[ 2012 March - June | 2011 November - February | 2011 July - October | 2011 March - June | 2010 November - February | 2010 July - October | 2010 March - June | 2009 November - February | 2009 July - October | 2009 March - June | 2008 November - February | 2008 July - October | 2008 March - June | 2007 November - February | 2007 July - October | 2007 March - June | 2006 November - February | 2006 July - October | 2006 March - June | 2005 November - February | 2005 July - October | 2005 March - June | 2004 November - February | 2004 July - October | 2004 March - June | 2003 November - February | 2003 July - October | 2003 March - June | 2002 | 2001 | 2000 ]
Each political note has its own anchor in case you want to link to it.
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.
Some sites have paper tiger paywalls that can be defeated by deleting a cookie. I don't post links to those sites because it would be too complex to tell users what to do to avoid having to identify themselves.
A poll finds Americans want big cuts in military spending, so why are even Democrats in Washington against it? The only answer I can see is money.
The article says that most people polled are concerned that military cuts would cost jobs, but that's not true. Spending the money in other ways would support more jobs than spending it on the military, so the result would be a net increase in jobs.
JP Morgan's $2 Billion Tumble Renews Call: "Break Up the Big Banks".
"Too big to fail" is too big to be allowed to exist.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter urgently to support the amendment to remove imprisonment without trial from the NDAA. The vote will be later this week.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
South American countries will build cables so their communications don't pass through the US.
They know that the NSA watches all their traffic.
Tsipras was unable to form a government, but has held to is opposition to austerity and refused to join a government that would approve the deal.
This means a new election, and the people — seeing for once a politician with the courage to refuse to hammer nails into their coffin — are flocking to his party.
Professor Keridis represents the position that "What's good for the banksters is good for Greece" wants a "stable, long-term government" that can implement even bigger cuts and disregard the public. Such a government would have to be fascist.
UN guidelines about the use of farmland, fisheries and forests are intended to promote local food production.
The article was written by a UN official under whose auspices these guidelines were drawn up. I'd be interested in seeing what criticisms activists have of these guidelines. However, assuming they are better than nothing, the question becomes whether the WTO, World Bank and IMF will pressure countries to do the opposite.
Rotterdam is trying new methods to prevent inundation as rains get heavier than they used to be.
These methods can cope with rain, but most of them are useless against the rising sea levels due to global heating, except for the floating communities. For the rest of the city, the only way to defend against rising seas is with higher dikes. If they really can't do that, eventually they will have to abandon the city.
An unknown Italian anarchist group claims to have shot a nuclear power company CEO.
It is not impossible that this is true, but it could also be a lie. Right-wing Italian groups carried out bombings in the 70s so they would be blamed on leftists.
The mainstream media incessantly say that austerity is a solution rather than the problem.
ABC broadcast a "news" segment painting fracking as a bonanza for western landowners, which carefully did not use the term "fracking".
Some NATO countries want US tactical nuclear weapons removed from Europe.
In strictly logical terms, the presence of these weapons in Italy or some other country does not mean the US would necessary use them to retaliate if that country were attacked, and moving them elsewhere does not mean the US would necessarily not use them. The two questions are more or less independent.
I don't think that where these weapons are stored is a very important question in its own right, so it might as well be negotiated as part of a nuclear weapons treaty.
The US government is worried that the new coalition in Israel could lead to an attack against Iran "at any moment".
The European Environment Agency says that endocrine disruptor chemicals found in many household products may be responsible for cancer, obesity, autism and/or diabetes. It isn't certain yet. But the agency recommends taking a cautious approach to the use of these chemicals.
UK ministers were so subservient to Murdoch's empire that they asked for advice, or should we say instructions, on how to help it acquire another cable TV company.
JP Morgan's huge losses from gambling in the big casino show that the 2010 financial regulations are inadequate.
Bring back Glass-Steagel!
Everyone: call on governments to require companies to offer a choice of operating systems for PCs.
US citizens: call on the Department of the Interior to fix the loopholes in its fracking regulations.
An Afghan army soldier shot a US soldier yet again. It was the 15th such attack since the beginning of the year.
The immediate effect of these attacks is that US troops can't trust the Afghan troops they are supposed to be working with (and, in some cases, advising or training).
However, the real significance of these attacks is that they demonstrate that the Taliban inspire loyalty and Karzai's puppet regime does not. That is why the US cannot possibly "win" the war in Afghanistan.
These events also confirm that reports of "progress" in strengthening the Afghan army are bogus. "Just give us another year and we'll get there", they have said, over and over. A year later they say it again. That talk is cheap, but the war costs money and lives.
The American public are learning not to believe the liars. But that won't lead to a pullout until we have congressional candidates willing to reject the lies.
Analysis: Why we must name all drone attack victims.
Companies are asking Obama to use the TPP to impose draconian laws.
The article doesn't really say what sort of laws, since it follows those companies in describing them with the vague term "IP". However, I expect that what the RIAA and MPAA want are draconian copyright laws.
Other companies might want stricter trademark laws, and maybe that is part of this same campaign; but since copyright law and trademark law are totally unrelated, it is a mistake to unify those two issues. The companies lump them together to discourage thoughtful consideration of either issue. To follow their lead on terminology plays into their hands.
ARM computers with Windows will handcuff users like the iThings.
Stallman's Law is at work.
Everyone: sign this petition to Brazilian President Rousseff to veto the forest bill that relaxes protection against cutting down the Amazon forest.
The cholera strain has evolved since its introduction, suggesting it may be permanently established.
As mentioned before, the experimental vaccine Paul Farmer is not the right way to address this problem. The right way is to set up for clean water.
Israel ordered Palestinians to destroy 1000 olive trees on their land, which Israel declared a nature reserve.
Nature reserves are a good thing, but these people were not represented in the decision to establish one, and they won't get compensation for their farm.
Occupy protesters have set up a camp right next to the London Stock Exchange.
This is in the "City of London", a small borough with few residents, effectively controled by the banksters and used by them for political purposes. It must be abolished.
BP will start operating more drilling rigs in the Gulf of Mexico than it did before the Big Spill.
Although Obama made regulations a little more strict, he did not do as much as is necessary to eliminate the danger. But what the hell? The Gulf is already poisoned.
Around the world (including in the US), mining companies push the local people out of the way and pollute them to death. Strict regulation is needed to stop this.
Obama's is mainly on the side of the mining companies. His heart is made of oil and coal. Jill Stein for president.
China is building another dam on the Yangtze which is expected to cause the extinction of several species of fish.
In Peru, continuing to grow coffee may require great efforts for reforestation.
The departing CEO of JP Morgan said, "In hindsight we took far too much risk, the strategy was barely vetted, it was barely monitored. It should never have happened."
The solution is simple: don't allow banks to do risky trading.
China is punishing Chen Guangcheng's family for his escape.
The US is not clearly better than China on this score; the US has also been known to attack family members of targets. For instance, the Bush forces in Iraq sometimes got their hands on people by taking family members hostage.
Bernie Sanders, Keith Ellison Unveil Bill To End Fossil Fuel Subsidies.
Republicans won't let it pass the House of Representatives, but it would be nice at least for Obama to support it.
ALEC's next target is to undermine laws to promote clean energy.
Many US states have made libel a crime.
This has threatens freedom of speech.
The UK has established many "marine reserves", but since fishing is still allowed in them, they are "reserves" only in name.
In the US: call on the CEO of the biggest US private prison company to debate the ACLU.
Uganda's government threatens to ban Oxfam and the Uganda Land Alliance for revealing how the state chases farmers off their land to give it to corporations.
Keep Domestic Cybersecurity Efforts in Civilian Hands.
The solution to anything on the Internet that you feel might be bad for your child is for the child to view things together with you.
Australia allows its citizens can be arrested and extradited to the United States based on information supplied by Australian spies for breaches of US law on Australian soil.
In effect, Australia is converting itself into a colony of the US. That should be considered treason.
Philadelphia plans to destroy the public school system, replacing many schools with charter schools.
Charter schools are usually worse than the public schools they replace.
Congress does nothing to stop the FBI and NSA from collaborating to impose the idea that all of Americans' communications should be subject to government eavesdropping.
The Netherlands has legislated requirements for network neutrality, including a requirement that ISPs cannot disconnect a subscriber except on specific conditions.
This is a great step forward, except that a court has imposed very broad censorship to block access to the Pirate Bay. The censorship requires blocking access in a web proxy, and forbids even listing the names of unrestricted proxies.
To really block access to the Pirate Bay would require the equivalent of Chinese censorship.
Canadian journalists rebuke Canada's government secretive policies.
I think it is inaccurate to categorize this as a matter of freedom of expression. Rather it is a matter of government secrecy. But it is bad in any case.
Canadian journalists should write articles citing extragovernmental scientists' reasonable conclusions, then add, "No scientists at the Department of Pollution Obfuscation expressed disagreement with what Dr. Independent said." Eventually the state will decide it is better to let its scientists speak.
There was a massive terrorist bombing in Syria, and it is not clear who was responsible.
An appeals court rejected an Illinois law that banned recording the actions of the thugs.
The latest US idea for discouraging illegal immigrants is to deport them if they get traffic tickets, or even report crimes.
Senator Franken asked the "Justice" Department how many times it got Americans' cell phone GPS data without a warrent.
To require a warrent for looking at saved past cell phone location data is obviously necessary, but it is not enough. A warrant should be required to start saving this data.
Turkey censors the mass media, with a hundred journalists in prison, but so far has less success in censoring the Internet.
Ecuador is close to passing a law requiring loan forgiveness for first-time home buyers that go negative, up to a certain limit.
This is what the US needs, and any congresscritter who won't support it needs replacing.
U.S. Treasury Claim of Iran-Al-Qaeda "Secret Deal" Is Discredited.
Wall Street's Casino Culture Still Alive and Well.
The US should pass the Glass-Steagall act again.
Obama's agreement with Karzai presents an appearane of giving Karzai's government control over night raids, but it is a false appearance.
The agreement envisages keeping US troops in Afghanistan till 2024.
But that's unlikely to put an end to the Taliban, so they will have to extend it till 2034.
US citizens: phone Obama at 202-456-1111 (9am to 5pm Eastern time) and tell him to fire Ed Demarco, the official blocking adjustment of mortgages for homeowners whose equity is negative, and prosecuting the banksters for foreclosure fraud.
In the US: rebuke Microsoft and Comcast for supporting the Heartland Institute, a global heating denier.
In the US: call on the CEO of the biggest US private prison company to debate the ACLU.
US citizens: call on the IRS to crack down on Karl Rove's political organization that wants to pretend to be a charity.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to vote to remove imprisonment without trial from the new NDAA bill. Also send email through this page.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Everyone: support the Palestinian prisoners' hunger strike against imprisonment without trial.
US citizens: thank Obama for supporting same-sex marriage.
It is rare that he does anything progressive, but it is good to give positive feedback as well as negative.
Feds Bypassing Citizens to Massively Invade Their Privacy.
Congress plans to give the Pentagon broad powers to carry out "clandestine operations in cyberspace".
Against the UK's new Internet surveillance plans.
An Israeli official admitted that imprisonment without trial isn't usually "necessary", even by Israel's standards.
Twitter is fighting hard to block the subpoena for an Occupy protester's private information, arguing that it belongs to him.
Twitter sets the standard for how a company should protect its users' privacy against subpoenas — a standard by which other Internet services fall short.
Protesters should use a proxy in some other country to talk to Twitter.
The IMF and World Bank have strangled Jamaica by pressuring the country to pay an impossible debt load.
Congressional intelligence leaders say the Taliban has got stronger since Obama's "surge" in 2010.
The US can prop up Karzai in Kabul, at great cost in money and lives, but there is no way to win this war.
The US has acknowledged that a bomb killed one Afghan family, but never acknowledges the implications of activities that repeatedly have such consequences.
It is true that wars generally kill civilians; even with the best efforts to avoid doing so, it will happen. When soldiers kill a civilian, it does not necessarily mean that they did something wrong. Sometimes they made the best decision they could, in a hurry, with their limited information, and it goes wrong. This is called "moral bad luck."
It follows that the decision to fight the war is responsible for those civilian deaths that the soldiers could not reasonably have avoided. This is why it is wrong to fight a war without a strong justification.
Most Americans in all parties oppose Obama's plans to continue propping up Karzai's government.
Even low doses of neonicotinoid pesticides harm honeybees and bumblebees.
Local US anti-wind-power groups are being organized nationally using funds from fossil fuel companies.
Global heating is causing fish species to move northward.
In a couple of decades, the species that now need the colder water will only be able to live in the Arctic Ocean. And in another couple of decades, they will be extinct.
The supposed underwear bomber was a CIA agent.
This seems to imply progress in infiltrating jihadi circles outside the US. That's the best method for dealing with them — much better than wars or drone bombings.
The jury deadlocked on the Oracle v Google trial,but its verdict is irrelevant anyway. The all-important question is whether copyright covers interfaces at all, and the judge will decide that. I expect that eventually the Supreme Court will decide it.
For the rich, America is "regenerating its strength", as it jettisons most of the population into poverty.
A proposal to extend transparency laws to corporations.
The CIA has blocked another attempt to explode an underwear bomb in an airplane.
It seems clear that the TSA had nothing to do with blocking the attack. The TSA has never caught a terrorist. Even though there is a real danger of attacks against airplanes, that doesn't make TSA security theater necessary (or useful).
US journalism is threatened by Obama's secrecy and spying, and by ISP's attacks on network neutrality.
Nestle is funding "water education" in US public schools, but it fails to teach them the social costs of bottled water.
The Fukushima reactors are not entirely stable. One suffers from a water leak that seems to be reducing the level of cooling water and could cause it to heat up.
If another earthquake occurs in the next few decades, it could cause the cooling arrangements to fail, leading to a disaster much worse than what already happened.
China has shut al-Jazeera's news bureau because al-Jazeera did not provide the favorable coverage China wanted.
Cate Jenkins, who was fired from the EPA for warning that the dust from the World Trade Center was toxic, has won a lawsuit and got her job back.
Now we need an investigation into why the EPA exposed hundreds (or is it thousands) of firemen to lung damage by failing to warn them or protect them.
Human Rights Watch rebukes Israel's practice of imprisonment without trial.
The Pirate Party has got 8% of the vote in various regions of Germany and stands a chance of doing equally well nationally.
Chen Guangcheng's relatives, friends and lawyers are being attacked by thugs and stopped from communicating.
I support China's one-child-per-family law. Given how much future load each child places on the world's limited resources, which are running scarce already, we must reject the idea that people are entitled to make as many more people as they wish. Some countries don't need to take action to reduce birth rates, but China did not have that good fortune.
Just because a law is necessary,, that doesn't justify enforcing it in the cruel Chinese manner. I agree with Chen Guangcheng in condemning that. If Chen Guangcheng opposes the one-child-per-family policy itself, I disagree with that position, but I defend his right to stand for it.
As Putin celebrated being "re-elected", the thugs visited cafes where dissidents gather and arrested people at random.
Putin does not allow serious opposition in his elections; the permitted parties were no real challenge. The US has two parties that can easily win elections, but neither challenges the power of the banksters.
The Syrian opposition boycotted the parliamentary election.
The in-laws of Sahar Gul, who tortured her to force her into prostitution, have been convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison.
To establish women's rights in Afghanistan would be a great thing. This goal is why I supported the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, when it required little bloodshed. But I don't think it justifies the level of bloodshed that will be required indefinitely to keep Karzai in power.
Investors in Billionaire Polluters may sue the company for misleading them by covering up previous drilling accidents.
Putin's thugs arrested 250 protesters after attacking many more, in a large protest against his phony democracy.
I wonder if the people who threw bottles at the thugs were provocateurs. The thugs attacked the protesters in general, not those people specifically, which suggests that they were provocateurs.
The leaders of the opposition were arrested and certainly were not among those.
A right-wing foaming-at-the-mouth government minister sent 8000 thugs into Barcelona and shut a university, all to prevent an imaginary protest.
Even if the protest had been real, this would only prove he is an enemy of democracy.
The author writes "psychopath" but I think he meant "psychotic".
The same minister was in charge last year when plainclothes thugs were caught infiltrating a large protest and starting violence.
This provided their fellow thugs with an excuse to "retaliate" tenfold against the peaceful protest.32 Iranian students are still in prison for political opposition in 2009.
The real job creators are consumers that spend, but austerity and inequality imposed by cruel laws prevents this from happening.
The flowering of various plants is getting earlier due to global heating, faster than was predicted by previous experiments.
Former chief Guantanamo prosecutor Morris Davis condemns the military kangaroo courts he was involved in.
Officials say these are preferable for a small group of prisoners. They fail to say that the preference is so as to conceal how they were tortured by the US government. Thus, these kangaroo courts are part and parcel of Obama's policy of covering up torturers.
Human Rights Watch published a report about the murder of opposition activists in Burundi, but was ordered by the state to stop distributing it there.
For more info, here is the report.
A glacial lake in Nepal burst, causing dozens of deaths.
Global heating makes glaciers unstable.
The idea that streets are mainly for cars, and not for people, was established by an organized corporate political campaign.
The consensus among Israeli military and intelligence chiefs opposes Netanyahu's desire to start a war.
Bahrain has arrested important protest leaders, one for planning illegal protests and one for insulting thugs.
To make it a crime to insult someone is tyranny in itself.
The Philippine military kills, tortures and disappears people with impunity.
Sad to say, asking the US to get the Philippines to stop this is like asking the pot to pressure the kettle to get clean.
Anti-austerity parties gained ground in Greece; the government of occupation will have to struggle to impose its austerity plans.
Sarkozy lost the election for the French presidency.
Good riddance to him, but I don't think Hollande will justify the term "left-wing". I fear he will be centrist. He lacked the courage to oppose Sarkozy's tyrannical Internet and DRM laws.
Indeed, he says he will pursue austerity in France.
I fear that taxing the rich, though correct, won't be enough to prevent the disaster spiral that the rest of Europe is experiencing.
This article argues that Osama bin Laden had been put out to pasture, and no longer had anything to do with real operations of al Qa'ida.
Reportedly other al Qa'ida leaders considered him mad. However, he could not have been entirely mad if he was able to recognize that killing civilians was self-defeating.
The US government seems to thickheaded to learn the same lesson.
Many governments, including the US and UK, threaten Internet freedom in the name of "security".
Imperialism Didn't End. These Days It's Known as International Law
Hundreds of Chinese imprisoned unofficially for going to Beijing to complain have gone on hunger strike.
Thugs in Togo attacked a journalist and took his camera while he was lying unconscious.
Sounds a lot like the US.
Heights of Hypocrisy: The Universal Use of 9/11 in Politics
Americans who celebrated the death of Osama bin Laden were focusing a minor enemy while the main enemy is robbing them blind.
US citizens: call on Rep. Pelosi to stand firm for Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare.
Microsoft says it will make its datacenters carbon-neutral.
I am skeptical that this activity will really mean anything in practice. Electricity is carbon-neutral if generated without burning carbon fuel. However, what companies more often do is claim to compensate for their carbon emissions by funding carbon sinks. That is fine in theory; the problem is that those sinks (such as planting trees) are not guaranteed to absorb the carbon they are supposed to compensate for.
Of course, this issue is not limited to Microsoft.
Meanwhile, Microsoft will continue to hand users software that tramples their freedom.
Soldiers involved in the Batang Kali massacre said in a 1970 investigation that they were ordered to shoot prisoners.
The investigation was launched by the Labour Party, when it really stood for something, and was stopped by the right-wing Tory Party.
Alexis Tsipras, who will try to form the new government of Greece, declared the austerity deals void.
Everyone: call on Honduras to provide protection to journalist Dina Mexa.
US citizens: tell Obama to release all the photos of damage done by the Big Spill, without further delay.
Hundreds of Portland Oregon high school students protested against cuts.
Obama has authorized air force drones to spy on Americans as long as they say it was an accident.
A London thug faces prosecution for attacking a handcuffed prisoner.
Western countries have done nothing to stop businesses from selling deep packet inspection equipment to dictators.
Part of the problem is that these countries themselves perform increasing surveillance of the Internet.
Iran's Internet filtering blocked distribution of Fearless Leader's fatwa about filtering.
Libya's interim government has adopted a censorship law worthy of Gaddafi.
Naomi Wolf asks whether the FBI is telling us the truth about the new underwear bomb, or just doing PR to sell more expensive scanners.
Someone will surely design a swallowable suicide bomb some day. It won't be possible to find that with body scanners.
Bank Vs. America: Protests Outside, Inside BofA Shareholder Meeting
Moving your money out of Bank of America is a good way to take action. Convincing companies, organizations and cities to move their money can be even better.
Fukushima released more radiactive fallout than Chernobyl , and has rendered almost 1000 sq km uninhabitable. And it may still get worse.
The World Bank calls for states to assign monetary value to natural capital.
Many have proposed this, and it might do some good if economic decisions take account of that natural capital. For instance, if corporations that diminish the natural capital are required to pay for it, they might not do it.
Charlotte, North Carolina, has adopted laws to prevent protests, and used the Bank of America's annual meeting as a test case.
The sea of garbage in the Pacific can alter the ecosystem.
Effects of global heating will result in total destitution for 30 million Bangladeshis in a few decades. And they know it.
Gouging workers has become standard practice for US companies even when they are tremendously profitable.
We should note that this isn't the only nasty thing that Caterpillar does. It is a target for divestment campaigns because it supplies equipment for Israel's annexation wall.
Debunking 5 tax myths spread by the 1%.
Another advantage of taxing financial transactions, not mentioned in the article, is that it would make a some short term speculation unprofitable while doing nothing to discourage long term investment.
All the Egyptian parties distrust the military and doubt it will hand over power.
Some Egyptian protesters say that people they did not know infiltrated the latest protest and started throwing stones at soldiers. It is plausible that the military sent provocateurs; it is a common tactic for the thugs.
Senegal has cancelled the licenses of foreign factory fishing boats.
Let's hope this is permanent — Senegal needs to protect its fisheries. If it keeps the fish stocks up, and the population down, it will avoid pushing itself into disaster.
However, disaster might come anyway. In a few decades, global heating could wipe out all those fish.
A GMO experimenter pleads for environment defender not to destroy an experimental field.
The article does not address the question of whether the use of these genes would spread patent pollution. If they would, then the work is not available for ethical use, so the experiment is pointless. If not, then maybe his arguments are valid.
Occupy protests were held across the US on May 1.
Daniel Chong wasn't charged with a crime, but federal agents put him in a cell, then nearly killed him by ignoring him for five days.
Kuwait Prepares to Crack Down on Social Media.
Refugees from North Korea describe the trivial reasons for which people are thrown into prison camps in which they can starve to death.
The Mexican government is investigating and monitoring the leaders of the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity, a political organization calling for an end to the War on Drugs.
Thugs attacked a sit-in by students in Brooklyn College.
There is evidence tying senior executives of Billionaire Polluter to the coverup of the extent of the Big Spill.
US citizens: call on the FCC to revoke Rupert Murdoch's broadcast licenses.
Portland, Oregon, is using dirty tricks against Occupy protesters that face criminal charges.
The changes are bullshit in the first place, fabricated by thugs as an abuse of their power.
If you are ever on a jury, and thugs testify that a protester committed a crime, consider the testimony of any number of thugs worth less than the word of one protester. The thugs are accustomed to lying in court, and they plan their testimony together.
Three states have given ALEC a special exemption from requirements on lobbyists.
Dajaz1's lawyer says that domain name seizures are not authorized by US law.
The term "intellectual property" or "IP" is a uselessly broad generalization about many disparate laws. The generalization has a harmful effect on public debate and even on legislation, because it suggests choosing between simplistic foolish positions such as "for IP" and "against IP".
The name of the "PRO-IP Act" shows that it is based on this foolish thinking.
The Israeli army absolved itself of responsibility for killing 21 civilians in Gaza, who were in a building where Israeli soldiers had ordered them to go.
Israeli colonists in the West Bank pollute the water supplies that they haven't seized.
The Israeli army demolished a Palestinian farm ; the cows may die as a result.
Israel destroyed the only road to the Palestinian village of Khirbet Yarza.
Israel is considering plans to annex a large part of the West Bank, and kick out most of the remaining Palestinian inhabitants not already squeezed out.
Israeli agents admit infiltrating Palestinian protests and throwing stones in the direction of Israeli soldiers.
The reason to exclude the Israeli theater company Habima is that by performing in a colony in the West Bank it explicitly endorses the occupation.
Kansas is considering a law that would require doctors to warn women about false "dangers" of abortions , and is also trying to regulate abortion clinics out of existence.
TestPAC is campaigning to defeat Lamar Smith, author of SOPA.
The Philadelphia thugs' union plans to expel Ray Lewis, retired thug, for wearing his old uniform in an Occupy protest.
They even sought an excuse to charge him with a crime. Just like thugs.
The US government concealed photos of threatened animal species harmed by oil from the Big Spill.
False DMCA takedowns are being used for political censorship.
Frackers use legal strategems to gag people who suffer health problems due to fracking.
Videos of cover songs are an example of where copyright law is broken.
Steve Kardynal's remixes, Songs in Real Life, are censored now due to copyright.
To fix copyright law will require crushing the political power of the copyright lobby — in other words, the businesses that wanted to feed us SOPA. With their nasty practices, they don't deserve to make one red cent, not even when they do something that isn't itself wrong.
Obama supports a Senate bill that is approximately as bad as CISPA.
Egyptians protested at military headquarters, and fought with troops that tried to stop them.
Some of the protesters were captured and face military trials — some simply for participating in a forbidden protest.
The Heartland Institute has turned off its billboard that tried to smear concern for global heating by associating it with the unabomber.
The revised route for the Keystone planet-roaster pipeline still threatens to pollute water supplies.
This is in addition to the certainty of putting humanity on a path to megadisaster.
India has imposed Internet filtering on ISPs, blocking access to many unauthorized sharing sites but also to other sites.
NFL players often sustain repeated brain injuries that subsequently ruin their lives. The NFL denies this, so some players commit suicide and donate their brains to science to help prove it.
I don't even like to watch football because the violence fills me with revulsion. I wonder how watching such violence — real, not fictional — affects children and teenagers. To ban fiction is censorship, but it would be legitimate to regulate football violence in reality.
The UK's loony experiment of privatizing the London fire department is burning up badly.
Private fire departments will sooner or later find a way to squeeze money out of the owners of burning buildings, as Crassus did.
Privatization government activities is always bad unless it results in a competitive market for users.
The Guantanamo judge silenced a defense lawyer who spoke about how his client had been tortured.
Connell is entirely right to say that this kangaroo court is a "blight on America's international reputation and her commitment to the rule of law." Shame on you, Obama!
The European Union is considering regulating the scrapping of EU ships, even if it is done outside the EU, for the sake of workers' safety.
I am completely in favor of this. Why allow businesses that don't have proper safety rules to compete in our markets? And while we're at it, why allow sweatshops to compete?
I don't think it is wrong to employ workers in Bangladesh, or China, rather than workers in the US or Europe; but it is certainly wrong to replace safe working conditions and good pay with low-paid dangerous conditions. If you want to hire Bangladeshis, go ahead as long as it isn't an excuse for a setback for workers' rights and pay.
The UN suggests that the US should return some of the land stolen from Indian tribes in violation of treaties.
There is no denying that justice calls for this.
I also think the US ought to pay reparations for slavery to the descendants of slaves. They suffer today from the repercussions of the policies that denied them fundamental legal rights.
All US slaveowners are long dead, and most Americans today are not even their descendants. We cannot inherit personal responsibility for an old evil. However, the US government which denied slaves equal rights still exists. So do the state governments which until the 1960s had racist laws that denied all Blacks equal rights. These governments must take responsibility for those acts; they must pay reparations to the victims and their descendants.
Lincoln High School in Walla Walla has reversed the destructive trajectory of its district's problem students, by rejecting the cruel and punitive spirit of zero tolerance.
Many of these children's suffering could have been predicted in advance because they were born to problem parents. As an individual, you can't retroactively choose your parents, but society can influence how likely various people are to become parents. We need to do more to encourage these people to have no children, perhaps by paying them to get sterilized.
Obama has launched an all-out attack against medical marijuana, using any conceivable pretext to shut dispensaries and harass patients.
The UK government is trying desperately to build nuclear reactors, but this is running smack into its promise not to subsidize them.
The article considers a minimum carbon trade price as a kind of subsidy for nuclear power, but that is only half true. It is, rather a kind of subsidy for everything other than fossil fuels. Absent some other subsidy for nuclear power, I expect businesses to choose to invest in renewable energy and energy efficiency.
When Democrats win, and when they lose, the corporate media say it proves they ought to become more right-wing.
They won't have my vote unless they become Liberals again.
The White Plains thugs will get off untouched after killing Kenneth Chamberlain.
It may be true the final step, the actual killing, was justified if Chamberlain was attacking his tormentors with a knife. But the whole dispute was provoked by the thugs. There no excuse for not leaving him alone when nothing was wrong, or for not allowing him to talk with his relatives.
Let's think carefully about the thugs' statement that they will "never run away from an emergency". There was no emergency except the one they created. In effect, their position is that once they create a problem they will not let it end. And they had to destroy Kenneth Chamberlain in order to save him.
The US government shut down Dajaz1.com in advance of hypothetical charges against it — then never filed any charges.
What US politicians say about Iran and nuclear weapons is the opposite of what thoughtful leaders believe.
Those thoughtful leaders include the main Israeli generals and intelligence chiefs. Against them is Netanyahu and his obsessions, together with US politicians intimidated into supporting him.
Look at the list of cruelties that a court said John Yoo couldn't be expected to recognize as torture.
A man who was seriously injured when Portland thugs shot him with tasers won a lawsuit against the city.
I am glad he won, but unless the thugs are personally punished, they won't learn to stop attacking innocent people.
A terminal at Newark Airport was completely evacuated because a baby had gone through security unchecked.
Lesson: always check your babies, rather than carry them into the cabin.
The band All Shall Perish was shocked to discover that a copyright troll has started suing their fans.
Who is to blame here?
The copyright troll is doing something inexcusable under any circumstances, but others are responsible too. The record company was negligent, at best, in selling the rights to a troll, and if it did so without consulting the band, that was abusive treatment of the band.
The band members were wrong in accepting a contract designed to forbid the public from sharing, but I understand that the record company pressured them to do it, so I would forgive them if they condemn the record company strongly enough.
Syrian subjection forces are massacring the inhabitants of Idlib.
The paramilitaries of Colombia are terrorizing journalists there.
While the state fights against the FARC, who are drug traffickers and kidnapers, it does little to fight the paramilitaries who are the worst terrorists in Colombia. That's because they have close ties to the ruling elite, including former president Alvaro Horrible.
Amnesty International condemns censorship in Tunisia.
Human rights defenders must not be soft on Islamist censorship, Freedom of speech includes the freedom to criticize any one, any thing, and any idea -- including any religion and any church.
Palestinian, Israeli and International peace activists blocked the Israeli army from destroying 1400 Palestinian olive trees.
The National Academy of Sciences says parts of Obama's Europe-based missile defense system won't work and should be scrapped.
Since Obama is willing to withdraw the troops from Afghanistan in two years without a victory, why wait?
The full list of corporations that support ALEC.
They include Johnson & Johson, State Farm insurance, AT&T, eBay, Amazon.com, Yahoo, and Time Warner.
The FBI wants a law to require surveillance backdoors in web services and communications software.
I seem to recall reading that Skype already provides surveillance facilities.
I wish we had a government that only used its powers against criminals and not against dissidents, a government whose idea of the public interest were different from "Give that company whatever it wants."
A schedule of royalty rates for different kinds of Digital Restrictions Management threatens to become part of US copyright law through a backdoor.
Most Internet users are not aware that Spotify is DRM and must be fought. Please support our campaign against DRM.
Austerity in Europe, and lack of stimulus in the US, is pushing a lot of Europe into recession and has prevented recovery in the US.
We need FDR, not Obama.
Ms Londono Suarez says that the secret service agent who slept with her committed a horrible wrong because she could have gone through his papers to learn secrets.
I suppose she could have, but he was a bodyguard, not a diplomat or policy planner. He probably had nothing in his papers that would be very important to national security, and he probably knew this.
As far as I can see, the only thing he did wrong was refuse to pay her.
The motive for military kangaroo courts in Guantanamo is to cover up the crimes of torture committed against the defendants.
The US government wants to label as secret anything they say about their torture experiences at the hands of US inquisitors.
This is totally under Obama's control, and therefore totally his responsibility. Obama, stop shielding US torturers!
Greenland's glaciers have sped up by 30% since 10 years ago.
While this is not as bad as some imaginary scenarios, it is bad. We have no way of predicting how much worse it will get as temperatures rise even more. Global heating concentrates in the polar regions; the Earth on average has heated by about 1 degree C, but it's more than that in Greenland. And further heating will again be worse in Greenland than the average for the Earth.
Argentina's economic policies present an example for the downtrodden countries of the euro zone.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to call for withdrawing the troops from Afghanistan now. Also sign this petition.
I don't think the fact that Osama bin Laden is dead makes any difference to the situation. There is simply no point propping up Karzai; that won't change next year, and it won't change in a decade. So there is no reason to continue the fighting.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
US citizens: tell Obama you demand criminal prosecutions of bankster fraud.
US citizens: sign this petition for the EPA to intervene regarding the southern part of the Keystone XL planet-roaster pipeline.
US citizens: support the Equal Rights Amendment.
US citizens: sign this petition for sustainable fishing for canned tuna.
US citizens: tell the Senate to reject anti-environment provisions in the transportation bill.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to call for withdrawing the troops from Afghanistan now. Also sign this petition.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
I don't think the fact that Osama bin Laden is dead makes any difference to the situation. There is simply no point propping up Karzai; that won't change next year, and it won't change in a decade. So there is no reason to continue the fighting.
Egypts' generals said they were not responsible for the killing of protesters, and that they want to hand over power to civilian government, but it is hard to believe they were not responsible.
The US admits that drone bombings kill civilians, but still pretends they are very few.
Republicans are trying to cut social welfare programs and increase the military budget.
And they want to cut taxes even more for millionaires.
This is when we are handicapped by having Obama instead of someone who will denounce "trickle-down" as a fraud and a lie.
The Methodist Church voted to condemn Israel's occupation of Palestine but rejected divesting from the companies that supply equipment for it.
The files of the East German secret police say that Ikea used Cuban political prisoners to make its furniture.
Republicans now want to cut the children's health insurance program, as well as nutrition programs.
While fighting to protect fictitious babies, they are trying to kill real babies.
Correa's anti-austerity policies in Ecuador have extended education and reduced poverty by 25%.
US citizens: call on Energy Secretary Chu to end fracking.
Almost 400 US troops have died in Afghanistan since Osama bin Laden was killed. (I don't know how many Afghan civilians have been killed, but I'd guess it is more.) These deaths appear to have been for nothing.
For one week: US citizens, phone your senators to oppose CISPA. Also sign this petition.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Civil liberties amendments for CISPA were mostly rejected, but other amendments were adopted. Here's more detail about them.
Egyptian plainclothes thugs attacked a protest with guns as well as teargas, and killed several protesters.
I can't make sense of the stories about Chen Guangcheng. He left the US embassy, for unclear reasons but maybe he thought he had a deal with China, but now he wants to flee to the US.
It seems the US embassy told him about Chinese threats to harm his family members.
Passing on information about an enemy's threats is not the same as making the threats. It looks like Chen had prepared cleverly to escape from his village and get to Beijing, but was not prepared to deal with threats of that kind.
One must be prepared to tell hostage-takers, "If you hurt hostages, the evil will be on your head."
Inside documents show that the UK coalition is privatizing the NHS and will enable companies to get big profits by making big cuts.
The UK will end up with a system as bad for the public, and as good for busineess, as the US has.
Some US judges are resisting the tactics of the copyright trolls.
This shows why Hollywood and Obama are determined to force ISPs to punish Internet users: by avoiding trials and courts, they can evade the basic principles of justice that courts are supposed to maintain (and sometimes do).The head of the Senate commerce committee seeks information about News Corp from the UK.
The company, and Rupert Murdoch in person, have been described by the UK parliament as unfit — relevant because some of their broadcasting activities require licenses and companies must meet that standard.
Quebec student protests have spread into a broad social movement against austerity.
Bravo!
Professors are suing to stop skeletons 10,000 years old from being lost to science due to NAGPRA.
For a historical Amerindian tribe to claim these bones belong to their ancestors is absurd. The city of La Jolla has as much basis for such a claim as the Kumeyaay do.
US citizens: sign this petition to require labeling of GMOs.
Expert confirms EPA finding that fracking linked to Wyoming ground water contamination.
Therefore, Obama has a clever plan to make it hard to prove that future fracking has contaminated water supplies.
While the Republicans launch a cavalry charge crying "Death to the environment!", Obama tries to destroy it subtly and quietly.
There was a protest in DC against mass imprisonment in the US.
I support the cause, but I dislike the hyperbole of describing this as "occupying the Justice Department". It was a protest march.
EU's highest court ruled that APIs cannot be copyrighted there.
Bolivia has renationalized its electric power grid, taking it away from a Spanish company.
Hooray, Evo! Privatization of such things is the act of a government that wants to give away as much as possible to business.
Obama, subservient to Netanyahu, is trying to delay the UN Human Rights Council's investigation of the occupation of Palestine.
A Pakistani court ruled that the government's Internet censorship plans are unconstitutional.
A US court approved Internet censorship by libraries, inexplicably disregarding Supreme Court precedent.
UN observers in Syria say both sides are violating the cease fire but that the violence is decreasing.
Obama continues to claim that the Taliban are losing.
Everyone: Obama's negotiators are trying to block global negotiations to protect marine life and fisheries. Sign this petition.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to call for an investigation of Rupert Murdoch and News Corp. Also send mail through this page.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
US citizens: sign this petition against allowing poultry processors to do their own inspections.
Also please sign this petition, directed at Obama.
The Cambodian thugs who killed Chut Wutty arrested him first, and knew who he was.
Filter Schmilter: Libraries and Internet Filtering Software
Austrian human rights activists have organized street protests and a legal challenge against the universal surveillance of mandatory data retention.
Iran plans a totally controlled "Internet" with surveillance of everyone and no access to the outside world.
Malaysian thugs specifically targeted journalists covering protests for clean elections.
The thugs also destroyed or stole cameras which had evidence of how they were treating the protesters.
Aboriginal people trying to protect their land in South America often face charges of "terrorism".
When someone proposes an "anti-terror law", think "anti-democracy".
Vietnam arrested Nguyen Quoc Quan, allegedly planning a protest, and accused him of "terrorism".
Wouldn't it be nice if the US set a good example that we could urge Vietnam to follow?
In case anyone that speaks Vietnamese is reading this, is "Nguyen Quoc Quan" a patriotic pseudonym?
Even some thugs are participating in a campaign to end the war on drugs.
Mass protests covered Europe on May Day.
It is not enough to demand an end to austerity. Europeans must support parties that will take their countries out of the euro zone unless the rules are changed so the banksters are not in control.
A Pakistani legislator says her country is helpless against US drone bombings, and asks Americans to press for an end to them.
Detroit high school students, suspended from their school for protesting against the plan to close another public school, started their own "freedom school".
Coal ash is toxic, but the Republicans want to stop the EPA from regulating its disposal.
ALEC says its activities will focus on American working people. ALEC seeks to reduce their wages, cut their sick days, smash their unions, and undercut them with forced labor in privatized prisons.
However, ALEC won't really get out of the voter suppression and killing promotion field.
That was a pretense.
At ALEC meetings, corporation representatives speak and state legislators listen.
Israel ordered Palestinians to destroy 1000 olive trees on their land, which Israel declared a nature reserve.
Various European countries are putting pressure on Ukraine to stop torturing opposition politician Yulia Tymoshenko in prison.
Mississippi has passed a law designed to force the state's only abortion clinic to close, through artificial requirements.
Aborting unwanted pregnancies is an admirable mission. It can prevent lots of suffering, in the short term and in the long term.
An EPA official who proposed to prosecute polluters energetically has resigned after Republicans criticized his colorful metaphor.
That was a typical weak Obama response, and symptomatic of his weak concern for the environment. A president who really cared would have corrected the metaphor and defended the goal.
Romney's choice for the Supreme Court is Bork, even more right-wing than today's conservatives on the court.
Americans are imprisoned for debts they owe, and debts they don't owe, through various legal excuses.
This may stop when imprisoned debtors decide to stay in jail rather that pay.
US citizens: tell the SEC not to let publicly traded corporations hide their political spending.
US citizens: rebuke the TPP negotiations: states and their corporate masters conspiring secretly against their citizens.
The Oklahoma initiative to declare fertilized eggs and embryos persons was blocked as unconstitutional.
The head of the Star of Hope Mission, which says it aims to help the poor, endorsed a plan to fine anyone in Houston who gives home-cooked food to the needy without a permit.
The supposed reason is to prevent unsightly homeless persons from making commercial properties unattractive. But it seems that part of the motive is to ensure homeless hungry Americans can't get help except from churches.
The US Patent Office wants to cancel the practice of publishing patent applications after 18 months.
The original purpose of patents in the US was to discourage trade secrecy. Inventors were offered 17 years of monopoly in exchange for showing others their technique. This exchange no longer really occurs, because patent lawyers have worked out how to get broad patents while concealing the most important knowledge.
Trade secrecy in 1800 was simple: you just didn't tell anyone your methods. That didn't depend on any government intervention. Nowadays, information can be distributed massively and still considered a trade secret, and laws have been passed to help maintain these secrets. In other words, with one hand the government facilitates and thus encourages trade secrecy, and with the other hand it imposes monopolies to reduce the harmful practice of trade secrecy.
What a racket!
An American woman let her breast cancer become untreatable because she feared losing her job if she got treatment.
This story begins quite a ways down the text.
The suicide rate in Greece increased 40% from 2010 to 2011.
Rivers in India suffer from god pollution.
Most of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission commissioners appear to be subservient to the industry, and they seem to be undermining the commission head by provoking him into anger so they can call for his replacement.
This is an instance of the general corruption of the US government by business interests.
Elected officials and journalists sued New York City over attacks against protesters in Liberty Park.
As jihadis conquer towns in Yemen, and imprison anyone who won't pray, the people flee.
But the army fails to fight them effectively, because the state is recognized as a US puppet.
ISPs in the UK will be required to block access to the Pirate Bay.
People in Britain will still be able to access the site through proxies, and its new data base format is small enough that they may simply get copies of it.
I believe that noncommercial redistribution must be legalized, but not necessarily commercial use of copyrighted works. Because the Pirate Bay gets money from ads, it can be considered a commercial activity; it is on the edge of what constitutes commercial. Thus, I don't necessarily object to shutting down such sites, as long as it is done with a fair trial.
Bahrain says Al-Khawaja can have a new trial, but will be kept in prison.
He may fast to death before the new trial occurs.
Mullah Omar, head of the Taliban, had a continuing conversation with Osama bin Laden and seemed to share his ideology.
In 2001, the Taliban were willing to cut their ties with al Qa'ida in order to have a better relationship with the US. If their position has changed, why did that happen? Clearly because of the war.
But it has not necessarily changed. This ideological sympathy may have existed already in the 90s. If that didn't stop the Taliban from making concessions for peace in 2001, it might not stop them now.
Two Russian dissidents who wanted to pray in the Moscow cathedral for Putin's removal were attacked by official thugs and a private gang.
Privatizing US education, which Obama favors, is a great business opportunity for makers of proprietary rote lessons.
Louisiana is doing this, with help from ALEC.
The presence of ALEC shows that the real goal is private profits. And the "school choice" delivered by vouchers turns out to mean "you can choose a religious school".
Apple pioneered techniques for avoiding the low US corporate tax rate in order to pay next to no tax.
The loopholes that Apple uses would be closed, if not for the political power of business. "Free trade" treaties give business increased power to block such changes, so we must abolish them to break business's power.
A published letter allegedly proves that Gaddafi provided 50 million euro to Sarkozy's previous election campaign.
Sarkozy says it is fake, and that is not impossible. However, his argument that this must be false because the campaign spent only 20 million is nonsense. Such a donation, if it occurred, would not have been entered in the campaign's official account books.It appears certain chiropractic manipulations can cause strokes and death.
The FCC decided to require TV stations to report who bought their political ads, but failed to insist on non-obfuscatory formats.
Tar sand oil may be extracted in the US.
It is stupid to look for more fossil fuel to extract. We already have far more deposits than we can safely burn.
US citizens: call your senators to oppose CISPA. Also send email through this campaign.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Professor Loretta Capeheart is fighting to keep her job when the boss wants to fire her for criticizing his policies.
A UK supermarket cooperative will boycott Israeli export companies that deal with produce from colonies in the West Bank.
Connecticut has abolished the death penalty.
Workers in general would benefit from an increased minimum wage.
Evidence implicates top BP executives as well as its partners Chevron and Exxon and the Bush Administration in the deadly cover-up of the blowout in the Caspian.
This went so far as falsifying a report to the Securities Exchange Commission.
This is the full version of an article linked to in a pol note on April 26.
Shell grossly underestimated the size of an oil spill in Nigeria.
It looks like such minimization is standard practice for oil companies.
A UK store chain asks people to give an old piece of clothing when buying a new one.
It seems like a good idea, but the right way to cut down on wasteful purchase of clothing is to ensure the people who make it are paid decent wages. People will buy less, less water and fertilizer will be used, and the total income of the workers will increase even as the amount of work they do decreases.
Nothing stands in the way except the subservience of government to business. The "free trade treaties" are instruments constructed by subservient governments to carry out the orders they receive from business; we need to eliminate them, but they are the instrument, not the cause.
Pakistani human rights lawyer Shahzad Akbar has received a US visa to speak at a discussion of US drone bombings.
The US refused for months to answer him, purely because of his activities as a lawyer for victims. Even though the US ultimately did the right thing, it was wrong to even hesitate.
What's wrong with Obama is not that he can't overcome Republican votes in Congress. It's that he doesn't even try.
Obama doesn't try because he is more interested in satisfying the oil companies, Hollywood and the banksters than in the American people. Just look at what he did with the free exploitation treaties with Colombia, Panama and South Korea — and now the TPP.
However, many Liberals who swallowed Obama's vague slogans in 2008 are still reluctant to recognize that they were had.
I wish we had mounted a primary challenge to him, so that at least for a while there's be a Democrat in the race that deserved our support, but I guess nobody could raise the money to try.
Jill Stein for president!
The new Hungarian "anti-terror" thug force has the power of the secret police of a fascist state.
You might notice that some of these powers exist in the US as well under the PAT RIOT Act.
"Fighting terrorism" is an old excuse for fascism. The US-backed dictatorships in South America in the 1970s said they people they secretly murdered were "terrorists". This is why "fighting terrorism" does not justify any special state power over individuals.
Medical personnel are increasingly threatened during wars, for many reasons.
The US intervention in Afghanistan and Pakistan, including the trickery involved in finding Osama bin Laden, have fed the distrust of vaccination programs there although irrational suspicion of medicine, also found in the West, has contribute too.
Privatizing thug jobs in the UK has made some thugs formally unaccountable to the Independent Police Complaints Commission.
This is above and beyond the unofficial tendency for the IPCC to give thugs impunity.
The problem that contractors bring unaccountability is a general pattern. We saw it also with mercenary contractors in the Bush forces in Iraq.
The Unlearned Lessons of the BP Disaster.
This doesn't include the lessons to learn from BP's concealment of a previous smaller disaster caused by the same corner-cutting practices, which Greg Palast is revealing.
Reporters investigating secret Pentagon PR contracts in Afghanistan were smeared by a dirty tricks campaign accusing them of working for the Taliban.
Under the unjust law signed by Obama last winter, this could have served as an excuse to imprison them without trial.
Secret emails of the Islamist party in power in Tunisia demonstrate that it was looking for ways to impose aspects of Shari'a law. And various other irregularities.
The Tunisian state has attacked the human rights of protesters in recent weeks.
A Lebanon newspaper reports a reporter resigned from al Jazeera because he was told to slant the news against Assad.
Al Jazeera has been accused before of slanting some news areas at the orders of the Qatari state, so I don't think this accusation is impossible. What is surprising is that this happens only rarely, allowing so many issues to be covered without state-imposed bias.
I don't know what al Akhbar stands for. Maybe it is pro-Syrian. (Syria has a lot of influence in Lebanon.) But even if that is so, I think the story is credible.
Curtis Johnson, age 55, must kill himself soon or be condemned to many years of suffering with no escape.
His last act will be to damn the laws that put him in this predicament.
He could spend his last few hours in front of the state capitol, and kill himself there. That would drive the point home to the ones who must act to fix this.
If he has some months left, he could start protesting that way each day. He might perhaps get them to change the law by his deadline — it is worth a try.
The TSA wants to search bus passengers in the US.
This has nothing to do with preventing terrorism. It is just a system for searching Americans as they travel.
The UK government wants to apply the motto of "open data" to personal information held by any state agency.
Thugs in New York State arrested 28 people for planning a protest outside the gate of a base from which drone bombings are launched.
To require such a small number of people to get a permit for a peaceful protest is in itself tyranny, and it is clear that the military are working with the thugs to attack Americans' right to protest.
Spain plans to criminalize using the Internet to organize protests.
Everyone: Tell Shell's CEO: You can't profit from human rights abuse.
Correction about CISPA: the last-minute amendment didn't make it worse. Rather, it replaced dangerous vagueness with dangerous specific powers, making explicit the danger that was previously only inferred.
Chickens in factory farms get a broad array of drugs, and drugs whose use has been banned are still showing up in chicken feathers.
Republicans rejected a ballot petition in Michigan because of the size of the type.
The term "intellectual property" spreads confusion every time it is used. Here's an interesting article about copyright policy, with the completely evitable flaw of using "intellectual property" as a synonym for "copyright". Put that together with another article which equates "intellectual property" with patent law, and you're likely to be totally misled.
The article gains nothing whatsoever from that term. There was no reason to use it other than the feeling that (misled) readers expect it. Misled readers expect it because of articles like this one that use it. If the article always said "copyright", it would have been clear and correct.
When will they ever learn?
The Ridenhour prizes are awarded to heroic whistleblowers.
As "middle class" Americans slide down towards poverty, the term "middle class" becomes a euphemism for "not quite poor".
Private Prison Corporations Are Modern Day Slave Traders.
The TSA defends its decision to body-search a frightened 7-year-old girl with cerebral palsy.
In a narrow but meaningless sense, this search was necessary. I wouldn't put it past a terrorist to hide a knife on his daughter. For thorough security, little girls must be searched.
In a broader sense, there is no reason to worry about the weapons that could be hidden on a little girl. Bringing a knife on the plane would gain a terrorist nothing: he couldn't do more harm with it in an airplane than he could do on the street.
On Israel's independence day, a small group of activists held a discussion criticizing the expulsion of Arabs in 1948. Thugs stopped them from leaving the building, and arrested one of them for speaking.
The Internet has made it much easier for the FBI to catch people who collect child pornography.
I see nothing to criticize in the FBI's methods in getting evidence against Cafferty. It steered well clear of entrapment. The characters in its nonexistent videos were described as unambiguously children, not stretching that term to the postpuberal. My only objection is to the idea that people should be imprisoned for having a collection of images based on what subject matter they depict.
And it seems to me that the FBI could just as easily to apply the same methods to prosecute people interested in any other kind of material. Material from Wikileaks, for instance.
Effectively purchased by agribusiness, Brazil's congress passed a law that will facilitate deforestation.
Blind Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng has escaped from his guards, and describes how they tortured his family from someplace in Beijing.
Why the Israeli government tried to stop CBS from talking about what life is like for Palestinians.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to support the Violence Against Women Act.
Here's a little more information, but I can't recommend you sign it since it requires running nonfree Javascript.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
The US has expanded drone attacks in Yemen, including situations where they don't know the identity of whoever is being bombed.
Israeli Army Chief Says He Believes Iran Won't Build Bomb.
The CIA agent who destroyed videos of CIA torture committed a crime, but he basks in impunity thanks to Obama's protection.
Coca Cola Company vetoed a plan to refill visitors' water bottles at Grand Canyon National Park.
Fortunately the park ultimately reinstated the plan.
This problem shows how it is dangerous for important activities to be funded by donations from companies. We need to get their funds by taxing them, so that they threaten not to pay.
Meanwhile, there is a world-wide boycott of Coca Cola Company for murdering union organizers in Colombia and Guatemala.
Rugged Operating System, used in industrial control systems, has a back door installed by the developer.
When it is activated, the devices could act as if they were running D-Rugged Operating System ;-).
If the system were free software, users could fix this problem; but if it were free software, such a back door would probably never have been introduced.
US citizens: state your support for the Progressive Budget.
Billionaire Polluter told the public that the flow rate of oil from the Big Spill was irrelevant to stopping the leak, and that the "top kill" was working, although engineers were telling the company otherwise.
The Royal Society says that humanity's priorities must include limiting population and consumption.
A study finds that fracking causes cracks in rock, which occasionally extend over 300 meters away. So it recommends that fracking not be allowed within 600 meters of an aquifer.
Maybe this is sufficient protection for water supplies, but it won't protect against global heating.
A large study finds that mobile phones do not cause illness for their users.
They do however subject their users to surveillance worse than Stalinesque.
The FBI is prosecuting a BP minnow, but not the BP sharks.
US citizens: support the workers of Station Casinos which is trying to stop them from unionizing.
Israel was going to demolish a West Bank colony built without government permission, but the extremists have made the state back down.
Germany has used copyright to suppress publication of Mein Kampf. The copyright will expire soon, so Germany is considering a more ethical way to combat Hitler's racism: explaining why it is wrong.
I hope the copyright industry won't push to extend copyright world-wide just so that Mein Kampf can be further suppressed. There is no limit to how small a tail the copyright industry will try to wag the dog with.
Connecticut is considering a law to punish individual thugs who interfere with legitimate video recording by citizens of what the thugs are doing.
Plenty more laws like this are needed to stop these armed gangs from marauding around the US.
Media Jump On Idea That Social Security Is Going Bankrupt, Ignore Easy Way To Ensure Its Future.
US citizens: urge Obama to stand firm against CISPA.
School vouchers offer an excuse to divert public funds to religious schools , backed also by the broader privatization lobby.
170,000 students are on strike in Quebec against austerity plans.
The Bush tax cuts, preserved by the Republicans, amount to twice as much as the Social Security shortfall over the next 75 years.
And the military cuts called for by the law that set up the supercommittee would also cover it.
US citizens: tell Congress to cut bombers, not health care.
Obama's extension of drone attacks in Yemen appear to lack authorization from Congress.
Meanwhile, US drone attacks in Pakistan have been officially forbidden by the government of Pakistan.
Pakistan would be entitled to regard these attacks as an act of war.
The Dutch government has imposed a ban on selling pot to visitors.
It is noteworthy that the states reasons would evaporate if neighboring countries were to adopt the same policy that the Netherlands has had for decades. The cause of the supposed problem is therefore the prohibition in those other countries.
Film student Ian Van Kuyk was beaten up by thugs, then charged with fabricated crimes, because he refused to stop making a video of thugs at work.
His girlfriend had to try to rescue the camera in the interests of justice so that the thugs could not destroy evidence against them.
For-profit US colleges joined ALEC.
Many of these colleges ought to be shut down so they cannot rip off the public; they are using ALEC to lobby to prevent that.
The Pirate Party in Sweden organized young artists to denounce the copyright lobby's pretends to speak for them. Now founder Falkvinge calls for a similar campaign in Germany and other countries.
Chen Guangcheng appealed to the Chinese state not to persecute his family.
I've read elsewhere that he is in the US embassy.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to support the Arbitration Fairness Act* (H.R. 1873, S. 987). Also send a message through this page.
The Cambodian soldier who killed Chut Wutty is dead. Supposedly he shot himself when he realized what he had done.
I am skeptical that a soldier who helped protect illegal loggers felt remorse about killing an environmentalist. If the soldier was in fact shot dead, I suspect he was killed or coerced by other soldiers, in order to make him the fall guy and protect his commanders from blame.
US citizens: tell the US not to allow experimentation with oil shale to pollute public land in the west.
ACTA was condemned by the EU Parliament member appointed to study it.
He rejected it despite his confused support for the bogus concept of "intellectual property". In the specific issue of ACTA, that is a good sign. However, the monster is not dead yet; Europeans still need to support the organizations that fight against ratification of ACTA.
Meanwhile, the fact that he gives credence to the confused concept of "intellectual property" — and, worse, support for the idea of enforcing "it" more — suggests he might be disposed to support some other unjust measure for copyright enforcement, and wouldn't even know how to separate that issue from other unrelated laws and their unrelated issues.
ALEC will attack state targets for renewable energy.
A former CIA agent was so upset to hear his fellow agents called "torturers" that he destroyed video evidence of their torture.
The Harvard libraries have created a stir with a cry of distress about restricted scientific publishing. However, their recommendations are still timid. Michael Eisen shows what a really strong stand would look like.
Jill Stein says, if elected president she would pardon Bradley Manning.
Wal-Mart faces federal criminal probe tied to allegations of bribery in Mexico.
Colombian union leaders receive death threats from neo-paramilitaries.
If Obama's world were concerned with the truth, he might be embarrassed that this has happened just after he certified that Colombia was making progress ending the assassination of union leaders.
Israel retroactively authorized three "outposts", new colonies built without official government support.
The effect is to launch additional government-approved colonies.
Vietnam is tearing down mangrove forests for golf courses and shrimp farms. And not just a few — in decades they could be nearly gone.
"Free" (gratis, not libre) games for the iThings can convince children to spend lots of money.
Recall that Apple censors iBad software based on many other criteria and says this is for the users' sake.
Kenyans say UK agents kidnaped them in 2010 and handed them over to Uganda's torture police.
In Uganda's prison, UK and US agents interrogated them and helped to torture them.
China is beginning large efforts to control carbon emissions.
A Billionaire Polluter engineer faces charges for deleting text messages that belied BP's public statements.
UK welfare cuts placed great expenses for housing on local governments. Some near London are talking about moving the poor to other areas with lower rents.
I suspect that those areas, far from London, have no jobs at all.
The International Energy Agency says that humanity is failing to implement the measures necessary to avoid global heating disaster, and governments are to blame.
Humanity has an opportunity to act to avoid disaster, and must not lose that opportunity.
The Dutch copyright-enforcing cartel BREIN acts like a thug (in both senses of the word).
California is considering a bill to make the state get a warrant to access cell phone location data. The cell phone companies oppose it because they make lots of money from selling this data to the state.
Shell underestimated the size of an oil spill in Nigeria by a factor of 60.
It will be hard to prove that Shell knew the statement was false without internal documents. However, it is clear that we cannot trust an oil company to tell anyone the true size of an oil leak.
Argentina has begun collecting fingerprints and other biometrics of everyone entering the country, not to verify their identities but rather to build up a data base for use in tracking them in other ways.
I was going to visit Argentina in June for discussions about a free software law. Now that is out of the question. I will miss Argentina and my friends there, but some outrages must not be borne.
The TSA outdid itself, subjecting a married couple of age 85 and 95, in wheelchairs, to multiple feel-ups, and making them put $300 in cash in the bin, from which it was stolen, and then the TSA rejected responsibility.
If TSA searches did a necessary job, perhaps one could argue that every system goes wrong sometimes and this is the price we must pay for safety. However, all we buy with this price is a ticket to security theater, and we'd rather skip the show.
A study estimates that typical web users would need to spend 250 hours a year to read the privacy policies they encounter.
It would not be worth the trouble, because the reliable way to prevent misuse of data is by preventing it from being collected, so privacy policies do little good anyway.
Planned Parenthood sees an inexplicable surge in women visiting and asking about abortions based on the sex of the embryo, and suspects that they are phony patients trying to create a phony scandal.
If this is true, they seek to use the irrational prejudice against women who abort a fetus because of its sex. There is nothing wrong with choosing on that basis.
In some cases, the motive for such a choice might be prejudice against females. There are other possible motives — someone might feel, "I have a boy/girl so now I want a girl/boy." If the motive is prejudice, it is foolish and could hurt people's feelings, but women are entitled to abortions for whatever reason.
Shareholders will confront American Electric Power with the 3200 deaths caused by pollution from its coal-powered electric plants in the past year alone.
That's more than one September 11 attack per year.
When appliances are connected to the Internet, they become vulnerable to attacks through the Internet. This includes attacks by the manufacturer through back doors that the appliances might have.
When you hear "Internet of things", think "danger".
Common Cause has called for an IRS prosecution of ALEC for lobbying in contravention of the rules for public charities.
The United States can't abandon the country [Afghanistan], but our troops must leave.
Palestinian hunger strikes draw attention to Israeli detention practice.
Anyone imprisoned without a fair trial deserves a "get out of jail free" card. The Palestinians arbitrarily imprisoned have not found that. What they have discovered is a chance of getting out by maintaining a hunger strike for months, which causes severe bodily damage, perhaps irreparable.
Elie Wiesel rebuked Netanyahu's attempts to equate Iran with the Nazi extermination campaign.
There is another plan for exporting tar sands oil from Canada: through New England.
Extracting that oil will inevitably cause disaster due to global heating, and it is well known which areas of the world are going to suffer the disaster first. (They are typically coastal or arid.) The people in those areas can morally justify sabotaging these pipelines based on the necessity defense. It might even prevail in court, if the judge is sincerely concerned about justice.
The effects of global heating and climate change make it a human rights issue, which is further justification for those attacked to resist.
One point in this article is strangely confused. Why would anyone dream that the failure to stop global heating is due to democracy, and propose eliminating democracy as a "solution"? Everyone should know that the nondemocratic political power of business is directly tied to the failure to stop global heating; oil companies fund global heating denialists and arrange for mainstream media to pay attention to them. That the corrective to plutocracy is democracy should not be countintuitive.
Bahrain's suppression forces arrested a British TV news crew, which had come for the car race, but tried to cover protests in nearby villages.
Palestinian prisoners are on hunger strike to protest the tyranny of their imprisonment without trial.
I am not impressed by Israeli claims that these people are "dangerous". Bring it out in court, or shut up.
The World Bank is financing the land grab in Africa.
Olympic parathugs attacked photographers taking photos of games venues from nearby streets.
I've coined the term "parathug" by analogy with "paramilitary" and "paralegal". These people are not official thugs, but they work alongside the thugs in the same field.
A PBS program funded by Dow is functioning effectively as an infomercial for Dow.
The Globalization of Hollow Politics — and the popular backlash.
Neelie Kroes, Vice President of the European Union condemned the practice of punishment by Internet disconnection on mere accusation.
She also condemned DRM and cited the Free Software Foundation (Europe).
Interview with Nabeel Rajab, President of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights.
Paul Ehrlich reaffirms his concern about the population bomb , which is still ticking away as he predicted.
The UK's latest plan to help poor countries reduce carbon emissions: give them $100 million (a drop in the bucket) to build carbon capture and storage facilities (which have not yet been made to work).
Divestment by the Methodist Church from companies connected with the occupation of Palestine would ease Palestinian suffering.
Everyone: support CBS's presentation of the story that the Israeli occupation has pushed most Christians to leave the area of Bethlehem.
Cambodian thugs shot and killed environmental activist Chut Wutty, who exposed illegal logging.
First they tried to take away his photos. They must have been in cahoots with the loggers.
How the NSA is setting up total surveillance of Americans, in the name of "protecting" us.
Here Amy Goodman interviews Appelbaum, Poitras and Binney.
A Mexican law allowing the state to get cell phone location data without a warrant is likely to help criminal gangs find their victims and kill them.
The US government spreads fear among Americans by asking people to report anything "suspicious". Many Americans refuse to do this because they recognize that it is likely to harm innocent people.
Another part of the same point is that they recognize it is very unlikely to have good consequences.
A nation of informers — both human and computerized — is exactly what the state is developing. Claims to the contrary are disingenuous if they are not simply lies. State violence is a bigger threat to American lives than any non-US-affiliated terrorists, and it permist state bullying that crushes our human rights.
The foundation for these attacks is the fear spread by security theater and by announcements in our buses and subways. The fear makes the pretense that this is protecting us seem plausible to too many gullible Americans. Even many who realize it is bullshit feel obliged to kowtow to it. We need to stop kowtowing and say we don't want to be "protected" this way.
Everyone: phone people in North Carolina to help defeat an anti-gay initiative which also threatens everyone else.
The US still allows feeding cattle brains and other nerve tissue to various kinds of animals, including chickens whose droppings are then fed to cattle. Whether this can transmit mad cow disease is not known.
I am not outraged on principle about feeding chickenshit to cattle. I don't know whether cattle dislike it; if it is mixed with other things, they may not notice. However, we had better make sure it is safe.
The "Internet of things" proposes to connect your appliances and your car to the Internet.
This means some company will collect data from your things and store it, then the state will find an excuse to collect it all. Stay away from it!
The House of Representatives passed CISPA with an amendment to extend it beyond "cybersecurity".
Even before that, CISPA was still very bad despite some other changes that shaved off certain bad points.
Charles Taylor has been convicted of crimes against humanity.
The latest Republican false accusation against Obama is that he wants to enforce environmental laws strictly and protect the environment.
What a vile canard! Obama is a firm supporter of undersea oil drilling and the planet-roaster pipeline too.
It's only our biosphere and ordinary people that lack his support.
Thousands of monks protested in Tibet, and were repressed by Chinese thugs.
It resembles the US response to Occupy protests.
US citizens: call on the Senate Intelligence Committee to publish its study on torture.
Wal-Mart started to investigate reports its Mexican subsidiary had paid bribes to get permission to build stores, but then decided it would rather not know.
US Senate candidates report their campaign contributions on paper, which creates long delays in making the information public.
Large Indian Internet sites typically apply Internet censorship eagerly, deleting anything that someone objects to.
Free software activists in Bangalore organized street theater against Internet censorship.
I think they are making a mistake by conceding censorship of so-called "hate speech". Once you tolerate censorship of something, on whatever grounds, it is hard to object to censorship of anything else that someone can present as "disgusting" or wrong-headed. Views can be hateful, but not more hateful than gagging people.
Do Limbaugh and such tell lies about electric cars because they hate the very idea of conservation?
Or is it because they have business relationships with oil companies that want to maximize the consumption of oil?
As global heating melts Arctic ice, big oil companies are trying to drill for oil where the ice used to be.
The wells might cause disasters as BP and others have done. If they avoid this, the oil will boost global heating and melt more ice. The companies probably think that's great, while tens of millions die of the consequences.
The US has agreed to give Karzai's government control over night raids in Afghanistan and control over prisons.
These two decisions are the right ones. The night raids decision is right, because Karzai's men in control will reduce the killing and injury of civilians in those raids. As for the prisons, both countries abuse prisoners and there is someting to be said for letting the Afghan government have real sovereignty.
I remain skeptical that Karzai's government can ever stand on its own. It is corrupt and inspires little loyalty; we never hear of Afghans who join the Taliban, then shoot the other Taliban soldiers as enemies of Karzai's government. Thus, I think that any resources, human or financial, put into propping it up will be wasted. However, with these two decisions those efforts will do less harm while they continue.
The UN will study the life situation of US aboriginal peoples as it has studied those of other parts of the world.
Wikileaks cables confirm the US government knew about BP's blowout in the Caspian sea, but helped conceal this from the public.
This article was abridged; full version later.
Meet the Media Companies Lobbying Against Transparency (of their political advertising).
Tax Day is a good opportunity to protest the US government's heavy spending on military and war.
Craig Murray's evidence about UK torture has been fed into the investigation of former minister Jack Straw.
A right-wing plutocrat said, "I think (the ultra-wealthy) actually have insufficient influence (in Washington)." But they are working on fixing that.
The Corporations United decision (I call it by a descriptive name rather than its dishonest official name) represents phony democracy.
Facebook has a history of blocking the posting of links about certain controversial political issues.
Australia's high court affirmed that the ISP iiNet has no obligation to filter copyrighted material out of its users' communications.
The expert is right that copying is not theft, and that people refuse to consider it so. However, I am skeptical of the claim he makes when he uses the term "illegal downloading" too. Downloading copyrighted material is not in general a crime. Even uploading without authorization is usually not a crime, though it may grounds for a lawsuit. Unless Australia has a particularly nasty law about this, his discription is misleading.
One of the nasty things the copyright industry is doing is trying to make unauthorized copying a crime. The US tried that in ACTA but had to give it up.
Citizens of California: phone Senator Boxer to oppose the Keystone XL planet-roaster pipeline. Republicans are trying to make the senate pass a bill requiring it.
US citizens: call on the EPA and Obama to put strong limits on carbon emissions from power plants.
The TSA defends its actions in ordering a 4-year-old they had terrorized to stop crying and stand still for a pat down.
In 10 years, if another mother disobeys orders and goes to comfort her little child, they will arrest her or even shoot her. SWAT teams already do that sort of thing, then justify it based on violence in their imagination. That is the spirit of rigidity and zero tolerance, which is the spirit of America.
The Vatican told US nuns: stop caring for the poor so much and start focusing on abortion.
Bassem Tamimi, nonviolent protest leader from Nabi Saleh, was granted bail. This could mean recognition that the false case against him has collapsed.
US citizens: call your congresscritter to support the WORK Act that would allow low-income women to count raising children as work.
Also send a message through this page.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Wealthier people have less compassion.
Some cardiologists own specialty cardiac hospitals which boast of better-than-usual patient outcomes. But it's not because the hospitals are better.
It turns out that these hospitals select the healthier and wealthier patients, and the doctors make more effort to treat them than they do similarly ill patients in the other hospitals where they work.
The silly scandal about prostitution should not hide the real scandals of the Summit of the Americas, which were found in Obama's statements and actions.
The Japanese government relaxed radioactivity standards for food after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, so some food stores have set stricter standards. The government now wants them to stop doing that.
I don't know whether the revised standards add up to significant increased danger for people who eat the food. They might have been hypercautious before.
An independent nuclear engineer, given access to the Japanese government's data, reports on what really happened in the Fukushima.
Meltdowns penetrated the pressure vessels and the containment structures, releasing radiactive fuel into the ground.
He draws a lesson, too:
If you have to assume something, then you are not prepared.
In particular, redundancy for a certain apparatus — such as, backup electric generators, or connection to the power grid — is a useful precaution against random equipment faiures, but inadequate against systemic problems, since they can make all the similar pieces of equipment fail at once.
Two years after the Big Spill, many people exposed to the oil are still sick.
John Brennan says that stripping and putting his clothing through the TSA's X-ray machine was the right thing to do.
I think people should have the right to go naked in public if they wish, and should not have to give a reason. It should never be illegal to have an appearance that someone else feels distate for.
Journalist Laurie Penny says she understands why the Occupy movement detests journalists — because most of them take orders from the 1%.
US citizens: sign this petition for the Pentagon to stop buying from Rosoboronexport, which is a principal supplier of arms to Assad.
The rate of teen pregnancy in the US has decreased greatly in recent decades, but is remains highest in the states that are religious and conservative.
This may relate to the established failure of abstinence-only "sex education". However, that causes another problem that is more frequent: it fails to help teenagers who need help to enter the world of sexual relationships.
UK agents threatened Libyan exiles with deportation to Libya if they did not cooperate with the UK and Gaddafi.
It is possible for indigenous tribes to survive — if they can keep their lands.
However, logging countries are murdering the Awa tribe to cut down the trees on their land.
You can tell the politicians who are subservient to business because they criticize Argentina's nationalization of its oil company.
The company was privatized by a previous right-wing government as a give-away to the rich.
Privatizing state assets is generally harmful and wrong except when the result is a competitive marketplace for the public.
The Barhain F1 race will proceed even though a protester was beaten to death by the thugs.
In typical thug form, they seem to have falsified evidence to accuse him of violent actions — although that would hardly be an excuse even if true.
The Prime Minister bends over backwards to defend Bahrain's interests.
With international aid for water treatment, cholera in Haiti could be wiped out in months.
Instead, Haiti will be the testing ground for a questionable vaccine used in a way that won't eliminate cholera even if it works.
Applying Darwinism to economics shows why laissez-faire does not serve the general good.
We must regulate business.
The UN authorized sending 300 monitors to Syria.
Syria has excluded the international press, making it impossible to check on reports of government attacks. This is why I believe those reports are generally true, even though some fabrication may occur. Maybe these monitors will fill the gap.
100,000 protested in Prague against austerity.
The House Agriculture Committee wants to cut food stamps for 46 million Americans.
This is to keep military spending increasing as was previously planned.
Republicans want to eliminate the Lacey Act that cuts down on illegal logging around the world.
It isn't 100% effective — it has not stopped Asian Pulp and Paper from cutting down rainforests — but that could only be a reason to make it stronger.
Don't be fooled by the bill that pretends to correct the injustice of imprisonment without trial.
US citizens: call for thorough safety regulations for undersea oil drilling.
US citizens: sign this petition to cancel the F-35 aircraft program.
US citizens: sign the ACLU's campaign against CISPA. and Avaaz's as well.
The US and India endorsed the coup against Maldives President Nasheed, which suggests they encouraged the coup too.
The pattern of support suggests the coup was organized because of his efforts to curb global heating, by governments that don't want to help.
Now that ALEC has dropped voter-ID laws, right-wingers will run their campaign through the National Center for Public Policy Research
Having promised no subsidies for future nuclear power plants, the UK government is considering hidden subsidies.
Governments should not subsidize business without getting stock in return.
Tennessee plans to legislate that crimes can be committed against embryos.
This could lead to punishment for abortions, and even for women that try to commit suicide while in early stages of pregnancy.
Florida Governor Scott appointed a "task force" to study the "stand your ground" law. All the legislators in it supported the law.
Guardian: In the state-orchestrated grab for cyber-territory we have to work together to ensure our online freedom is protected by law.
In contrast to Anonymous' digital protests, governments attack dissenting web sites too.
Anonymous is to Chinese government digital attacks as a popular protest is to the "spontaneous rallies" of tyrannical states.
The Formula 1 race in Bahrain has become the focus of protests.
The race, and the teams that persist in racing give the foolish excuse that sport is above matters of life or death, and freedom or tyranny, so it should not be "used for politics". But the reason they won't stop is that they are being paid. In effect, paid for political propaganda for Bahrain.
Supporters of Wikileaks will start a US foundation to receive funds on Wikileaks' behalf.
What's the Difference Between War Crimes and Regular Old War?
Sign this petition to Obama for mortgage relief for US homeowners.
Thugs in the UK insulted, attacked and tased Edric Kennedy-Macfoy, not bothering to find out that he had approached them to give them information.
Then they arrested him and pressed false charges. He was actually prosecuted, but acquitted. Meanwhile, the thug department tried to bury his complaint.
The article focuses on the point that they apparently did this because Kennedy-Macfoy is Black. However, I think that the reasons for their choice of victim are a minor detail. Attacking and framing innocent people would be no more acceptable if they chose victims at random with no racial bias, or if they chose people for their political activities (which they often do).
The thugs will stop terrorizing people when they get properly punished for doing so. If they don't go to prison for this, it will be a miscarriage of justice.
20,000 people protested the construction of a coal-fired power plant in China, fearing the pollution it would generate.
They stormed and destroyed local government buildings after the government refused to consider their protest.
BP covered up dangerous practices that caused an oil well blowout in the Caspian sea, according to someone who was there.
This enabled BP to use the same dangerous practices later in the Gulf of Mexico, and cause the Big Spill.
Global heating is changing the zones where various butterfly species can live, and the times of the year when they develop, but they are havintg trouble moving to those new locales.
For the populace, austerity is cruel stupidity.
But it's great for the banksters.
EFF: Yes, CISPA Could Allow Companies to Filter or Block Internet Traffic.Yes,
Since 2010, fishermen in the Gulf of Mexico have seen fish and crustacians with a wide variety of2 unprecedented deformities. Sometimes 50% of the catch is deformed.
The article describes these animals as "mutated", which claims their DNA has been altered. However, the article does not report any tests which might determine if that were so. The deformities could have been caused during development by the influence of chemicals on the developmental signaling that generates the animal's body plan.
It is no surprise that animals are missing both eyes and eye sockets, because the two probably develop together in response to a single starting signal at that place in the embryo. If that signal or its recognition is suppressed at the crucial time, neither the eye nor the socket will develop.
I find it noteworthy that these defective animals manage to reach adulthood in large quantities. Surely they are less able to avoid predation than healthy animals, so why weren't they eaten? Perhaps because the predators that would have eaten them are missing or defective too. In other words, the problem may be more ecologically extensive than this article shows.
In any case, it seems likely that the Big Spill has damaged fishing in the Gulf of Mexico for decades. Obama, true friend of the oil companies, downplays the damage just as Jindal does.
A few days ago I read a message from the League of Conservation Voters endorsing Obama. Obama has authorized undersea oil drilling in the Arctic, where cleanup would be even harder. I suppose the endorsement was based on "lesser of the two evils" reasoning, but it did not express any misgivings about Obama. I can't stomach this "lesser" evil any more than I could stomach a deformed and dying fish.
The computer science community can organize to overcome organizations such as the ACM that restrict access to papers published by scientific conferences.
More about the prosecution in India of Sanal Edamaruku for "insulting religion".
Polluters are lobbying to redefine the mission of the Illinois Pollution Control Board to include "emergency" actions to protect polluters from financial setbacks.
Why the Israeli state is terrified of peaceful protest.
I want Israel to end the occupation of the West Bank and the near-embargo of Gaza. I don't want the Israeli state to "destroy itself". However, if it continues to crush democracy for the sake of occupation, it could delegitimize itself completely.
The planned extradition of Richard O'Dwyer has focused attention on the general injustice of the one-sided UK-US extradition treaty.
The UK must cancel this treaty.
The Formula 1 car race in Bahrain, the centerpiece of the Bahrain regime's "everyone's calm and contented here" PR campaign, has instead inspired renewed protests.
It is amusing to read the article's concern that these protests might overshadow a mere car race. Horrors!
The protesters are responding to the regime's violence with violence of their own.
It is natural, and I can't blame them, but it plays into the hands of regime supporters such as the US government.
The CIA wants to conduct drone bombings in Yemen without identifying the people to be killed.
Past experience shows this will lead to killing many civilians.
For the Israeli government, the worst thing that can happen with Iran is a diplomatic nuclear deal between Iran and other countries.
Congress is considering a bill that would to require a tracking device in all new cars starting in 2015.
This is in addition to punishment without trial for people accused of owing a lot of back taxes. I am in favor of collecting taxes from rich people, but punishment without trial cannot be acceptable.
Obama activated the US-Colombia free exploitation treaty by pretending not to see that Colombia continues to tolerate the murder of unionists.
(The words "deeply disappointing and troubling" hardly do justice to this injustice.)
Putting provisions into the treaty to require Colombia (and the US) to uphold some rights of workers was a nice idea, but if the states simply disregard those problems, these provisions do no good.
It is absurd to think that free exploitation treaties can do any good for the 99%. We must cancel them all.
The FBI shut down many web sites and mailing lists by seizing an server which also runs an anonymizer service that someone used to send a bomb threat.
Since the anonymizer was designed to save no relevant information, seizing it was useless for finding the person who sent the threat. I suspect the FBI wants to make people scared to run anonymizers.
I suggest running them on separate small computers.
Figures from a few cities suggest that US thugs are doing lots of cell phone tracking, and spending millions of dollars for it too.
Note the attempt to argue that "EZ-pass and Google know where you are, so why care if we track you?" In other words, "There is so much surveillance now that there's no point objecting to it." Before these surveillance systems were widely used, they had a different argument: "You don't have to use them." Thus, according to the perpetrators of mass surveillance, it's always either too early or too late to raise the issue. I think it is legitimate for the state to collect phone location data pursuant to a specific warrant signed by a judge. What is unacceptable is for phone companies to store location info about phones without already having a warrant.The newest World Bank sleaze: loans for "development", supposedly to improve the life of the poor, go through banks and even hedge funds which can redirect the money to their own profit.
The European Stability Mechanism creates a totally unaccountable organization that can demand any amount of money from any of the member governments.
Formerly secret government papers show that the British Empire fought Communist rebels in Malaya using familiar methods: strip-searches, censorship (even of concerts), and death squads.
When the UK sought to set up the US base on Diego Garcia, and planned to exile all the natives, it set up planned a deception campaign to cover up the fact that they lived there.
Members of the US Secret Service are being punished for having sex with prostitutes.
It is a typical prudish US sex scandal, much ado about nothing. The only conceivable concern of the government is that it might lead to blackmail, but that concern only exists if the US government makes an irrational fuss as it is doing.
If an agent indeed tried to deny a prostitute her pay, that was wrong; but if that's the issue, they should say so.
Ban Ki-Moon says that Syria has reduced the violence since the UN cease-fire but not ended it.
Two of the Cuban Five have an art show in the UK.
The Cuban Five were imprisoned in the US for trying to warn Cuba about terrorist attacks organized by US-based Cuban expatriates.
Obama proclaimed support for "open government" but his actions don't fit his words.
Obama opposes CISPA but supports Lieberman's senate bill, which is not as sweeping but is dangerously vague.
Obama retreated before the banksters on regulation of financial derivatives.
ALEC says it will cease its support for voter ID laws and "stand your ground" laws.
Henceforth it will only lobby for "economic" measures, such as crushing unions and prohibiting municipal free Internet access points.
US citizens: call your congresscritter and senators to support the RESTORE act, which would use BP's fine money to try to restore the damage of the Big Spill.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Also send them mail through this page.
FCC Chairman Genachowski rebuked TV broadcasters for opposing plans for an FCC data base on political ads they show.
What it was like to get an abortion in the US in 1978.
Israel's Deputy Prime Minister Admits Ahmadinejad Never Said Israel Should Be 'Wiped Off the Face of the Map'.
The US needs to reduce military spending the way Nixon and Eisenhauer did.
Big Brother Is Not Your 'Friend'.
The EFF's FAQ explains the dangers of CISPA in detail.
Israel, acting in a spirit of paranoia, barred entry to many people who were not coming to protest. Even some Israelis were not allowed to go Israel.
I disagree with the article on one point. Even if a passenger did intend to participate in the Bethlehem peace ceremony, that hardly qualifies as "solid legal grounds" for barring that person.
By excluding visitors to Palestine, Israel proved that the West Bank is run as a prison.
Israel promised not to allow new "settlements" in the West Bank, but winked as new ones were built. Now, facing a court order to dismantle some of them, the government wants to build other new colonies to replace them.
Some of the expansionists who build them also repeatedly attack earby Palestinians.
The Israeli army arrested a Palestinian woman for "attacking soldiers" who were taking away her 3-year-old child.
Palestinian farmers trying to work their land cut off by the annexation wall face a series of hurdles. Getting a permit is just the first one.
Ex-marine Ross Caputi says he shares the views of Tarek Mehanna — that Iraqis and Afgans attacking US troops are simply defending their homelands from occupying armies — and dares the US to prosecute him too.
I must partially disagree with one of Caputi's side points. It is true that "jihad" means "struggle" in general, and does not imply it is against non-Muslims. However, there are Muslims who advocate trying to conquer the world and impose their dominion over the non-Muslims. Several countries have trampled human rights in the name of Islam.
However, that issue is a digression from the main point of the article. Publishing articles advocating any views, even Muslim world dominion, is not terrorism.
Most comments in Israel about the officer who smashed a nonviolent protester in the face with a rifle support the officer. When regrets are expressed, they are regrets for what this will do to Israel's image. They cannot see the injustice of the act.
This reminds me of the Americans who were ready to disapprove of the costs of the occupation of Iraq but unwilling to question it on moral grounds.
The US Congress is trying to sabotage talks with Iran just as they look promising.
This makes sense if their goal is to do whatever Netanyahu wants. He would consider a peaceful resolution of this dispute a disaster, since it would leave nothing to distract attention away from Israel's occupation of Palestine.
Many Americans can reduce their federal income tax to zero by working less, making less money, and doing more things for themselves instead of paying others to do them.
I am not against taxation on principle: a welfare state requires taxes. If the US government were using its money for ethical purposes, which would include some military preparedness along with helping the poor, research, support for the arts, and other things, I would not regret paying taxes. But given what the US government is now, a machine for transferring wealth to the rich, I don't see why non-rich should not resist in any way they can.
The UK government told an activist he will be jailed if he protests anywhere near Olympic games sites.
When the UK gave independence to African colonies, it destroyed most of the papers describing atrocities carried out by the colonial governments.
It kept the rest of the papers secret although legally they were supposed to be released long ago.
The ACLU wants the US to own up to its missile strike in Yemen that killed many civilians, and explain whether it has given compensation for their deaths.
It is not currently possible to look at a YouTube video with an ordinary browser without running nonfree software, which you shouldn't do; but there is a youtube-dl script that can fetch the video.
Abdel Hakim Belhaj, tortured by Gaddafi after UK and US help, has sued former UK minister Jack Straw after MI5 sources said he as minister approved the operation.
Tim Berners-Lee spoke against proposed UK surveillance legislation.
House Republicans propose to cut food stamps and other aid to the poor, to avoid the pre-programmed cuts in military spending that they pressured Obama to agree to.
Twitter says it will make a commitment in writing, to its employees that file patent applications, not to use the patents for aggression.
I have proposed for 20 years that employees demand this of their employers, in some of my speeches on the danger of software patents. I am very glad to see that a prominent company will set an example.
Citizens of Massachusetts: call your state legislators to support spending on reproductive health services.
US citizens: call on Congress to reform the 1872 mining law that charges nothing to companies that mine US natural resoures.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to oppose HR 4089, which would weaken protections for wilderness areas.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
US citizens: call on the US government to demand Bahrain release nonviolent protest leader al-Khawaja.
US citizens: call on Obama to label GMOs in food.
The US military is intervening in Hollywood to ensure its movies are positive propaganda for the military. And now perhaps in music videos too.
The for-profit spying lobby campaigns for CISPA.
Tens of thousands of Palestinian farmers are impoverished because the Israeli hoops they must jump through to reach their farmland make farming unfeasible.
Fossil-fuel subsidies are the real job killers.
Medical insurace companies have a PR campaign saying it's unfair to require them to spend 60% of their income on medicine.
Vietnamese blogger Nguyen Hoang Hai faces 20 years in prison for criticizing the state.
The approved builder of a UK nuclear power plant demands increased guarantees of future income.
Nuclear power plants are so expensive (as well as risky) that none will be built without tremendous subsidies. And once the state pays so much, it is unconscionable to allow a private company to walk away with the results. The UK claims future nuclear plants will get no subsidy; Obama is proud of these giveaways to business.
Long-term drought due to global heating is putting many farms out of business in southeast England.
The US government is trying to prevent Megaupload from paying lawyers for its defense and to rule all experienced copyright lawyers off limits.
Six Rigged Rules Corporations Use to Dodge Taxes.
The World Bank has spent billions to privatize water systems and plans to increase that.
The claim that corporations are obligated to place shareholders' gain above all else is not a law, not a moral principle, just a right-wing lie.
Corporate executives may fear they will be replaced if they don't push the stock price up by the end of the year. They may lack the moral fibre to disappoint the board or the shareholders, but that is not the same thing as being legally required or morally obligated to go all out for their gain.
As Andreas Ias was riding a bicycle with a group of pro-Palestinian activists near Jericho, an Israeli soldier hit Ias in the face with his rifle. Nothing unusual about this, but this time it was caught on video.
The government says this does not represent the Israeli army. As readers of these notes are aware, it represents many armies all too well.
US citizens: tell your senators to oppose an attempt to make it harder for workers to vote on forming a union.
Thugs in Jordan arrested protesters and then tortured them so badly that some were knocked unconscious.
The protest was about the imprisonment of other protesters.
Istanbul, Tokyo, Baku, Doha and Madrid are competing for the 2020 Olympic Games .
Whichever city "wins" will suffer as a result . The effects may extend to the whole country it is in.
If you live in Istanbul, Tokyo or Madrid, better start organizing now for your city to "lose". Baku and Doha are in countries too authoritarian to let people organize; paradoxically, it is only in those countries that the games might do no harm, mainly because the elites there can do all the harm they wish without an excuse.
Zimbabwean exiles in South Africa are pushing that country to prosecute Mugabe for his grave human rights violations.
The cost of global heating and acidification on the world's oceans is estimated at 2 trillion dollars per year, over this century.
Since the problem is growing, the annual cost now are less than that. Towards the end of the century, the annual cost will be more than 2 trillion dollars.
"Micro-labor" is a new form of piecework, offering businesses an easier path to eliminating workers' benefits such as health care and pension contributions.
This is one further reason why these necessities should not be tied to employment.
Tennessee and Arizona are in a race to attack science, women, and poor people.
Five Reasons Why The Very Rich Have NOT Earned Their Money.
The way company profits are distributed has only an occasional loose relationship with who earned them.
Stephen Downs, who defends American "terrorists" caught by FBI sting operations, say that the charges are based on lies and that the US is turning its courts into a platform for show trials.
Proposed: an ISP that will go all-out to protect customers' privacy.
A lawsuit seeks to require a state agency to reveal what chemicals companies are using for fracking.
Trade secrecy is antisocial; the US patent system supposedly exists to discourage the practice. To require everyone to disclose all secrets would be tyranny, but when an activity threatens public health, that is valid grounds. Companies should be allowed to keep secrets only when there is no public interest in requiring disclosure.
China's leadership promises to crack down on corrupt officials, starting with Bo Xilai.
It will be hard to succeed at this without more democracy and less censorship.
While I wouldn't put it past a scheming high-level official's wife to have someone killed, I'd expect her to have enough self control not to do it personally. It seems more plausible that this is a frame-up, pinned on Bo's wife for political reasons. Is anyone investigating the possibiliy that someone else killed Mr. Heywood?
Israel blocked 50 passengers in Ben Gurion airport simply because they wanted to meet with Palestinians. Hundreds of others were blocked in Europe based on obviously false accusations.
Israel's position is that it shouldn't be criticized until it gets as bad as Syria. Next Putin will say that criticism of Russia's repression is not allowed because Russia isn't as bad as Iran, and Obama will say that criticism of US human rights violations is off limits because it isn't as bad as China.
Sergey Brin says the Internet's freedom is under attack "from all sides".
When the thugs attacked Occupy Wall Street, they smashed all the laptops of the people they arrested, and claimed it happened by accident. But the Free Network Foundation's radio tower, they simply stole.
Perhaps the radio tower was shot while trying to escape.
The Spanish neofascists now in power propose to criminalize various currently used forms of nonviolent protest in order to "make the people fear the system more". These include:
Passive resistance, which would be considered an "attack against authority" and equated with terrorism.
Messages calling for resistance that "affects public order" would be considered "organized crime". These could include any protests that the government wasn't notified about in advance. Any or all participants in a protest of the indignados could be imprisoned.
"Intimidating behavior" would be treated as "violent attacks" against the suppression forces. The thugs often lie and say protesters attacked them, but video can prove they were lying. However, "intimidation" can be very subtle; if thugs fabricate such charges it will be impossible to prove they are lying.
Americans are driving less; younger Americans are driving much less.
I suggest the reason Congress hasn't noticed this is that it listening to companies, not Americans.
When Facebook paid a billion dollars for Instagram, what it paid for was Instagram's users, and its data about those users.
In other words, part of the requisite for trusting an online service with your data is a commitment that will be binding on successors of the company.
Ten Egyptian presidential candidates were barred from running, with no reason given.
13 ways the US government tracks us, and some that are on the way.
The US government is democratic in form, but it has largely converted itself into a government of occupation for the empire of the megacorporations. In other words, a banana republic.
Obama's JOBS bill is tailor-made to encourage fraud and lead to stock bubbles like the 90s .com bubble.
This will make it dangerous to invest in companies that have been public for less than 5 years.
Two Mexican bikers face charges of terrorism for revving their engines.
The crowd at a festival thought they heard gunshots, panicked, and couldn't get away since stalls had blocked the streets.
In the US, they'd have to rev their engines for some sort of political opposition group to get accused of terrorism.
The US government uses sexual humiliation to demoralize its populace.
A new Tennessee law says schools must allow teachers to deny evolution and global heating.
Kuwaiti writer gets 7 years imprisonment for tweeting a claim that Kuwaiti Shi'ites are loyal to Iran.
Such a statement, in Kuwait, could be aimed at stirring up intersectarian hatred and persecution of Shi'ites. I think that is a bad thing to do, and I hope it fails; but making it a crime to state such a claim is directly injust.
A UK mining company is using children as miners in the Congo.
The Olympic Games contracted to Adidas to make uniforms, and Adidas contracted with factories in Indonia, which pay workers around $2.50 for a 10-hour work day.
Daniel Davis exposed how the US is pretending that the war in Afghanistan is a success. The US government can't prosecute him, so it ignores him and te truth.
200 young Afghans wanted to protest that the government doesn't respect women's rights, even the right not to be murdered; but only 30 arrived. The rest were too scared to show up, or were prevented by their families from participating — which proves their point.
The UN will send observers to Syria hoping to put the cease fire back together.
CISPA, Cybersecurity, and the Devil in the Dark
The Internet defeated SOPA with the help of many of the same businesses that are ready to acquiesce to CISPA. CISPA is the test for whether the users of the Internet can block an oppressive law.
The first US/UK oil sanctions against Iran were the prelude to the CIA-organized coup in 1953.
I don't agree with all of the article's conclusions. I do not believe that the Iranian government launched its nuclear program for the sake of nuclear power plants; however, Iran seems to be willing to offer concessions on uranium enrichment now.
Don't forget that the world needs to reduce its use of fossil fuels.
US jobseekers now face criminal background checks carried out by sloppy companies.
Every recession in the US tends to lead to new demands and indignities on people looking for jobs; employers swamped by applicants grab for any excuse to reject some of them. These burdens tend to become permanent, perhaps because the level of unemployment has slowly risen over the long term.
Climate scientist Michael Mann denounces the attacks of the global heating deniers, who do disregard science for political ends.
UC Davis has pressed charges against students and professor who carried out the bank blockade.
Professor Nathan Brown calls for protests against UC Davis Chancellor Katehi until she quits.
In the BP annual meeting, one shareholder-protester asked if the board was preparing an escape pod to leave Earth when it is devastated, and whether tickets could be purchased. Others raised serious questions, but got no answers.
The EPA made tenuous excuses to disregard the danger of pesticide 2,4-D.
10,000 joined an Occupt protest in Papua New Guinea against a plan to allow the legislature to remove judges, and appear to have stopped it
Occupy Detroit Rallies to Save School for the Deaf.
Thousands of people are planning a "fly-in" to Israel to accept an invitation to a peace ceremony in Palestine.
This is to highlight the fact that Israel tends to refuse to allow people entry if they intend to cooperate with Palestinians in any fashion.
Airlines are supporting the Israeli government by cancelling these people's tickets and not refunding their money.
The airlines' argument that they might be required to transport the passengers home is bullshit if these passengers have already paid for the return flight.
Mexican soldiers are accustomed to impunity, so they terrorize everyone, from innocent travelers asleep in a bus to acclaimed human rights lawyers.
The Syrian army started shelling again, which means the cease-fire is not holding.
We should not criticize Kofi Annan for trying this. It was worth a try.
Protesters against Swaziland's absolute ruler were crushed by the army.
Don't believe Bahrain's PR — its oppression of dissent continues.
The suicide rate in Greece increased 40% in early 2011 compared with 2010.
I suspect that the death rate from illness increased too, but the figures are not available yet. I also suspect that things have got worse since a year ago.
Canada's Supreme Court rejected a law allowing the thugs to listen to phone calls with no controls as long as they say it is "to prevent an emergency".
Sanal Edamaruku debunked a "miracle" on TV, so he now faces arrest for blasphemy.
Why the best solutions are so often "off the table".
The idea of buying the friendship of everyone in Afghanistan (or Vietnam) is interesting partly because that's almost what the US did. In 2002, it seemed that the war was essentially over and it was time to fund development projects. Unfortunately they didn't work, and turned into gifts to a small fraction of Afghans.
Uri Avnery: Gunter Grass's criticism of Israeli policy mostly sensible and partly mistaken, but it wasn't hostile, and Germans should not be barred from criticizing Israeli policy because they're German.
Uri Avnery was German too, until 1933.
In the US, Big Brother is getting bigger.
The US subsidies for US nuclear power add up to many billions in corporate welfare.
Everyone (even if you don't use Facebook): tell Facebook to drop its support for CISPA.
CISPA is the unlimited NSA Internet surveillance bill that also allows blocking sites.
US citizens: call on Obama to order federal contractors not to discriminate on sexual orientation or gender identity.
In Spain: sign this petition against the plan to make peaceful protest a crime.
Citizens of India: sign this petition to annul India's Internet censorship rules.
US citizens: call on the US to stop opposing the establishment of global marine reserves.
Marine reserves not only protect endangered species, they can also increase the total number of fish available to catch. That is because the mature fish in the reserve produce young that eventually leave the reserve.
US citizens: tell the Department of Agriculture not to approve genetically modified corn that is made for use with the dangerous pesticide 2,4-D.
US citizens: call on the Attorney General to act firmly to protect the right to vote against voter suppression laws.
US citizens: tell the EPA to make strong regulations to curb industrial CO2 emissions.
In the US (and maybe elsewhere): tell companies to stop supporting ALEC.
Here's the message I gave:
Americans are waking up to how ALEC-promoted unjust laws endanger their rights, their well-being and even their lives. If you fund ALEC, we will consider you to blame for what ALEC does. Please cut off your support to ALEC forthwith.
See www.ALECexposed.org for more info.
In the US: tell NPR and PBS to reject political attack ads even though the law requiring to do so was just struck down.
Of course, NPR and PBS should not run any ads. They don't admit they run ads; they call their ads "enhanced underwriting". I decided to support the petition nonetheless because the petition calls them "ads", and thus also works against the pretense.
US citizens: tell Obama to do a thorough and proper investigation of Wall Street's crimes, not an inadequate investigation with too few staff.
10 Big Companies That Pay No Taxes (and Their Favorite Politicians).
An expensive, experimental program of cholera vaccination has started in Haiti.
This is instead of building an infrastructure to provide safe drinking water, which would prevent many diseases.
India's government says Indian airlines are forbidden to pay the EU's tax on CO2 emissions.
I think it will relent when those airlines face fines or exclusion from flying to Europe.
What is significant here is only that India has declared its opposition to curbing global heating. When Indian officials say that they won't agree to a deal to achieve that goal unless this tax is cancelled, in effect they say they won't agree to any plan that is effective. That puts them in the planet-roaster camp, with the US.
People in developed countries should eat 50% less meat (especially beef and pork) to curb global heating, and reduce the use of fertilisers by 50%.
Eating less meat is wise, since it would lead to better health and longer life.
Tasmanian forests, home to threatened animals, need to be protected from logging.
People, cities and churches are moving lots of money out of the big banks.
Have you moved yours?
The oil companies say they have improved safety measures since the Big Spill, but the UK still has more than one significant safety problem per week. I expect the US has them much more often.
Protesters say BP's use of dispersant sunk a lot of the oil to the sea bottom, from which it rises and re-pollutes the shore.
March 2012 was the hottest March ever recorded in the US.
Will this convince the skeptics, or will they wait for a record-breaking July and August?
It appears the US welcomed the coup against President Nasheed of the Maldives. I doubt the goal was to stop him from campaigning to halt global heating, but has anyone proposed an explanation?
The UK is talking about banning brands from cigarette packages.
The opposition is dishonest, pretehding that this discouragement to marketing is a prohibition of tobacco. I would oppose prohibition of tobacco, dangerous and harmful as that drug is, but prohibition is not the policy being proposed.
The real obstacle to this may be from free exploitation treaties. Uruguay and Australia have tried partial measures along the same lines and have been attacked for it this way.
Thanks to Clinton's "welfare reform", aid to poor children is at the lowest level in 50 years, while poverty spreads.
I disagree with the interpretation that Clinton destroyed the Liberal movement's moral authority. Rather, he betrayed the Liberal movement and denied it the support of the Democratic Party. It still has the support of people like me.
The signatures on the Walker recall petition were very carefully checked and proved to be 97% valid.
Forced evictions in China lead thousands to protest across the country every month.
Navajos and Hopis protested together against a senate bill inviting the tribes to give up their water rights.
They seem to be afraid that the Navajo president will agree to this deal.
French people have sued the state for racial profiling.
Vietnam's new Internet censorship regulations will require users to give their real names.
It is not surprising to find such rules in China, and now in Vietnam. Requiring people to indentify themselves for postings is a tool of tyranny. I urge people to reject communications platforms such as Facebook and Google+ which require real names.
Farmers in Haiti were dispossessed without warning to build sweatshops that will make clothing very cheap.
Kuwait is extending its assault on freedom of speech with a bill to execute people for blasphemy.
This would put it in the same cruel class as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.
Under international law, Israel cannot justify attacking Iran because it is not under imminent threat.
A UN-brokered cease fire in Syria is partly effective.
The Real Invisible Hand: George Orwell, and Why We Got JOBs not Jobs.
In Poland the state can access communications traffic records with very little controls, and did so almost 2 million times in 2011.
Perhaps the officials are nostalgic for Communism.
Lloyd's of London joins environmentalists in warning that undersea drilling in the Arctic is dangerous.
Would it be interesting drop several gallons of oil in a few places on Arctic coasts to measure how much of it remains how long? Spills of that size must be frequent from ships, so a few artificial ones won't do grave harm, and we might learn something from them.
Trayvon Martin's killer faces charges of second degree murder.
US unions want the US Labor Department to invoke CAFTA provisions against Honduras for denying workers' rights.
Given that CAFTA exists, I will be glad if it can do some good against for lable rights. However, I doubt it will do enough good to outweigh the harm done by free exploitation treaties, whose general effect is to turn every country into a banana republic.
Several presidents from Latin America will tell Obama that the War on Drugs must be stopped.
They have recognized that when a war is on drugs, it attacks almost randomly and everyone becomes a target.
If the US implements the US-Colombia free exploitation treaty, that would reduce the US' political leverage to improve labor rights conditions in Colombia.
However, Obama isn't inclined to use that leverage anyway, since implementing the treaty would mean disregarding the continued murders of unionists. Apparently he intended this party of the treaty as a false promise, to be ignored once it convinced the US Congress to vote for the treaty.
An appeals court ruled that violating web site terms of service is not a crime.
As well as being the right policy, it is also a sensible legal decision. It is hard to be confident that courts won't stretch laws for the sake of corporate power.
CEOs reduce their taxes by using a corporate jet "for safety".
Shahzad Akbar, Pakistani human rights lawyer, has sued the US government for killing civilians in Pakistan with a drone bomber. Since then, he has been unable to get a visa to revisit the US.
The US government says that this is not retaliation for his lawsuit. Do you believe that?
In the Jordan Valley, Israeli repression hits every aspect of life.
I don't see anything wrong, in general, with diaspora Jews' sending money to help Israeli Jews live better. And one can ask why diaspora Palestinians (and other Arabs) don't provide such donations to poor Palestinians in the Jordan Valley. However, it would take tremendous sums to compensate materially for the effects of the denial of land and water, and no amount of money could make up for the tight restrictions on construction.
Everyone: call on Honduras not to criminalize taking the morning-after birth crontrol pill.
Everyone: rebuke the city of St Petersburg for arresting people for carrying signs in favor of equality for gay people.
US citizens: tell Democrats to go beyond the millionaire's tax and end the Bush tax cuts.
The US is exhausting itself in an arms race with nobody.
The pesticide that kills bee colonies may be getting in via high-fructose corn syrup.
It should be easy to see if bees fed another substance are safe. Meanwhile, high-fructose corn syrup carries pesticides into beehives, maybe it carries them into you and me.
China has imprisoned hundreds of Tibetan pilgrims who went to a ceremony in India.
The president of Guatemala calls for drug regulation instead of drug prohibition , but isn't bold enough to say he will pull his country out of prohibition.
That probably means he will allow his country's policy to be controlled by Obama, who isn't bold enough to tolerate medical marijuana even though over 75% of Americans want him to.
Malaysia is considering a law to end imprisonment without trial and recognize political freedom of speech.
Malaysia is not blatant tyranny like China or Iran, but it still has a long way to go to fully respect human rights. For instance, Malaysia must allow anyone to practice any religion, or no religion. This law can be a major step in the right direction.
Facebook "apps" that some persons run get access to everything their "friends" make visible to them, and may hand all that info to a company.
While this article shows that there is currently a way to turn that off, I expect that Facebook will take any necessary steps to ensure that most users don't do so. The purpose of those apps is to get access to that data, and I'm pretty sure that benefit figures, to Facebook's advantage, into the financial arrangements between the app developer and Facebook. Facebook will make sure it does not lose that advantage.
Chinese high school students, worn out from studying many hours a day with little vacation for standardized tests, burned their textbooks.
The US is in the process of making its education system just as bad.
The US ordered UK and Canadian airlines to give details of passengers flying between the UK and Canada or Cuba, and to apply the US "no fly" list to them.
The British acquiescence in this demand is a remarkable display of the "special relationship" between the two countries. The usual name for that relationship is "master-slave".
You should not board an aircraft in the UK, because they use X-ray scanners (unsafe!) and don't allow you the option of feeling you up instead. This is one more reason to take a train to some other country and fly from there.
US citizens: CISPA is the new Internet Blacklist Bill, using "security" as the excuse this time. Phone your congresscritter and say no, and sign this petition too.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
US citizens: tell Obama to prevent oil drilling in the Arctic.
The European Court of Human Rights approved the extradition of Babar Ahmad to the US.
Here is an interview with Babar Ahmad.
As far as I can see, all he is accused of is stating opinions, which is supposed to be a human right that we respect whether we agree with them or not. When the US gets its hand on him, will it accuse him of something that would honestly constitute terrorism, or will it stretch the term as it often does?
Looking at the larger issue, the UK's one-extradition treaty with the US is unjust for two reasons: because it is one-sided and because it abolishes protections such as dual criminality (the principle that you will not be extradited for an act that isn't prohibited in the country where you are).
Israeli occupation observers report on a Palestinian family made homeless, and a Palestinian man released from prison in Israel but not given his ID card back.
The state invited him to ask for his ID card at the prison in Israel, knowing he cannot go there because he has no ID card.
Requiring people to use ID cards is itself tyranny.
Peter Beinart's book which exposes the lies of the Israeli right wing makes them so uncomfortable that they have launched a campaign of personal vilification to distract attention from what it says.
I got a small dose of such vilification myself, after my visit to Palestine and Israel in 2011. The more prominent the author, the stronger the vilification.
The Israeli government evicted the right-wing activists who had seized the home of a Palestinian family.
The government's policy is to do precisely this, but slowly over a long term. When individuals rashly rush things, that causes embarrassment.
Israeli soldiers disguised as civilians entered the Palestinian village of Rammoun. Three villagers who didn't recognize them accused them of being thieves, whereupon the soldiers shot them all.
One of them was shot again later, while already wounded. He died.
10 years on, the Israeli annexation wall that snakes around through Palestinian territory is almost twice the length of the border between Palestinian territory and Israel.
Large gaps remain in the wall, where construction has been stopped by lawsuits. Evidently the cessation of suicide bombings for many years is not because the wall blocks them.
Israel is building more new housing in East Jerusalem and demolishing Palestinian homes.
The revenue of a casino and a "nonprofit" bingo operation in California funds more such construction.
Obama knows that Israeli construction makes peace impossible, but he only cares about staying in office.
Wellcome Trust will push for free access to research it funds.
I can't tell from this article whether this will include the freedom to redistribute articles, which is also necessary.
In the US: Tell AT&T to stop supporting ALEC.
Ni Yulan defended poor Chinese people who were left homeless for the Olympic games. The thugs atatcker her so badly she is permanently disabled, and kept her in an unofficial "black jail" in a hotel. Now she has been framed for not paying the hotel.
The UN's world happiness report put China at number 112 out of 156. So China banned it.
Individual Chinese know they are unhappy, but the idea is they should not know they aren't alone.
Pharma companies seek to invent new diseases to convince Americans they need more medicines.
A widely used herbal remedy, aristolochia, causes kidney disease and cancer.
Many human rights organizations called on Obama to get human rights defender al-Khawaja freed from Bahrain's prison before he fasts to death.
Everywhere: inform your friends about the boycott against Ahava cosmetics, made in an illegal Israeli colony in the West Bank, and sold in the US, perhaps in a store near you.
Tunisian thugs attacked protesters and journalists, breaking the hand of an opposition leader.
The agreement giving the Afghan government control over US night raids has loopholes that Humvees will drive through.
The Republican Party wants to encourage driving rather than biking.
Whatever it takes to burn more oil faster.
Marlyand adopted a law forbidding employers from demanding employees or applicants social media passwords.
Protestors oppose a high-speed train line in Italy through the Alps to France.
What would they rather travelers do? Drive? Fly?
This line, with a further an extension inside Italy, would make it just feasible to take a train from Paris to Milan instead of flying. That will attract many more travellers to use the line. The existing train line can't possibly achieve that.
The Syrian army bombarded a refugee camp in Turkey, and Assad has effectively rejected the UN's cease-fire plan.
Malawi's new president has fired the thug chief who has terrorized dissidents for two years.
A software patent has halted the development of systems to transmit medical images for several years.
Software patents generally do harm because a large software package needs to combine thousands of ideas. Each time an idea is patented, the patent is ready to cause a disaster like this one. Some disasters are bigger than others, but disaster is all they can cause.
It is too bad the article equates patents to "intellectual property". The author probably felt it was obligatory to use that fashionable term.
Even worse, the article speaks of "theft" of this mysterious reified substance. Patent infringement is not theft; a patent is an artificial government-imposed monopoly. One of the reasons to reject the term "intellectual property" for patents is that it leads people to try to construct strained analogies such as these between patents and physical property. These analogies are misleading, and they generally encourage support for stricter patent law. That's another reason to reject the term.
The US cyberspying bill is "even worse than SOPA".
Obama wants to use the TPP to criminalize even private sharing of copies of music.
The propaganda term "copyright theft" is a simple falsehood today, and always has been: copyright infringement is not theft, and in many cases is not a crime at all. However, our enemies want to change the law to match their lie. Apparenltly TPP stands for "Tyrants Punishing People".
Another point of the TPP would be to apply to patent law a "loser pays" rule that ACTA applies only to some other laws. I am not sure whether this is good or bad (does a plaintiff that loses have to pay the defense legal fees?), but it is silly for a treaty to specify this.
This reflects a general tendency of the misleading term "intellectual property": by generalizing about these unrelated laws, it encourages making them more similar. It also encourages and paves the way for one treaty to deal with several of these laws together, as does the TPP. It is therefore unfortunate when anyone uses that term.
The MPAA thinks Obama can get it something like SOPA, and they are working on it now.
Dodd of the MPAA described this as a new backroom deal.
ALEC pushed for the "stand your ground" law in Florida, and in other states too.
The UK now admits it is compelled to support Karimov, the tyrant of Uzbekistan, in order to use the highway to Afghanistan.
The US is in the same boat.
Thus, another benefit of pulling out of Afghanistan will be that the US and UK can stop supporting Karimov.
How about suggesting to Craig Murray that he point the link there to avoid the paywall?
The European Union proposes to ban "Hacking Tools".
This adds insult (using "hacking" as synonymous with "security breaking") to injury (banning useful programs).
The Egyptian military has whitewashed its of women.
Uganda has declared tyranny by banning an important opposition group.
US border guards harass award-winning documentarist Laura Poitras every time she enters the US, trying to get her notes, footage and sources.
When she decided to note down their questions, they threatened to prosecute her claiming that her pen was a weapon. More dangerous than a sword, perhaps?
The Palestinian Authority arrested Palestinians for publishing criticism of it.
60,000 protested in France against nuclear power, in a "human chain reaction". The world's media took no notice.
The supposed recovery has not spared US workers from layoffs.
Another important Russian journalist was attacked on the street. When the thugs appeared, they did not seem interested in what had happened to her. This suggests the attack was organized by the state.
Everyone: call on China to release film-maker Dhondup Wangchen.
The UK asked the US to kidnap exiled Libyan opposition activist Abdel Hakim Belhaj and his wife, Fatima Bouchar. They were tortured first by the US government and then by Gaddafi's men.
Now the UK is considering a law to block courts from handling their case and similar cases, as the US has already done.
It was Dubya's men who ordered this monstrous evil, but Obama has a duty to prosecute them. Instead, he does everything possible to cover up their crimes, and thus makes himself responsible for them.
Unending copyright is creating a book desert, a period of many decades whose books are nearly all out of print.
It is clear this is caused by copyright because the desert begins at the year when books start to be under copyright today.
How this leads to their unavailability is not self-evident. My guess is that the hassle of determining who has the rights to an old copyrighted book, plus the risk of being wrong about the answer, plus the difficulty of negotiating with heirs who imagine their titles are far more valuable than they really are, have combined to lead publishers not to even think about reprinting an old copyrighted book, except for those so successful they were in print not long before.
If you live near the coast of the US, find out if you're likely to be flooded in the next few decades due to sea level rise.
Everyone: call on the governor of Louisiana to move the Angola 2 out of brainwashing conditions.
Here's what I put in as the personalized message:
Prolongued solitary confinement is a form of brainwashing. Whether Woodfox and Wallace are killers or not, they should not be subject to an inhumane punishment. Likewise, stopping prisoners from reading is inhumane.
Please put an end to this abuse.
US citizens: Tell Obama and Dodd, no to SOPA 2.
US citizens: call on Obama to regulate fracking for safety as he said he would.
Everyone: call for prosecution of the thugs who shot Kenneth Chamberlain, age 68, who was unarmed in his own house purely because his medic alert system had triggered spuriously.
Here's some more information, which includes evidence that the thugs are making false accusations against the dead man to justify their crime.
US citizens: sign this petition against the Big Brother "cybersecurity" bill.
Everyone: call on Oxford University Press to follow academic standards of citation and disclosure.
More information about what it's doing wrong.
Registration of web sites in Lebanon will make it easy to censor them.
Hey there, shock capitalism: here come the Olympic Games and celebration capitalism, which have almost the same effect.
Activists fight "cyber-security" bill that would give NSA more data.
Please help; see the urgent note published in this batch.
Five persistent right-wing myths exposed.
Specific reasons why US dissidents have reason to fear they will be labeled as "al Qa'ida supporters" and imprisoned. And US government representatives refused in court to say this was impossible.
A Greek man, age 77, shot himself in Syntagma Square because he was broke and had no way to survive. Protesters say the state killed him. I'd say the banksters did it.
In 1972, the Limits to Growth study predicted economic collapse around 2030. The world is right on track for it.
Uri Avnery: two viewpoints on the Passover story, viewed from weakness and from power.
Arizona is considering a law that would define a woman as pregnant since her last menstruation before conception.
By this logic, every fertile woman would be considered pregnant all the time.
Even aside from the law's attempt to reduce abortion rights, that may not be a matter of semantics. Women have been prosecuted for things they did while pregnant. Imagine combining this with that.
Prosecutors in the US are almost never punished, even for causing grave miscarriages of justice, such as concealing evidence that proved the innocence of accused people on trial and causing false convictions.
The US has an "economic recovery" for the 1% only.
Given how many unjust laws they have imposed, this is no surprise.
There is a campaign to pressure web sites to ban all prostitution ads, because some of them are placed by pimps that force women into prostitution.
The author says, "Many prostitution ads on Backpage are placed by adult women acting on their own without coercion; re not my concern". But they are the article's concern, since its demand is that Backpage stop publishing those ads too.
I am in favor of action against anyone that coerces or threatens prostitutes, but that can be done without harassing other prostitutes.
Obama's men raided the state-licensed Oaksterdam University medical marijuana training school.
The school's founder, legalization leader Richard Lee, says he will step aside from running it but that it won't close.
The UK is exporting Internet surveillance technology to other states that can also punish people for what they say or read.
Five Iconic Mountains Threatened By Climate Change.
Tunisia's Islamist government has used a law left over from Ben Ali's dictatorship to imprison people for mocking Islam.
Confirmation that Judge Garzón was singled out unfairly by the Spanish Supreme Court. This article (in Spanish) says that the listening to defendants' discussions with lawyers was approved by the prosecutor's office following a standard procedure that other judges have also approved.
Whether or not this policy is just, to punish one judge for doing this and not criticize the other judges who did it too (let alone change the policy) shows that the real goal was "Get Garzón".
Farmers around the world are resisting Monsanto's domination of farming.
Hungary's intellectuals are fleeing because anyone who criticizes the regime gets accused of some sort of crime.
Increased use of fertilizer in the past 50 years has increased emissions of nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas.
If only there were a way to collect it in balloons for the farmers to sell.
Tunisian thugs attacked a protest of unemployed university graduates, breaking the legs of some of them.
I am not sure whether there's any legitimate measure by which the state can give these graduates jobs. (Curbing corruption would help in the long term.) But even if they are barking up the wrong tree, they shouldn't be attacked for doing so.
Colleges are acting as collection agencies for US government student loans, blocking defaulting, penurious graduates from applying for further education or jobs.
The result is that higher education, for many low-income Americans, is just a trap.
If someone is in arrears on a loan for a bachelor's degree, it might be wise to think twice about his prospects before lending him more money for a Ph.D. Even if he is personally diligent and not to blame for his unemployment, he might still find no job with a higher degree; competition is often even stiffer at that level. But that's a different matter from blocking him from employment or furthert schooling.
A proposed anti-abortion measure in New Hampshire could leave poor women without medical care.
These fanatics are "pro-life" for fetuses only.
German officials discussed their surveillance trojan with officials from the US, UK and France.
I think this technique, like interception of phone calls, is legitimate as long as courts keep close control over it — something we Americans cannot rely on today. However, the vulnerabilities that make this possible can be exploited by others.
Despite Apple's profits, it still cadges handouts from nearly-broke city governments.
I wonder why Austin offered that subsidy. Did Apple say, "Another city offered us $20 million; pay us $21 and we will choose Austin instead"? I have no information about this case, but that is a common practice, and it has led local and state governments across the US into spending lots of money on "jobs programs" that make no sense except as handouts to business.
Airport security theater harms passengers directly, and everyone indirectly.
The claim of 500 deaths per year due to people who drive instead of flying in order to avoid TSA checkpoints is an extrapolation of an estimate that was made for 3 months in 2002.
I don't think we can extrapolate confidently from ten years ago to today. People have had time to get used to TSA inspections; meanwhile, the TSA has made them more inconvenient and offensive than in 2002.
Besides, that estimate presumes everyone who decided not to go through airline security drove instead. Surely some took a bus while others stayed at home. It would not surprise me if the actual number of extra fatalities due to the TSA were as low as 100 a year or as high as 1000 a year.
How the US Uses Sexual Humiliation as a Political Tool to Control the Masses.
Many Americans are adapting calmly to the current high price of gasoline, which has not yet equalled the 2008 peak.
These price fluctuations are annoying because they are unpredictable. The goverment should take the uncertainty out of the matter by telling Americans when the price of gasoline will be $5 per gallon (perhaps in 2014), when it will be $6 (perhaps in 2015), when $8 (perhaps in 2017), and so on. And then adjusting the gasoline tax to make prices follow the schedule.
Libyans rallied in Benghazi for disarmament of the militias.
The leader of the military coup in Mali has agreed to hand power back to civilian rule.
That still leaves the issue of how to deal with the Islamist butchers who have overrun the north of that country.
Saleh's replacement as president of Yemen seems to be no more democratic than Saleh.
People are not protesting him; is that because they like him better or because they are more afraid?
Jim Hansen says that limiting global heating is a great moral issue, and calls for a worldwide tax on carbon emissions to avoid disaster.
Amnesty International calls for the release of Bahraini political prisoner Abdulhadi Al-Khawaja.
He has been on hunger strike for two months, so he is probably only a few weeks away from death.
160 countries have signed the treaty to ban land mines, but the US is still holding out.
The US mainstream media gave widespread attention to Rep. Ryan's assault-the-poor budget but hardly mentioned the progressive caucus' Budget for All.
Airline pilots conceal incipient mental health problems because they fear losing their jobs. America's weak social safety net means they might end up on the street with their families.
In other words, this spectacular (though rather unlikely) danger of a pilot cracking up and crashing a plane is a small consequence of the large, everyday harm that modern American society does to the non-rich. The best chance to make sure our flights are safe is Occupy Wall Street.
Thousands of Haitians called for the resignation of their US-imposed president.
Tim Christopher's has been put in a special restrictions cell just for questioning whether his legal fund should accept donations from a certain company.
Christopher heroically blocked an oil drilling lease auction in order to protect the shore and the environment, at the price of two years' imprisonment for himself. Three cheers for Tim Christopher, and shame on President Obama for not pardoning him.
Leading climate scientists say it is too late to avoid 2C of global heating, and it will be hard to stop at 3C.
Jor-El, are you building your spaceship?
The US is considering rules to stop hired children from doing certain kinds of farm work that can be dangerous. These rules would not apply to children working on their family's farm.
Therefore, some Republicans have introduced the "Preserving s Family Farms Act" to block these rules. Typical Republican dishonesty, to block regulation of employee working conditions and raise "family farms" as a red herring.
If Republicans cared about family farms, they wouldn't have driven most of them bankrupt under Reagan.
Wall Street titans support financial speculation tax! (A late April Fool.)
The US needs a national conversation about ensuring that those legally eligible to vote are permitted to vote.
Preventing what Dubya did in 2000 to steal that election needs to be part of this conversation.
Users are suing Google about its new policy of combining the data it gets from all its services.
I find Google's argument, "The better to serve you with my dear," to be an insult to our intelligence. At the same time, I think this is a secondary issue. Whether or not Google combines all this data, the FBI can collect it all, keep it for 5 years (under Obama's new policy), and combine it. The problem is not that Google combines it too. The problem is that it is collected at all, by anyone.
The article errs when it says that Facebook uses only data that users did knowingly hand over. In fact, Facebook does lots of surveillance.
Corrupt police in the UK delete police files for those with money to pay.
This reminds me of the fictional "Google cleaner" in Cory Doctorow's story, "Scroogled".
Computers in cars can lead to exhaustive surveillance of drivers.
Note OnStar, being a cell phone in the car, implies tracking of the car's whereabouts at all times. License plate recognizing cameras also threaten to enable Big Brother to track all cars in the US. And if you carry a cell phone with you, that too tracks you and can be remotely converted into a listening device.
The EPA, with Obama's backing, has set limits on CO2 emissions from future power plants. But these limits are weak.
With these limits, future coal-fired power plants can only be built if they promise later to install facilities to capture much of the CO2 emissions — but that is future technology, a chicken that hasn't hatched. We can't depend on a promise that can only be kept if technology advances.
Limiting use of coal could limit the practice of mountaintop removal for coal mining, which destroys the environment and people's health. But not necessarily — the US might mine the coal and sell it for China to burn.
The proposed standards have other loopholes too.
This rule will do some good but it is just the first step towards a policy that would limit greenhouse gas emissions enough to protect us from their deadly long-term effects.
The United Arab Emirates shut down the National Democratic Institute and jailed its staff, just as Egypt did earlier.
The National Democratic Institute is to some extent an instrument of US foreign policy (it was involved in the US-sponsored coup in Venezuela), so perhaps shutting it down on those grounds can be justified. However, jailing its staff is shocking.
US citizens: call your senators to support a bill to raise the US minimum wage. Also sign this petition.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Tunisian thugs attacked a peaceful protest calling for aid for people wounded in the revolution and for the families of those who died.
Then, as thugs are wont to do, they made false accusations against the victims.
Canada plans to make its warrantless Internet spying bill even worse.
After Todd Stave rented a building to an abortion clinic, Christian fanatics began making threatening calls to him and his family. So he organized his friends into Voice for Choice, which gives the nastiest ones a mild taste of their own medicine.
Foxconn's truth is nastier than Mike Daisey's fiction.
Why did well-paid factory jobs with medical benefits and safety regulations get replaced with these sweatshops? Clinton together with the Republicans adopted laws and treaties to make it happen.
Zuckerberg is wrong: Americans do care about Internet privacy.
I urge Americans who care about privacy to do as I do, and refuse to surrender their privacy. How about starting by boycotting Amtrak until it stops interfering with passengers' privacy?
The CIA's source of torture ideas has been leaked.
Thousands of Bahrainis braved attacks by the government's suppression forces in support of an imprisoned protest leader who has been on hunger strike for two months.
The US government trained terrorists in 2005.
Specifically, the US military trained members of the Mujahideen-e Khalq, an Iranian opposition group which at the time was on the US list of designated "terrorist" organizations. Providing any sort of assistance to a banned group, even advice about how to respect human rights, is a crime according to the Supreme Court. Providing military training is unquestionably a crime — so will those responsible be prosecuted?
The Mujahideen-e Khalq were reported recently to have helped Israel kill some Iranian nuclear weapons development scientists. That's not exactly terrorism, but the organization may do terrorism also.
However, the US can't make this so by saying so. To ban organizations arbitrarily without a trial is tyranny.
A broad range of US organizations called on Congress to facilitate a diplomatic deal with Iran.
Islamists in Tunisia resist the abolution of the death penalty.
Does the support for the death penalty in the US come mainly from Christians? I think so.
A Tuareg uprising in northern Mali has morphed into a jihad to slaughter Christians (and probably any non-Muslims).
Don't fall for the line that Islam is a religion of peace.
Assad's shelling is sending thousands more Syrians into flight.
Mutant H5N1 bird flu virus papers to be published in full.
The US has agreed to hand over prisoners to the Afghan government, despite the risk they may be tortured.
However, if the US forces stay in Afghanistan until the day it is clear the Afghan government won't torture them, that would require them to stay forever. And the US tortures prisoners too. This transfer may be the least bad of a bad set of alternatives.
Users are organizing to pressure pinterest.com for changes its Terms of Service.
This is good, but this method of resistance can't do the whole job. In general, the users have much less clout than the site. People who believe they can't stop using Facebook will be unable to pressure Facebook this way.
I think we need laws to regulate these Terms of Service, just as laws regulate landlords' terms of service for leasing an apartment.
Arizona keeps almost 3000 prisoners in conditions comparable to brainwashing.
Google invites news sites to require visitors to fill out Google marketing surveys before they can see an article.
With few exceptions that occur rarely, I won't identify myself to any web site. Since I view web pages by having a server run the equivalent of wget, I wouldn't be able to fill out these surveys even if I wanted to. I'm automatically safe — but you are not.
Building a long-term campaign against war with Iran to oppose the long-term campaign for war.
Space exploration by humans is far more effective than robots.
Panamanian indigenous people fought with loggers cutting down endangered trees in their traditional lands.
The US soldiers in Afghanistan are cynical about the war. They know that the US is effectively funding the Taliban.
I expect they know of other reasons to be cynical, too. Why continue this farce?
The Secret Torture Memo Cheney Didn't Want You To See
Drug policy reform organizations condemn Obama's raids on state-licensed medical marijuana facilities.
With most Americans supporting medical marijuana, Obama nonetheless broke his promise to stop these federal raids. He's such a coward he will cave in to a mere shadow of a threat.
Nuclear power reactors planned for the US depend on government subsidy in the form of loan guarantees. They may get cancelled because the government conditions don't add up to enough of a subsidy.
Stopping Climate Change Is Much Cheaper Than You Think
Even if it were expensive, it would be better than the alternative.
CIA to UK: "Protect our torturers, or we will refuse to warn you about bomb plots."
The UK government seeks to adopt legislation to stop courts from revealing information about US torture practices. It wants to terrify Britons into supporting that legislation. So it announced that the CIA refused to give the UK details of a terrorist plot in the UK.
The plot apparently was not carried out. Either it was thwarted anyway, or it never existed. However, there are more important points to make here.
Assuming the CIA really did what was reported, that wasn't directly a matter of concealing torture practices. The CIA could have told the UK everything relevant about the supposed plot without revealing anything about torture.
Thus, this refusal was more in the nature of a threat: "change your laws to protect our torturers, or we will let you down when you need us." Some special relationship, eh?
That is, if these events really happened as reported. Maybe the CIA made up the plot so has to create an opportunity for the threat. Or maybe the UK government, which wants to protect US torturers, made up the whole story.
The only thing we can be sure of is that this does not excuse the torturer protection law that the UK government wants.
The Intelligence Bureaucracy That Ate Our World.
Bush muzzled the FDA because he didn't want to protect Americans' health if that would annoy business. Obama continues the practice, perhaps because he's afraid to do anything Republicans might criticize.
Improper and unsupervised use of the latest antimalarial drug is helping the malaria parasite develop resistance.
The lack of proper medical care for the poor can kill you even if you have the money to pay for your own medical care.
The WTO's appeals board upheld the decision that banning flavored cigarettes is a forbidden "barrier to trade".
For the WTO, childrens' lives are of no account if they get in the way of business. Americans, kill the WTO before it kills your children!
Obama's policy forbidding US diplomats to talk with Iranian diplomats puts the US on a track that almost assures war.
Proposing a "fair trade Israel" certification for Israeli products that don't benefit from or promote the occupation.
Education bureaucracy and No Child Left Behind are turning US education into a test-passing pressure piston.
Arizona legislators plan to limit the law to criminalize offensive Internet postings, but not enough — it would still be an unconstitutional attack on freedom of speech.
In the US, it is effectively impossible to buy soybeans which don't have Monsanto's patented genes.
A lawsuit charges the CIA is illegally ignoring FOIA requests.
Lakota activists have launched a hunger strike against the Keystone XL planet roaster pipeline.
If that pipeline is built, it will harm millions through global heating. Cancelling that pipeline is not enough to prevent planet-roasting, but it's a necessary step.
An investigation into the failure to show undercover infiltrator Mark Kennedy's tapes to protesters' defense team found nobody to blame.
The thugs probably feel they got home free. This will not do much to avoid future miscarriages of justice like this one, which was only exposed after some protesters were convicted.
Meanwhile, the UK thugs have found an excuse not to investigate how they shot Mark Duggan and sparked off riots.
The US will ease trade sanctions against Burma as a reward for holding an election in which opposition candidates can win.
Have the opposition victories been recognized by the state? I thought the official results would take a week to announce.
Obama plans to try accused Sep 11 conspirators in military kangaroo courts.
Like everyone accused of any crime, these suspects deserve a fair trial. Obama has shown he is soft on human rights, and also that he is timid when facing opposition.
Former New Orleans thugs were sentenced to long prison terms for killing refugees fleeing when hurricane Katrina flooded much of the city.
As usual, other thugs lied to help them cover up their crimes.
The US and Afghanistan are negotiating to give Karzai's forces control over night raids.
In this deal, which presumes US troops would remain in combat in Afghanistan after 2014, Afghan soldiers would be in charge of each raid.
This might make them less destructive to civilians.
The FARC released their last prisoners from the government forces, as a peace gesture.
Will the government release any FARC prisoners as a peace gesture?
The worst terrorists in Colombia are the government-linked paramilitares. They never had any principles except greed, and I doubt they ever took prisoners.
The U.N. Human Rights Council condemned Israel's colonization of Palestinian territories and launched an investigation into it.
United Nations Still Denies its Troops Brought Cholera to Haiti
The UN also pretends that its troops in Haiti are "peacekeepers" rather than occupiers meant to prevent the poor from electing who they wish.
International Criminal Court says it cannot investigate alleged Israeli crimes in Gaza because Palestine is not a state.
However, this might change if the General Assembly declares Palestine a state.
Prominent British theater figures called on the Globe Theater to rescind its invitation for Israel's national theater company to perform there.
By virtue of being the "national" theater company, it represents the state. It also endorses the occupation by performing in Israeli colonies in Palestinian territory. I think therefore that it is entirely appropriate as a boycott target.
Global heating episodes millions of years ago were caused by releases of CO2 into the atmosphere.
The UK LibDems are resisting Tory plans for secret trials.
The crucial issue about any such proposal is to ensure that the UK can be held accountable for complicity in torture by other countries (such as Pakistan, the US, and formerly Libya) which wink at torture and protect state torturers.
Many companies pay very little taxes in the UK and the US by shifting their profits into countries that have low tax rates for businesses.
Rather than changing tax laws to offer "US" companies an incentive to bring profits to the US without being taxed, the US should change its tax laws to tax some of those profits anyway. The existing system does a bad job for the 99%, so there is no reason to cling to it.
A man is being prosecuted in the UK for having the wrong "kind" of book.
UK rivers are drying up, making it necessary to catch wild fish and keep them alive in tanks.
Chinese thugs attacked and arrested farmers protesting land seizures. It sounds like they are taking lessons from the US thugs that attack and arrest Occupy protesters.
Thugs lie so frequently that their "side" of the story signifies nothing.
An interview with Bill McKibben about the planet-roaster pipeline, Obama, and strategy for ending global heating.
Voters concerned with the environment, with human rights, and with reducing the power of business do have a better candidate to vote for: Jill Stein.
Hana Shalabi, who went on hunger strike when imprisoned without trial, was released from Israeli prison but forcibly exiled to Gaza.
The Israeli army demolished the houses of Susiya on the grounds that the nearby colony was erected very close to it. Now the residents live in tents, so the army plans to demolish them too.
The US leaked a report that Israel had made a deal to use Azerbaijan's territory and airports as a refueling point for attacking Iran.
The speculation is that this was announced so as to impede an attack. Obama appears to prefer to avoid war with Iran, but he doesn't dare say so.
Noam Sheizaf: nothing can end the occupation of Palestine except putting pressure on Israel.
An Israeli human rights lawyer discusses Israel's slow movement towards explicit rejection of human rights. There were cases he took to the Israeli Supreme Court which he believes would now only uselessly legitimize injustice.
Haitian farmers are worried about US "donations" of hybrid seed that could result in long-term dependance.
US-imposed Haitian president Martelly received 2.5 million dollars in payments from a Dominican Republic senator.
That senator's construction companies won many contracts in Haiti, worth around $200 million, and these payments may explain how.
The US Congress is pushing the US into a commitment for war with Iran, listening to AIPAC and disregarding the American public.
It may be impossible to hold the next scheduled election in Afghanistan in 2014, so there is talk of advancing it to 2013 or postponing it (probably forever).
Considering how fraudulent the last election was, cancelling the next one would only admit what is already the case.
Isrealis "bought" a Palestinian family's home from a fraudulent "owner", then invaded it with the help of soldiers and forced the family out. Netanyahu gave the thieves permission to remain there.
A UK thug attacked a teenage prisoner in a police station.
His colleague who made a racist insult was not punished at all, while ordinary citizens have recently been prosecuted for such insults. Insults must not be a crime, but any public employee who says such things while carrying out a public function should be fired.
Several multinational companies say they will not buy from Asia Pulp and Paper, which destroys forests in Indonesia.
This is good, but there are plenty of others willing to buy that company's paper, if not in Europe and the US then in China. Stronger action is needed.
How to stop factory fishing ships from wiping out the fish off Senegal's shore.
EU rules to promote biomass energy are leading to cutting down of forests.
Cameron wants to repeat Thatcher's mistake: privatizing "council housing" which is built to rent to poor people.
Although the privatization works by selling these homes at subsidized prices to the people who rent them, they subsequently get sold again in the regular housing market, and become useless to the people that need council housing. Unless the state builds new council housing to replace what gets privatized, the result is that poor people once again can't find homes to rent.
Bhutan warns that the world's suicidal path must be changed.
Human activity is unsustainable in many ways: it cannot continue for very long as it is now. That alone does not imply it is suicidal; when one resource runs out, we may be able to use another. However, global heating is more or less suicidal for civilization even if some humans might hang on in a devastated world.
The ACLU found that different US cities have a hodge-podge of different rules about access to saved cell phone location data.
It is not enough to require a court order for access to this data. Phone companies should not be allowed to save it without a court order telling them to store it.
Indian thugs often disregard murder of women by their families or when they are accused of witchcraft.
Some state elected officials have complained to the US government about Obama's raids on state-licensed medical marijuana activities.
This is another one of Obama's treacheries.
Senator Franken is campaigning against surveillance by companies such as Facebook and Google.
It is most important to campaign against government surveillance. However, since the government can take whatever personal data these companies have collected, they are in effect arms of government surveillance too.
Europe is making progress on accountability for torture, but Obama protects the torturers in the US.
Thugs in Baltimore arrested children aged 8 and 9 in school and kept them in jail 11 hours.
The thugs said they handcuffed these children to protect themselves, apparently feeling they were threatened by the children.
These children reportedly fought other kids in ways that endangered them. Some action was called for to put a stop to that, but there was no need to make it so cruel.
However, the arrests of other children, for 'rudeness' and a harmless prank, were totally gratuitous. They simply reflect the general trend towards rigid cruelty on the part of US thugs and schools. The "zero tolerance" fad taught them that arresting children is the thing to do.
Putin shut Red Square because a protest was planned.
Everyone: call on Delaware to revoke Massey Energy's charter.
US citizens: cry "fowl" about the USDA's plans to let poultry companies do their own inspections of chickens and turkeys.
In the US: call on ALEC's corporate sponsors to end their support.
US citizens: phone your senators to call for effective regulation of toxic chemicals. Also sign this petition.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
US citizens: oppose the plan to give parts of the Tongass National Forest to a company for logging.
Israel's secret plan to expand its colonies in Palestinian territory has been exposed.
Honduras is about to ban emergency contraception.
Abortion is already banned. Thus, the coup-installed government which kills journalists and opposition leaders will kill women too.
The US and other countries are discussing aiding the Syrian rebels.
There is a report that the US and Turkey are already arming them.
I might support aiding Syrian rebels if they were in a position to win and if they were likely to establish a regime better than Assad's. I have doubts about the latter, because I'm worried that this might lead to forcing Alawites into exile (and it isn't clear where they could go). Meanwhile, I see no chance they could win. But they could get lots of civilians killed.
European and other factory fishing boats are overfishing the waters off West Africa.
Perhaps Europe should fund a coast guard for Mauritania.
Europeans Pushing Back Against Austerity.
Grading teachers and schools by their students' standardized tests puts pressure on teachers to improve their students' answers.
Convincing the public to support curbing global heating needs to show the public its own interest, not just polar bears.
The difficulty is that the disastrous harm to the public, causing tens of millions of deaths, is likely to take a few decades to materialize.
Neoliberal economic policies in South Korea ap pears as an economic success, but the people there are the unhappiest in the developed world.
Iraq's vice president, a Sunni that the government wants to arrest, has remained at large for months.
I don't know whether al-Hashemi was running Sunni death squads, but it was well known that Shi'ite death squads connected with a major Shi'ite party were operating in Iraq. I have not heard that al-Maliki had tried to arrest those Shi'ites. Thus, whether or not al-Hashemi is guilty as charged, the govermnent's policy is sectarian bias.
Aung San Suu Kyi's party claims victory for nearly all the seats that were contested in Burma's parliamentary by-election.
We will find out in a week whether the government counted the votes honestly.
Arizona is on the verge of passing India-style Internet censorship, or perhaps even worse.
The Department of Homeland Security says that Internet voting is "premature".
Understatement of the year?
CNN is stirring up war fever with imaginitive reports of an army of Hezbollah agents in the US waiting to attack.
US citizens: tell Attorney General Holder, stop lying about how the U SAP AT RIOT is being stretched.
I am disappointed that this campaign uses the propaganda term "Patriot Act", but I think it is worth supporting anyway.
That term isn't the law's official name. The law's official name is an acronym: the U.S.A.P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act.
If we are going to treat that series of initials as words, U SAP AT RIOT or PAT RIOT are just as valid as USA PATRIOT or PATRIOT.
US citizens: phone your senators to support a tax increase on millionaires. Also send a message through this page.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to support the Restore Public Trust Act, which would ban members of Congress from feeding data secretly to Wall Street.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
US citizens: call Senator Leahy to urge him to demand release of Obama's assassination policy.
In the Boston area: oppose the coming MBTA fare increase and service cuts.
Senators Who Voted To Protect Oil Tax Breaks Received $23,582,500 From Big Oil.
Now that prosecutors can't put GPS devices on people's cars without a warrant, they want to use cell phone location data without a warrant instead.
I think it is an injustice even to collect so much data about everyone. A state that collects massive data about everyone is a police state. A warrant should be required before the data can be saved for even a short time.
America Needs Healthcare, Not Health Insurance.
Mass privatization put former communist countries on road to bankruptcy, corruption.
Students were required by their schools to work in Apple factories in China.
Chubu Electric is building a 59-foot wall around a nuclear power plant, but seismologists say that tsunamis at that spot could be up to 69 feet.
The US has given approval for construction of new nuclear power plants, disregarding safety flaws.
The UK government wants a law to allow the state to monitor who people call and what web sites they visit, without even a warrant.
Weren't the Lib Dems opposed to such things? Why aren't they fighting it now?
Republicans want to destroy the USPS, and are using a phony deficit created by their unreasonable legal requirements as an excuse.
As global heating makes the Arctic Ocean navigable, oil spills from ships threaten the environment and we have no way to clean them up.
Dolphins are still sick from the Big Spill, and many kinds of arthropods in marshes have been badly hit.
Naomi Wolf explains how she has foregone interviews for fear of being put in prison without trial.
The English Language Arts Exam (a New York State required test, I think) is designed to trick the students.
Professor Enrique Dans has been sued by the Spanish music industry's organization, Promusicae, for saying it acts monopolistically.
I've read elsewhere that it is an officially established monopoly, which leaves no room for doubt that it acts monopolistically.
Others tell me that Promusicae also acts as the music companies' lobbying organization, comparable to the RIAA in the US.
Tar balls from the Big Spill are still washing up on Gulf beaches, and some have been found to contain deadly bacteria.
The US government is trying to frame Aristide for drug trafficking.
Obama has boasted about drone attacks in speeches, but his officials refuse to confirm in court that they really occur.
We can respond, "No-bama?"
This reminds me of his denialist response to the Wikileaks cables, claiming that they were still secret even though they had been published. And that reminds me in turn of how Dubya's official rejected "reality-based" thinking.
As regards war and human rights, Obama is not significantly better than Bush, and I doubt McCain would have been very different either. I an proud I did not vote for Obama, but that is a rueful kind of pride when I think of what he and Dubya have done to my country.
Guatemalan troops helped sugar plantations kick peasants off their lands, but now that it is obliged to give them aid, it says it can't find them.
Hungary has weakened judicial independence and shut down the main independent radio station.
ICANN plans to help governments seize domain names.
I think this increases the need for an alternative DNS system that does not depend on ICANN and that governments would find hard to mess with.
A Turkish variant of Islam, named Gülen after its founder, has got taxpayers to fund 130 religious "charter schools" in the US.
I would guess that Christian sects have done this too, but I don't have information about that.
Harry Potter e-books have no DRM, but they carry EULAs that teach children an antisocial lesson. As of today, the terms include this:
12.3 You may not and may not permit others to do any of the following things in relation to any book or extract: § sell, distribute, loan, share, give or lend the book or extract to any other person including to your friends (except in the limited circumstances explained at 12.1 above); § print-on-demand or copy or burn the book or extract to a device whose principal function is to act as a storage device, for example, a CD/DVD or USB stick;
That is not a good lesson to teach to children.
China has shut web sites which were used to spread rumors (apparently false) about a military coup.
Where truthful information is blocked, rumors will spread.
The UN rebuked India for allowing soldiers in Kashmir to arrest and kill arbitrarily with impunity.
Some Chinese from Suzhou who complained about confiscation of their land have been imprisoned secretly.
Thanks to a global monitoring system, it is effectively impossible to hide a nuclear test. This removes one objection to the US' signing the nuclear test ban treaty.
Shell claimed its untested technology would reclaim 95% of the oil spilled from a leaking undersea oil well, and the US government believed it.
Is the US government a sucker, or was it paid to believe, or what?
Iraq is threatening severe Internet censorship.
Global heating denial is a matter of faith, and is more or less resistant to rational or scientific argument.
The inhabitants of some towns near Fukushima can return home soon.
"Suspicious activity reporting" means keeping dossiers on anyone that someone feels suspicious about.
These are the root hairs of the sapling US police state.
Marwan Barghouti, framed for terrorism but still committed to nonviolence, calls for an end to Palestinian cooperation with Israel.
That cooperation was meant to prepare the path to peace, but since the Israeli state has no intention of following that path, it only maintains the occupation.
Facebook together with mobile apps makes it easy to find girls (or boys) that are currently somewhere near you, and learn a lot about them before you go meet them.
If Zoe found out that half the men who picked her up in the bar in the past month had found her through Girls Around Me — rather than meeting her there by chance — would that bother her? I don't know, but I see no rational reason why she should think that's worse than finding her via match.com.
Would it bother her to know some of them told a false story to start a conversation? I would find it difficult to tell even such a small lie, but I think most people would shrug it off as insignificant. ("Honey, I have a confession to make. When I met you at the bar, it was no accident. I just had to meet you.")
However, she might rationally be concerned that someone frightening will stalk her this way some day. It's not an everyday occurrence, but it happens at some point to a lot of women.
The law allowing imprisonment without trial is being challenged in court by people who fear their political activities might be grounds to imprison them.
If the law provided for punishing corporations without trial, they'd have a better chance with our current supreme court.
Genetically modified wheat emits a low level of peppermint odor to scare away aphids.
For aphids to evolve a defense against this, they would need to change their alarm chemical. I expect that would be difficult. They could easily evolve to ignore their alarm odor, if the selective pressure were high enough, but they'd pay a continuing penalty for that so the net result would still be beneficial.
I would guess that these plants will be pretty safe for wildlife, since peppermint has not caused an eco-disaster. But that is not certain. If this is widely adopted, the quantity of peppermint odor coming from wheat could vastly exceed the quantity that comes from all the peppermint in the world, and that could have unprecedented effects on wildlife — which might be disastrous or not. This would have to be studied.
Meanwhile, if the plants are patented they would attack the rights of farmers. And if they pollinate across distances, they would pollute other farms and put them in danger of being sued.
A student was suspended from school in Indiana for using a common expletive on Twitter.
This is one wrong piled on another. Even if a student wrote a "dirty word" on the blackboard in school, it has no business suspending him for that.
A Catholic school in the Phillippines is denying some students their diplomas for posting prank photos and wearing bikinis. Three cheers for the parents who have sued the school.
An audit of the Foxconn factories that build iThings found people working overtime and not getting paid for it, blocked fire exits, and plenty more.
Public pressure might eventually make Apple make Foxconn clean these things up. However, making Apple stop abusing its own customers will be more difficult.
Aung San Suu Kyi says the coming Burmese election is neither free nor fair.
A Republican attack ad used an edited audio recording attack Obama's health care bill based on something that never happened.
I think this amounts to a lie. It's also irrelevant to the issue, and an insult to people's intelligence.
Obama's anti-regulation team has blocked the regulation of several highly toxic chemicals for years. They won't even tell us which chemicals the EPA wanted to ban.
Obama created the anti-regulation team as part of his general right-wing policy of surrendering to business. I'd rather have an admitted 1960s Republican as president than this crypto-Republican.
US citizens: call for stronger EPA regulations to limit CO2 emissions.
US citizens: tell Obama to tax financial transactions and stop trying to interfere with doing so elsewhere in the world.
Recent breakthroughs in Pre-Zen studies.
Republicans are obsessed with abortion but have little interest in protecting fetuses from birth defects due to toxic chemicals from the environment.
Some Republicans want to punish pregnant women who do anything that hurts a fetus. Strange that they don't care about the problem when a factory causes it.
Republicans and Democrats ignore the one way to reduce health care costs.
The article says "all parties", but it really only talks about the Republican Party and Democratic Party. I think the Green Party has a better stand.
An eye-witness denied Zimmerman's claim to have been attacked and badly injured by Trayvon Martin.
Why are people presenting indirect evidence about whether Zimmerman's nose was broken? Wasn't he examined by a doctor after the event?
A Black Londoner has a recording to prove that a thug called him a "nigger", after strangling him.
It is an injustice to criminalize stating one's opinions — the UK's law against racist insults violates the fundamental right of freedom of speech. However, public employees who make such insults against members of the public in the course of their work should be fired, since treating people of all races as persons is part of their job.
As for the strangling, that was a crime of violence.
US citizens: Tell Congress to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to oppose broad "cybersecurity" bills that threaten to give the government total access to our personal data.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
David House is suing the US for confiscating his computer at the border, and the judge refused to dismiss the case, meaning that the government may have to yield up information about its motives.
The FBI told agents they could break the law.
I don't believe people are morally obligated to obey unjust laws, for instance laws against copying and sharing, or against gay sex, or against abortion. Some laws are valid; for instance, the law against murder is an obvious example. But that law is not the reason why murder is wrong.
However, when state agents break laws, the result is arbitrary rule. We can't tolerate that.
France: new biometric ID database found unconstitutional.
The US-backed pro-"government" militias in Somalia, and the Ethiopian troops, are killing and torturing prisoners.
400 Afghan women are in prison for running away from forced marriage, or for being raped.
The Taliban would be worse, but this is not good enough to fight a war for.
Senator Collins has introduced a bill to require proper safety tests for X-ray body scanners, and EPIC is suing to demand the same thing.
Ultra-orthodox rabbis in Brooklyn cover up sexual abuse of children, just like the Catholic Church.
A general strike against austerity in Spain shut down cities and major industries.
A pesticide related to some widely used ones damages bees' ability to navigate and to produce queens.
Thus, while it doesn't kill bees directly, it can wipe them out.
The UK says that Werritty defrauded donors to Fox's "charity".
This raises the question: what did Werritty tell Moulton the money would be used for.
Dictator Mugabe and his party get the money from Zimbabwe diamond fields.
Chinese companies do the mining, and also construction, and they abuse workers terribly.
One of Mugabe's youth militias have taken over some areas and has blocked their opposition deputies from coming to them.
As Occupy protested the New York thugs' violence, the thugs committed more crimes against protesters and reporters.
What the EU data retention directive really means.
Research into possibly dangerous variants of flu virus faces censorship.
The danger of mutated viruses is obvious. The danger of censorship is not as obvious but it too can affect millions.
Global heating will cause disastrous weather events around the world.
An airline pilot who went mad during a flight faces criminal charges.
What is the sense of prosecuting someone for madness? That cannot be deterred by penalties. His life is already ruined; isn't that enough?
The current House of Representatives is the most anti-environment in the history of the US.
The Republicans behave like an invading army, aiming to loot and destroy as much as they can get away with. Most of their attacks have been blocked, but from time to time the Democrats join them.
The Red Cross plans to use funds donated to help Haitians to build a hotel instead.
US citizens: pledge to resist the WTO when it attacks laws needed for purposes more important than mere trade policy.
Fukishima reactor 2 has been examined with sensors and the radioactivity is worse than expected. The other two damaged reactors can't be examined because they are even more radioactive.
An official panel found that the UK riots of last summer were caused by giving poor youth no stake in society and bombarding them with advertising for luxury goods.
The right-wing coalition has used the riots as an excuse to make things worse.
Exclusive: How the Sierra Club Took Millions From the Natural Industry Gasand Why They Stopped.
Brune ended the relationship after he became executive director of the Sierra club, but he tried to conceal the fact that it had previously existed, though he refused to tell an outright lie about it.
Although burning gas produces less pollution than burning coal, fracking adds to the greenhouse gas output and eliminates any advantage. This is in addition to polluting water supplies.
However, the deeper lesson is about getting close to companies to try to change their practices: the chances of success are small.
It would not surprise me if the same energy companies that cozied up to the Sierra Club and other environmental organizations, leading them to think this would result in passing a climate protection bill, were also funding lobbying to make that bill fail.
When the 57 countries of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation were prepared to offer Israel a peace deal, Hamas tried to kill it with a terrorist attack. But they went ahead anyway, and it was Israel that has rejected the offer for 10 years.
Israeli occupation policy is to continue the occupation of Palestine and block any long-term solution, because most Israelis like the status quo. Thus, Israel will not choose between "one state" and "two state" long-term solutions until international pressure such as sanctions makes continuing the occupation of Palestine cease to be attractive.
Israeli interrogation policy has a special exception to facilitate torture of "security suspects".
Israeli school textbooks convey prejudice designed to produce soldiers ready to dehumanize Palestinians.
It doesn't always work. Here are interviews with three Israeli conscientious objectors who will soon go to prison for refusing to serve in the army. One of them was formerly an officer.
This can be compared with stories that Palestinian textbooks use to dehumanize Jews (though reportedly that was corrected in the 90s).
Regarding prejudice in US textbooks, see the book Lies My Teacher Told Me.
Why did Israel break the Gaza truce and provoke a round of fighting?
Tel Aviv University Lecturer Anat Matar participated in a quiet solidarity rally for hunger-striking prisoner Hanaa Shalabi. Now the university is going to "investigate" Dr. Matar for this "illegal protest" at the request of a right-wing group.
It sounds a lot like McCarthyism to me.
If this is what academic freedom means in Israel, Israeli universities can hardly claim any sympathy against the Palestinian boycott call. If this is what democraticy means in Israel then there isn't much of it left.
The UN rebuked the Israeli law that would force the Bedouin of the Negevto settle in specific towns.
The European Parliament will vote on ACTA in June. All opposed, get active now!
Everyone: sign this petition to ban trade in rhino horns.
Just banning the trade won't magically end poaching, but it will make enforcement easier.
I wonder if it would be possible to develop a cheap convincing fake rhino horn that only laboratory analysis can distinguish from real rhino horn. All the sellers would sell the fake, and the rhinos would be safe.
Another idea is to inject a chemical that has harmful effects on humans into the horns of living rhinos. It would not hurt the rhino if it stays in the horn. (Of course, this could be verified first.) If this were done to 10% of the rhinos, it would scare off purchasers.
In the US: phone Walmart and say they should not sell Monsanto's genetically modified corn.
Walmart mistreats its workers in many ways, so you shouldn't buy from them. But you can phone anyway.
Activists in South Africa are petitioning a court to investigate torture in Zimbabwe.
Is the White House Hiding the Influence of Special Interests on Crafting Regulations?
Extrapolating from Obama's other behavior, I expect the answer is yes.
US states are still resisting the REAL ID plan to turn drivers' licenses into a national ID card.
India's government has arrested Tibetan activists , and sealed others in their dorms and neighborhoods, to stop them from marring a Chinese tyrant's visit with unsightly protests.
Other Indians should protest on the Tibetans' behalf, against China's treatment of Tibey and against the tyranny of their own government.
An undersea well near Britain is leaking various gases including methane and hydrogen sulfide. The gas could poison marine life, and could even cause explosions.
The engineers can't find where the leak is coming from, so they can't try to seal it. But the company says we should not worry; the situation is "stable" and there is no danger. That would be reassuring, if we could trust them to be honest if that were not the case.
Shell says it will be safe to drill in the sea near Alaska. That would be reassuring, if we could trust them to be honest if that were not the case.
The UK budget cuts have brought about another recession.
No surprise there.
The Pirate Party got over 7% of the vote in regional elections in Saarland, Germany.
Iran buys Internet surveillance equipment from a Chinese company which also resells US equipment.
Boston will have to pay Simon Glik $170,000 because thugs arrested him for making a video of them.
Mozambique has a boom due to fossil fuels.
The inhabitants certainly deserve what they get from the trickle-down, but this increase in fossil fuel extraction adds up to death for many of their grandchildren.
The Internet Society has hired Paul Brigner , a SOPA advocate at the MPAA.
If Brigner's job were managing a factory, perhaps it would not matter what views he expressed in his previous job. However, I expect his job will include speaking for the Internet Society, and I don't believe he can do so and be considered sincere.
Company computers that trust the company's self-signed certificates can snoop on and even take control of employee's interactions with web services — even their banks.
Walmart and many other big store brands get their workers through multiple layers of temporary agencies. They pay these workers piecework, speed them up on threat of being fired, use up their bodies, then fire them , while paying them peanuts.
These companies should be required by law to take direct responsibility for everyone working in their plants.
In a rejection of freedom of speech, the UK has sentenced a student to prison for making racist remarks .
Most articles are mysterious about what this "crime" consisted of — apparently to keep Britons in ignorance of just what might land them in jail. One article shows what he said:
His words are racist and nasty, and I don't agree with them one bit. But they do not threaten to hurt anyone. They only express hostility. It is tyranny to imprison people for mere insults no matter what the details.
The US "state secrets privilege" has been used to stop victims of US torture from suing, so as to conceal information about how they were tortured. Now we find it has also been used to conceal a stupid failure of intelligence against Afghanistan.
I wonder if that operation, had it been carried out, would have provided intelligence about the planning of the Sep 11 attacks.
Western governments have been secretly pressuring the Egyptian civilian government in waiting to declare an amnesty for the military rulers, accused of killing and arresting protesters.
In the US: participate in nonviolent direct action training April 9-15.
The Sierra Club accepted $25 million from the fracking industry, and its executive director falsely said it had not received them.
I wonder what they told themselves to justify their decision to accept secret donations from companies they should have been campaigning to stop.
Extreme weather events were more frequent in the last decade than before.
MPs in the UK want to censor search engines world wide.
The TSA had Bruce Schneier removed as a witness in a congressional hearing about the TSA.
Simple ways to defend the good parts of Obama's health care law.
These are indeed good aspects. The bad part of the law is the part whose validity is being challenged before the Supreme Court: the requirement to buy insurance from a private insurer. If the law is invalidated, it will be because of Obama's surrender to those companies.
The anchors of prominent news programs make so much money that they might well tend naturally to support politics for the rich.
The Federal Trade Commission is considering solving a tiny part of the problem of corporate surveillance of Internet use.
Poor Bangladeshis sold their kidneys and then did not get paid.
I am not sure that sale of kidneys for transplant is a bad thing. And if it were legal, the sellers might at least get paid. (Though in a country with high corruption there is always uncertainty about that.)
The death of coral in the Gulf of Mexico has been traced definitively to the Big Spill.
The US required cities and states to buy, from the banksters, billions of dollars worth of fixed-rate loans as a hedge against possible high interest rates. Then the US drove down interest rates to cater to the banksters, making our cities lose while the banksters win.
The result is thousands of jobs lost.
ALEC "scholarships" amount to illegal gifts to legislators.
Despite Rights Concerns, U.S. Plans to Resume Egypt Aid.
With the JOBS Act, Congress proposes to smooth the way for all but the largest companies to succeed — by defrauding their investors.
The WTO and NAFTA may be used to block the regulations needed to prevent more financial crises.
Yet another reason we must abolish these treaties.
US TV broadcasters are fighting tooth and nail against publishing who paid for political ads.
After Obama's betrayal of many Democratic Party pledges about civil liberties (many listed in this page), will the party maintain its pledges for the coming election, or abandon them?
US citizens: file comments in support of birth control coverage in health insurance.
US citizens: tell the FDA to ban Bisphenol A in food packaging.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to support the progressive Budget for All and reject the Ryan anti-non-rich budget. Also sign this petition.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Murder, mutilation, misogyny and madness are part of the nature of war.
Thousands of US atheists and seculars participated in the Reason Rally in Washington DC.
The UK plans to increase the retirement age along with life expectancy, so that people would be required to work until age 71 or even 74.
In a society with a labor shortage, this policy would make perfect sense. If more workers are needed, each person needs to work for more years. But what's the good of this in a society with high unemployment.
Former vice president Cheney had a heart transplant.
Now that he has one, does he feel sorry for the victims of war and torture that he is responsible for?
The London thugs attacked student protester Alfie Meadows, who needed brain surgery as a result. Now students protest that he is on trial instead of them.
Spain is entering the cycle where austerity produces a budget shortfall that demands more austerity.
A majority of Israelis oppose attacking Iran, and some protested in Tel Aviv to show their opposition.
Muslims in Pakistan kidnapped a Hindu girl and forcibly married her to a Muslim man. They also claim she converted to Islam.
The article says she was "forcibly converted", but that would require a mind control device. She may have been forced to pretend to convert.
When this was exposed, they intimidated her into denying it, or else lied and said she had denied it.
Pakistan has sentenced people to death for "blasphemy" because they criticized Islam. This arrogant disrespect for the rights of non-Muslims has been a strong current in Islam since Mohammed's day.
Thet Sambath, filming about the motives behind the Khmer Rouge mass murder, says that people connected with the crime are trying to kill him before he can finish it.
The thugs are a street gang, and they treat Occupy protesters as a rival gang.
Facebook has put an outrageous trademark claim on the word "book" into its terms of service.
To be dependent on Facebook, or any other specific company you could not replace with another, is to make yourself vulnerable to unbounded legal aggression. Don't be a fool — unfriend Facebook today rather than accept these terms.
Cubans who tried to protest for human rights, using the occasion of a papal visit, have been met with repression comparable to what Occupy protesters in the US received.
Meanwhile, in Mexico, indigenous human rights activists are being framed for murder.
The Republicans plan to gut the FCC and allow unbridled media concentration.
This is even worse than Obama's plan.
Internet Society Hires MPAA's Paul Brigner: Just Flip Over and Shake?
A general strike against austerity measures shut down Portugal's main cities.
As usual, austerity causes a further downturn and makes it harder to pay the debt, which predictably leads to need for a further "bailout" and more austerity. It is like putting ice on someone with hypothermia.
Obama's new forest service rules weaken the protection for wildlife.
The campaign to ban regular feeding of antibiotics to farm animals has won a court victory.
The EPA admits that its regulations about acid rain are inadequate, but refuses to tighten them anyway.
A right-wing politician such as Obama makes business his main constituency.
Indians have started a campaign against the government's harsh Internet censorship.
Malawi has adopted the unjust practice of criminializing insulting the president.
France and Ecuador both have similar unjust laws, as well as other countries that have been mentioned in previous notes here but which I don't recall.
Using civilian satellites to document Sudanese army bombing of civilians in South Kordofan.
Silent Spring Dawns Hot, Dry and Merciless.
The March heat wave broke thousands of temperature records across the US, day after day.
The heat wave is over in Massachusetts, because the weather still fluctuates. "If you don't like the weather in New England, wait five minutes", though this time we had to wait a few days. But that doesn't mean global heating has stopped. There will be more, worse heat waves, and they will become more frequent. And they will happen in summer and kill vulnerable people. By ten years from now it will be worse.
Don't let the temporary return of non-extreme weather lull you into a sense of security.
Sarkozy's plan to criminalize the mere viewing of Islamist web sites is running into some opposition.
Note how Sarkozy cites the prohibition of "child pornography" as a precedent for prohibiting access to a political opinion. The idea that this was the thin edge of the wedge is no longer just a theory. It is an excuse for censoring all sorts of things.
No matter how disgusting some works may be, censorship is more disgusting.
A Big Polluter whistleblower says that a BP deep sea drilling platform lacks the engineering documentation needed for safe operation. He says it is an accident waiting to happen.
Given BP's culture of cutting corners on safety, I find it entirely plausible that they are taking reckless risks yet again.
While Obama "expedited" part of the planet-roaster pipeline, protesters were put in a cage miles away, where neither Obama nor TV camera would notice them.
Just like Bush.
The US' problem isn't Big Government, it is government obeying Big Money.
Cory Doctorow explains the distortions of copyright in practical terms.
My article explains the conceptual distortions which facilitate the passage of unjust copyright laws.
When the thugs arrested Occupy protesters in New York, in some cases gravely injuring them, they galvanized the movement.
Computerized barter systems are spreading around Greece.
It is a nice fillip that it (probably) uses free software — though I can't be certain, because it says "open source", and there are a few open source programs which are not free.
But I also worry about the idea that the system knows about all the dealing.
Obama's new nominee for head of the World Bank has the support of Jeffrey Sachs.
Was it wrong for Mike Daisey to make false statements?
I think it was wrong. If he did not want to stick to the truth, he should have criticized a fictional company, or said "It would be easy for XYZ to happen", rather than saying presenting exaggerations as real events.
I also criticize movies that say "based on a true story" when they have willfully changed things.
The real facts about Apple products are sufficient reason to refuse to use them.
By contrast, there was nothing wrong with making false statements about himself to Foxconn in order to get evidence about Foxconn.
Fools are criticizing the French government for not predicting that Mohamed Merah would commit murder.
What they want is impossible; this cannot be predicted. There are surely at least 50 people who show such "warning signs" and don't engage in violence, for each one who does so. It would be tyranny to imprison them all, and short of that, there is not much that can be done which wouldn't be worse than the disease.
However, a few measures that might help could be possible. For instance, he could have been denied permission to have firearms.
US citizens: tell the IRS to enforce tax laws against right-wing political groups that pretend to be "social welfare" organizations.
US citizens: call on the SEC to require publicly traded companies to disclose their political spending.
The murders of union leaders in Colombia continue. Ricardo Ramon Paublott Gomez, a leader in the union in the Coca Cola plant, was shot and killed in January.
Sergeant Bales has been charged with murdering Afghan civilians.
The article says he is being kept in an "isolated cell". I hope he is not getting the same inhumane treatment as Bradley Manning. Bales is accused of murder, while Manning was heroic whistlebowing, but no prisoner (whether accused or convicted) should be kept in long-term solitary confinement.
Nevada is running out of water, and either Las Vegas or a farming region will have to do without.
The proposed pipeline will probably not solve the problem for long. Global heating will make the American west dry up even more, so the problem will come back. A solar-powered desalinization plant is the only sustainable way to keep Las Vegas supplied with water.
The banksters committed systematic crimes when they misled borrowers. Why won't Obama prosecute them?
New antidepressant drugs are worse than old ones, even ineffective. They were approved because of one-sided publication of studies.
In the arid land of the West Bank, Israeli colonists have taken dozens of natural water sources away from Palestinians.
US citizens: phone your senators to support S.2204, which would repeal tax breaks for big oil.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Everyone: support Greenpeace's campaign against Shell's arctic drilling.
Former IAEA officials accuse its current head of twisting the facts to suit the enemies of Iran.
This accords with a Wikileaks cable that said he was in cahoots with the US.
Remember when Boehner and the Republicans committed Congress to budget cuts cross the board if the Supercommittee didn't make a deal? Now he wants to exempt military spending from those cuts.
This shows his real goal: to impoverish most Americans.
Students at UC Davis have permanently shut a branch of US Bank on campus.
Sarkozi plans to criminalize reading, using one murderer as an excuse.
A thousand people rallied in New York to condemn the killing of Trayvon Martin.
Repress U, Class of 2012: Seven Steps to a Homeland Security Campus
Move your money (and organizations' money) out of the big banks, which not only caused the economic crisis and practiced massive fraud, they also invest in fossil fuels.
Kony 2012 shows what's bad about Kony and the LRA, but the other side isn't good.
There are a couple of points in the article I don't agree with. Even though the US government generally has a business-related motive for any action, including an intervention, that doesn't necessarily mean the action is wrong. On occasion, what's good for US business happens to be the right thing for other reasons.
Secondly, if the US tries to stamp out a kind of nasty practice in one place while supporting a government that does the same nasty practice in another place, that might support the conclusion that the US is hypocritical, but that doesn't imply that it is wrong in both cases. It could be doing right in the first case and doing wrong in the second.
Thus, a US intervention against the LRA could be justified (though it might also be unnecessary now in Uganda). But that doesn't justify US support for Uganda's government on other issues.
Alarming rhetoric in push for cybersecurity bills.
Scotts Miracle-Gro has admitted putting highly toxic pesticides in birdseed, despite warnings from employees, and has been offered a plea deal with a fine that's tiny compared with the profit it made.
Why haven't the managers responsible for falsified papers been prosecuted?
US citizens: tell Obama not to build the Keystone XL planet-roaster pipeline.
That page focuses on the minor issue of gasoline prices, but what's at stake here is avoiding global heating disaster.
Here's the message I used.
The Keystone XL pipeline would be a disaster for the world, since it would commit to use of a large reservoir of oil that produces more CO2 than ordinary oil. To use the tar sands oil would be an act of folly, and if you make the decision to do so, future generations will hold you resposible.
Some states, under the control of the reality denial party, are opposing teaching about global heating as well as evolution.
The biotech giant companies are distributing pseudoscience to children, making false claims about the benefits of genetic engineering.
NSA whistleblowers say the NSA can and regularly does spy on Americans' communications.
And when the NSA hesitates to spy directly on US communications, it gets Canada to do the job.
Is your refrigerator spying on you?
This is why I distrust the "internet of things".Iran and the IAEA came very close to agreement about inspections. The talks broke down because Iran refused to allow issues, once settled, to be reopened.
I think Iran's position was unreasonable. This is a matter of inspection, not criminal prosecution. I would expect nuclear facilities and possible nuclear facilities to be inspected repeatedly like elevators.
Congress and Obama plan to abolish large parts of stock regulation.
The EPA whitewashed fracking-related pollution problems in water in Pennsylvania.
Dangerously Vague Cybersecurity Legislation Threatens Civil Liberties.
Obama's plan to impose Summers as head of the World Bank has come apart.
Romney's advisor says he's like an etch-a-sketch: after he wins the nomination, he can "hit the reset button," and whatever he said during the primary campaign can be forgotten.
The FBI complains about how inconvenient it is to need a search warrant.
If they could investigate anyone with no limits, they could surely prosecute a lot more people — maybe everyone.
US citizens: send a comment to the FDA calling for mandatory labeling of genetically engineered foods.
US citizens: call on Congress to keep the interest down on student loans.
US citizens: tell Congress to move election day to Sunday.
This is desirable, but not enough. Another the reason minority groups and poor people don't vote is that Republicans have taken action to stop them. And another reason is that there is rarely anyone good to vote for.
Russia and China supported a UN resolution threatening some sort of action against Assad if he does not end the violent repression in Syria.
Israel tortures and brainwashes thousands of Palestinian children and teenagers, pressuring them into confessions that are surely often false. Over 90% of them suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder afterwards.
An Israeli right-wing group calls for accelerated demolition of Palestinian homes, effectively acknowledging the goal of ethnic cleansing.
Hana Shalabi, imprisoned by Israel without trial for a second time, refuses to eat and is close to death.
I hope I will have the courage to escape from prison this way if it is called for.
Occupy Wall Street tried to set up a camp in Freedom Park, but the thugs violently attacked them to enforce new rules set up to ban protest camps.
Cameraman ZD Roberts was attacked by New York Thug Department while covering an Occupy protest — for the second time.
Banksters' bonuses were cut by 25% and they can't make ends meet. They might have to quit the country club or take care of their dogs at home.
Bolivia under Evo Morales has made great economic strides by rejecting surrender to the corporatocracy.
Five Tips for President Obama on Nuclear Negotiations with Iran.
Large mines are being developed in Afghanistan, so it can pay for continuing occupation. Now we know what the war is for.
The mines won't be ready until 2024, so I suppose Obama will want us to prop up Karzai's corruption until then.
There is evidence to show Trayvon Martin's killer did not shoot in self-defense.
When sites require facebook accounts to post comments, it means that a person's comments on all sites can be tied together, which adds up to broad and intimidating surveillance.
The Internet tends to create near-monopolies, one for each activity. (Not every activity has developed a near-monopoly yet.) Due to the weakness of democracy today, these are not regulated like the old near-monopolies, the phone company and the post office. So they use their power to worm their way into controlling more and more activities.
British troops in Afghanistan are restricted in handing prisoners over to Afghan custody because Karzai's men are likely to torture them.
This creates a conundrum about what to do with prisoners when NATO troops are removed from Afghanistan. They cannot remain permanently in Afghanistan to guard those prisoners, they cannot take the prisoners out of Afghanistan, and they cannot hand them over to Karzai. Some of them are probably prisoners for no good reason, but not all.
Google has provided legal arguments to defend Hotfile (and Megaupload).
The UK's right-wing government will destroy planning regulations so that business can easily trash the environment and public health.
Privatizing infrastructure is a big handout to business with no benefit for the public.
That's why right-wing governments want to do it: they serve business, not the public.
Miami Occupier Tells of Violent SWAT Raid.
Tell the Toll Group to stop intimidating union supporters and stop firing truck drivers for taking an emergency bathroom break
Requiring drivers not to stop when they feel weak or sick is not only illegal, it could cause a fatal accident.
Obama has taken another step backwards in requiring contraceptive coverage.
No law allows the thugs to demand that prisoners give iris scans, but they are informally retaliating against Occupy protesters who refuse.
You'd think that fingerprints would be sufficient for the purpose of verifying that the intended person is being released. So why do they want iris scans at all? Perhaps so they can track people's movements on the street. So it is very important to refuse.
Staying in jail longer should be part of the aim of protests where one gets arrested. The freedom riders of the 60s aimed to fill the jails to the bursting point.
The Supreme Court gutted age discrimination law, so a bill proposs to reverse the decision.
Everyone: call on HP to stop providing biometric systems for checkpoints in the Israeli annexation wall.
China's large investments in solar and wind power put the US to shame.
A carbon emission tax could solve the US deficit problem, if only lunatic officials were not in the way.
Germany plans to push for renewable energy even while phasing out nuclear power.
The Syrian government is tricking users into visiting a fake YouTube site which installs malware into their systems.
I suspect that this only targets Windows (which is malware in its own right), and that you'd be safe if you use GNU/Linux. Does anyone know?
ITU control of the Internet would exclude civil society.
The US control of the Internet leads to injustices such as domain name seizures, but that doesn't mean the ITU would be better. Russia and China surely don't care about defending netizens from the US government and its masters in Hollywood. Obama and the US Congress would love to let the ITU adopt regulations comparable to SOPA, since then they could say, "We have no choice: the ITU has forced it on us."
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to oppose HR 5 which would shield hospitals, drug companies and doctors from responsibility for negligence.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
US citizens: tell US ISPs not to attack people who share.
Romney's old company, Bain, owns a Chinese company that makes surveillance cameras.
For something of very general use, such as pencils or general purpose computers, it is valid for the manufacturer to argue that it can't control how purchasers use them. That argument is inapplicable for surveillance cameras in China because repression is their most significant use.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to support legislation to discourage a war with Iran. Also sign this petition.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to oppose the cartel cable companies want to start. Also sign this petition.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Abdulhadi al-Khawaja, a Bahraini protester sentenced to life imprisonment for protesting, has been on a hunger strike for weeks.
In the US, people can be informally imprisoned for life with no trial at all, just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The UK has proposed another pointless criminal law against harassment or violence that drives someone to suicide.
This law would be ineffective in discouraging those practices. The perpetrators surely do not expect the victims to kill themselves (which is a rare event), so they will not worry about being prosecuted under this law, and thus will not be deterred.
An effective policy would have to address the violence as such, not just in the rare case where it leads to suicide.
Meanwhile, if Nosheen Azam said she feared being killed, doesn't that suggest someone else attacked her? That is a crime already, and this proposed law would not apply.
An Italian student attacked by thugs and arrested, just for taking pictures of historic buildings in London, has received financial compensation but no apology.
I think she would have been more true to herself had she held out for a public defeat for the thugs.
Austerity in Portugal appears to have killed 1000 people in February.
45,000 Americans die per year due to lack of medical insurance.
A Syrian official defected and published documents showing Assad's personal involvement in plans to crush demonstrations.
Persecution of homosexuals is sweeping across Africa.
The corporate-run World Water Forum is the first step in a plan to privatize the natural world and abolish the right to water.
If the natural world is privatized, poor people will be compelled to sell their shares (if they got any in the first place), and then will have no water. It is one way to do population control, but not a humane way.
After the UN-approved intervention in Libya to protect civilians was stretched into a drive to oust Gaddafi, the Russia and China are unwilling to approve interventions to protect civilians.
Five accused terrorists were shot dead in Bali.
The alleged terror plot is plausible, but the fact that all the accused participants were shot dead is fishy. It suggests that the thugs wanted them dead to avoid putting them on trial to demonstrate their guilt, as the US apparently did with Osama bin Laden.
Thugs in China unofficially imprison people for ransom in unofficial jails if they try to file political complaints.
Israel has held Ahmad Qatamesh prisoner without charges for a year after taking his family hostage to get ahold of him.
He is apparently being used as a political football.
Meanwhile, this shows the Palestinian Authority also holds people prisoner without charges for political reasons.
Many video games are developed as propaganda, either for specific countries and causes, or for war in general.
The UK's treasury-robbing government wants to privatize existing roads.
60 women in Alabama have been jailed through a law that equates fetuses with children.
It is not totally unreasonable to punish actions that risk causing the birth of a defective child. Unless it is very severely damaged, it will be a person after it's born, so if it is impaired then, a person will have been harmed. However, this must be done by laws that explicitly concern fetuses, not by equating fetuses with children.
The EFF is looking for prior art to abolish a software patent that is being used for extortion against many US cities.
I wish them luck — please help if you can — but eliminating software patents one by one is as useless as trying to eliminate malaria by swatting mosquitos. Every software patent is a threat to the field of software, and we need to get rid of them all at once.
endsoftpatents.orgA radical artist who doesn't want to make art super-expensive for the 1% got funding with Kickstarter.
A copyright collecting organization in Belgium wants libraries to pay for allowing volunteers to read books aloud to children.
These libraries should strike back: they should tell the volunteers to read only public domain books, and post signs condemning the collecting organization and calling on people to oppose it.
Oil company executives face criminal charges due to an oil well leak off the cost of Brazil.
It is not clear from this article why individuals should face charges. The mere existence of a leak should not be a crime. However, if they directed workers to take reckless risks like those that led to the Big Spill, that would justify charges.
The US' failure to charge anyone for the Big Spill simply shows that Obama is in the oil companies' pockets.
It must take special talent to be in so many pockets at once.
How and why Wall Street is responsible for US education cutbacks.
Papuan independence activists have been convicted of treason in Indonesia for a peaceful protest, and sentenced to three years in prison.
The US plans to threaten protesters with 10 years in prison.
The dictator of Belarus executed "terrorists" convicted after an unfair trial.
The US also carries out bogus trials.
US citizens: call on the US to protect the sea life in Bering sea canyons.
US citizens: call on state attorneys general to defend the state election laws that limit corporations' election spending.
US citizens: tell the FCC not to allow more media consolidation.
US citizens: tell Republican presidential candidates you don't like their talk about war.
The European Court of Human Rights approved kettling, at least in one case.
Dharun Ravi was convicted of a crime for putting up a webcam in his room and watching his roommate. And then teasing or insulting him about being gay.
Ravi was charged with "intimidating" the roommate. Hostile teasing is mean, and people shouldn't do that, but merely insulting someone should not be a crime. If he made threats, that should be a crime. I don't know what Ravi actually said.
As for the webcam, that was just a prank.
Amazon is demanding that small publishers sell at a loss.
One ironic point about the article is that it treats the Amazon Swindle as a legitimate product, taking no notice of the way it attacks readers' freedom and should never be used.
The small publishers should start selling without DRM, and should let independent book stores sell copies for them.
The UK will allow information on all drivers, including their credit card numbers, to be stored in an Indian outsourcing company.
This decision means Britons will have fewer jobs and less privacy, but a corporation will make more money.
Note that the issue exists because of the decision to implement a congestion charge based on general surveillance. It could have been implemented another way.
The UK wants cameras at filling stations to detect uninsured cars and refuse to let them get gasoline.
Given the UK's austerity, these drivers won't be able to buy insurance. What they will do is arrange for their friends to buy gasoline for them, which they could then siphon from one car's tank to another.
The same system spies on everyone, so everyone should object to it. As for detecting drivers that don't pay, an old-fashioned security camera whose images are viewed only when there's a reason would suffice for that.
A study shows babies grow up smarter if they are fed whenever they are hungry.
The US has sold irreplaceable helium for party balloons, and now it has become permanently scarce.
Coptic Christians in Egypt feel threatened by Islamist extremists.
They used to support Mubarak for his protection. Supporting the oppression of most people can't be justified, but Muslims must recognize religious freedom, which includes the freedom to argue for or against any religion.
Venezuelan thugs provoked a scandal by shooting and killing a diplomat's daughter.
The thugs in Venezuela have checkpoints all the time on major highways between cities. They check everyone's papers, regardless of whether they suspect the people of anything. They don't usually kill, but often they arrest people demanding fines which are effectively ransoms/bribes. They even do this to government officials (an official I know told me this happened to him). The problem is older than Chavez's presidency.
Another Tibetan self-immolation sparked a large protest march.
It is typical of oppressive regimes to attack dissidents protesters with distracting side issues. When China says that these protests are encouraged by "supporters of the Dalai Lama", they might as well say "Tibetans".
Politicians are whipping up public jealousy of public school teachers.
The US military has a ray that causes people to feel an unbearable sensation of heat — at a distance of half a mile.
Just like drones, this will find its way to the thugs, who will find it even more fun than pepper spray for hurting people that want to practice democracy.
During the great Irish potato famine, there was plenty of food in Ireland, but landlords exported it and starved the poor.
This offers a lesson for today, with a billion people hungry and another billion overweight.
Uri Avnery: Israel unleashed a battle in Gaza with a targeted killing of someone easy to replace. Was this justified, or even advantageous?
In general, it is legitimate to kill leaders of an enemy army in war. But not when a truce is holding.
Indian police have linked the bomb attack against the Israeli embassy to Iranians.
This doesn't surprise me; it confirms that the attacks were tit-for-tat.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter saying to sign Chellie Pingree's letter saying don't use ammoniated meat ("pink slime")in school meals.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
US citizens: call on the US delegation to the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission to protect tuna from destructive fishing methods.
US citizens: phone your senators to oppose McCain's cybersnooping bill. Also send them messages through this page.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
The overfishing of sharks resulted in destruction of scallop fisheries.
Senate Bill Could Roll Back Consumers' Health Insurance Savings.
The US-Korean free exploitation treaty was rushed into effect before the Korean election, in which the opposition party is expected to win thanks to the strength of public disapproval of the treaty.
The opposition should cancel the treaty immediately, rather than allow the US to play for time by "negotiating" changes.
Voting fraud in the European Parliament blocked copyright reform.
Denmark blocked access to Google and Facebook saying they had "child pornography".
Censorship attacks basic human rights, and must not be tolerated except in an emergency such as war.
The World Water Forum has become a corporate trade show, so activists have set up the Forum Alternatif Mondial de l'Eau to organize to implement the recognized right of access to water.
In the US: call on Rush Limbaugh's advertisers to stop funding his show.
A court in India ordered all the country's ISPs to block access to sharing sites.
At the corporate-run World Water Forum, the hot idea is digital ration cards for water.
Rather than condemn the landless poor to flee in search of a place that will let them have water, it would be far more humane to discourage people from giving birth to them. The world needs subsidized contraception and subsidized sterilization.
The NSA snoops on effectively all of Americans' digital and telephone communication, and records it permanently.
A former manager says we are very close to a "turnkey totalitarian state".
Do you find it hard to believe Obama would intervene to keep a journalist in prison in a foreign country?
A Republican congresscritter wants to sell off national parks.
Privatizations are generally arranged to benefit businesses, so the state doesn't get a fair price. And that's just the beginning of how the citizens lose.
Sign this petition to stop bailing out AIG and start taxing it.
US citizens: tell officials to extend whistleblower protection to the Public Health Service and NOAA.
By 2050, conventional pollution is expected to kill 3.5 million people per year. I say "conventional pollution" because that figure does not count greenhouse gases and the effects of global heating, which if not stopped will eventually kill tens of millions per year, but perhaps not until later than 2050.
Sabu did more than just inform on a cracking group — he set it up, effectively acting as a provocateur. He recruited people to be crackers so the FBI could punish them.
In the UK, support for fracking is "growing rapidly in some political circles", but not in the public.
I think that is corporate money at work.
Iraq's implosion after conquest illustrates what intervention in Syria might lead to.
Witnesses in Afghanistan insist that more than one soldier participated in the latest massacre.
I wouldn't give unreserved trust to the US officers' claims. However, witnesses can easily be mistaken about people they saw, unless they already knew and recognized those people.
The Congolese Army is preparing an offensive against Rwandan gangs and the LRA, but it might kill thousands of civilians instead.
Two senators say that the US government is stretching the unjust provisions of the U SAP AT RIOT act, and doing so for purposes that are not even crucial for national security.
Republicans want to keep bodies taboo.
This promotes anxiety that makes people unnatural with other people's bodies.
Terrorism, Money, the Internet, and ICANN.
We must stop accepting "terrorism" or "child pornography" as excuses for warping technology into a system of oppression of everyone.
Two Pakistani UN soldiers have been convicted of raping a Haitian boy.
It is bullshit to refer to the UN troops as "peacekeepers". Peacekeepers prevent war from breaking out between two armies. That was never the case in Haiti. What this UN mission is intended to prevent is an outbreak of democracy.
Israel won't connect Palestinian villages to the electric grid, so Europeans funded solar power for them. Israel plans to demolish the solar panels because they don't have permits (which Palestinians basically can never get).
I agree with the UN official: the goal of this harrassment, which extends to many other areas of life, is to drive Palestinians off their land.
Progressives must proudly repeat the arguments for abortion rights and contraception, not shy away from these issues.
Obama's health care program has provisions that increase costs and provisions that decrease costs. By considering the former and ignoring the latter, Republicans make false attacks.
False statements by Republicans are hardly news in general. What's really noteworthy is that a national health service, such as most developed countries have, would save tremendous amounts. Of course, Republicans oppose that.
Republicans want to go in the opposite direction by privatizing Medicare.
Pakistan has denied permission for further US drone attacks there.
Haitians are ready for democracy, but the US won't allow it.
Americans judge Obama on gasoline prices, and Republican war talk raises gasoline prices — leading Americans to support those Republicans.
Wanting low gasoline prices is foolish, short–term thinking, but I am not surprised to see that from Americans.
Karzai demanded that the US pull its troops out of Afghan villages.
If the US does not obey, that will imply that in fact the US is occupying Afghanistan.
Pumping water from aquifers for farming in China emits more CO2 than New Zealand.
When the aquifers are depleted, where will they get water? And how much CO2 emissions will that require?
MPs accused Shell and Cairn of totally inadequate emergency plans for undersea drilling in the Arctic.
Too bad they have the US government on their side.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to support HR 780, which would end funding for the war in Afghanistan except for withdrawing US forces.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Everyone: call on the Governor of Kansas to oppose the "Let Doctors Lie" Bill, designed to encourage them to trick women into having babies with birth defects.
The US senate rejected an amendment that would have allowed undersea oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildife Refuge and elsewhere, as well as authorizing the Keystone XL planet-roaster pipeline.
Keeping that oil in the ground is necessary to protect species all around Earth, including humans.
Sri Lanka's shameful record on detention without trial.
It carries out assassinations too.
The US could be a force for good in the world if its own policies were better than these.
PayPal has clarified its censorship policy, which it will apply book by book.
The total amount of censorship will be much less, but it is still wrong to censor by restricting the act of payment.
A PAC is campaigning to unseat Rep. Lamar Smith, enemy of Internet users.
(The host name is humorous but it is a real campaign.)
Major US ISPs are setting up to punish their clients based on complaints from Hollywood and the record companies.
This plan, which was arranged by every Internet users's enemy, Obama, takes advantage of the fact that ISPs are allowed to terminate anyone's service more or less at will; users have no right to continued service. That is a general injustice of the Internet today, and this is just one manifestation of it.
More info about the school that demanded a girl's Facebook password.
Phosphorus in Chicago's sewage fuels the dead zone at the mouth of the Mississippi.
Thoreau's wildflower records lead to an estimate of 2.4C of warming since 1850.
Arizona is considering a law to allow women to be fired for using contraception.
Yemeni journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye is in prison for revealing the truth about a US bombing, and Obama seems to want this to continue.
On fundamental human rights issues, Obama is little different from Bush. Both deserve to be tried for conspiracy to commit torture.
Some unknown technology company has challenged the validity of a warrantless FBI search of records about individuals.
Understanding national security in the broad sense, these searches threaten it more than the terrorists (and dissidents) that the FBI investigates.
Wall Street's shift from long–term gain to short–term greed started in the 80s.
US health care in 2037 could cost more than the median income, if current trends continue.
The fix should include a national health system, which can cut costs by 50% while providing equally good service.
The US is keeping lots of secrets about Bradley Manning's trial. Reporters have petitioned for publication of official steps.
If we don't cap global heating very soon, melting permafrost will emit large amounts of greenhouse gas.
2 degrees C of global heating is probably enough to make Greenland's ice sheet begin melting away irreversibly.
The melting would take centuries, but it would be a world–wide disaster nonetheless.
Many economists have implored Obama to support, not oppose, the European Union's emission–trading scheme for airplanes flying in and out of the EU.
It is insane to fight against efforts to reduce global heating. Doing so is the sign of a government so subservient to business that it will follow a suicidal path on command.
Tar sands oil extraction will emit even more CO2 than previously estimated, by destroying peat bogs and releasing their stored carbon.
Peat bogs are carbon sinks, so their loss will increase subsequent global heating too. This means that pledges to restore the land as it was are bogus (greenwashing), since they do not plan to replace lost bogs.
The world has plentiful supplies of fossil fuels, but we dare not burn them because it will roast the Earth.
Citizens of Massachusetts: phone your state legislators to support extending the Bottle Bill (required deposits on drink bottles) to other kinds of bottled beverages. Also sign this petition.
US congresscritters have signed letters calling for suspension of aid to the coup–installed government in Honduras.
How the US lost the 40-hour work week, and how to bring it back.
The best way to buy a congresscritter is with an offer of a million dollars a year job after leaving office.
The revolving door applies to other government employees too.
Democrats in Congress asked Obama to support Jeffrey Sachs as head of the World Bank.
However, Obama seems to want Larry Summers, who advocated giving the banksters what they wanted.
In the US: rally at Walmart stores against selling Monsanto's GMO corn.
The Syrian opposition obtained and leaked Assad's private emails.
The messages show he had contempt for the "reforms" he announced. However, the article does not say they include orders to commit violence against Syrians, so they shed no light on that.
Assad received advice not to attribute a bombing in Damascus to al Qa'ida, but that doesn't indicate whether the bombing was really carried out by al Qa'ida.
Greg Smith quit Goldman Sachs and said that the company has a culture of preying on its clients.
This demonstrates the need for a strong Volcker Rule to stop banks from doing this.
The International Criminal Court has issued its first conviction: Thomas Lubanga was convicted of forcing children in the Congo to fight.
The biggest problem of the ICC is that the US, since Bush days, has opposed it and gone all-out to weaken it. This is because Bush (and Obama I presume) didn't want to be accused there of torture and other crimes against humanity.
US military leaders say that going to war with Assad's army is a very bad idea.
There are reports that the US is secretly arming the rebel underground. That might be legitimate if they could win — and if it were clear that most Syrians prefer them to Assad, something which is not certain. However, if they can't win, arming them only leads to useless casualties.
Why We All Need to Oppose the TPP.
International trade benefits every country in terms of increasing its GNP. But if the country doesn't have a strong democracy, the 1% will snap up the increase and leave most people with only a cut in pay. Thus, the arguments for increasing international trade are valid only so long as it doesn't weaken democracy.
However, every "free trade treaty" attacks democracy by enabling businesses to make states race each other to the bottom.
Protesters showing "Bust up Bank of America" on their bras were arrested and violently attacked by New York thugs, then kept in a freezing cell for hours.
But they are not about to give up.
There was a large spike in infant deaths in the US northwest in the weeks following the Fukushima disaster.
The article covers several topics; you need to scroll through it to reach this topic.
US citizens: call on Obama to pull US troops out of Afghanistan this year.
Bassem Tamimi`s trial clearly shows that nonviolent protest organizer is being framed.
The recent outbreak of fighting in Gaza started when Israel assassinated two militant leaders, saying they were planning an attack in Israel, and that they were responsible for a previous attack. But that seems to be false.
Israeli soldiers shot people in a funeral procession.
The army says these were "warning shots". If they couldn't avoid hitting people with warning shots, that was incompetent. If they didn't try to avoid hitting people, that was dishonest. Which was it?
In the Palestinian village of Seefer, people must spend an hour crossing a checkpoint on foot to get water.
They cannot drive cars, and they cannot have visitors.
The motive for these restrictions is to drive them off their land, which is also why they stubbornly refuse to leave.
Noam Gur decided to go to prison rather than participate in repression of Palestinians.
The US and Europe are no longer the main consumers of oil, and the other users are much more efficient. This means the US will need to make radical improvements in efficiency or be priced out of the market.
US citizens: oppose oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
US citizens: call for AIG to start paying taxes again.
In the US the police now require a warrant to attach a GPS tracker to your car, but San Francisco has invented another method to get it: inviting you to pay for a parking space through the Internet.
For "Internet of things", read "massive surveillance".
Shell's wacky solution to Arctic oil spills is to train dogs to sniff spilled oil.
If they were looking for an ounce of spilled oil, that would be a reasonable method to find it. However, if the problem is a hundred tons of oil broken up into tarballs scattered along miles of shoreline, they wouldn't need a dog to find them. It would suffice to dig up any foot of the shore to find some. But they wouldn't pay for this to be done.
The London Olympics will leave London with a permanent burden of new surveillance systems, repression, and debt.
Nowadays, the Olympic games are a handout for corporations. If your city is proposed as a site, fight back before the decision.
The World Water Forum has been designed to help transfer the world's water resources to the wealthy, and to undermine the human right to water.
Stating that access to clean water is a human right is vital for stopping companies from buying up all the water and leaving none for the poor. At the same time, we cannot eliminate real limits on resources by proclaiming human rights to use them. If we want fewer regions of the world to be under water stress in 2050, we must subsidize and encourage contraception.
US veterans who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan will return their medals to the NATO summit to state their rejection of those wars and demand a pull-out from Afghanistan.
Nitrates from fertilizer are contaminating the drinking water in parts of California.
Occupy Education debated the Gates Foundation about its standardized-testing approach to education.
India granted a compulsory patent license for cheap manufacturing of an anti-cancer drug.
The WTO rules permit compulsory licenses, but the US has persistently pressured poor countries to let people die rather than exercise that option. Al Gore was doing this job as vice president in the 90s.
After the massacre that killed an Afghan family, the US mainstream media are worried that the war may suffer.
Afganistanis expect that the US will whitewash the crime.
It has done so in other cases.
This massacre differs from many others in that the chain of command did not give an order for it. The direct responsibility falls only on the person who decided to kill. For the other massacres, the US government shared in the direct responsibility.
At another level, the war is responsible for all, because it is inevitable that such crimes happen occasionally in a war. Soldiers are under great stress, and some will crack. Many others find excuses to kill wantonly in accord with the rules of engagement, so that they won't be punished. This is why it takes very strong reasons to justify a war.
Slovak voters rejected the corrupt government that privatized their social security, but right-wingers still want to do this in the US.
Several states have passed laws allowing obstetricians to intentionally lie about of birth defects that they see when examining a fetus.
The goal of these laws is to trick women into having babies with birth defects. Wouldn't you like to have a birth defect?
The UN rapporteur on torture has accused the US of "cruel and inhuman" treatment of accused whistleblower Bradley Manning.
He also accused the US of blocking him from finding out whether Manning was tortured.
It looks like Gaddafi funded Sarkozy's previous election campaign.
What an ingrate he was, supporting the Libyan rebels! Now he has no Gaddafi to turn to. ;-}
Tony Nicklinson, who is almost totally paralyzed and can communicate only by blinking, has petitioned for help in killing himself.
I suppose he would jump at the chance to live a normal life, but there is no way to give him that. The question is, should he be forced to endure years more of "dull, miserable, demeaning, undignified and intolerable" life, in which he cannot achieve anything?
Japanese officials were warned the day of the earthquake of a danger of a meltdown at Fukushima, and covered it up.
In towns near Fukushima, children are not allowed to play outside. People fear to air out their futons and won't buy local vegetables.
Is this fear irrational? In one sense, yes. I suspect that children playing outdoors in cities near Fukushima are at more risk from car accidents than from radioactive fallout. (But I don't have real figures, and it would be interesting to check this.) In another sense, no. After a series of lies from TEPCO and officials, parents have a rational reason to distrust what officials and their scientific employees say now about the amount of risk.
Obama wants warrantless access to cell phone location data. This article argues that this should be unconstitutional.
However, I think it is not enough to require a warrant for the government to access this saved data. It should not even be collected without a warrant about an individual.
400 New York professors call for New York's thug commissioner to be fired.
New biometric ID cards in France attack the rights of every citizen.
Tanya McDowell faces 5 years in prison for "stealing" access to a better public school.
The root of the problem is the fact that cities in most states fund their schools from local property taxes. Thus, poor people's children get a worse education.
Glyphosate, aka roundup, has damaging effects on cattle that eat "roundup-ready" corn, and makes the corn vulnerable to disease even though it doesn't kill the corn directly.
It is wiping out monarch butterflies by killing off the milkweed that their caterpillars eat.
That article links to another article saying that glyphosate residue hurts people's intestinal bacteria.
Bill Gates claims that GMOs are the solution to world hunger, but he's ignoring a study which says that they don't help.
Today's GMOs are the agricultural equivalent of proprietary software. Perhaps that's why Gates wants us to use them.
Greg Palast reports on falsified safety records at the Shoreham nuclear power plant on Long Island.
There is some confusion in what he says about the strength of the earthquake in Japan. An earthquake at 9.0 on the Richter scale involves 10 times the shaking amplitude as a 8.0 earthquake. Anyway, it was actually the tsunami that caused the nuclear disaster. (Of course, underwater earthquakes often cause tsunamis.)
But this does not invalidate the overall point. Wikipedia says a study in 2008 warned that Fukushima Daiichi could be damaged even by a 7.0 earthquake, but it was ignored. TEPCO also refused to take precautions against large tsunamis despite being warned. This sustains Palast's main point.
Republican candidates say the planet-roaster pipeline is needed to reduce gasoline prices. However, the pipeline presumes high gasoline prices, since otherwise it won't be profitable.
High prices are needed to encourage conservation measures, including improvement of mass transit and more efficient cars, as well as renewable energy provision.
These candidates' policies would increase both the supply of oil and the use of oil. Evidently their real goal is to increase oil companies' profits, and never mind the damage done.
The UK government wants Europe to consider nuclear power "renewable".
Amerindian groups are suing to block a large solar power development in the Mojave desert.
I can well believe that the planners of the project failed to consult local people properly. That seems to happen frequently. However, the claims stated in the article seem exaggerated and bogus. I am skeptical that anyone in the Mojave Desert ever heard of Aztec gods, except via modern books about them. The claim that a horned toad appears at the center of the Aztec "calendar stone" seems strange too.
Nobody knows where the Mexicas (later called Aztecs) lived before 1100 AD or so. Their myth said they started migrating from a place called Aztlan, but if it ever existed, it can't be identified now with any real place. It's not clear those migrations really occurred at all. The northern part of what is now Mexico was inhabited, at the time of the Aztec empire, by different peoples with different beliefs and unrelated languages.
Meanwhile, it is clear that the Maya inhabited their current territory since at least 2500 years ago. (Perhaps we could assert a larger number, but I don't have access to my books about it here.) Whether their ancestors ever passed through what is now the Mojave desert, it is impossible to tell. There are some partial similarities of beliefs between the Maya and the Aztecs, but also great differences.
Petroglyphs of Kokopelli abound in the American southwest. All petrogyphs should be protected, but that can surely be done without cancelling the project.
Biden wants to meet with various Central American presidents to bully them into continuing the destructive War on Drugs.
I find it noteworthy and disturbing that Biden arranged to meet with them in Honduras, hosted by coup-installed President Lobo. In effect he has pressured them to grant legitimacy to the coup.
Airplanes given by the US to Afghanistan are being used for drug trafficking.
With all the "development" projects that achieved nothing, at least this project has contributed to Afghanistan's economic development.
US government spending on birth control is a very good investment for society.
It also helps reduce global heating and other environmental degradation, especially in the US, since people in the US use resources more wastefully than elsewhere.
Internal documents show New York thugs had programs to investigate all Muslims in certain communities, based on their religion alone. This also shows Bloomberg made false denials of this. Since he was in charge, he was wrong whether he knew this was false or not.
Citizens of Massachusetts: support the Massachusetts bill to legalize marijuana.
In the US: rally on March 15 to tell Obama to reduce mortgages held by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
CNN presented a corporate PR strategist as a commentator "on the left".
Rationalist International's sting operation against a very expensive Indian faith healer.
Around 100 countries are planning universal health care.
The US, with its government controlled by business, is not one of them.
Former US generals and intelligence officials say, don't attack Iran.
Republican redistricting knocked Kucinich out of the House of Representatives.
Bogus research purporting to demonstrate that abortions lead to mental illness has been debunked. It looks like the researchers stretched the truth to prove the point they had in mind.
Israel attacked Gaza, and militants in Gaza retaliated with rockets aimed (as usual) at civilian targets.
Both sides were wrong.
Users of cell phone apps fail to consider what the apps might do with their personal data.
Saudi Arabia holds people prisoner without trial, apparently for intending to hold a protest.
Perhaps the reason most of them have not been tried is that torture has not yet extracted the desired confessions from them.
The partially-censored contract for the environmental study of the Keystone XL pipeline reveals a conflict of interest.
It's fine to make the builder pay the cost of the environmental study, but whoever does the study should not be beholden to the builder.
Obama and Holder are trying to nail the coffin shut on the idea that Americans have legal rights.
Jon Corbett, who found a way to trick the TSA's body scanners, says the TSA is trying to intimidate reporters.
NPR presents stories that glorify fracking and minimize the danger.
If the US indeed has oil reserves bigger than Saudi Arabia, we dare not extract and burn that oil.
A US soldier was arrested after wanton murder of Afghan civilians.
I suspect this reflects a general hostility between US troops and Afghans which only rarely manifests itself as murder.
The UK banned mephedrone, but usage has increased nonetheless.
US citizens: tell Attorney General Holder to release the purported "justifications" for Obama's targeted assassination campaign.
US citizens: tell the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to stop rubber-stamping license renewals for nuclear power plants.
US citizens: tell your governer to reject a deal to privatize prisons which would require imprisoning enough people to keep them 90% full.
What if prison is the disease, not the cure?
Jeffrey Sachs as president of the World Bank would stop its destructive practices.
Blue sharks are a threatened species because of overfishing for shark's fin soup.
A hoax ad said that MacDonalds would give a gratis "happy meal" to anyone who has been stopped and searched three times on the street by the New York Thug Department.
The US reached an agreement to transfer Bagram prison and its prisoners to Karzai's control.
Although the US is responsible for assuring these prisoners won't be tortured, experience shows neither the US nor Karzai can be trusted to refrain from torture. Moreover, while the US focuses on preventing release of prisoners, I fear that it won't pay enough attention to releasing those who were imprisoned for meaningless suspicion.
Jonathan Corbett describes a simple, reliable method to fool the TSA's body scanners.
The TSA response says, in effect, "Ignore our flaws, have faith in us."
I'm not worried that this will endanger the safety safety of flights because, as Bruce Schneyer has explained, this aspect of the TSA's security checks are mere theater anyway. The real dangers of the TSA are (1) radiation exposure from x-ray scanners and (2) the danger to our freedom from letting them go fishing through our pockets and handbags for grounds to arrest people.
With Deep Packet Inspection, both totally tyrannical countries and occasionally tyrannical countries can spy on all your nonencrypted Internet communications.
The Senate narrowly blocked a Republican plan to force approval of the planet-roaster pipeline, thanks to strong public opposition.
UN top torture official denounces Bradley Manning's detention.
It is noteworthy that the people who support Obama on this are right-wing extremists, because Obama is indistinguishable from a right-wing extremist. In the 1970s, many of Obama's policies merited the label "right-wing extremist".
I wouldn't dream of voting for a right-wing extremist like Obama. Occasionally he has done the right thing, and I've said so, but these are the exceptions to the general practice. This is a regime of the kind that someone like Bushbama would offer; to invade in order to restore our freedom and democracy.
Peaceful protesters in Russia face prison terms of up to 7 years for their protests.
However, that's less than what the US Congress voted to do to peaceful protesters, who can face 10 years in prison.
Putin is right to compare Russian repression with US repression, and the US may be worse. Of course, that is no excuse for Putin. "We're not as bad as the US" is not a valid justification for trampling human rights.
US citizens: tell the FCC to investigate the deal Verizon wants to make with Comcast.
US citizens: call on the FAA not to let drones spy on people in the US.
US citizens: phone your senators to oppose McCain's "cybersecurity" Internet surveillance bill.
Also sign this petition.A deputy minister in Syria announced he was defecting. This was announced also in Russia Today, which suggests it is not a hoax.
There's a report that 13 French officers are prisoners in Syria.
Sibel Edmonds reports that NATO is training Syrian dissidents in Turkey and smuggling arms into Syria.
I'm inclined to believe her because of her past history as a whistleblower. Her testimony about US government foreknowledge of the September 11 attacks was gagged by the US government.
Arming the enemies of a dictator is sometimes the right thing to do. Of course, the US wouldn't be doing it for the sake of freedom and democracy. It would be doing this for political reasons involving Israel, Lebanon, Hamas, Iran, etc. However, doing the right thing for the wrong reasons is still the right thing.
But it isn't right thing in all situations. It isn't always wise.
Paypal has imposed censorship on publishers, demonstrating how the Internet exposes users to a loss of freedom: you always depend on companies as intermediaries, and they can cut off their services whenever they don't like what you're doing.
The Big Lie: One Year After Fukushima, Nuclear Cover Up Revealed
The book estimating deaths from Chernobyl has some questionable science, and I have doubts about its conclusions, but the article's overall point seems valid despite that.
International Women's Day needs to return to its radical roots and throw off corporate-funded mildness.
Cheetahs, following their favorite prey, are being hit by global heating.
If you unexpectedly receive "child pornography", the last thing you should do is report it to the police.
However, just deleting the files may not be safe either. Police investigating you for some other reason might find the data of that deleted file, and then not believe you received it by accident.
I put the term in quotes because US law dishonestly defines images of young adults even of age 17 as "child pornography", despite the fact that most Americans of age 17 have had sex. Perhaps in the UK the term is limited to children.
To punish people for possessing some sort of published work — whether "child pornography" or "terrorist information" or anything else — is simply wrong. And it regularly hurts the innocent.
A leaked Stratfor report involves interviews with US military officers reported as saying that secret US military teams were on the ground in Syria.
Greek credit default swaps are being voided under government pressure. Why didn't the US treasury do that?
The UK wants to build new nuclear power plants, and all the sites will be vulnerable to flooding due to global heating.
The Red Cross has been allowed into Baba Amr after being kept out for several days.
Why the delay? Some reported that Assad's men committed massacres. Others say they planted evidence to blame supposed armed gangs. What is clear is that there was no possible legitimate justification.
This article claims the western media are framing Assad in conjunction with mysterious gangs of snipers.
I would not put it past the US, Saudi Arabia and Qatar to do such things. But it is also possible for Assad to pressure people to lie. I doubt that gangs of snipers could have operated for months fighting the Syrian army, or that protesters would have failed to recognize what was going on, or that they would have taken the side of snipers against the army if the army was not attacking them. I also doubt that soldiers would have defected if they hadn't really been ordered to kill civilians.
Delaying the Red Cross seems like the ultimate proof, because that was in the hands of Assad's army and nobody else.
In a part of Nigeria, lead dust from mining is making thousands of children sick.
Coal mining in northeast Australia threatens the Great Barrier Reef.
The article fails to mention that burning the coal will produce lots of CO2, which will kill the reef. It needs to stay in the ground.
Since 1990, the percentage of people without access to clean water has been reduced to 10%.
This is a great achievement, but we ought to give priority to reducing births to the point where the population starts to slowly decrease.
Someone hoaxed France 24. She pretended to be the Syrian ambassador to France, and said she was resigning in protest against Assad's actions.
Canada's elections last year were sabotaged by robocalls that told people the wrong place to go to vote.
Republicans have done this in the US, too, but Canada's judges are taking the matter seriously.
The UK's libel reform proposal is inadequate to protect the public debate.
A whistleblower says Walmart's subcontractor told him to falsify employees' time sheets.
As long as Walmart uses disposable subcontractors it will be almost impossible to prevent that. The practice must be banned.
New Zealand plans to replace journalistic privilege with an ersatz version where journalists can't refuse except at the first step.
UK TV channels are under pressure to hand over hours worth of unbroadcast footage of riots, and say they object to being turned into evidence gatherers.
The UK government will start threatening people who share, in accord with an unjust law imposed in a manifestly unjust way.
Global heating affects the jet stream in a way that makes extreme weather more likely.
The jet stream becomes more wavy and the waves move more slowly, and this can lead to either a heat wave or a big rain.
AIPAC silences its opponents through intimidation of advertising companies.
China proposes to follow the US in officially legalizing imprisonment without trial for "terrorists" and related crimes (such as political opposition).
A US court rejected the case of organic farms afraid of contamination by Monsanto's patented genes.
Tunisia is debating whether freedom of speech extends to criticizing religion, and whether it extends to attacking secularists.
Christian prosyletizers are moving into US public schools.
Jello Biafra talks about his decision to participate in the boycott of most Israeli cultural institutions.
The Palestinian areas separated from Jerusalem by the annexation wall get no emergency services, and almost no public schools.
Thus, students and a teacher were left to burn to death inside a school bus, while the only public school is terribly overcrowded.
AIPAC is working for the 1%.
A video shows patients in a Syrian hospital who have been tortured there.
Fleeing refugees report seeing their relatives slaughtered by troops.
Wisconsin's voter ID law ruled unconstitutional.
Internet dating sites are careless with users data, even when they don't sell it to advertisers.
Several members of LulzSec have been arrested, after one member betrayed the others.
If I remember right, some of LulzSec's actions released bystanders' personal info. I think it's not right to do that sort of thing. However, their other actions were minor compared with the wrongs of the organizations they targeted. The US disregards those wrongs.
Schools and employers demand to see job and sports applicants' Facebook passwords.
In this case, it is not Facebook's fault, and they do the same with other similar sites. The conclusion is, don't use a social networking service for private communication. Use email.
Amazon appears to treat self-published authors pretty well, but it can unilaterally drop the price of their books. And when it does, the authors are the ones who lose.
Santorum said that unwed mothers were "building more criminals".
Since their children are likely to be poorer, and lack educational advantages, they may have a somewhat larger chance of becoming criminals. If so, the two principal ways to avoid this problem are (1) birth control and (2) abortion. Just what Santorum wants to prevent them from having.
Karzai has approved a declaration affirming Islamic law over women's rights.
I originally supported the intervention in Afghanistan because of the Taliban's tyranny, especially towards women, so I regret this as defeat for the intervention. However, I think this defeat is now inevitable because the intervention has failed.
It seemed to have a chance, at first. An Afghan government with clear popular support might have been able to advance women's rights. However, Karzai and his government's corruption can hardly convince Afghans of anything about ethics.
It would be absurd to maintain women's rights in a country by occupying it permanently. We must recognize defeat and stop prolonging the war with useless bloodshed.
Virginia's legislature has directed state agencies and staff to refuse to cooperate with imprisonment without trial, in the name of the Constitution.
After a large protest in Moscow about Putin's fraudulent election, 1000 protesters refused to leave and stayed in the square. Russian thugs attacked and arrested them, then beat their prisoners.
Holder misrepresents the issues when defending Obama's power to kill without any supervision by the courts.
Talking about "real time" supervision is another red herring. Soldiers in battle must decide immediately whom to shoot, so it would be absurd to require them to ask a court's approval. However, targeted killings like that of al Awlaki are planned at high levels, and once ordered, they can take months to carry out. Asking courts to consider each case would be no practical difficulty.
Diesel exhaust causes lung cancer, but not enough is being done to reduce it.
I expect that trains (even with diesel engines) emit much less pollution than trucks, for the same amount of cargo. Thus, this is one more reason to encourage use of trains rather than trucks.
Under Dubya, the US was building a new Interstate highway mainly for trucks to drive from Mexico to Canada. Wasn't that stupid? An electified train line would have been much cheaper, used less space, produced less pollution, and burned less oil. However, the oil companies dislike the idea of burning less oil.
Google+ isn't meant to be used, just to get people to give Google their biographical data.
Syria has kept the Red Cross out of Baba Amr for days, and some refugees have arrived in Lebanon.
Many gratis Android apps pass personal data to advertising networks.
I expect that these are all proprietary. Can someone confirm that for me?
The Israeli raid on the unfinished Osirak reactor was credited with stopping Saddam Hussein from getting nuclear weapons, but it may have done just the opposite.
Was it pure stupidity (or rather, greed and overconfidence) that led Hussein to attack Kuwait in 1991? A leaked report said that the US ambassador to Iraq had said, "We don't care if you invade Kuwait, feel free." Perhaps Hussein fell into a trap carefully laid to take advantage of his greed and overconfidence.
Aid groups say the CIA is to blame for a resurgence of polio in Pakistan.
"Vultures" who speculated on Argentina's defaulted debt at pennies to the dollar, and are now pushing for repayment in full, are getting support from the US government.
Argentina should offer to renounce its claims to the Falkland Islands, whose inhabitants are considered British and want to remain so, in exchange for UK's explicit support on this issue.
Flood insurance in flood-prone areas in the UK is getting much more expensive.
This is inevitable and necessary so that people will stop living and stop building in those areas. Global heating makes floods more likely.
Guernsey is trying to set itself up as a world-wide libel extortion state
Australia will require Muslim women to remove face coverings when they are required to identify themselves for other legal reasons.
I think this is a legitimate policy, precisely because it is so narrow. It avoids the wrongs of the laws in France and the Netherlands.
Warmer winters mean Canadians will be unable to play street hockey.
I hope they notice this before they build the planet-roaster pipeline.
Putin faked his way to "victory" as president of Russia.
Citizens of Massachusetts: oppose "3-strikes" minimum punishments in Massachusetts.
US citizens: are you fed up with Obama for letting Shell drill in Arctic seas, and for expediting the Keystone XL planet-roaster pipeline? Support Jill Stein for president.
Ralph Nader suggests that the next goal for Occupy should be to raise the minimum wage.
"Americans have made it clear that they equate releasing innocent civilians with being 'soft on terrorism'."
Mexico allowed warrantless access to people's cell phone location data.
Homeland Suppression is searching Twitter and Facebook postings for some very common words, including enriched, IRA, prevention, pirates, radicals, hurricane, storm, snow, watch, earthquake, help, hail, aid, relief, interstate, hacker, China, worm, and social media.
Marrying "Drill, Baby, Drill" and "Yes We Can": Obama has been promoting Arctic undersea oil drilling ever since he was elected.
The US gave Guantanamo prisoner Majid Khan a plea bargain to cover up how he was tortured.
He has been promised a sentence of no more than 19 years, but that is meaningless since he may be kept in prison for life regardless of "sentence".
Billionaire Frank VanderSloot, who is an executive in Romney's campaign, has blocked media covered of his political and business activities by threatening to sue journalists and publishers.
Putin's cronies are forcing magazines, radio stations and web sites to censor criticism of Putin.
Global heating is hitting the US in the form of tornadoes, and insurance companies are very worried.
The House of Representatives passed a bill imposing ten years in prison for disrupting certain government activities, including any that involve presidential candidates.
Even visiting foreign dictators would get this protection from protests.
Under international law, US leaders are guilty of planning a war of aggression against Iran.
The article says the same is true of Israeli leaders, but I think it may not be correct, since Israel and Iran are already in a state of war.
If it were a virtual certainty that Iran would make nuclear weapons and use them to attack, I think that would justify (under certain conditions) a pre-emptive strike to prevent it from doing so. However, intelligence says this isn't so.
Bush deserves to be tried and punished for invading Iraq, but not executed, because capital punishment is barbaric.
How Andrew Breitbart damaged honest people and organizations with lies.
Like Steve Jobs, he made the world a worse place.
Dubai has expelled 50 Syrian permanent residents for a peaceful protest against Assad's violence in front of the Syrian embassy.
Some have lived their entire lives in Dubai. They can't go to Syria.
The Illinois law against recording the police has been ruled unconstitutional.
Here's more information about why.
Unfortunately, the problem doesn't end with this: when the thugs can't arrest you for making a recording, they can fabricate some other pretext.
Shawan Jabarin had the good fortune to be allowed to travel outside the West Bank — for the first time since he became head of a human rights organization.
Not allowing people to travel is typical of tyrannical regimes. For instance, the Soviet Union was famous for stopping many people from travelling, particularly including Jews who might want to move to Israel.
The UK government cooperated with a construction industry blacklist of workers who supported unions or were considered troublemakers.
The victims have tried suing but in the past usually lost.
A professor studying health and safety issues of oil drilling was also recorded in the blacklist, but it isn't clear why the the list maintainers were interested in him. Perhaps they worked for other clients besides construction companies.
The father of one of the victims of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing is trying to prove that Libyan Abdelbaset al-Megrahi didn't do it. I presume he wants the real bomber to be convicted.
Australia is fighting against "investor-state" provisions in the TPP.
Bravo, Australia, but the treaty will only do harm even without that.
The latest brilliant right-wing idea: privatized police forces.
If the thugs that beat you and lie about it are not employed by the state it will be even harder to punish them for it.
Egypt's Ministry of Education has ordered schools to keep students out of political activities, even debates and blogs.
Israeli troops shut down two Palestinian TV stations giving the pretext that they don't have Israeli permits (which would be impossible to get).
Santorum must be very glad that it is becoming difficult for Americans to go to college.
This is one of many reasons the US needs to increase income taxes for the wealthy.
Elsevier dropped its attempt to eliminate the US public access policy, with the result that the Research Works Act has been defeated.
Scientists should not relax now. We should follow up this victory to gain more victories for science against the journal publishers.
For the first time, one of the US torture lawyers faces official embarrassment. But this is far short of the trial for crimes against humanity that he ought to face.
The CIA has made the procedure to request declassification effectively impossible to use, by charging a lot of money for it.
The US has involved psychologists in torture since the 1950s. But they are not punished.
Dirar Abusisi was kidnapped by Israel from the Ukraine, then imprisoned without trial and denied medical care for kidney stones.
Stanford students support a Palestinian graduate, a nonviolent activist, who was arrested by Israeli thugs at a protest on charges that are probably fabricated.
Even if a protester does really push a thug, that is hardly a valid reason to put him in prison. It is an excuse.
Netanyahu is cracking the whip, making Obama promise to attack Iran when Israel does.
Note how this article presumes that war with Iran would be justified and even necessary if sanctions "fail". However, as we know, for the US to attack Iran would be futile, unjustified, and disastrous.
Our CO2 emissions are making the oceans more acidic than they have ever been, as far back as we can measure.
our ability to measure past ocean acidity goes back 300 million years. We don't know if the oceans were ever more acidic before that.
I think the Permian extinction, which wiped out 96% of species in the ocean, was the worst in the Earth's history. But Obama and the oil companies are not satisfied with tying that record. They are aiming for 100% with Keystone XL planet-roaster pipeline.
Occupy the Corporations protests in 70 US cities condemned ALEC.
Twitter closed accounts that were used to criticize Sarkozy.
It is no surprise that Sarkozy is the enemy of French Internet users, but it is frightening that Twitter is supporting his attack.
A reporter went undercover at a shipping fulfillment warehouse to document the sweatshop conditions.
When you buy from the Internet instead of a store, are you supporting this?
Note the peculiar demand of the editors that McClelland couldn't lie about her name or work history. Why not? It wouldn't affect the validity of the report. It was recently pointed out that this is a recent change in the policy of US media and is linked to the diminution of invstigative reporting.
Our labor laws need to be changed sufficiently to allow these employees to unionize. One necessary change might be to ban the use of temporary agencies to get workers to do a job that is permanent.
US citizens: tell the FDA to make rules to stop massive use of antibiotics on animals.
This could save your life when you have an infection some day.
China has tightened regulations about soot in the air, and credit bloggers for pressuring for this.
Perhaps the Chinese rulers will eventually realize that democracy is beneficial for society. But it's the US rulers that affect the world most. Will they ever learn this?
The world has learned nothing from the Big Spill; deep water oil drilling is proceeding faster than ever.
If we are "lucky" and avoid further disasters from the wells, burning all that oil is sure to cause one.
A disease that causes lambs to be born deformed spread to the UK thanks to global heating.
In sub-Saharan Africa, most land belongs to the state. So when the state sells it to foreign companies, the farmers are helpless.
Individual title is no solution either. (As the article notes, many of these lands are used collectively, not individually.) In the early 20th century, the US used individual title to destroy many Amerind reservations. It divided up the land among the members of the tribe, and their poverty compelled most of them to sell it to non-Amerinds.
With real democracy, these governments would not sell farmland to foreigners. I wonder whether some foreigner institutions pressured them to start selling land. The World Bank or IMF, perhaps?
Karzai and Obama have been unable to agree on a framework for US troops to remain in Afghanistan.
The main issue is that Karzai wants to restrain US night raids, something the Afghan people demand. Karzai's government may be too corrupt and despised to remain in power without the US' propping it up, but if it is ever to have any chance of not being despised, this is it.
As for the prisons, we know that both the US and Karzai's government are likely to torture prisoners, but if the US stops torturing it might have a chance to break the habit.
Assad's regime blocked the Red Cross from providing food and medical treatment to civilians in Baba Amr, while the army reportedly is shooting and arresting lots of people there.
On the Internet, censorship implies surveillance.
Each US soldier in Afghanistan costs around a million dollars a year.
This isn't the main reason to bring them back to the US. The main reason is that they achieve nothing but death.
Jeffrey Sachs: How I would lead the World Bank.
Some prominent supporters of Israeli hawks have joined the campaign to remove the Mujahedin-e Khalq from the US list of arbitrarily banned "terrorist" organizations.
It has been noted that this campaign is well funded, and reported that Israel and the Mujahedin-e Khalq work together to assassinate Iranian nuclear scientists. That suggests that the campaign is funded by US backers of the Israeli hawks. who coordinate with the government of Israel.
If they coordinate with the government of Israel, and that coordinates with the Mujahedin-e Khalq, does that mean the campaign violates US anti-"terror" laws? The question is amusing, but irrelevant in practice. The US has no intention of enforcing these laws even-handedly.
The US policy of banning "terrorist" organizations without trial is ipso facto injust. If an organization carries out violence it should be put on trial, along with its members. The practice of banning organizations arbitrarily is turning the US into a dictatorship where nobody has any rights. Your bowling club could be put on the "terrorist" list even if all it does is bowling.
The Virginia attorney general's campaign to get climate scientist Michael Mann's emails (as a fishing expedition looking for some sort of accusation to mak) has failed.
Although science has won this battle, it looks like the planet-roasters have won the war. Their well-funded lie campaigns have convinced millions of US religious lunatics that global heating is a fabrication, and meanwhile Obama would rather ship Canadian oil than protect the world from the damage it will do.
BP agreed to pay about 8 billion dollars of damages to some of the people harmed by the Big Spill.
When Venezuela and OPEC push oil prices up, they help avert global heating disaster.
Companies with power over many people's communications, such as Google, must be watched.
I think all email services should be regulated to protect the rights of their users.
Spanish Internet users are trying to overload the agency that enforces the SOPA-like Ley Sinde.
US psychiatrists have invented a disease, Oppositional Defiant Disorder, which simply consists of a tendency to argue with "authority" rather than obey.
How convenient for "authority" if people who resent how they are treated are led to take drugs rather than organize.
The Department of Homeland Suppression's internal memo about the Occupy movement was dangerous even though it wasn't outright menacing.
Since Lamar Smith failed with SOPA, now he wants to impose warrantless surveillance of Internet users through ISPs, and make all the info available without a warrant.
I wonder if Hollywood thinks this will be of use in the War on Sharing.
Stockbrokers are more reckless and manipulative than the usual psychopath.
A famous Egyptian actor was sentenced in absentia for insulting Islam.
This is not the freedom that Egyptians protested for.
A test of Internet voting in Washington DC resulted in a victory for a drunken robot. The hapless election authorities didn't even know they'd been had.
NPR has adopted a new code which gives priority to presenting the impartial truth, rather than balance.
It will be interesting to see whether this cures the US press' vulnerability to manipulation through presenting a bogus controversy.
New action against the banksters: F* (for "foreclose") the Banks. To encourage people to move their money, Bank of America has imposed new fees on customers.
In the US: call on Rush Limbaugh's sponsors to drop him because of his insults against Sandra Fluke.
Citizens of India: oppose the government's plans to protect nuclear power plant company from liability for their disasters.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and senators and say, no attacks on birth control insurance coverage.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
US citizens: tell Rep. Hoyer, a Democrat, not to make backroom deals to cut Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid.
US citizens: tell the FDA not to approve the latest pesticide-resistant GMO corn. The pesticide to be used is dangerous.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and say, end the secrecy of negotiations in the TPP. Also sign this petition.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Western opposition to Uganda's anti-gay bill has led to support for the bill as a form of nationalism. (broken link fixed) In other words, fools are scapegoating gays for the economic harm caused by organizations such as the IMF. If only they put the blame in the right place, they might achieve some good.
The law would also ban organized advocacy of gay rights, meaning it would attack freedom of speech and association, as well as sexuality.
Protesters against the coming G8 meeting in Chicago demand a financial transaction tax to be spent on alternative energy.
In the Netherlands, people have the right to help in euthanasia if they are incurably sick, suffering unbearable pain, and have repeatedly stated they want to die.
When people are trapped in incurable pain and death is their only escape, we ought to help them escape. Sure, it would be better if we could cure them instead — I expect they would agree — but it's no use clinging to an impossible hope and forcing them to continue to suffer.
It is a good thing that this right is not limited to those who are expected to die soon anyway.
Assad's forces retook the Baba Amr neighborhood in Homs, which had been held by soldiers that defected from the regime, after the defectors retreated to other neighborhoods.
The reports that government forces subsequemntly massacred civilians there might be true. I would not put it past them.
However, I question whether the Free Syrian Army was justified in fighting from positions inside the city, given that it had a choice. Those troops had a duty to defect, but fighting to hold an urban area against overwhelming force afterwards is a different story. There was no chance it could lead to a victory, or to a better government in Syria; it could only produce the shelling and civilian deaths that in fact occurred.
It would have been better for them to fight their way out of Syria. Maybe the UN could have passed a resolution to help them get out, as long as the resolution did not permit any other intervention.
We should pursue truth, but Obama and the US instead pursue the messengers that tell us the truth.
A lawsuit accuses the US of endangering coral reefs by allowing overfishing of parrotfish that protect the reefs.
Fukushima released twice as much radioactive Cesium as previously estimated.
Japan's government tried to quietly end its decades-old radiation monitoring program shortly after the accident, and to gag scientific reports about the radiation.
Japan said it would increase the permitted level of radiactive materials in food, but the public rebelled.
The question can be judged rationally. How many additional people are likely to have health problems from the higher level? If the previous level was super-cautious, it might be few. But we can't tell that by guessing.
A lawsuit seeks to make the US Navy take care to avoid killing marine mammals with its sonars through training exercizes.
Their hearing is sensitive, and the loud sound of the sonar drives them mad.
The Department of Homeland Suppression's surveillance of Occupy, and the Stratfor report released by Wikileaks, may have encouraged the often brutal attacks on Occupy encampments.
Public Knowledge has proposed some changes to reduce copyright power.
These changes are steps in the right direction, but this proposal fails to right the worst wrongs of today's copyright law. It doesn't ban DRM, it doesn't shorten copyright to a length of time we can live with, and it doesn't legalize sharing.
We can't expect proper copyright reform to pass through today's Congress, and we can't expect Public Knowlege's smaller steps to pass through today's Congress. What we can achieve in the short term by advocating changes now is to influence public opinion. Demanding less than what we really need is aiming low.
How YouTube panders to copyright extortion.
An Israeli legislator says Israel should annex the West Bank and offer citizenship (second class) only to those Arabs who learn Hebrew, complete with a plan to gerrymander the voting districts so they won't have much political influence even if they vote.
He says that the two-state solution "has been tried and failed, but in fact it was never tried, because Israel set up colonies in the West Bank to assure it wouldn't be."
A single state in which Jews and Arabs would have equal rights would not be inherently unjust, but that's not the proposal here.
After Israeli prison guards beat false confessions out of some Palestinian teenagers, border guards gave false testimony to substantiate the confessions.
Fortunately there were records to prove that both were false.
Will the border guards be charged with perjury? Will the prison torturers be charged with torture? If they are not punished, they will repeat these crimes.
In Russia, Nikolai Blinov died trying to defend Jews from a pogrom. A ceremony in Israel honored him, but completely missed the point of his example.
How HP supports the occupation of Palestine.
US citizens: tell the FCC: don't allow any more media concentration.
US citizens: take a stand against state "right to work" laws that undermine unions.
A town in Spain will fight unemployment by growing marijuana for a large smoking club in Barcelona.
Shell has preemptively sued environmental groups that were expected to sue Shell to block Arctic undersea oil drilling.
PayPal is censoring erotic literature.
Syria's rebelion conflict is taking on a Shi'ite - Sunni aspect.
Syria with minority Alawites ruling is the mirror image of what Iraq was under Saddam Hussein, with minority Sunnis ruling.
The senators who demand war with Iran if Iran has a "nuclear capability" are not clear on what that means.
How to prevent the movie companies from buying another iteration of SOPA.
I basically agree, but I criticize a few points.
To speak of "pirating" a movie is to repeat their propaganda. If you don't believe that sharing is wrong, join me in refusing to call it "piracy".
Also, I don't think unauthorized copying does much good for the movie companies, even if they know about it and you can include it in their statistics. They don't need any factual basis for their statistics,
Another point is that you especially shouldn't use Netflix, because that has DRM that people probably can't ever break. (They can change it too quickly.)
25 people have been arrested for the virtual equivalent of street protests and scribbling criticism on political posters.
To refer to these activities as "attacks" represents a pre-emptive strike against democratic political rights, using the shift from physical to virtual activity as an opportunity.
Obama made an executive order to sidestep the recent military-imprisonment-without-trial law.
That's one small good thing, but it isn't permanent: we still need to get rid of that law.
The Global Partnership for Oceans solutions for sustainable fishing may cause problems for poor subsistance fishers.
We cannot continue unsustainable fishing, so it is crucial to take whatever measures are necessary to make fishing sustainable. Perhaps these proposed measures are necessary, but if they can be adapted to help poor fishermen, it's worth a try.
The UK proposes to deport any foreign domestic workers that lose their jobs.
When this was the practice in the past, it made those workers defenseless against abuse by their employers, since they'd be deported if they complained.
The Maldives army attacked a group of protesting women , spraying pepper spray into their eyes while they were prisoner and telling others they aimed to mutilate them.
Since the democratically elected president was overthrown by force, the replacement is not legitimate. So there's no ethical reason why the population shouldn't fight back with force. If they could find suitable weapons, they'd be within their rights to kill the soldiers and the police, as well as "president" Waheed, except those who surrender. Whether to do this or use nonviolence is a tactical question.
However, the army is not justified in attacking protesters even if the attacks are not fatal. It has already put itself in the wrong by staging the coup, and each time it attacks nonviolent protesters, it commits an additional crime.
Police attacked a large student protest in Barcelona, and the students responded by general violence.
Ex-generals from the Pentagon's Paid Political Pundit Propaganda Program are still appearing on NBC and presenting themselves as disinterested experts.
Republicans are pushing the War against Women to even greater extremes.
The Republican Party has gone insane with hatred.
Ireland has passed a law comparable to SOPA.
A former FBI agent who worked in counterterrorism says the TSA is useless, wasteful, offensive, and unjust.
Our civilization faces collapse , as others have collapsed before, if it fails to cope with the challenge posed by overdemands on the environment.
Asian Pulp and Paper is selling the endangered trees which make up the habitat of the endangered Sumatran tiger.
AP&P's response is the usual bullshit of organizations trying to deny evil activities: "In theory, we don't do this, so please ignore any contrary facts."
Demand for minerals has led to global devastation for the peoples unlucky enough to live where the minerals are found.
US citizens: call on the US government to prosecute Murdoch for bribery.
US citizens: tell Congress not to pass HR 1837, which would damage the ecology of salmon runs to give the water to agribusiness interests. More information on this bad bill.
US citizens: call on Obama to regulate dangerous chemicals.
As the US and Israel threaten to attack Iran, Brazil's foreign minister pointed out that making such threats is itself a violation of the UN charter.
I don't know whether this applies to Israel, since Israel and Iran are have been formally at war for a long time.
Only 20% of Israelis would want to attack Iran without US support.
The others believe the attack would have very bad consequences.
People in the US are suing to overturn the imprisonment without trial provisions of the NDAA.
A team of Bahraini "reformers" visited the US and criticized the protesters.
The visit organized by the regime's PR company.
A coming Supreme Court decision may determine whether US companies can be punished for helping repressive regimes do high-tech surveillance.
France says new Google policy (for using personal data) . violates EU law
I am more concerned with what Big Brother knows about us than with what companies know. Where companies might do annoying things such as target us with ads or distort search results, the state can (and does) sabotage protests and destroy democracy. Under the U SAP AT RIOT Act, Big Brother can collect all this information already, and even if Google does not put it together, Big Brother can do so.
To reduce Big Brother's ability to get information about you, I suggest accessing Google Search (if you use it) through TOR and never logging in. And use an email service in some other country that won't be interested in you.
North Korea has agreed to suspend its nuclear program and let the UN inspect.
Iran is willing to allow IAEA inspection of Parchin, but wants an overall framework agreement about the inspections first.
Western journalists are struggling to escape from Homs, where two of them were killed last week, and Syria blocked the UN humanitarian aid chief from entering Syria.
The EU has a sleazy plan to censor the Internet unofficially so that nobody has any legal rights.
The FARC say they will release all their captives and stop kidnapping.
Meanwhile, Colombia's principal terrorists, the right-wing paramilitaries with support in the government, have shown no let-up in their depredations.
China sends North Korean refugees back to North Korea, where they face horrible punishment.
The former commander of El Salvador's national guard will be deported there to stand trial for murders and torture.
Afghan protesters say explicitly that burning qur'ans was just the trigger for their intense protests against US and NATO intervention.
The article asks Americans to imagine that the US were occupied by an army that burnt American flags and bibles. I would sneer at anyone who got upset about that, but if they killed thousands of Americans, that would be a real reason to protest (or fight back).
Thousands of people were imprisoned in the US and the UK for opposing the draft in World War I.
"Investor-state" provisions of many free exploitation treaties, starting with NAFTA, give foreign companies more rights in the US than US citizens.
Minnesotans call on their local and state governments not to cooperate with US plans to deport foreigners who get arrested (even if they are never charged).
Sea Shepherd activist Erwin Vermeulen was acquitted of fabricated charges in Japan, where he tried to monitor dolphin hunting.
Purchasing Prisoners, Creating Criminals & How Occupy Could be Next.
GOP Contenders' Anti-Labor Fervor Reaches New, Disturbing Heights.
Drone aircraft, both government-run and privately run, create a new part of the privacy rights debate.
Obama Budget: Grow Prisons and Keep Gitmo.
Over half of federal prisoners are prisoners of war — the War on Drugs. In other words, they are political scapegoats, imprisoned to keep drug profits high.
Liberal commentator Matt Taibi enjoys seeing Republicans attack each other with the same irrational hatred they have dished out to everyone else.
I might enjoy it if I were confident it would destroy them, but that's not certain. Some have suggested that the money men, the vultures, are preparing to bring in another candidate at the Republican Convention, someone who isn't running now and isn't being attacked by the current candidates.
Liberal commentator Matt Taibi enjoys seeing Republicans attack each other with the same irrational hatred they have dished out to everyone else.
I might enjoy it if I were confident it would destroy them, but that's not certain. Some have suggested that the money men, the vultures, are preparing to bring in another candidate at the Republican Convention, someone who isn't running now and isn't being attacked by the current candidates.
Obama's proposal to lower the tax rate for corporations makes no sense, either as a policy or as politics.
It's a typical example of the things Obama does in order to show he's no progressive.
The Occupy movement's next method is to block foreclosure: Occupy Our Homes.
Right-wing lies about the nature of US economic problems assure they cannot be solved. Wimpy Democrats and a press that aims "balance" rather than truth prove no obstacle for them.
The UK deports Tamils to Sri Lanka even though they may be tortured when they arrive.
The UN threatens Internet freedom by proposing to put the Internet under the control of the ITU.
People involved in these discussions told me that the ITU generally tends to pander to big telecom companies. I would not entrust net neutrality to the ITU. While it has no history of pandering to the copyright industry, I expect it would swiftly learn to do so.
Unfortunately, individual governments also threaten Internet freedom with laws such as SOPA and treaties such as ACTA. Under a regime without real democracy, we're not safe from any side.
The ACLU is suing to block a voter suppression law in South Carolina.
A German ministry wants to punish people for sharing by disconnecting their Internet connections, but there is so much opposition that no party is likely to propose any such bill.
A Saudi teacher faces criminal charges in a terrorism court for speaking to the BBC about the lack of human rights in his country.
The idea that criticizing a government is treason because the country's interests may suffer from resulting condemnation is one we have seen in many countries including the US.
The NRDC is suing the EPA to ban a widely used pesticide that is toxic to humans.
Facebook is not just surveillance. It also does censorship of photos based on prudish criteria.
Return to Richard Stallman's home page.
Please send comments on these web pages to rms@gnu.org.
Copyright (C) 2012 Richard Stallman
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.
