrimpers keep catching oiled shrimp, and a few scientists keep finding massive amounts of oil and devastation on the sea bottom.
Victims of the big spill and other BP mistreatment will be protesting inside and outside the BP annual meeting.
Louisiana tried to force a new mother to give personal data in exchange for a birth certificate for her baby.
Jacob Appelbaum still gets "randomly" detained every time he enters the US.
Everyone: sign this petition calling on Israel to recognize Munther Fahmi as a resident of Jerusalem, where he was born.
Uri Avnery: Goldstone mistake is focusing on specific war crimes. The war itself was the crime.
How IKEA avoids taxes and acts to crush unions.