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Each political note has its own anchor in case you want to link to it.
My intention is to make links only to publicly accessible, stable URLs. If you find a link to a page that requires subscription, please report that as you would report any other broken link.
David Nutt explains why his report opposes the idea of stricter prohibition of marihuana.
For common individual activities that occasionally cause problems, the precautionary principle is an absurd approach, a recipe for harshness and overreaction. On the other hand, it's called for when dealing with a plausible potential disaster whose likelihood cannot effects cannot be anticipated, such as the disaster of global warming and the disaster of acid seas (both of which CO2 emissions are causing).
Meanwhile, harsh policies towards individuals are a much more grave measure than regulation of businesses. We should generally be far more reluctant to deny some people freedom than to reduce the profit of some businesses.
So it is curious that politicians tend to cite the precautionary principle when it could be an excuse for treating people harshly (in this case, pot users), to prevent problems from common activities. But when it's necessary to limit certain business practices to prevent world-wide disaster, they argue that the precautionary principle is overcautious.
Why this paradoxical backwards response? I think it's because these politicians conceive of the businesses as their masters, and the people as their subjects. Harsh restrictions on people teach them the habit of obedience. That's good for cementing corporate rule, regardless of whether these restrictions serve any purpose.
In response to this article, the government removed Nutt from the ACMD, on the grounds that he was interfering with its plans to give the public clear, simplistic, false messages about the danger of drugs.
UN torture investigator Manfred Nowak was invited to Zimbabwe by Prime Minister Tsvangirai, then arrested and deported , almost certainly at the orders of Mugabe. The UN will be right to take action against Zimbabwe for this. It should also take action against Israel for blocking Judge Goldstone from visiting Gaza.
Pakistan's army brought journalists into South Waziristan for a brief visit . A brief, controlled visit like this is not enough for journalists to see the real situation there. Like the Bush forces' embedded journalists in Iraq, they see only the Army's side. An army can, potentially, suppress organized and overt rebel activity such as occurs in South Waziristan. However, the Islamist terrorists in Punjab are a different kind of problem, which can't be addressed this way.
Citizens of Massachusetts: Call Senator Kerry and tell him not to go along with exempting coal-burning power plants from the Clean Air Act.
The pain of torture makes victims sound guilty
, to those connected in some way with carrying out the torture.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Israeli border guards sadistically attacked Palestinians
on the street in Jerusalem, and boasted about it. But they were not punished. Sadistic attacks by the border guards are normal, from what I hear. What is unusual is that they didn't even hide it.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-13 because the old link was broken.]
Here's another take on the civil war in Pakistan. Parts of it seem one-sided; for instance, using local militias in Swat to fight the Taliban there seems reasonable to me.
The progressive organization J Street calls on American Jews to proclaim that they do not support the Israeli hawks.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-13 because the old link was broken.]
The bombers of Iraqi government buildings may have had help from inside the "security" forces. In Iraq, parties regard control of a ministry as a sort of booty, and each party has a militia. There could be, inside the police, sympathizers of each party willing to help an attack against a ministry controlled by another party.
Karzai's brother has been paid by the CIA for 8 years.
The US Chamber of Commerce has sued the Yes Men for their hoax press conference. If we take the accusation at face value, then we should note that this lawsuit gives the Yes Men publicity nobody can buy. Let's do our best to increase the publicity by spreading the word.
Gush Shalom plans to legally attack the US organizations
that apply their tax exemptions to extending Israeli settlements (colonies) in the West Bank. Settlers attacked Palestinian farmers trying to harvest their olives. The Israeli army did nothing to stop them
. That's nothing unusual.
[References updated on 2018-05-13 because the old links were broken.]
Many former Israeli officials face arrest for war crimes if they go to European countries.
Iraq's government says car bombs were made inside the Green Zone.
Matthew Hoh, a US diplomat in Afghanistan, has resigned so as to call publicly for an end to US military intervention there.
Australia is considering a policy of banning construction near beaches, since such buildings are likely to be flooded due to global warming.
The UK police label protestors as "dangerous extremists" in order to justify harassing them.
The UK government is still trying to conceal evidence of torture by the US. It's one bunch of tyrants in cahoots with another.
US residents, and anyone who can help: support the BanksterUSA.org campaign to reregulate the banks that cheated the citizens and prosecute the executives that acted illegally.
The EU is well on the way to have "the coercive machinery of a state" without democratic controls.
A democratic union of Europe, which would place priority on the well being and freedom of the citizens, is an inspiring ideal. The European Union of today is nothing like that, and if it isn't corrected, it should be ended. Each and every country should be prepared to withdraw from the EU of today, for the sake of its citizens' freedom, if the EU is not reformed to respect freedom and democracy.
Amnesty International says Israel takes 80% of the West Bank's water for settlements (colonies) while leaving 20% for the Palestinians.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Gary McKinnon's case is spurring review of the unjust extradition treaty between the US and the UK, which discards the usual legal protections. I don't see it as very significant that McKinnon may have Asperger's syndrome. Illness or not, it unjust to propose a heavy punishment for someone who did not intend to do damage.
Also I wish they would stop calling him a "hacker". Breaking security doesn't make him a hacker, though he might be one for other reasons. The major issue of this case is the injustice of the treaty itself.
This looks like a plan to intimidate protestors and those that work with them. In other words, it is tyranny: business as usual for the B'liar/Clown regime, which is an occupation government for the empire of the megacorporations.
Radovan Karadzic is using delaying tactics to prevent his trial for genocide.
One of Scientology's Hollywood stars has broken climactically with the church and denounced its policies.
Attempts to put palm oil production on a sustainable basis are breaking down. Note the absurd arguments of the agribusinesses: "since we have already ruined the Earth so much, why not stop now?"
The best solution is to prohibit use of palm oil and other farmed crops for making fuels. It doesn't save energy, and it adds to global warming.
The WTO shares the responsibility for this problem, since it prohibits the consuming countries from placing requirements on how things are made in other countries.
Japanese citizens: sign the petition to abolish fingerprinting
of visitors to Japan.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: support this petition to the FCC for net neutrality.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Israel's quandary over the Goldstone report: sham investigation, or just stonewall?
Everyone: support the 350.org campaign for measures to stop global warming.
Reportedly, Iraqis blame election infighting for the bombings in Baghdad. (In Iraq, each party has a militia.)
Note that what reduced the violence in Iraq was not an increase in Bush forces troops, but rather the policy of buying the support of Sunni militias who were getting annoyed with al Qa'ida.
Iraqi Sunnis have bombed and destroyed several government ministries in Baghdad.
A large protest in London against the war in Afghanistan included a soldier facing court martial for refusing to return there.
Scientists propose to preserve coral from extinction cryogenically.
Will this preserve the many other species of fish and arthropods that shelter in or live on reefs? I doubt it.
Madagascar's rainfall has been reduced by global warming and deforestation. The result is hunger.
Part of the problem is having too many babies. Part of the aid that Madagascar needs is contraception and programs to help people use it.
US citizens: take action against "tort reform" that would leave the victims of medical malpractice without recourse.
For more information about the issue read this.
T. Boon Pickens says his company is entitled to Iraqi oil contracts
because of the Americans that died fighting in the Bush forces.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Far more Iraqi civilians died than Bush forces soldiers. By this reasoning, Iraqi civilians are the ones really entitled to the income from the oil.
US citizens: support the campaign to
turn around the WTO.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
I suggest editing the message to object to the WTO's rules on copyrights, and to the requirement for poor countries to recognize patents on medicines and plants.
Peruvian protestors say a multinational mining company imprisoned and tortured protestors, and worked closely with police to kill some.
The free exploitation treaty between Peru and the US gives support to businesses like these which endanger the environment.
China has executed some Tibetan protestors.
The US Chamber of Commerce is trying to block reregulation of the banks by saying this will create jobs. But its whole history is of supporting outsourcing and elimination of jobs.
The US Chamber of Commerce violated tax laws by spending millions on judicial elections and not reporting it.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to support Kucinich's single-payer health care plan.
Disinformation PR campaigns have convinced 20% of Americans to doubt the danger of global warming in the past two years.
Obama's men meet frequently with the large progressive political
groups to
try to keep them in line.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Obama is not much of a progressive, so it is only natural that progressive organizations want to go further than he does and that he tries to slow them down.
This demonstrates the importance of putting pressure on Obama and other Democrats. In particular, progressives must organize to replace the "blue dog" conservative Democrats.
The US Chamber of Commerce is trying to shut off a parody website using the DMCA.
The US Chambern of Commerce says it represents American business. If it weren't a dishonest bully, it would not be an accurate representation.
Copyright is an easy tool for corporate censorship, since most ISPs delete anything at the first complaint.
The US military resorts to sneaky and deceptive methods to get information about American teenagers.
However, we need to teach children that the risk of dying is not the worst thing about joining the US military. There are causes for which risking one's life is admirable. But many of the US's wars are evil, and it is wrong to fight them even if the soldiers are operating a drone by remote control and are totally safe.
An Iranian blogger has been imprisoned for a year without trial. His father's open letter calls on the state to state the charges and give him a fair trial.
Many other countries practice imprisonment without trial, including the US. Their citizens should be ashamed.
The UNHCR condemns forcible deportation of refugees to Iraq.
The UK tried to do this. Iraq allowed in only those who said they were willing to return.
Many people say LSD and Ectasy help them deal with severe medical and psychological problems.
Parents of British soldiers killed fighting in the Bush forces want B'liar to be prosecuted for lying to start a war of conquest.
Vigilantes in the Dominican Republic shot and killed Haitians who were cutting down trees to make charcoal.
Cutting down the forest causes eco-catastrophe, so it was necessary to stop them. But it should have been done without killing.
Verizon and AT&T are corrupting legislators and minority group NGOs to oppose net neutrality.
Our plastic refuse is
killing albatross chicks
on remote islands in the Pacific Ocean.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
3/4 of the
babies born in Falluja
are deformed — probably because of Dirty Uranium used by the Bush forces. Countries which are allied with the US should think twice about whether to allow the US to "defend" them in such
a deadly fashion.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Karzai accepted the runoff election required by the massive election fraud in the first round, in exchange for being praised as a "statesman". But nothing has been done to prevent fraud in the second round.
A hoax press conference, perhaps by the Yes Men, claimed the US Chamber of Commerce had dropped its opposition to measures to stop global warming.
US citizens: sign
this petition
asking Democratic legislators to boycott Faux News.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
How do US banks make money? They borrow money from the US government at zero interest rate, and buy treasury bonds. In effect we are just subsidizing them.
Overuse of ground water has dried up the lagoons at Las Tablas de Daimiel, and now they are on fire underground.
The cruelty of the Bible continues to do spread pain today, even in jury decisions.
The UK nuclear industry funds a special police force that carries out covert intelligence against protestors to prevent "public disquiet".
We can expect this will be used against political dissidents. Here is more information.
Children of Dalits in Gujarat face abuse in school — forced to do dirty work, denied access to water fountains, even denied grading of their exercises.
Pakistan has launched an attack on rebels in South Waziristan that launched a series of bombings in the past week. I think that the stability of Pakistan, which has nuclear arms, is properly given higher priority than whatever happens in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, since the groups under attack are linked with other Islamist militants in other parts of Pakistan, this may not be enough.
Once again, we are offered fallacious arguments that it is "too late" to reject genetically modified food.The confusion between genetically modified human food and meat from animals that have eaten genetically modified feed is a logical fallacy in the reasoning of this article.
There is also an error in the presuppositions. Cutting down the forests in Brazil to grow soy beans to feed to cattle is hardly the way for the world to avoid disaster. Eating smaller amounts of meat would do a lot better.
I am not necessarily against genetically modified food, provided it is tested properly for safety and does not deny farmers their traditional freedom. We can hardly expect proper testing under the control of the agribusiness companies, have attacked the careers of scientists who criticize them.
The UK's plans for disconnecting users accused of sharing is meeting a lot of public opposition.
US citizens: sign
this petition to house and senate leaders
for a strong health care reform bill.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Uri Avnery explains why Israel acts to make PA president Abbas weak and strengthen Hamas, while its words go in the other direction.
The copyright lobby in Canada opposes legal protections against surreptitious installation of sabotage software and spyware in users' computers.
It looks like the international Election Complaints Commission will find massive fraud in Afghanistan and report that Karzai got less than 50% of the vote.
Global warming increases the spread of marine mucilages, giant long-lasting blobs of jelly-like substances in the sea that harbor bacteria that can infect humans and fish.
Some businesses are now pushing for action to prevent global warming, in the hope of preventing measures that would reduce the size of the economy.
It will be nice if no economic sacrifice is required, but we would be fools to refuse sacrifices outright.
If 70% of emissions "come from" consumers, this is nonetheless due to the social patterns which are shaped by laws and business practices. A substantial change in the amount of emissions requires changes in those laws and practices. Governments need to act to make that change.
It would be folly to assume that businesses think long term. Many of them think only as far as the stock price in the next year.
Here's a different view on the question of whether more economic growth is what we need.
The UK has set up a massive program to record the thoughts and views of of citizens, under the guise of "preventing terrorism", and have subverted many organizations into reporting on people they deal with.
The B'liar-Clown regime has consistently headed towards tyranny along many avenues, so this is a natural progression. Just as naturally, it lies about the activity and lies about people who oppose it. This sort of government is far more dangerous than the non-state-sponsored terrorism it uses as the excuse.
Should we fear high oil prices? Here's an article that invites us to consider that possibility public danger number one.
That article is a subtle attempt to distract us from the greater danger of global warming. It harps on the short term danger of a recession due to high oil prices while disregarding the longer-term danger of destroying civilization through burning too much oil. We don't know whether technology will be able to extract 11 trillion barrels of oil from the ground, but we can be confident that pumping all that CO2 into the air will bring us ruin.
Why this one-sidedness? Perhaps a clue can be found in what it says about the multinational oil companies. In the past, they controlled the oil in countries such as Iran and Venezuela, and exported most of the profits as well as the oil itself. They defended this exploitation by getting the US and UK to attack governments which attempted to keep these profits in the country. For instance, the overthrow of the elected leader Mossadegh in Iran, which restored the Shah to power, later led to the current Islamic Republic. The article describes this sort of colonialism in glowing terms. I suspect that the oil companies have something to do with the writing of the article.
I wonder whether the author has some sort of profitable relationship with these same oil companies.
Cartels and bubbles can indeed cause unnecessary trouble. The way to prevent them is to manage the price of oil, and all fossil fuels, with a tax that will make the price rise in a steady, predictable way. That won't directly stop market manipulation, but it will reduce the demand which makes market manipulation so effective and tempting.
But that's not what the oil companies want. They want to sell as much as possible in the near future.
The UK tried to forcibly deport some Iraqis to Iraq, but Iraqi immigration would not allow them to brought in against their will.
The UN Human Rights Council approved the Goldstone report on war crimes in Gaza and submitted it to the General Assembly.
There is no chance that this can interfere with US initiatives for peace because those are already flat on their back.
The banks have no shame. After they caused a financial crisis, and got a massive bailout while the public didn't, they think they are entitled to be immune from regulation to prevent a repeat. The bailout should have given the government ownership of these banks so that it could order them to cease all lobbying on the issue.
Collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), one of the financial derivatives that caused the financial crisis that started in 2008, offer an opportunity to create booby-traps which nobody can detect or even prove. This would be a good reason to prohibit CDOs, but there is another reason which is even more important. When people about to lose their houses asked banks for forbearance, the banks said it was impossible since they had already resold the mortgages to other companies.
Banks should not be allowed to resell home mortgages — not as CDOs, not to anyone.
US citizens: tell your congresscritter not to let the US stop states from putting their own regulations on mortgages and loans. The federal government protected banks from state regulators a few years ago, with disastrous results.
Big companies can shape the direction scientific research takes by making small contributions to it. They use this power to ensure that possible harm done by their products is not studied. I agree we should bar companies from making these corrupting small contributions, but we should go further. We should tax them more, and support research with their taxes without asking their opinion.
The Bush forces casualty figures still do not properly count the casualties among mercenaries, disregarding legal requirements. This policy was surely implemented so as to disguise from the public the full extent of casualties among the Bush forces. Bush also chose not to count the number of Iraqi civilians that his invasion killed or wounded.
80 Israeli high school students have stated
their intent to go to prison rather than serve in the army
as part of the occupation of Palestine.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-13 because the old link was broken.]
The "free trade" economic system guarantees perpetual poverty for millions of export manufacturers in Haiti and other countries. The proponents of free exploitation treaties invite us to have faith that things will get better some day, when the economy expands so far that the world has an overall shortage of workers. But we are already choking the planet by producing too much. We need to fortify all the poor countries in demanding higher minimum wages for their citizens.
The UK used an "anti-terror" law to stop a citizen from travelling to Denmark for a protest.
Maoist rebels in India
gain strength
as the government takes poor people's land to give to commercial projects. Usually they don't get compensation, but when they do, they get swindled out of it. Here's an instance of
what India does to poor people
when a company wants their land for a mine.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Israeli troops
demolished a house in Jerusalem
after evicting the occupants. Israel has demolished 60 Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem and now proposes to
demolish almost 300 more.
[References updated on 2018-05-13 because the old links were broken.]
Israeli troops
threatened Palestinians who house international peace activists.
These activists serve as witnesses when Israeli troops or settlers attack Palestinians and lie about it. Some activists such as Rachel Corrie have been killed by the Army.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-13 because the old link was broken.]
Clown has decided to
send UK troops back
to the Bush forces in Iraq. 100 troops are just a symbolic contribution to the Bush forces. They are only enough to make the UK once again responsible for the occupation.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: Tell Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to make sure a public option is included in the health care reform bill goes to the floor of the Senate.
Loggers massacred an Indian tribe in Brazil so they wouldn't be a legal obstacle to logging. I think only full protection of large regions — together with well-funded birth control programs — can prevent these.
Legal restrictions on abortion kill 70,000 women a year in poor countries.
Gorillas and elephants are necessary for the survival of the trees in the forests where they live. However, protecting the gorillas won't save the trees from being cut down by humans. This requires ending human population growth in those regions.
Big companies get injunctions in the UK to censor the press and forbid reporting on censorship too.
The Senate Finance Committee passed a health care bill without a public option.
Despite this victory, the insurance companies campaigned at the last minute to make the bill even worse. Maybe that is because the battle isn't over: the whole senate still has to vote.
Meanwhile, Christian fanatics reinstated funding for Bush's perverted "abstinence only" anti-sex-education, and came close to banning insurance coverage for abortions.
An PLO internal memo recognizes that Obama has caved in totally to Israel and dashed any chance of he can achieve peace.
Good for him that he already has his Nobel prize.
The UN's attempt to disarm the Hutu armies in Eastern Congo has killed and raped thousands of civilians.
Greenpeace protestors climbed to the roof of Parliament to unfurl banners calling for reduction of CO2 emissions. Government spokesmen criticize this act of tresspassing to distract our attention from their endangerment of civilization's survival.
Global warming is melting the glaciers on Mount Everest, causing drought and occasional catastrophic floods.
US citizens: tell Congress to enact strong protection against misconduct by banks.
Global warming has caused a giant dead zone off the coast of Oregon and Washington.
A scientist has demonstrated how to produce something like the Shroud of Turin.
The Senate passed Al Franken's bill to bar contracts to companies that stop their employees from taking sexual assault and discrimination cases to court. The 30 senators who voted against this apparently do not care about any sort of abuse.
China has sentenced a number of people to death for murders during the riots in Urumqi. They might be guilty — I have no basis to say they were not — though it is hard to have confidence in Chinese justice. But even if they are, execution is not justified.
Bush secretly continued Total Information Awareness after Congress ordered it shut down.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
A fund manager from Bear Stearns faces prosecution. In his diary he admitted that his fund could "blow up", but he told customers everything was fine.
Pakistan's army attacked the Islamist terrorists who had taken hostages in Pakistan's army HQ. I'm not surprised they were able to attack with inside support, since it was Pakistan's intelligence service that launched al Qa'ida, an it has been accused of protecting al Qa'ida and the Taliban throughout recent years. This attack will make it hard for anyone in Pakistan's government to try to protect them any more.
I fear that they will torture the captured terrorist, Dr. Usman. If so, he is likely to give false confessions. They might be useful for making Pakistan's intelligence service look good (or covering up its involvment), but we must not suppose they are true.
The UK will end its loopholes and support an EU ban on shark finning. But we need a global ban in order to prevent sharks from being wiped out.
Sarkozy has given France the world's nastiest law (HADOPI) to stop unauthorized copying, but his office does unauthorized copying on a large scale. The French minister of culture, who pushed hard for the HADOPI law, seems to think that rape of a minor is a much less serious wrong than sharing files.
Vancouver has banned protests during the Olypmic Games — even signs and leaflets. Citizens are fighting back. Meanwhile, the International Olympic Committee is trying to use copyright to suppress photos of the exteriors of its sports venues.
An Iranian protestor faces execution, allegedly as a result of a false confession obtained by torture.
Private equity companies profit by buying and selling companies, loading them up with debt in the process, and ultimately leaving them bankrupt.
Change we can't believe in: Obama mostly continues Bush's policies.
So why did they give him a Nobel prize? His efforts towards peace between Israel and Palestine are laughably weak, but he has indeed launched diplomatic initiatives for nuclear disarmament and peace with Iran which might achieve something. However, results remain in the future. It is too soon to judge these efforts, too soon to judge whether they will deserve a prize.
US citizens: call your representatives in support of the Fair Elections Now Act, which would establish a public funding alternative for congressional elections. Or use this web page to send a message.
Burma's military dictators allowed foreign representatives to meet Aung San Suu Kyi.
Perhaps they are hoping for relaxation of sanctions. I don't believe they will be willing to allow democracy, but they might be willing to run a dictatorship only as bad as that of China or Egypt.
UN diplomat Peter Galbraith says that 1/3 of Karzai's votes were fraudulent.
High-tech organized poaching rings are putting the rhinoceros in renewed danger of extinction. Can someone develop convincing fake ground rhino horn?
IMF policies in 31 countries exacerbated the economic downturn.
The US troops in Afghanistan are discouraged and demoralized, not knowing what they are fighting for.
The new head of the bank bailout program rebuked various government agencies for lying to the public about the situation when the bailout was started.
The Taliban announced that they do not wish to threaten western countries, suggesting they might be willing to break with al Qa'ida and make peace with the US. I supported the invasion of Afghanistan, not because of al Qa'ida but because of the tyranny and cruelty of its rule in Afghanistan. However, nowadays some of the Taliban have moderated and don't seem to be much worse than the US-supported corrupt Karzai regime.
A man was arrested for informing protestors at the G20 meeting where the police where going. The same methods were used by protestors in Tehran. Then police searched the house where he lived and seized the belongings of everyone there, based on a warrant that was improperly broad.
The "tort reform" movement was invented by the tobacco companies. It uses false stories to make liability law seem dangerous, so as to generate support for reducing liability.
The only possible way to convince Iran not to develop nuclear weapons is to negotiate a treaty denuclearizing the whole region, including Israel.
Kucinich reminds Americans of how in 2002 he documented the holes Bush's arguments for invading Iraq. So nobody is entitled to the excuse that "If we knew then what we know now, we would all have opposed it."
Berlusconi's law making him immune from prosecution was found unconstitutional, allowing many prosecutions to go forward.
The Republican Party now has no philosophy beyond hurting the Democratic Party.
In Chiapas, right wing militias
attacked Zapatista farmers,
captured some and tortured them.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
A proposed coal-burning plant in the UK has been cancelled. This project was the target of major protests by climate protection campaigners. The Maldives island held a cabinet meeting underwater to call attention to the danger that it will be submerged by rising sea level.
Do you know people in Paris? Please call their attention to
the campaign
against new surveillance cameras.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Some Israelis don't dare visit the UK lest they be
accused of war crimes.
Meanwhile, Hamas is preventing Palestinians from firing rockets at Israel. There is no possible doubt that Hamas is a possible partner for peace. The doubt that remains is about Israel.
[References updated on 2018-04-07 because the old links were broken.]
Israel is building
800 new apartments and houses
in colonies in the West Bank, hurrying construction to negate any future freeze.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-13 because the old link was broken.]
Afghanistan is looking more and more
like Vietnam,
and the US is trying the same "solutions" which failed there.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
The Palestinian police have kidnapped and tortured many Hamas supporters. Some have been tortured to death.
British troops in the Bush forces tortured a prisoner by pouring urine on him and pushing his head into a toilet.
The UN has a plan to pay poor countries to preserve forests. But it could be vulnerable to massive corruption. If the verification is done by an international agency based on satellite data, it could be harder for corrupt politicians in the poor countries to fiddle with it.
US citizens: phone your senators to demand health care reform including a public option.
US citizens: sign this petition calling on the US to plan its exit strategy for Afghanistan.
Soot from wood fires and diesel engines is contributing to climate change as it falls on ice and absorbs heat.
But reducing soot does not make it safe to continue emitting CO2, which is making the ocean acidic enough to dissolve the shells of molluscs and wipe out most life in the sea.
Chicago may have lost the Olympic games because US immigratiom is so unpleasant for visitors.
Instead of correcting the problem, the government is considering a PR campaign to suppress the resentment it arouses.
Don't let this succeed! As long as the US takes fingerprints of visitors, everyone subject to this policy should refuse to go to the US.
Judges ruled that the British government was derilict in not investigating accusations from relatives of tortured and murdered Iraqi prisoners.
Ireland voted to approve the EU constitution-in-disguise. This is sad news for Europe.
London police apparently killed an anti-fascist campaigner while he was protesting a fascist rally 30 years ago.
In Honduras, Micheletti's abolition of human rights has weakened his position, and he has agreed to
talks with Zelaya.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
The US and Europe quashed an attempt to ask the UN Security Council to take up the war crimes (by Hamas and Israel) described in the Goldstone report. This shows that Obama has become, like Bush and Clinton, a puppet of the right-wing Israeli government.
It may also indicate that the PLO is desperate to reinforce its status through futile peace negotiations. There is no chance that negotiations will be fruitful unless the US ceases to give Israel unlimited support.
Bank of America's policy: we won't cash your check unless you come with arms.
While Mr Valdez objects to their demand for his print because he could not provide one, I think it is just as wrong to demand a print from a person who can provide one.
Speaker Pelosi insists that the House of Representatives' health care bill will have a public option.
The public option will not reduce overall costs like a single-payer system, because that requires eliminating the health insurance companies and the multi-payer bureaucracy of our current system. But at least it will provide medical care to the uninsured at reasonable costs.
The US government gave up control over ICANN wich allocates Internet domain names and IP numbers.
Interpreted in nationalistic terms, this change would appear to be ipso facto good for the world outside the US. However, the question that really matters about ICANN is not which country nominally controls it, buit how it deals with the rights of internet users; specifically, whether it bows down to companies that wish to use ICANN to extend their control over names they use beyond what trademark law allows. I don't know how this change will affect that question.
The Senate Finance Committee ruined the health care bill by eliminating publicly funded insurance as an option.
This is the result of a systematic and deceptive right-wing campaign.
Being tortured destroys memories: the victim can come to believe false accusations before signing a confession.
Investigators that want information already know that torture is an ineffective way to get it. The real motive for torture is to get confessions — it works really well, if you don't care whether the confessions are true or false.
A UN investigation confirmed that Georgia started the war with Russia in 2008.
Attend
the speeches of the Israelis who went to prison
rather than participate in the occupation.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
In NYC: See the Yes Men's film on Oct 7.
Catastrophic global warming could occur as soon as 2060.
A secret CIA prison was operating in Baghdad through the end of 2008. Prisoners were held there secretly and tortured.
The UN is headed for treating caste discrimination as a human rights violation.
Iran has made a tentative deal that heads in the direction of showing it is not trying to make nuclear weapons.
I am skeptical: I tend to think that Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapon.
Three three nasty provisions of the U SAP AT RIOT act are going to expire.
Obama wants to renew them. Some senators
propose to replace them
with something less dangerous.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Lisa Graves testified in the Senate committee opposing renewal.
The Burmese military rulers decided to keep Aung San Suu Kyi in house
arrest.
The IMF will work on a
global tax on financial companies
to build up a fund for future bailouts.
It looks like the alleged bomber of Pan Am flight 800 was convicted
based on testimony obtained by witnesses who were paid for it, and
information contradicting their testimony was concealed from the defense.
Pakistan is
setting up local militias to keep the Taliban out of Swat.
UK conservatives say they will end the surveillance state, but their
manifesto
fails to address many of the worst forms of surveillance.
The presidential guard
killed 150 protestors
in Guinea.
China's anniversary "celebration" turns Beijing into
a phony theatrical act,
in which thousands have been forced to perform, while most of the city has been ordered to stay home and out of the way.
How
the BBC is conspiring with Hollywood
to impose DRM on broadcast TV in the UK.
Israel denounces the Goldstone report as "one-sided", but
the report condemns Hamas war crimes as well
as Israeli Army war crimes. However, the Goldstone commission was in a way superfluous: the overall approach and rules of engagement chosen by Israel guaranteed many civilian casualties in Gaza.
Ahmed al-Darbi describes how
he was tortured into false confession
by US agents in Bagram and Guantanamo. He saw another prisoner tortured to death. Parts of his sworn statement were apparently censored. Do they describe torture even more embarrassing than what was allowed through? Will Obama keep him in prison for the rest of his life so he cannot tell them to us?
Peace negotiations without a freeze on Israeli settlement contruction is just a cover for continued colonization. When
Obama surrendered on this issue,
he assured that any negotiations will not get anywhere.
Global warming will lead to
global food shortages and malnutrition
in a few decades. Global warming is reducing the Antarctic ice cap by speeding up the flow of glacier to the ocean. Whether this will lead to catastrophic flooding in this century is beyond science's ability to predict. So, do we want to take the chance?
A grandmother faces criminal charges for
buying cold medicine twice in a week
for her three sick grandchildren. Here you see police on a power trip.
Citizens of Massachusetts: call your state legislators in support of HB 2160 which would protect medical marijuana use.
Palestinians related to civilians killed by the Israeli attack on Gaza want Britain to
arrest Ehud Barak.
Instead of sending bulldozers to demolish Palestinian homes so as to take drive them out and expand the "settlements",
Israel now orders the residents to destroy their own homes.
A London policeman who attacked a protestor will
face charges,
but Tomlinson's killer still escapes prosecution. These bullies will keep on rampaging until they are made to pay.
US citizens: Thank Speaker Pelosi for
insisting on a public option
in US health care reform.
Net neutrality in Europe is under threat from (what else?)
business corruption of government.
People in Honduras are starting to denounce
the business elite that backs the coup regime.
And a Brazilian official confirms that the embassy was attacked with toxic gas.
With Iran testing new missiles, and a secret uranium enrichment plant revealed, there is
new pressure for stricter sanctions.
The question remains, as before, whether China will veto them.
The person who originated the distorted "death panels" accusation against Obama's health care reform plan is an experienced (and obviously unscrupulous)
right-wing paid political activist.
Six EU countries with large fishing fleets blocked
a proposal to ban fishing Bluefin tuna,
which is being pushed to extinction. This reflects the way our political system, which pretends to be democracy, is organized to obey the businesses most directly interested in the issue at hand. Even when those businesses are destroying the resources they use, governments still cannot disobey them.
Antarctica's glaciers are moving faster, so
the ice cap is thinning.
New York, Boston, Washington DC may go the way of New Orleans in a few decades.
Lt. Ehren Watada, who refused deployment to Iraq because he believed it was an illegal war,
will be discharged from the army,
which has given up trying to prosecute him again. I take issue with Kagan, who cheered that Watada "never disparaged the service and the sacrifices made by countless other soldiers and officers who obeyed their orders" and presented that as positive. The pretense that Bush forces soldiers were "serving their country" and that they deserved our "support" were instrumental in blocking effective opposition to the war.
I admire the sacrifice and risk that Lt. Watada undertood, which was all the more heroic because he did it without any moral support from those around him. That is plenty to make him a hero, and I will not criticize him over anything else which he might have additionally done. But if he had also disparaged the so-called service that obedient Bush forces, that would have been good to, and perhaps quite effective for ending the war.
Death squads, disappearances and torture in Pakistan.
The war against the Taliban in Swat was justified, but
that doesn't excuse torturing and killing people in custody.
Obama's pledge to close Guantanamo has become meaningless,
since he does not plan to end the injustice that Guantanamo
represents — just shift it around.
One point this article fails to mention is that Guantanamo or some
overseas prison is a necessary part of Obama's policy of imprisonment
without trial. Moving the prisoners to the US would give them the
legal rights that they deserve, so Obama would have to either
prosecute them or release them. To avoid that, he needs a black hole
outside the US to dump them in, and Guantanamo does the job.
However, Guantanamo is not the only place he can do this. Bagram in
Afghanistan is being used the same way. To close the Guantanamo
prison by moving the prisoners to Bagram, or some other destination
outside the US, would be no more legitimate.
Greece is
imprisoning thousands of illegal immigrants who arrive by
boat fleeing violence in Iraq and Afghanistan. THey will take any
risk to get to Europe because the alternative is probable death. Yet
Greece gives asylum to hardly anyone.
The root cause of this problem is in the wars started by Bush,
which drove these people out of their home countries.
The G20 have agreed on
new regulations for bankers' bonuses and to limit trade imbalances.
To put the latter into practice seems to require a big decrease in the
US standard of living. That might be tolerable if the4 burden falls
on the rich, but I expect Obama to do the opposite.
Zelaya, in the Brasilian embassy in Tegucigolpe,
is
attracting world attention to his demand for reinstatement
to preside over the election of his successor.
Americans are
turning against the war in Afghanistan, and against
Obama at the same time.
I never supported Obama, because he always struck me as too right
wing, but I did support the war in Afghanistan when it looked like it
could succeed in liberating Afghanistan from the Taliban's oppression.
However, the people of Afghanistan are no longer enthusiastic about
our help, and under those circumstances it cannot do any good.
Uri Avnery:
Netanyahu has beaten Obama and vanquished,
for the time being, the threat of peace.
The Senate is considering a plan to
trim back the U. S.A.P. A.T. R.I.O.T. act.
Note how the Republicans' excuse for total surveillance is to have "all possible tools for law enforcement". That is a bad goal: to give the police all the power they say they need is to create a police state. We must protect ourselves from the bigger danger, which is the tendency of the US government to start wars with no valid justficiation. This is a bigger crime than the 9/11 attacks, and also tends to encourage such attacks.
The Senate may also cancel the retroactive immunity that it granted a year ago to the telephone companies' illegal spying.
300 people dared to protest
the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh
despite effective military occupation of the city.
The Yes Men said they would storm the UN by water, then lock world leaders in a room till they reached a deal. They were not serious.
The police arrested the protest's leader,
based on statements which are provably lies.
Obama's support for
nuclear arms reduction
has led to signs of progress.
Why 16 is too high for the age of consent.
The harm done by criminalizing pleasurable activities that don't directly harm anyone else is why I don't advocate outright prohibition of proprietary software.
Spain's government
denied participation in a scientific contest
to a university localed in an Israeli colony in Palestinian territory.
In the UK,
a large fraction of prisoners are military veterans.
The same thing was observed in the US after Vietnam, and it was partly attributed to the military quagmire and to the well-recognized injustice of the US intervention there. But these British veterans are not all from quagmires, and not all from unmust wars. This poses a problem I don't know how to answer.
The FBI has brought back
"total information awareness" datamining.
True to form, they presented "terrorism" as an excuse, but use the system for investigating all sorts of people, including dissidents.
Obama has definitively endorsed
the practice of imprisoning people without trial,
based on mere suspicion or even rumor. The supposed reason for this policy is to protect the US. Likewise, when China imprisons people without trial, the supposed reason is to protect China.
These excuses are nonsense. A government which imprisons people without trial is an evil regime that has no legitimacy. Even US courts persist in recognizing this, saying that prisoners in Bagram have the right to a court hearing.
Lula's brother-in-law owns a company that uses
cheap labor in Haiti.
(This information appears far down In the article; search for "Brazil", and read the 7 paragraphs following that heading.)
A leaked White House memo shows that Obama is
concerned about the banks and the stock market,
not about citizens.
McChrystal wants to withdraw troops from rural areas and
concentrate around cities.
That means a step forward for the Taliban, along the path that guerrilla uprisings take. I think there is no way to defeat the Taliban under the present circumstances. The people of Afghanistan don't like them, but someone like Karzai cannot inspire them to fight. It is Vietnam all over again.
China took a step towards a strong commitment to
stop global warming.
The US notably failed to do the same.
Netanyahu has refused to freeze construction in Arab lands,
preventing any progress towards peace.
Uri Avnery has explained many times that Israeli leaders want to avoid any peace deal, and how they make peace impossible by refusing to consider the necessary concessions. If Obama is trying to achieve anything beyond the fictitious successes Bush boasted about, he needs to put pressure on Israel.
As the Israeli Army attacked civilians in Gaza,
the police attacked civilians in Israel who tried to protest.
US citizens: phone your senators to oppose Murkowski's amendment that would block the EPA from regulating CO2 emissions from power plants and factories. The amendment would delay this for one year, but you can expect them to delay over and over.
Torture in the British army wasn't done by "bad apples";
the whole barrel was rotten.
The coup-installed Honduran government has besieged the Brazilian embassy, and shut down a large area of Tegucigolpe around it.
This siege may be an act of war;
if so, Brazil would be entitled to respond with a naval blockade cutting off Honduras' trade. That would, in effect, be the sort of trade sanction that could reverse the coup.
Buzzwords
can't mask failure
in Afghanistan.
Illegal CIA experiments on U.S. soldiers were
the basis for Bush regime torture,
and doctors participated.
France has adopted a slightly modified version of
the law for internet disconnection as punishment.
Since the first one was found unconstitutional for imposing punishment without trial, this variant calls for quick "trials" which disregard norms of justice.
Laws banning smoking in public places
cut heart attacks by 1/3.
A total ban on tobacco would probably save additional lives, but prohibiting something that many people want to do causes disastrous problems (as we learned from prohibition of alcohol in the past, and marijuana today).
Airlines are trying to forestall CO2 emissions regulations by proposing
an ambitious-sounding program of reductions.
The problem is, they won't actually reduce their emissions, just buy reductions from others.
'The Age of Stupid':
a wakeup call on climate.
Zelaya is now in
the Brasilian embassy in Tegucigolpe.
The US says that the Honduran air force has control over the base in Palmerola and does not ask US permission to land planes there. However, there are strong arguments that the military would not have acted without a go-ahead from the US.
Obama is considering the posibility that
the war in Afghanistan is unwinnable.
The Yes Men strike again, with
a fake New York Post issue
giving future news of global disaster due to climate change.
China and India are adopting
strong climate protection policies
on their own.
17 journalists have been
murdered or died suspiciously
in Russia in recent years. The state has done little to prosecute the killers.
Obama is exploring
deep cuts in nuclear weapons
as a way to spur worldwide nuclear disarmament. It will be hard to get an agreement, but the willingness to try shows real statemanship.
Whole Foods markets itself as "natural" to appeal to progressives, and
gives the money to nasty right-wing causes.
Massachusetts citizens: support the campaign for
instant runoff voting.
Israel's response to the Goldstone report is
the same old counteraccusation,
no matter how absurd it is.
Trafigura, which dumped
poisonous wastes in Africa that made many people sick,
hopes to get off the hook by paying compensation that is small compared with its profits. At that rate, poisoning people could be profitable even if it is discovered occasionally.
Obama gets mixed grade on
privacy issues in EPIC report;
C+ on civil liberties.
The UN is planning
workshops for world leaders
to get them ready for a climate control deal.
Court documents show how various drug companies
systematically produced "scientific" papers for marketing purposes.
One of them is suing a doctor for denouncing the dishonest way a paper
was published.
The crucial point is that the doctor, Eastell, who participated in the
corruption, was motivated by the desire to protect grants from a drug
company. We must not allow drug companies any control over the
funding of university research. Instead we should make them pay taxes
which will be handed out through peer-reviewed government programs.
Hard proof of
election fraud in Afghanistan.
Paper ballots do not guarantee an honest election, but they do make it
much easier to investigate.
Due to global warming, shipping between Asia and Europe can now
travel through the Arctic Ocean.
Next they will be able to
sail across Manhattan Island.
Wall Street should give priority to stopping global warming before it
gets flooded.
Now Blackwater offers
security training for "faith-based organizations".
Kucinich warns that the Obama's health insurance reform is likely to
turn into a replica of the Massachusetts bill that
requires everyone to buy insurance.
Israel
refuses to freeze housing construction in Palestinian land,
and Obama continues to demand it.
Israel is dependent on US money just as the Palestinian Authority is.
If Obama wants to achieve peace, he will have to use this lever on
both sides.
The record companies are now
asking children to write their propaganda.
US citizens: use
this page to tell your congresscritters and senators
to support stricter regulation of banks.
Fashion and media are
systematically sexualizing young girls
to make them shopaholics.
A European oil company has been
dumping toxic waste in Africa,
and tried to deny it, even to the point of suing the press to cover it up.
Muntazer al-Zaidi speaks
for Iraq, devastated by Bush. Sadly, a man in Falluja threw a shoe at Bush forces troops and they shot him.
A lawsuit by Iraqi torture victims
against mercenaries was thrown out.
The judge is a personal friend of Cheney and Rumsfeld, which ought to disqualify him.
Damilvany Gnanakumar, who volunteered to treat civilian casualties as Sri Lanka's army crushed the Tamil Tigers, has been freed from prison and allowed to return to England where she lives. She says that
the civilian casualties were enormous and the government is lying about them.
That is standard practice in Sri Lanka. During the fighting, civilians fled to an area where the army said it would not bomb them, and and then it did bomb them. The continued imprisonment of nearly all the civilians is evidently cruel, but when I ask myself why this is being done, I fear the purpose is to kill them, or at least a large fraction of them. I cannot see another plausible motive.
Tomgram:
Is America Hooked on War?
A Taliban attack on NATO troops
killed many civilians. Note how the shopkeeper blamed NATO rather than the Taliban.
Obama has dropped the plans for
a missile defense system in Eastern Europe,
which could help plans for arms reduction. I'm skeptical that it could ever have worked anyway.
The SEC fined Bank of America for concealing bonuses from its stockholders. The fine was too small to mean anything, and
a federal judge rejected it.
Wendell Potter explains
how businesses run capitalist front groups
to create a false appearance of broader support.
The US has
invaded Somalia again.
People call Somalia a "failed state", but the last government to exercise control over Somalia didn't fail on its own. It was destroyed by the Ethopian intervention, which was backed by the US. That intervention kicked Somalia back into the chaos of battling militias, with a "government" that is no more than the militia that gets some US support.
A year of financial crisis has done nothing to weaken the banks'
stranglehold over the US Congress. Senator Durbin says
the banks "own the place."
The BBC has
plans to regulate TV sets in the UK, imposing DRM and
potentially other malicious features.
US citizens: phone your senators and tell them not to give in to
right-wing demands to prohibit health insurance from covering
abortion.
US citizens: call your congresscritter to support the Respect for
Marriage Act, which would give the same recognition to same-sex marriages
(when made in states that allow them) as to other marriages.
You can also send email through
this page but a phone call carries more weight.
The UN has
demanded a recount
in 1/10 of Afghanistan's voting precincts.
Zaidi says that he was tortured in prison.
The torture start in the Green Zone,
which is controlled by the Bush forces directly, and this makes them responsible.
Diplomats say that Obama wants
to scrap the Kyoto framework
in any new climate treaty, and start from scratch. This would weaken the resulting treaty, and probably take years.
The UN investigation found that
Israel's attack on Gaza was "designed to punish, humiliate and terrorise a civilian population"
and calls for prosecution of the individuals responsible.
Deniers of Stalin's mass murder are
suing a Russian newspaper
for saying what he did. Given Putin's influence over all institutions in Russia, and his wish to deny Stalin's crimes, I think he might order the court to sustain the accusation.
Corals might be able to resist rising sea temperatures up to a point,
by switching to different species of algae.
However, this won't help them resist the acidifying effect of atmospheric CO2, which starves corals of the mineral that they use to build their shells.
NYC will have a referendum to call for
a new investigation
of the 9/11 attacks.
In New York: help the Yes Men
pull a stunt
(still secret) to promote action on climate change.
Inhabitants of the US,
sign this petition
calling on companies to stop advertising in Glenn Beck's TV show on Faux News.
Obama again spoke of trying to
reregulate the banks.
However, it was not long ago that the US torpedoed a French plan to limit bankers' bonuses.
Another Republican "family values" hypocrite has been caught out. He boasted about
sex with a lobbyist
and didn't know his mike was live.
Wal-Mart's influence in
spreading poverty through the US
is rooted in the founder's contempt for his workers, and its effect goes far beyond its own workers.
Sri Lanka has released only 15,000 of the 300,000
Tamil civilian prisoners.
The rest lack food and water, and those who complain to reporters get disappeared.
When pregnant women drink alcohol, they can cause
permanent brain damage to the fetus.
Large numbers of children may be being born with brain damage that will make them dangerously violent. No other drug, whether now legal or illegal, is likely to harm as many people as alcohol does. But prohibition is a cure worse than the disease: it's unfair to millions who use alcohol in moderation, it doesn't achieve its goal, and it causes other worse problems. Prohibition is the wrong way to prevent the harm that some drugs do. What, then, could be the solution? I don't know, but I think we should look for it first of all for alcohol.
An
interview with two former Bush forces soldiers who have become
anti-war activists.
US citizens: sign
this petition asking Congress to censure Rep. Joe Wilson.
Religious fanatics in Baghdad are
stalking gays to murder them.
The "War on Drugs" has caused only disaster;
we must end this war.
US citizens: if you live in the states of certain crucial senators,
phone them to support health care reform.
Police in the UK stretch and abuse their
"anti-terror" stop and search powers,
which are already too broad.
Afghanistan is getting
too dangerous for real journalism;
the effect is likely to be that we only hear what the allied governments want us to hear.
Obama is continuing Bush's work in setting up
a pervasive system of surveillance in the US.
As usual, the excuse is "terrorists", but the system is used against dissidents, and anyone that the police don't like. The participation of "private companies" in handing over intelligence means that they report on their customers. This is why you should not give companies information about yourself. Don't feed Big Brother – pay with cash only.
Interviews with the family members of the civilians that were killed in
an airstrike in Afghanistan.
German troops called in the airstrike after the Taliban had taken some fuel trucks. But, by the time the trucks were bombed, mostly civilians were trying to get fuel from them. If the fighters had fired warning shots and returned in a few minutes, could they have avoided killing civilians, and shown that NATO does care about their lives?
US citizens: sign
this position supporting health care reform
including a "public option".
Although without instituting a single-payer system (and eliminating
the heath insurance companies) there is no way to save money, it will
provide coverage to everyone.
The Bush forces are
increasing troop strength in Iraq
while disguising it as a decrease: they are replacing official soldiers by a larger number of expensive mercenaries.
This technique could also serve to disguise a permanent occupation.
Proprietary software,
designed for surveillance on kids' browsing,
spies for the developer as well as for the parents.
China is bullying Nepal into
mistreating Tibetan refugees
and banning their protests.
France will
adopt
a carbon emissions tax, which will start out small and grow over
time. Since I despise Sarkozy for his attacks on internet freedom, I
have to recognize that here, at least, he sets a good example.
Zaidi, the shoe-thrower of Baghdad,
awaits a hero's welcome
when he is released from prison. The contrast between Zaidi, and Maliki who imprisoned him, will be stark.
The Israeli Army kidnapped
5 Palestinian teenagers
who were herding sheep.
Everyone: join
a climate change "wake-up" flash mob
on Sep 21.
US citizens:
sign Kucinich's petition
for a single-payer health care system.
The companies that want to mine tar sands have set up
a fake "consumer" group
to prevent action against the high CO2 emitted by converting these sands.
Van Jones was
targeted by an organized Republican demonization
campaign, and Obama surrendered to it meekly.
Rashid Rauf, suspected airplane bombing plotter, could not be
extradited to the UK because his torture rendered the evidence against
him questionable. Then the Pakistani guards said he escaped and later
was killed —
which may have been a disguise for killing him.
The UN commission says it found
"convincing evidence of fraud" in Afghanistan's presidential
election.
Lubna Hussein has decided to go to prison rather than pay a fine
for having worn trousers in public.
Since this has unleashed a battle between Islam-inspired bigots and
feminists, the world must not stand idle and let the bigots crush
dissent by force.
Iran
arrested dissidents investigating the torture of previously
arrested opposition figures, and locked the office of their party.
The Iranian police say that anyone questioning or opposing the
government is an enemy of their country. That's what the neocons said
in the US. That reasoning is the reasoning of a tyranty.
The Israeli government proposed a
6-month suspension of some construction of the illegal settlements
in the West Bank, which won approval based on the argument that it would
really change nothing.
Obama has not accepted the pretense that this would count for anything,
but unless he exerts more pressure, nothing more will be offered.
Iraq's government wants an
international tribunal for suspected bomb-layers in Syria.
The organizations of non-commercial users of the Internet
denounced ICANN for giving too much weight to the interests
of business.
This is what happens under governments in which democracy
has been corrupted by business power.
An Obama administration official was
pressured to resign by Republicans.
They attacked him for calling Republicans "assholes",
which is nothing compared to what they call Obama, and for doubting
the official story of who was behind the 9/11 attacks.
I suspect that Obama asked him to resign, although they do not say
this.
Obama not only fails to support a real investigation of 9/11, but
effectively shows that no one in his administration can support one.
US trade, like US aid, is designed to
keep Haiti in slavery.
Avoiding
killing civilians in Afghanistan
proves easier said than done. Part of the cause is that the military is trained to fight another army. In such a war, it is best to use the "most effective" weapon, the one that will defeat the enemy with the least risk: here, an air strike. But those priorities don't fit a counterguerrilla operation. The urge to bomb the trucks rather than risk troops retaking them must have been almost irresistable. However, even with the best efforts it is impossible to avoid killing civilians in war. Other civilians forgive this if they believe the war is being fought on their behalf. But it's clear that the people of Afghanistan don't believe this now. Although the NATO troops say they protect the civilians, the claim is not believed. Civilians in Helmand say they feel caught in the crossfire between NATO and the Taliban. Karzai's rigged election only makes it worse.
Israeli troops fired tear gas at
the weekly nonviolent Bil'in protest
and then at an Al Jezeera reporter who was covering the protest.
Child protection authorities in the UK
hope to remove babies from inadequate parents,
who would screw up their lives, and have them adopted by better parents, before they are old enough to notice. The idea makes sense in the abstract, but implementing it may be difficult. It may be hard to find good parents who want to adopt these babies, and hard to tell who would be good. It would be even better convince the inadequate parents to avoid having the babies. A reduction in natalist social pressure might have a great influence with people who are conflicted about what they want in life.
Melting ice caused by
global warming
will unleash earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanos.
Sri Lanka
expelled a Unicef official
who warned that the monsoon would soon flood the camps in which 300,000 Tamil civilians are imprisoned. Supposedly these civilians were detained so as to find Tamil Tiger soldiers hiding among them. The authorities should have been able to check and release a considerable number, at least tens of thousands, in the four months since then. How many of these civilians have been released? Should't the security council take action?
In Uganda, children are
killed to sell their organs.
Contrast this with the execution of adult prisoners in China
so as
to sell their organs.
Israel continues killing Palestinians in Gaza by blocking them
from
travelling to get medical care.
US citizens: sign
this petition to call for antitrust action
against Monsanto for its control over the seed market.
40 years of climate change have
made drought the usual condition in a
large part of equatorial Africa. There is hardly even enough water
for the people to drink, let alone keep their herds alive.
A million people can't survive by selling charcoal to each other.
(Not to mention that the activity causes deforestation.) The land can
no longer support its population, so the population is going to
diminish: many will have to either migrate or die, and nowadays
overpopulation will make other countries reluctant to let them in.
The people will not die all at once. It will happen over a period of
years; those who can't afford enough food will die of various diseases
which they can't afford to treat. Meanwhile, other problems caused by
climate change, pollution, and overpopulation will strike other parts
of the world.
Parts of the US are threatened by long-term water shortage. The US
overall still has food and drinking water enough, so people could
move. It might also use its resources less wastefully. But as the
productive economy gets weaker, the resources (including ground water)
are depleted, the rich concentrate political power, and the population
increases, we will gradually get closer to the edge. The Americans
who die now from medical problems they can't afford to treat are a
sample of what is in store for us. The fraction of uninsured only has
to double twice to include half the population of the US.
Although the world population is doubling more slowly than it was 30
years ago, it is still growing even as it overflows what the world can
handle. Reducing the birth rate is as urgent as other steps to reduce
CO2 emissions. The inconveniences of a population which is decreasing
due to fewer births are well publicized. People need to recognize how
much worse the other option is.
An Appeals Court ruled Ashcroft is
personally responsible for twisting laws to illegally imprison a US
citizen without charge.
Does this mean he can be prosecuted? Will Obama protect him?
Obama joined with Clown to protect bankers' right to
tremendous bonuses from banks that are losing money.
So whose side are they on?
Former President Cardoso of Brazil calls for
world-wide legalization of marijuana.
Shaker Amer,
now a prisoner in Guantanamo,
says the UK colluded when the Bush regime had him tortured in Afghanistan. He did not show up for a meeting with his lawyer, because the guards had taken away his clothing.
There is
an international press
to curb the bonuses paid by banks.
The US has
suspended some aid
to the coup-established government of Honduras, but approved an IMF loan that will more than make up for the suspension.
Iraq's semi-puppet government accused Syria of harboring bombers, and
Iraqi refugees there are afraid
they will be forced to return to Iraq. The fighting in Iraq nowadays has nothing more to do with resisting occupation. It is factions with militias fighting for control over parts of the country. If Syria is involved in that, it is just meddling. But Maliki might make a false accusation for reasons of his own.
Periods of higher economic activity correlate with
decreased life expectancy.
Pfizer faces a fine of over 2 billion dollars for
corrupting the US medical system.
If Bush had a third term as president, what would it look like?
Not that different from Obama.
I have to recognize a couple of important differences that the article
didn't mention: Obama is trying to reduce global warming and reform
health care. But these must be viewed against the background of the
many similarities described in the article.
US citizens:
send a message to Obama to stand firm for
a public health care funding option.
Even though it won't save money the way abolishing
the insurance companies would, it will provide health care
for the Americans that now go without.
Physicians for Human Rights says that
doctors participated directly in torture for the Bush regime.
CO2 in the atmosphere is already at the point where
coral reefs are doomed,
and with them, a large fraction of life in the ocean.
Senators in the pocket of fossil fuel companies have
killed the chance of a climate protection treaty this year.
They may also have killed our coastal cities, our planet's coral reefs, and our civilisation.
Society is moving towards
total surveillance of everyone's movements;
but it is not too late to put controls on it. From some of these forms of surveillance, you can defend yourself. For instance, don't carry a cell phone; pay for a metro card with cash, not a credit card; refuse to carry an ID card that identifies you to a computer; don't use EZ-Pass. These are all standard practice for me. But we need more than individual resistance to really correct this problem.
An interview with holocaust-denier David Irving has reopened the question of
European laws that make certain historical views a crime.
I disagree with Irving's position about the holocaust, but I stand behind his right to state it.
In addition to the big drought,
Iraqi farming has been devastated
by a US-imposed policy of welcoming food imports.
The same thing has happened in other countries,
such as Haiti.
Israeli conscientious objectors, who decided to go to prison
rather than carry out the occupation of Palestine,
are touring the US.
Azerbaijan has arrested people for
posting a parody news conference
with a donkey acting the role of a government spokesman.
I can think of some other countries where this comparison would be
apt.
Putin is trying to
make Stalin a hero.
Musicians' groups in the UK have taken a stand
opposing the War on Sharing.
Companies that sell bottled water, and other drinks,
are corrupting World Water Week with their subsidies.
These companies should pay more taxes, and useful events,
research, etc. should be funded through those taxes.
Plastic manufacturers are blowing tobacco-style smoke to
prevent the FDA from protecting the public from the highly
dangerous chemical Bisphenol A.
Israeli police tried to
arrest several people in Bil'in,
home of the longest-running series of Palestinian nonviolent protests. The most plausible reason for the arrest of these people is intimidation of their peaceful protests. Bil'in is not a center of anything else.
Melting of the Greenland ice sheet
keeps accelerating.
Recent predictions have already been surpassed, since warming creates new phenomena that speed the effect. It's very risky to bet your life on how long a big ice cube will last inside a furnace.
Bristol, in the UK,
will let the public vote
about each piece of grafitti to decide whether to erase it or keep it.
The UK will require doctors to raise the
issue of organ donation
with dying people whose organs might save lives, and their families. Doctors in the US pay too much attention to the preferences of family members. With the signed organ donor card in my wallet, nobody should have the authority to stop my organs from being used for transplantation if I die.
Obama plans to continue
handing over prisoners to countries where they have no rights,
as long as the countries promise not to torture them.
It is wrong to capture someone and hand him over to a government that
won't give him a fair trial based on evidence, even it doesn't torture
him.
Christian fundamentalists can now
purchase rapture insurance for their pets.
I don't see anything wrong with profiting from their lunacy,
but I think one is obligated first to try to talk them out of it.
The Canadian government held a "town hall meeting" about copyright
and pretty much
let only the copyright industry speak.
It also
blocked students from handing out leaflets to express
the position they knew would not get mentioned among the speakers.
The UK has
imprisoned hundreds of children, mostly under 5 years old,
as their parents face deportation. The children are emotionally scarred.
False reports that armed gangs of Blacks were looting in New Orleans
led to
real acts of murder by armed gangs of racist Whites.
A large fire
threatens Mount Wilson in California, as well as several suburbs.
Global warming is expected to increase both the drought and the heat,
so California and other parts of the American west have more and worse
in store if we don't have a strong treaty to cut CO2 emissions.
Using marijuana in Argentina is now legal, and other countries
in South America are also doubting the wisdom of the War on Drugs.
Iraq has
1000 prisoners awaiting execution, some of whom were tortured
into confessions. The trials are not fair.
A Colombian union leader who worked at Nestle
has been murdered.
Murders of union leaders in Colombia are typically carried out by the
paramilitary terror gangs that are allied with President Alvaro
Horrible. I suspect that Nestle paid them to it, since otherwise they
would have no motive.
Mexico has
decriminalized small-scale drug possession. Also: an article from High Times
It appears that concerns of
oil contracts in Libya
motivated the UK to release a convicted airplane-bombing terrorist. I have not mentioned this issue before, because I think the policy of releasing prisoners who are dying of cancer is a valid one. However, letting commercial interests decide the question can never be legitimate. It's an example of the sort of corruption that pervades many governments including the US.
Before Katrina, Ivor van Heerden of LSU Hurricance Center
warned that New Orleans' levees would break
break under such a storm. When they broke, the White House didn't tell him or anyone in New Orleans. Van Heerden revealed this to the public, so now he has been fired from the university. Big Oil rewarded LSU for firing him, and laundered the payment through an innocent environmental group.
The Washington Post published
an article defending torture
as useful for gaining information about "terrorists". Even if it were true, so what? Torturing people accused of "terrorism" — many of them accused falsely — is just as evil as Al Qa'ida. The first question for the US must not be, "How can the US win?" It must be, "How can the US deserve to win?"
Hundreds of children in parts of India have
major birth defects
due to uranium emitted by coal-burning power plants. The water in large parts of Punjab is contaminated with the uranium.
Dalit students
are humiliated in school,
not allowed to drink water with other students. Only they are told to clean the toilets because the other students are "too good" for this.
Bush set up
secret systems to spy on Americans' communications
with no probable cause or warrant, and Obama has not stopped it.
The UN says
Iran is blocking inspections, and the US wants more sanctions.
I doubt that any sanctions would stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons. I also don't think war would do it, short of a complete conquest, and that would meet tremendous resistance. We have to hope for deterrence and coexistence. If the US had not let the oil companies block conservation measures for 30 years, Iran would not be making so much money now and would not have the influence with which to gain the support of Russia and China.
The ACLU wrote to the UK government criticizing
the unfair extradition powers
that the US has in Britain.
Uri Avnery argues that a
boycott and disinvestment campaign against Israel
will not work. Although the occupation of Palestine broadly resembles the apartheid system of South Africa, the context is different.
After the Bush regime approved torture in principle, CIA agents began eagerly
trying and discussing various techniques,
trying to push the envelope of the cruelty that Bush had authorized. I've seen claims that Milgram's experiment was funded by the CIA as part of an investigation of possible torture techniques.
The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff says the US strategy for the war in Afghanistan is
a path to defeat.
The elections represent no real support for the government since people voted mainly according to their tribal identity.
Everyone: sign
this petition
in favor of a strong climate control treaty.
Citizens of Massachusetts: call your state representative to
support HB 2610,
the bill to legalize medical marijuana in Massachusetts.
As usual, the opposition to the UK's
new plans for the War on Sharing
focus on the destructivess of the weapons, and do not reject the idea that the government should fight this war.
US citizens: Sign
this petition to tell House Democrats to stand firm
for a public option in health care reform.
The public option
is not a full solution but replacing it with "health care cooperatives"
will make it a total disaster.
UK police diaries
testify to their unjustified and gratuitous violence
against peaceful protestors. Not only individual constables did this,
but the commanders too.
Madonna dared to
rebuke Romanians for their prejudice against Gypsies.
When I visited Romania the first time, my host refused to listen to
records of Indian classical music, saying "The Gypsies came from
India, so I despise everything from India." How absurd can prejudice
get?
A model was
arrested for posing nude in the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
surrounded by paintings and sculptures of nudes.
Everyone: Oppose the
campaign to fire Professor Neve Gordon. He endorsed a
campaign of boycott and disinvestment against Israeli apartheid.
Now he faces a campaign to fire him (despite tenure) as punishment for
expressing his views, which would damage academic freedom in Israel.
Through
this page you can state your opposition to firing him.
The UK's Climate Camp plans to
act directly against the dishonest planet-burner business lobby.
Note how the antidemocratic "free trade" treaties are being cited
implicitly by polluting industries: "If Europe doesn't give us
exeptions from carbon controls, we will move to a place that will."
For Europe to survive, it must tell them, "We won't let you threaten
us, and we won't let you move."
Obama says US agents will no longer use torture, but meanwhile he intends to continue
outsourcing torture to other countries.
The ringleaders of Bush regime torture are not only protected, they are making lots of money.
Iraq's latest plague is
drought,
exacerbated by dams in upstream countries.
400 Palestinians in Gaza face death if Israel does not allow
the importation of chemicals for dialysis machines.
The insurance companies latest idea for undermining health care reform is to propose
establishing "co-ops"
to compete with them. They propose this because those co-ops can't possibly do it.
As the banks were going broke, they paid
huge bonuses out of the bailouts
the US gave them. In effect, robbing all of us.
Israel used the civilians of Gaza as
targets to test new weapons,
including some from the US.
US citizens: sign
this petition
to Obama to get rid of the hypocritically named "Defense of Marriage Act."
Merck seems to have
paid various US medical associations
to support its advertising campaign for Gardasil. There's only one safe way for drug companies to fund activities related to medicine, and that's through their taxes. We need to make them pay a lot more taxes. (I have no opinion regarding Gardasil's usefulness or safety since that's outside my field.)
US citizens: phone your congresscritter supporting HR 104, to investigate how the Bush regime organized torture. Also
sign this petition.
Scotland will be home to a
large wave-powered electric plant,
large by the standards of wave-power that is.
In the UK, write to your MP to oppose the threatened
new measures to stop file-sharing.
But don't say that these are "unnecessary" because of the Lords of Copyright are getting increased profits, because that would accept the supposition that they are more important than citizens and sharing. I suggest saying that sharing is good, and attacking sharing is bad, and that trying to stop people from sharing published works is simply an injustice.
Torture, by the CIA or anyone else, is a felony. Holder has decided to
launch an investigation
of the individual practitioners, but fails to pursue the ringleaders.
Israel is talking about
stopping some of the construction in the West Bank settlements,
but Peace Now says it's a sham, and this will have no effect on construction. If Obama does not reject this sham, he cannot achieve anything more than a Bush-style show of futile efforts toward peace. But it looks like he is going to fall for it, and and "pay" for it with a harsher policy towards Iran. As I recall, Bush kept asking for harsher sanctions on Iran, but Russia and China always blocked them. Unless they have changed their attitude, there is little that the US could actually deliver to Israel in that line. (Whether such sanctions, or anything, could stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons is imponderable.) Meanwhile, if Israel doesn't really stop construction in the settlements, and start handing them over to Palestine instead, this won't have any chance of achieving peace between Israel and Palestine. So it looks like this agreement can only be theater.
A new
wave of attacks
on Iraq's power grid have reduced electricity in Baghdad to 2 hours per day. The official hinted that this may be due to battling between militias associated with political parties.
The UN found
evidence of considerable vote-rigging in Afghanistan.
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown says,
"
I was wrong to support the war in Afghanistan."
I too supported the war in Afghanistan, and for the same reasons (not
because of Sep 11). I'm not convinced she and I were wrong then. But
it is clear that the war has failed to achieve the goals for which
we thought it justified.
War always kills civilians even despite the best efforts to avoid it
(efforts which the US fails to prioritize). Civilians accept this if
they believe the war is necessary on their behalf. It doesn't seem
that Afghanis believe this.
The CIA admits it
made threats against the families of prisoners.
The Bush forces in Iraq went beyond threats: they actually
took relatives hostage to try to procure surrender of participants in
the Iraqi resistance.
Israel's settlements in the West Bank form the nuclei of a web of control
that pushes Palestinians into small areas, and is designed to provide an
excuse to
prevent them from having their own state.
With all the "security" cameras that threaten privacy rights in
London, you might think they at least catch criminals.
But they don't do much of that.
On the other hand, if you're the sort of person who feels good that
"Big Brother Is Watching You", these cameras might help you "feel
safer".
Shah Rukh Khan was
stopped for an hour by US border guards
as he came to promote his film about racial profiling. If a "procedure" involves detaining someone for over an hour, saying it's routine is no excuse.
Kucinich denounces Obama's health care bill as
corporate welfare
for the insurance companies.
Uri Avnery writes about
right wing extremist politicians in Israel.
The Vice Prime Minister recently gave his support to them.
If these "crazies" keep getting louder, they may give the US
an opportunity to make its financial aid to Israel conditional on
willingness for peace.
The CIA
used mock executions for torture.
Karzai's main rival accused him of
stealing the Afghan presidential election.
An interview with the Israeli extremists who are extending settlements
step by step with government help, even as the government claims it is
not doing this.
Each settlement outpost radiates an influence of restrictions across
Palestinian life, since the army shuts down Palestinian activities
and even seizes Palestinian land when a settlement expands into the
vicinity. And the settlers themselves harrass nearby Palestinians,
or shoot at them with rifles, to drive them away.
Extracting of tar sands in Canada
could release enough CO2 to hammer the last nail inour coffin.
It is also destroying the lands of native peoples,
who are protesting for their sake and for everyone's.
US citizens: call your senators to
oppose PASS ID and all other national ID card schemes on principle.
Also say you want the right to fly anonymously to be restored.
Passengers are all searched for weapons, so it doesn't matter
who they are.
The Iraqi government is
censuring information about the number of victims of recent bombings.
This article argues that trying to establish freedom and democracy in
Afghanistan is futile, and not worth a war.
My impression, limited since I have never been there, is that most
Afghans don't want the tyranny of the old Taliban to return, and want
help preventing that. However, some of today's Taliban is not interested
in such a tyranny, only in getting Westerners out.
Iran's new Defense Minister is one of those accused of
bombing an Israeli cultural organization in Buenos Aires many
years ago.
Atty General Holder used to work for the law firm that
represented the Republican Party. Is this why he is systematically
protecting Republicas from charges including vote-rigging?
Citizens of Ireland:
vote NO on the European Constitution that pretends not
to be a constitution.
Virginia police
arrested a woman for publishing criticism and
public information about police.
Fiji Water, an extremely wasteful operation that ships
water around the world in plastic bottles, tries to excuse
its existence based on trickle-down benefits to Fijians,
benefits it reduces to the minimum possible level.
It seems to have Fiji's dictators in its pocket.
Here's a rundown on that company's long list of slease.
I never get bottled water in the US except to take on a bus.
But if you must get some bottled water, don't get it from Fiji
(or from Coca Cola Company).
US citizens: phone your senators and say you want a strong climate change and clean energy bill.
A callous Chinese factory's treatment of its workers turned into
an experiment
in the health hazards of (a certain kind of) nanoparticles. Workers died from them.
Sean Rigg, physically healthy,
died in UK police custody a year ago.
The CCTV footage mysteriously disappeared, and police said the cameras were not working — but a policeman had earlier said they were working. His family think this is a coverup, and I do too.
US citizens: sign
this petition
in favor of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, and then phone your congresscritter about it.
Human Rights Watch says that there is
a campaign to murder Iraqi gays
and that government "security" forces participate.
Oil companies continue spending their money to
keep global warming going, incuding fake "grass-roots" efforts.
Iraqis blame a recent wave of bombings on
a battle between political parties, each of which has a militia,
and say that soldiers/police who support the militia allowed the
bombers to pass.
Iran has made an
important concession on monitoring its uranium
enrichment.
A factory in China
has given over 1000 children lead poisoning in one year.
This is a symptom of a general culture of corruption and coverup.
Local officials in China generally prefer to hide rather that correct
any problem that is related to profitable business.
Taliban attacks
effectively discouraged voting in some parts of Afghanistan.
Iran
continues persecuting Baha'is, including some who were supposed
to face trial on absurd charges while their lawyer is imprisoned
on other absurd charges.
China is considering
big cuts in CO2 emissions.
Now the question is whether the US is able to do likewise despite corporate rule.
Netanyahu may have quietly dropped the demand that Palestinians
recognize Israel as "the state of the Jewish people"
(something not even the US does). However, he is expanding the settlements rapidly by planting fruit trees. Palestinians are cut off from their land and their trees are uprooted; Israelis take the land, and the water, and plant their own trees. Of course, this does not directly expel any Palestinian from his home, but there other parallel measures for doing that.
In Uganda,
teenage girls are sold into marriage,
effectively as slaves.
Israel's occupation of Palestine fits
the treaty definition of apartheid,
according to a team of legal scholars.
The Taliban get a lot of their funds from
projects supported by the US and its allies.
They force the projects to pay protection.
A judge in Texas
faces possible removal
preferring execution to justice. The word "tough" is inadequate to describe Sharon Killer. "Callous and cruel" fit better.
Cuba owns 20% of TeleSUR, but only lets Cubans see
a censored version.
Australia proposes
total surveillance
of the internet for the sake of the War on Sharing.
Reprieve is suing the UK government to get
information about prisoners
who were handed over to the Bush regime and are now imprisoned without charges by Obama. Note the curious response that the Clown regime "has no reason to believe" that these prisoners are being abused. This despite all the evidence that other prisoners of the US have been abused. The Clown regime closes its eyes and says "I don't see anything". This policy of eyes and brains shut must be considered collusion and prosecuted as such.
Human Rights Watch reports that Israeli troops
shot civilians who were carrying white flags
(and were obviously no threat to them).
Israel's policy of
taking land and expelling Palestinians
is designed to make a Palestinian state impossible. Sometimes it is done under color of law, sometimes "illegally", but the result is the same.
Obama caved in to Big Pharma and presents it as a victory. After secret negotiations — violating his pledge to make them public — he convinced Big Pharma to increase prices by 2% less over the next 10 years. He did this by
surrendering the negotiating power
that could have saved 40% or more. Palast's article doesn't clearly say that the savings Obama achieved would be spread over 10 years, but but that is asserted here. Obama cannot achieve meaningful health care reform because he is aiming too small.
The rich in the US continue to take more and more of the national income.
The top .01% now get 6% of the income.
Some US doctors are pushing their patients to
sign copyright assignments
so that they can use the DMCA to censor criticism by those patients. The use of the term "intellectual property" should be a sign that someone is up to no good. This practice should be forbidden by law, not just for doctors, but for all kinds of commerce. Until that happens — which is unlikely in a country whose government obeys business against its citizens — you should figure that any a doctor who asks you to sign such a copyright assignment has some nasty secret to hide. Don't trust your health to him!
Venezuela has adopted
a law censoring all newsmedia,
prohibiting publication of anything that could encourage hatred or aggression, or even "indiscipline", among children. It also prohibits anything that "deforms the language" or attacks "healthy values, good customs or public health". If this is interpreted as a ban on cigarette advertising, I won't complain; but all sorts of things could be said to "attack healthy values". The law is not actually Chavez's initiative; it dates back to 1980.
Ads for Windows, the iGroan and the Amazon Swindle will be prohibited, since they definitely attack healthy values. But, much as I despise those products, I don't like the idea of applying censorship to them. Conspiracies among companies to impose DRM on the public should be a crime, but talking about them should not be.
The joint Palestinian/Israeli
nonviolent protests in Bil'in continue.
The soldiers fire tear gas, then falsely claim it was because someone was throwing stones.
Visiting the Taliban on
the Afghan-Pakistani border.
Senator Webb succeeded in
meeting with Aung San Suu Kyi.
I think this makes the visit a success, in that it will be hard for the Burmese dictators to present it as an endorsement.
Uri Avnery: Palestinians and Jews are both descendents of the Cana'anites. If both people studied
the history of the area,
some of the cited reasons for fighting would go away.
Two psychologists who planned
CIA torture based on how China tortured US POWs
may be prosecuted for this. They deserve to be prosecuted, but so do Bush and Rumsfeld who ordered torture.
In Haiti, supporters of Aristide face
imprisonment without trial in unsanitary conditions
until they die from lack of medical treatment. The US government confirms the general prison conditions. However, the US cooperates in maintaining the government which is responsible for them. And USAID is alleged to have arranged the overthrow of President Aristide by corrupting judges and lawyers. I find this claim plausible because of the fact that US troops ultimately kidnaped Aristide and flew him into exile.
Sign
this petition
calling on Democrats in the Senate to put committee chairmanships up for a vote. Also phone your Democratic senators about it.
Hillary Clinton has started to
accuse the Republicans of cheating
in the 2000 presidential election. Her statements are vulnerable to attack because they do not go into detail. She should explain how Florida dishonestly blocked over 50,000 eligible voters from participating.
Reportedly Chavez has dropped the proposed media law which I criticized in
a recent political note.
Afghanistan adopted a law allowing Shi'ite husbands to
keep their wives locked up in the house, and to starve them if
they won't have sex.
The reason I supported the invasion of Afghanistan was because the Taliban
were cruel to women. If the current government is cruel to them too,
there is no reason to spend a dime, or a life, to defend it.
Denmark arrested Iraqis being sheltered by a church, to
deport them after denying them asylum.
I am not particularly concerned about the church aspect. What
concerns me is that they are forcing refugees back to Iraq. Iraq
remains very dangerous, and most of the millions of Iraqis who have
fled their homes do not dare try to return. What can justify forcing
Iraqi refugees back into such conditions?
A young girl among the refugees' supporters is hit eight times by police, ultimately while trying to escape. A longer video showing more of the events.
The US government has set up
"
fusion centers" for cooperation between
various police and intelligence agencies. The one in Texas has
organized investigation of dissidents and Muslims.
The UK is dragging drug-sniffer dogs in public places to
search whoever they react to. A small fraction of the people they
search are carrying drugs. Now this faces a legal challenge.
Some Taliban groups
have agreed to a truce for the coming presidential election.
Obama is thinking about
relaxing the sanctions against the Burmese dictators.
If this is done as part of a deal which also allows Aung San Suu Kyi to
be released and allowed to work for democracy, it might be good.
Otherwise, it is just a surrender.
It is a mistake for anyone important, such as a Senator, to meet
with the dictators unless he gets a concession in advance.
Just having the meeting is a victory for the dictators.
China has made a
non-change in its policy about the Green Dam web filter,
and some of the Western press has been misled into believing it is
a major concession.
Use of Green Dam was never supposed to be mandatory on personal
computers. Sellers were going to be required to make it available,
but the purchaser did not have to install it, and could deinstall it.
The real possibility of harm from Green Dam was to the users of
computers in internet cafes and schools, since they cannot deinstall
it from those computers.
The announcement says that the plans to make Green Dam mandatory
on those computers, where it will really effectuate censorship,
continue unchanged.
The US government
suppressed for decades the films that showed
the effects of the atomic bombs dropped in Japan.
Chavez or his supporters have proposed
a law making it a crime to publish information
judged false and judged to threaten the state. Such a law would be censorship and unjust. It sounds reminiscent of the charges made against journalists in Iran. The law also makes it a crime for a publisher not to reveal the identity of an anonymous author. Even the failure to publish certain mandatory information is a crime. (Which information this applies to is stated elsewhere so I don't know what it is.)
Publishing inaccurate news reports is not good, but news is to some extent a matter of interpretation. The state and witnesses can claim information is false even if it wasn't, or can exaggerate the importance of minor points. To cite an alarmist right-wing ad as an example of what might be prosecuted is a further sign that this could mean prosecution for political opposition. So this law invites censorship. Imagine what Bush would have done with such a law. It cannot be acceptable.
In the US, it is increasingly
a crime to be destitute.
I wonder what kind of public assistance is available to a homeless adult in Tempe, AZ. Can someone find out?
In New York, carrying a small amount of pot is not a crime. Showing it in public is a crime.
So police lie to young people to trick them into committing that crime.
The police do this because the federal government pays them to do it. This is Obama's idea of a "stimulus". Will his next "stimulus" be for the prison industry?
Israelis:
oppose the biometric ID bill, and educate your MK.
Although the author of that article thinks human rights arguments are useless in Israel, I hope you will state them anyway. What makes it seem that human rights don't count is a shortage of people who demand them and defend them; to neglect them because others do is a vicious circle.
In June, the US (or maybe Pakistan)
bombed a funeral and killed 60 people.
A few of them might have been Taliban. The only significant difference between this and a suicide bombing on the street is that this attacker didn't have to commit suicide, or even risk his life. The US has also adopted the terrorist tactic of a second bombing aimed at the rescuers who try to aid the victims of the first bombing.
Galapagos Islands wildlife is in
danger from mosquitos
brought by the influx of tourists.
Everyone:
sign this petition
for the UN to act against the Burmese military rulers. Here for more information.
Workers in embassies in Iran have apologized in court for
reporting on protests.
The information they are accused of gathering, reporting, and passing
on to the US was information about protests in public. This is
journalism, not spying. But tyrants often make journalism a crime
when it says anything the state doesn't like. The Bush regime
made such noises too.
We don't have proof that the election was fraudulent, but we have
sufficient proof that the Islamic Republic is tyranny.
A prisoner in Australia
cooked and burned to death in the back of a
van that was transporting him.
Attorney General Holder may investigate overzealous individual torturers,
but plans to
shield the officials who approved torture.
The ringleaders of torture are the ones who must above all be prosecuted.
Meanwhile, the Clown regime still fights tooth and nail to
deny its acts of torture, using the most absurd excuses.
If the US says that the price of its cooperation is helping it cover
up torture, to pay that price is itself complicity in torture.
The foreign companies that deforested Haiti are now
digging up Haiti's mountains for minerals and cement.
US laws requiring off-street parking
force the US in the direction of inefficiency and sprawl.
Iran's police chief admits that
protesters were tortured in prison.
It is interesting to contrast the history of US and Iranian torture.
Iran has been much more ready to admit guilt, but also much more
open about convicting people based on confessions apparently obtained
through torture.
China uses executed prisoners as
a source of organs for transplant;
the money raised this way may be the motive for executing so many.
The site also discusses accusations that China kills Falun Gong
supporters for organs, but China does not permit the investigation
that would determine if that is true.
The 9/11 family members' petition for a new investigation was
rejected by New York City, which claimed insufficient valid signatures.
The petitionals will challenge these findings in court.
Blackwater employees charge that the company president
had people killed to stop them from reporting crimes.
Israel's government is rushing through a law to set up a
biometric database of all citizens.
After all the orwellian moves that the UK government has made,
is it surprising that they wish to
put cameras in homes to monitor people's behavior?
The Bush regime
tortured even children in Afghanistan and Guantanamo.
One of those children remains a prisoner in Guantanamo based on a
dubious confession extracted by torture.
Beaches in Brittany are
overwhelmed with toxic decomposing seaweed
whose growth is fueled by fertilizer runoff.
Fertilizer runoff also fuels the large dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico
around the mouth of the Mississippi.
The US has put
50 alleged Afghan druglords on a military hit list.
If ten civilians are killed for each target on this list,
that would mean 5000 civilians killed. That could give victory
to the Taliban.
Israel's quasi-fascist foreign minister
demanded the resignation of an Israeli diplomat
for reporting privately to his own government that
its policy of expanding colonies on Palestinian territory is harming
relations with the US.
I suppose the foreign minister can replace diplomats at his pleasure,
but firing replacing a diplomat for reporting bad news is the act of
someone who is trying not to face facts.
The Burmese generals
found Aung San Suu Kyi guilty
of having an unauthorized visitor while under house arrest,
and sentenced her to more house arrest.
Trials carried out under such regimes are merely excuses for
doing whatever they have decided to do. Unfortunately, the same is
sometimes true in the US.
After a bankrupt Icelandic bank's insider loans were exposed,
it started getting injunctions to censor the information.
A coal company front is organizing fake "grass-roots" support
for burning more coal.
Other businesses are
lobbying to support the coup in Honduras.
The coup against Zelaya was a
response to his introduction of a minimum wage.
Opposition to wage increases, in Honduras and Haiti and around the world,
is the result of "free trade" sweatshop treaties such as GATT. These are
what created the situation where politicians of each country try to woo
the multinationals by offering the worst possible working conditions.
Taxes to discourage giving away plastic bags in stores are
spreading around the world.
The argument that campaigning to reduce plastic bags is bad because it will
distract people from other issues is irrational. I won't say that
effect is impossible. But the opposite effect is also possible:
these campaigns can strengthen environmental consciousness and can be
used to build support for environmental protection in general.
As for the purchase of large and heavy plastic trash bags, I would
expect they are much less likely to end up in the ocean killing fish
and birds. So the net result is still a step forward.
New York City has
sold the name of a subway station.
Other cities are trying to do likewise.
The contemptuous end of the article, and its general tone, try to
downplay the seriousness of the issues at stake:
Watching wild animals from a
microlight plane doesn't even scare them.
I wonder if tourists could spot poachers this way.
Ex-employees claim Blackwater
prostituted young Iraqi girls
for a dollar a blow job. And that's just the beginning of their crimes. Meanwhile, the US government is still making contracts with Blackwater.
New York is planning to put
surveillance cameras in every subway car
if it can afford them. This will be acceptable for our freedom if the video is destroyed after a limited time, and police need a search warrant to look at any of it. But there is no sign that these necessary precautions will be taken.
The Copenhagen climate change talks
are likely to fail
unless rich countries agree to more sacrifices.
Workers in embassies in Iran have apologized in court for reporting on protests. The information they are accused of gathering, reporting, and passing on to the US was information about protests in public.
This is journalism, not spying.
But tyrants often make journalism a crime when it says anything the state doesn't like. The Bush regime made such noises too. We don't have proof that the election was fraudulent, but we have sufficient proof that the Islamic Republic is tyranny.
In the new world order,
poor countries' debt has been privatized by companies known as "vulture funds".
The term "vulture fund" is unfair to real vultures, which gemerally eat only dead animals. These companies are predators, not scavengers. They eat the poor. To deny them the use of US courts is correct, but it does not go far enough. They can easily kill more people than terrorists do, so they deserve some of the same treatment: to finance or "invest in" such a fund should be a felony. We must make sure that loans made to corrupt dictators do not get repaid, so that corrupt dictators will find it harder to get loans.
A study
shows how an unsupported hypothesis can become generally accepted in science if review articles disregard experiments with contrary conlusions.
Jacques Chirac confirms that Bush
cited biblical prophecies to explain the invasion of Iraq.
Chirac was not impressed and declined to commit French troops to the war.
Terry Pratchet announced his intention to kill himself before Alzheimer's disease destroys his mind, and demands legalization for helping people do this.
His statement is eloquent;
I only wish he had not presumed that everyone uses the iScrod. I don't want to die through suicide, or in any other way. I want immortality and eternal youth. But I can't have them, and death might be better than the real alternative.
For once, a US drone killed
a real Taliban leader
instead of civilians. I cheer this victory but it is likely to count for less than some people think. In general, killing the leader of a guerrilla army does not defeat it. If it has popular support, it can easily recruit plenty of new troops, and new leaders rise through the ranks. This leader's death will only make a real difference if it has some other effect.
US citizens: call your congresscritter to support HR 1549 to ban giving antibiotics to cattle as a standard practice. And
sign this petition.
Pharma company Wyeth corrupted medical research literature by getting respected physicians to put their names on articles written by PR companies.
These articles
presented a biased picture of the effects of hormone replacement therapy, which was later found to be dangerous. Drug companies have also run fake medical journals and corrupted doctors through gifts. This is what they do with the money they collect from imposing patents in poor coutries.
A BBC undercover journalist was arrested for using
a false name
to apply for her undercover employment.
An Indian police death squad was photographed in action
killing a targeted victim
after chatting with him on the street.
Ian Tomlinson's family accuses the UK police and the IPCC (which is supposed to investigate the police) of
a persistent coverup
of his killing by the police.
A headband of infrared LEDs
can jam CCTV cameras.
Just one person, wearing one of these LED headbands, would be easy to track. So this is not a personal defense against Big Brother. But suppose lots of people were wearing them; suppose it were a kind of adornment and a protest at once. What fails for one person could succeed for many.
Iraq is
censoring the Internet.
As most oil fields' extraction rate is
decreasing faster than expected,
a possible economic recovery is likely to run into a shortage of oil. The bad response to this fact would be to use more coal and oil shale, thus accelerating global disaster. The good response is to accelerate efficiency measures and construction of renewable energy facilities. Amory Lovins has identified many opportunities for large increases in energy efficiency in trucks and buildings.
The Israeli government is trying to convince other governments to
stop supporting Breaking the Silence,
the NGO which published testimony of soldiers about war crimes they saw or committed in Gaza.
B'liar submitted the UK to
an unjust extradition treaty with the US
which the US congress, correctly defending the rights of US citizens, refused to ratify.
The most effective way to reduce your long-term contribution to global warming is to
have fewer children.
All of humanities' global problems are exacerbated by population growth. For example, population growth in Brazil creates people who demand jobs, and they give political support to the rich people that want to cut down all the rain forest to grow soybeans and cattle. Population growth means more cars, more plastic, more oil burned. And since Americans typically use more resources per capita than everyone else, one less child born in the US does more to reduce all these problems than it would anywhere else. Given the problems of population growth, it is a good thing that the UK national health service is making in-vitro fertilization somewhat harder to get. But this policy does not go far enough. Health care programs should never cover IVF, because that makes the world's most dangerous threat more dangerous.
An Israeli peace activist tells
how soldiers beat him while he was handcuffed,
while a policeman made a video and said nothing.
B'liar, now an "envoy" to Israel and Palestine, promised Palestinians near Hebron electricity, and poles were set up to carry cables.
To harass them, the Israeli Army destroyed the poles.
B'liar's response to this will be illuminating. Will he insist that Israel behave, or will he ignore it? I predict the latter.
Lubna Hussein, by refusing to accept a whipping and hide in shame, has put the Sudanese government's
cruelty on trial.
A British court ruled in favor of
extraditing Gary McKinnon to the US,
where he faces charges of cracking military computers. (Please don't call it "hacking".) I am not convinced that Asperger's Syndrome makes a difference to the issue. What does matter is that the UK has adopted unjust extradition laws, discarding the basic safeguards that everyone is entitled to. The US tried to use the UK's lax extradition policy against Sean Garland, an Irish political figure, when he visited the UK. However, he escaped back to Ireland. Now he faces an extradition request there. I don't have an opinion about the charges Sean Garland, but Ireland's laws ought to assure him a real hearing. The UK should do the same.
The US government is trying to
suppress reporting about the total funds
potentially committed to bailouts: over 23 trillion dollars.
Israeli troops
arrested leaders of nonviolent resistance in Bil'in,
as well as children, whom they tried to pressure into denouncing their parents.
Coal mining by mountaintop removal is very cheap, because it employs few people, and it destroys the land permanently while spreading toxins. Obama has refused to act against it, but
the Senate is considering a law to ban it.
MPs demand
an independent inquiry
into the B'liar regime's complicity with torture.
The policeman who killed Tomlinson, a bystander at a protest,
may face
prosecution for homicide.
This is necessary to teach those armed bullies a lesson, but
most victims of police aggression don't die. To put an end
to this aggression, all cases must be punished.
CIA director Panetta is trying to
shield CIA staff from investigation for their past torture,
giving excuses that they had good motive for it.
Torture is so bad that no motives can excuse it.
US citizens: sign
this petition for an investigation of the Republican PR company
that sent forged letters purporting to come from progressive groups.
Congress is
cutting the Pentagon's propaganda budget
Australia says it has
thwarted a terrorist plot organized by Somali
Islamists and their sympathizers.
The "government" of Somalia never had popular support. It was put in
power, though that term was an exaggeration, by the Ethopian
intervention which
overthrew the Islamic Courts Movement government
that had really taken control and had some popular support.
The results apparently include even nastier Islamists in Somalia as
well as pirates attacking the shipping that passes along the coast.
India plans to
install tremendous amounts of solar electric power
in the next ten years — if the rich countries pay for it.
Avigdor Lieberman, leader of Israel's would-be ethnic cleansers,
faces corruption charges.
Uri Avnery says corruption is rife in the Israeli government.
The US government, specifically Clinton,
has demanded the UK government cover up US torture,
which is not only evil but also a crime in the UK. Clown regime officials who cave to these threats must suffer more than the possible loss of an election (which might have happened anyway). They must be prosecuted, and face imprisonment.
The ACLU says, Obama must stop the cruel
force feeding in Guantanamo.
These prisoners have never gone on trial. If their imprisonment, without hope of release, makes them wish for death, what follows? That they should be forced to suffer longer?
Even ISPs are now objecting to
UK plans for internet surveillance.
The UK intervention in Afghanistan has failed on essentially all its goals, says a parliamentary report. This is probably part of a larger failure of the US intervention. However, the US is drawing the opposite conclusion,
that it should fight more. The problem of pervasive corruption existed also in South Vietnam. Every attempt to support the South Vietnamese government was futile — even in battle, as described in the book John Paul Vann, a Bright Shining Lie. South Vietnamese who wanted freedom and democracy could not imagine getting it from President Diem, or from the military rulers that followed him.
Former president Khatami denounced
the Iranian show trials,
which seem to be based on false confessions extracted by torture. If the US fails to learn its lesson from this, and put aside torture and "military tribunals", it will continue to be reviled in the same way.
Bob Herbert: Expressing anger at policemen is part of our freedom. My only disagreement with
this column
is that it focuses too much on the side issue of race. Nobody should be arrested for expressing anger at a policeman. Racist cops may do this more often to Blacks, but when they do it to Whites, that is just as wrong.
Claims that organic food provides nutritional benefits
have been thoroughly refuted.
My interpretation of the situation regarding possible pesticide effects is a little different from the authors. It is not absurd to think that they might cause harm, so if there is no conclusive study about it, I would say that question is simply open.
100 Iranian opposition leaders have been accused of being foreign agents,
and
face unfair trials.
I've read that some have been tortured into confessions.
US citizens:
Call your senators, saying they should require Israel to
end the siege of Gaza and stop extending settlements, and should
investigate how Israel used US armaments.
Michael Irwin dares the UK to prosecute him for paying a gravely ill
man's fare to go to Switzerland and
get help in committing suicide.
Death is a horrible injustice, and so is serious incurable illness,
and so is aging. The fact that they happen to all of us does not make
them less unjust, it only makes the injustice bigger. But if someone
decides that death is less bad than an incurable illness, it is cruel
and evil to force worse suffering on him.
Evidence now shows
MI5 lied when denying its involvement in Binyam Mohamed's torture
in Morocco.
Limits on fishing are enabling some fish stocks to
recover from overfishing.
The UK Law Lords
rejected a "control order"
(permanent semi-arrest without trial), saying it violates the basic principle that suspects are entitled to answer the charges made against them.
The Clown regime continues to cover up the details of its cooperation with
CIA kidnap/torture plots,
even after admitting that it did so.
The torture of prisoners in Iran
— who were being pressured to sign false confessions of working for foreign powers — is creating further opposition. If only the US were in a position to criticize this without inviting a response of "You did it too."
Massive protests in Tehran were
attacked with tear gas and guns.
Nigeria's army crushed the Taliban-like rebels, but appears to have
killed some prisoners.
"Shot while trying to escape" was the Nazi's standard excuse
for killing prisoners.
Iraq is suffering
disastrous desertification in which wars have played
a major role.
Neda Soltan's parents plan to hold
a ceremony to remember her,
on the normal Shi'ite schedule for such ceremonies, but the Islamic Republic threatens to repress the ceremony.
Secretary of State Clinton directly
pressured the UK to conceal torture evidence.
If the price of intelligence cooperation with the US is to connive at torture, any decent government must cut that cooperation short.
The kidnaping of 5 Britons in Iraq
may have been engineered by Iraqi officials
to conceal information about their corruption.
Lubna Hussein faces a punishment of 40 lashes for wearing pants. She resigned her UN job, which could have given her immunity,
so as to confront this injustice head on.
In the 19th century, Marx called religion "the opium of the masses". For today's religious fanatics, "the PCP of the masses" might be more accurate.
A
previous note said that 240 radio station licenses had been suspended.
This article in Spanish
says that licenses have not been suspended; rather, 240 stations are being investigated for not having valid licenses, and may be shut down. Whether there is a political reason why they don't have valid licenses, whether they had valid licenses in the past, I don't know. It also announces a proposal to prohibit any one company from owning more than 3 radio stations, and prohibiting them from transmitting the same program in parallel more than 30 minutes per day. In effect, large media enterprises would be split up.
It seems
the election in Gabon
is being run dishonestly.
A Uighur activist in exile accuses China of
disappearing 10000 Uighurs
during the riots a few weeks ago.
Chiropractors claim implausibly to be able to treat many diseases, based on shabby evidence. The British Chiropractic Association is
trying to silence a prominent critic by suing him.
The GAO whitewashed
the Pentagon's Paid Private Political Pundit Propaganda Program on the grounds that they were not paid directly from US funds. This reminds me of Iran-Contra, where Reagan arranged to fund Nicaraguan terrorists indirectly. If this is not clearly and effectively prohibited, it means this corruption of democracy will get worse.
Tanning carries
a risk of cancer
like smoking.
Obama is reportedly pressing for
a deal to end Israeli settlement construction.
I suggest starting a US program to pay for a lot of housing construction in Israel. Many of the settlers moved to the colonies on Palestinian territory because of Israeli government financial incentives. Construct enough housing in Israel, and it will become cheaper to live there.
US citizens: sign
this petition calling on the senate not to sabotage
the EPA's regulation of CO2-spewing coal plants.
Global warming has been partly masked for a few years by cyclical
reductions in solar output. Now the Sun is heading into the hotter
part of its cycle, so the masked long-term warming
will become manifest.
Joel Tanenbaum writes about
being sued by the RIAA for 4 million dollars for sharing music.
Sharing is not wrong; to stop people from sharing is wrong.
The US and allies are trying to
negotiate peace with parts of the Taliban.
Big Pharma has bought a seat at the table to
get special subsidies from Obama's health care plan.
By contrast, civilized countries use their national health care
systems to push down the cost of medicine (and the drug companies keep
making and selling the medicine, because it remains profitable even
though the profit is less than in the US).
Nicaragua is killing women through a
total ban on abortion.
An Islamic fundamentalist group
attacked a police station in Nigeria.
Both Christianity and Islam contain the seeds of murderous cruelty.
The seeds to not always sprout, but they are always there.
USAID
shut down a jobs program in Iraq because of massive corruption
and no controls.
It seems that part of the purpose of the program was to pay
ex-resistance-fighters to cease to resist. Confusion between the
ex-restistance-fighters and others in the resistance is probably
inevitable.
A clique of Washington Democrats centered around Clinton are
supporting the coup in Honduras.
Henry Louis Gates has
agreed to meet with the policeman who unjustly
arrested him, and President Obama. It seems that the policeman
has not yet accepted the offer.
Reducing tension may be good, but the citizens of Cambridge must
insist that the city order police not to do such things. When a
policeman threatens an innocent person with arrest, he has no business
arresting that person for acting angry.
In one part of the UK, there is only one ISP, and it has imposed a
policy of
disconnecting its customers for sharing.
The customers are very angry, but their condemnation of this policy
fails to go deep enough. Underlying the injustice of the policy
itself is the injustice of its motive: to stop people from sharing
copies of published works. Sharing is good — to stop people
from sharing is evil.
Newly released US spy satellite photos show the
tremendous decrease in ice in the Arctic Ocean.
Film-maker Ishmahil Blagrove, who was captured by Israel on the Gaza
aid boat, says Israeli prisons are
full of Africans who are being confined in inhuman conditions.
The investigation of the killing of Iraqi troops in the Bush forces
seems to have been a coverup.
Pakistan says it has
cleared the Taliban out of Swat,
and the inhabitants are returning home.
This shows it is possible to defeat the Taliban when the
population does not support them.
However, Pakistan has
delayed a promised attack on the Taliban's base in Waziristan.
Perhaps this is because the Taliban there have too much
popular support to be defeated.
Hussam Mohammed Amin, who had explained to UN weapon inspectors
(truthfully) that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, surrendered
to the Bush forces to prove he was telling the truth. He was kept
sealed in a bag for days while the Bush forces repeatedly beat him,
under the orders of General McChrystal, who Obama placed in charge of
Afghanistan.
Most telling is how the Bush regime defended, in US court, similar
torture by Saddam Hussein against US personnel in the first Gulf War.
The Knesset has approved a bill to
sentence illegal immigrants to 7 years in prison.
Anyone that "aids the immigrants" could also be sentenced to 7 years
in prison. This is not limited to helping them enter the country;
even doctors that treat the immigrants for illness or injury could be
sentenced.
This reminds me of Captain Blood.
Official documents suggest support for Alam Ghafoor's claim that
UK intelligence played a role when he was arrested and tortured in the
United Arab Emirates.
Chinese saboteurs have
attacked the web site of a film festival
which will show a movie about an Uighur dissident.
Call the attackers "hackers" is misuse of the term. Most of them are
surely not real hackers ( people who enjoy
playful cleverness). Most likely most of them are just obeying
orders or doing their job. If a few of them are hackers, that doesn't
make these attacks any more or less wrong.
An infantry brigade in Iraq got into the habit of
killing Iraqis on the slightest excuse.
10 of the soldiers have been accused of killings subsequent to their
discharge from the Bush forces, and many others have committed lesser
crimes.
Daniel Martin of the Oklahoma Highway Patrol stopped a vehicle on the
highway and
attacked one of its passengers, paramedic Maurice White.
The patient White was attending in the ambulance, who was on the way to
the hospital, had to wait until Martin was done attacking.
Martin as punished for this lunatic behavior with merely 5 days
suspension from his job.
Contrast this with Professor Gates, who was arrested for mere verbal
expressions of anger at police bullying, and you see the problem:
police think that they are above other citizens. They can attack us
with impunity, but if we even talk back, we should be arrested. They
are the nobles and we are the commoners.
We need to teach those armed bullies a lesson that they are not
above everyone else.
Imprisoned Iranian protestors are
being tortured, and some are dying from disease in
inhumane conditions.
The Taliban have made a
truce with the Afghan government in one region,
and will participate in elections there.
Despicable as the Taliban's views are, it is better to have them
competing in elections than fighting for conquest. And
some of the Taliban are not much worse on women's rights
than the Afghan government we support.
US citizens: tell your senators:
don't go on vacation
while hundreds of thousands of Americans lose their health insurance.
Obama did not have the courage to
stand behind his valid criticism
of the Cambridge Police. The Cambridge Police have a repeated pattern of unjust behavior. They are more likely to do this to members of groups that they are prejudiced against, but no one is safe from them. Police can abuse a person, then arrest him for expressing resentment of the abuse. Consider the injustice of arresting someone for shouting in justified anger at a policeman who has already done wrong to him. Then consider the arrogance of a policeman who has done this and won't apologize — a person who thinks he is allowed to bully people and can arrest them if they complain. We need to get these armed bullies under control or get them off our streets.
US citizens: Secretary of Agriculture Vilsack wants to spend millions of dollars to help loggers cut down virgin forest in Alaska.
Sign this petition
to tell him not to do this. Protected roadless wilderness areas should remain roadless and protected.
UK police prosecuted a policeman who accidentally killed two dogs, but has done nothing about
almost 1000 people who died in police custody,
some of them shot. Would these people get more justice if the RSPCA investigates their deaths?
Obama is moving to allow asylum to women that cannot escape from extreme
domestic violence in their own countries.
Even aside from the injustice of this violence, I cannot understand the mindset of the men who commit it. What can they find appealing in a relationship which consists of making someone else feel fear and hurt? Rejection hurts, but threats and injury can't change rejection to love. These men must have no sense of love, only possession.
Many semi-isolated tribes
are threatened by relentless tourism pressure.
Honduran President Zelaya
tried to cross the border,
joining his supporters who are massing at the border, but he was forced back by soldiers. Clinton's comment fits with other evidence that the US actually supports the coup. This article says that the coup government posted snipers, and that Zelaya's supporters crowded around him for his protection.
UK police handcuffed Gemma Atkinson for
making a recording
when they searched her boyfriend on the street without cause. The police are aware that recordings will limit their ability to mistreat and bully people, so they will take any excuse to forbid recordings, and forbid witnesses.
Honduran supporters of President Zelaya are (were) gathering at the border to receive him, evading army roadblocks, while
a general strike
has blocked the country's roads elsewhere. The article does not seem to say anything about how numerous the supporters are, a question which seems very important. Meanwhile, the national police have gone on strike too and say they will not arrest Zelaya.
The UK is still pushing the
absurd road milage tax,
which (compared with the already existing gasoline tax) would shift the tax burden from gas-guzzlers onto efficient cars.
Africa's food production may be
cut in half
by 2020 due to global warming.
Prisoners in Guantanamo accused US personnel
of watching and photographing
the atrocities of General Dostum. See also here.
The Pakistani Supreme Court has called former dictator Musharraf to
account for arbitrarily removing some of the judges from office.
Christian fanatics are trying to make Texas public schools
promote religion.
They are wrong in claiming that Christianity founded the US.
Many of the founding fathers of the US did not believe in the sort
of religion these people advocate. They were deists: they believed
that a god created the universe and thereafter left it alone.
A UK local government is trying to use copyright to
suppress publication of speed camera photos which a motorost use
to prove he was not speeding.
I am amazed that so many motorists reach the point of challenging
their speeding tickets from speed cameras. The thing that makes any
automatic speeding punishment unjust is that the motorist does not
find out about it until days (at least) later. By that time he can
hardly have any clear memories of the incident. Right at that time,
he might know "I am not speeding". A week later, blurred memory
won't suffice.
Torture of prisoners in Guantanamo
continues.
The Republicans threaten to make Congressmen who support public
funding for health care should be required to participate in it.
Wendell Potter, health insurance company whistleblower, responds that
Congressmen who vote against it should be left with
only the horrible private plans.
The public funding options being considered already involve too much compromise to the insurance companies. They won't save money because the way to do that is to abolish the insurance companies.
New coal-fired power plans
will make mincemeat of Europe's plans for
reducing CO2 emissions.
The coup-installed government in Tegucigolpe (new name of the capital
of Honduras) gets
PR advice from Americans who have worked for
assorted dictators, and for Bill Clinton.
There are
riots in South Africa as poor people, who have gained nothing
materially since their enfranchisement some 15 years ago, were kicked
out of their shacks with nowhere to go.
Part of the reason so much poverty persists in South Africa
is the adoption of the empire's neoliberal policies.
US citizens: sign
this petition to restore the civil liberties
that Bush took away.
We cannot take for granted Obama's support for civil liberties.
Israel may be yielding to international to start
removing some of the settlement "outposts".
The government has supported the construction of many of these
outposts even while calling them "illegal".
The expansion of Israel's settlements has encircled a Palestinian
village near Bethlehem. Israel has
forbidden all new construction in the village.
While Netanyahu applies the argument about "natural growth" to the
settlements, which are really all illegal and were constructed for the
sake of annexation, he thinks it doesn't apply to the Palestinian
village which was there first.
Many of the prisoners in Guantanamo have no home they can return to.
They are losing hope of ever leaving.
In the past, Guantanamo prisoners committed suicide as a protest.
Now it is despair.
An EU initiative calls for a UN resolution to establish
a Palestinian state.
Two of the world's nastiest regimes, Burma and North Korea, may be
trading in nuclear weapons and missile technology.
The
NSA wiretapping story
nobody wanted to publish. (You may need to scroll down...)
Rafsanjani's sermon
took opposition in Iran to a new level.
US citizens:
Tell your congresscritter and senators
that the health care bill must support abortion rights.
The US government has
shown its support
for the coup in Honduras by pretending it was not a coup.
Congress has put
conditions on US funds for the IMF,
but Obama, following Bush's footsteps, say they are not binding.
US troops tortured Iraqi children
to make their fathers confess to various crimes (whether or not they committed them). Attorney General Holder is now deciding whether this ought to be prosecuted.
Professor Henry Louis Gates was
arrested by the Cambridge Police
while trying to enter his own home. It was considered suspicious that a Black man was in that neighborhood.
Portugal has
cancelled its inquiry
into its cooperation with CIA kidnaping flights.
Pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases among teenagers
increased substantially under the Bush regime,
especially in states where the perverted sexual attitudes of Christianity are influential.
Kucinich's amendment to protect state-level single-payer health care programs
was adopted in committee.
Now call your congresscritter!
The lone survivor of the Mumbai terrorist attacks has
confessed and pled guilty.
No one can be sure whether he was tortured into making this confession. If he was, then it might not be true. However, there does seem to be other evidence tracing the terrorists to Pakistan.
US citizens: support Weiner's and Kucinich's
single-payer health care
amendments.
Obama's health care plan is
meeting opposition in Congress for being too expensive.
The reason this plan would not save money is that it preserves the role of the insurance companies, so it cannot avoid paying for the work their employees do, or making their executives and stockholders rich. A single-payer plan would save all this money by eliminating the insurance companies from the system. In addition, disconnecting health care from employment would eliminate a disincentive that the current system places on employing people in the US.
New Zealand is establishing
"voluntary" internet censorship.
Voluntary for ISPs, but not voluntary for users.
Israel plans to construct housing for Jews in
a Palestinian part of East Jerusalem
— in effect, a new "settlement". In effect, Netanyahu is trying to force Obama to either to swallow this, in effect give Israel unconditional support no matter what it does, or else make an open breach (which Netanyahu thinks Obama does not dare do).
The UK is having trouble figuring out what to do with convicts on
probation whose crime
consisted of possessing "terrorist" literature.
What kind of state arrests people for what they read? A tyrannical
one.
A cell phone company
installed spyware in its subscribers' blackberry
computers. The users found out only because of a fortunate bug that
caused visible annoying symptoms.
The phone company was able to do this because the software in the
blackberry is proprietary, thus not under the users' control. The
user's only known defense against these malicious features is to
reject proprietary software and insist on free software.
Powerful drug gangs in Mexico
are fighting the government, since President Calderon
is trying to crush them with arms.
As long as these drugs are illegal in the US even for addicts to
obtain, the profits from smuggling them will be enough to corrupt
plenty of officials and police on both sides of the border, as well as
to support gangs that are strong enough to fight the government.
By the way, President Calderon was plausibly accused of
stealing the election.
Kadyrov, Russia's strongman in Chechnya, seems to be running
death squads to kill his enemies, inside Russia and outside.
This is the same thing that Cheney wanted the CIA to do.
The CIA assassination teams that Bush set up and concealed from Congress
had "no geographical limitations" — which means it could
have murdered people even in the US.
Protesters in Tehran numbered hundreds of thousands
as Rafsanjani spoke.
The Israeli Army's
idea of ethics
is to kill any number of Palestinian civilians rather than risk one soldier's life. This means that any war implies war crimes.
Amazon has a
back door in the Swindle
which can erase books.
China is trying to
censor a film about the situation in Xinjiang,
and not just in China.
The UK National Portrait Gallery
threatens to sue a US citizen
for copying photos of old portraits that are in the public domain. The photos are also in the public domain under US law.
Protests in Iran are continuing,
and the militia continue to crush them.
The regime in Iran is hiding corpses of murdered protesters, and forcing doctors and families to lie about them.
False Positives:
the danger of background checking.
Life is better in Nablus
because the US has made Israel relax some of the checkpoints that made life for Palestinians into a prison.
The US tried hard to
pin drug trafficking charges on Haitian president Aristide,
but failed. However, it supported a real drug trafficker in overthrowing Aristide.
Signs suggest that Natalia Estemirova was killed
on orders from Ramzan Kadyrov,
president of Chechnya. The lack of interest from the Russian press is one of these signs; it shows that the regime doesn't want Russians to think about the killing.
The Palestinian Authority
banned Al Jazeera reporters
after that station reported a grave accusation by a prominent Palestinian.
Dozens of Israeli soldiers
have testified to war crimes committed
against the civilians of Gaza.
The Israeli government
responds, "Don't tell the public
about our crimes."
A major tiger park in India now has no tigers. Poachers have
killed them all.
I wonder if someone can make fake tiger parts to satisfy the fools
that think they get some benefit from consuming tiger parts. Since
any benefit is due to the placebo effect, fake tiger parts will work
just as well as real ones. And they will be much cheaper.
A federal judge gave the CIA about 5 weeks to
release a report on US torture of prisoners,
which looks to be devastating.
One of the main human rights defenders in Russia
was kidnapped and killed.
She was investigating the murder of other human rights defenders. The Russian government shows no interest in these matters.
The UK government has made
a specific plan for reducing CO2 emissions.
For a few years I have criticized the UK government for making empty promises about future CO2 reductions with no plans to make them happen. I am glad to withdraw that criticism. Now the US must make a similar plan.
Obama tells US Jewish leaders:
demanding concessions only from the Palestinians cannot lead to peace. That is the right thing to say, but Obama has moved only a small distance from the past US policy of demanding concessions only from
the Palestinians. He has done nothing to end
the siege of Gaza,
which has reduced everyone in Gaza to abject poverty.
A convoy of humanitarian aid for Gaza has been stopped in Egypt. The Egyptian government is not democratic, but Mubarak would surely gain popularity among Egyptians for allowing the convoy through. However, he gets a tremendous amount of US aid, so if he stops such a convoy, that is surely due to US pressure.
In the West Bank, the Israeli Army helps extend "settlements" by destroying Palestinian farms.
Iranians angry at the stolen election and the murderous crackdown are
boycotting Nokia
for collaborating with the regime.
British neo-nazi Lewington was
arrested carrying bombs that he was talking about using to kill people of Asian origin. He has been sentenced to prison. However, the crimes he was convicted of were not defined in terms of "carrying bombs". That fact was irrelevant to the charges against him.
The charges against him are not that he constructed bombs, or even that he was preparing to construct a bomb. He is accused of
possessing things and information "likely to be useful" for making a bomb.
Not "likely to be used", but "likely to be useful". Whether he ever meant to make a bomb is irrelevant as far as these charges are concerned. Anybody possessing any one of these objects, or some of the information, could equally well be convicted, without any indication that he intended to hurt anyone. Such laws are sheer tyranny. Lewington was apparently planning murder, but putting him in prison for that does not require unjust laws like these. A much more specific, and therefore just, law would do the job. Meanwhile, it is futile trying to make it impossible for someone to kill a few people. A person who wants to do that does not need a bomb; a car is enough.
Coleen Rowley, FBI whistleblower, supports the call for
a real investigation of the 9/11 attacks
in the US.
Banks and the FDIC (which regulates banks and therefore has probably been captured by them) are
lobbying against Obama's plan for a Consumer Protection Agency.
The banks will be against anything that imposes the regulation that is necessary. The fact that they seem to be strongly opposed to this regulatory agency suggests it goes in the right direction. But that does not mean it will regulate them enough. The US should bring back regulations that were removed in the 80s and 90s — regulations whose purpose was to prevent a crash — and break up the big banks into many competing smaller banks.
How the coup in Nicaragua relates to
the context of Obama and US economic dominion
over Latin America.
The UK cancelled Israeli
export licenses for spare parts for weapons
that were used in the attack on Gaza.
US citizens: Tell Attorney General Holder he should
hold a torture investigation,
and it should start with the torture kingpins such as Cheney, not be limited to the footsoldiers.
An Algerian dissident faces execution if he returns.
He was given asylum in the UK,
but the UK keeps him in a form of almost house arrest, for reasons that are secret. I wonder why his name is concealed. Is this by his choice, or is this another UK injustice?
Cheney set up
a program to assassinate al Qa'ida supporters in friendly countries,
and concealed it from Congressional supervision. Killing al Qa'ida supporters (or members of other criminal gangs), rather than arresting them, is justified in some situations, such as when they are armed and too strong to be arrested, or as part of armed combat between the US and state that controls the area where they are to be found. But assassination of the inhabitants of a country with the US claims to have a peaceful relationship is, in effect, an act of war against that country.
Dow Chemical has refused to clean up
the chemical spill in Bhopal
or compensate the victims. So the Yes Men made a clever attack with
bottled "B'eau Pal"
drinking water.
Obama rebuked African leaders for
their corruption.
Obama is partly right, but he mentioned only one side of the picture. Much of the corruption and even the wars are caused by money from companies — dumping waste, and buying minerals and gems. And some of the poverty is caused by repayment of debt to Western banks. Meanwhile, looking at the mad spending priorities of wealthy countries, such as the US, we must ask whether a representative government is enough to qualify as making government spending accountable.
The reporters from Venezuelan TV stations
were arrested in Honduras,
and face expulsion. Apparently the coup forces don't want information to get out.
A group of UK doctors have gone to court to demand an inquest into
the death of Dr David Kelly,
claiming that the supposed suicide is too medially implausible to be believed. The state wanted Tomlinson's family to believe he wasn't killed by the police. We know that was a lie. We can't trust what it says about Dr Kelly when there's even a hint of cover-up.
The
Basij militia attacked and arrested students
in their dorm at Tehran university, beating them, raping some, and killing five of them. Their families were ordered not to talk about their dead. The US could use drone planes to drop photos of these murdered students over Iranian cities, and carry out the funeral rites that their families would have held. Dropping bombs would make the Iranian people rally around their tyrants, but dropping photos could work the other way.
Some in the UK government want drug companies to form patent pools for the treatment of HIV-infected people in poor countries.
This article
confusingly refers to patents as "intellectual property",
which mixes them up with totally different laws (e.g., copyright and trademark) that raise totally different issues.
It's confusing practice that
should be avoided.
If they were really serious, they would demand abolition of the parts
of TRIPES (*) that impose drug patents on poor countries. The drug
companies lie when they say that they "need" patents to "recoup the
cost of developing" life-saving drugs. They spend it more on
corrupting doctors, medical journals, scientists and governments
— and besides, they focus on developing drugs that mostly
healthy rich country inhabitants want to use over and over (like
viagra) and not on drugs to cure diseases.
* Trade-Restricting Impediments to Production, Education and Science
— a part of the agreement that created the antidemocratic
World Trade Organization.
A major drought covers much of India,
and people are fighting to get water to drink.
If the harvest is bad, they may fight over food. Global warming will make these droughts more common. In addition, it reduces the ice in the Himalayas that feeds the main rivers of India, Pakistan and China. Meanwhile, overpopulation makes it harder for the human population to bear the effects of the droughts that occur. If India does not want its population limited by massive death in drought years, it must greatly reduce the birth rate.
Wendell Potter, former health insurance PR executive,
explains how the insurance companies
plotted to discredit Michael Moore's film Sicko, and how they write the scripts for their politicians to oppose the establishment of an efficient and effective health care system in the US.
This article
that the US government could not have helped knowing that a coup in Honduras was being planned. And that if it had told the generals not to do it, they would have obeyed.
Government documents show
UK officials planned to deceive the ministers they worked for
about torture practices. This could work as long as the ministers were content to be ignorant. Thus, it does not absolve them of responsibility.
Sarkozy's new anti-sharing law imposes a sentence of
2 years in prison for sharing files. This after a 5-minute trial.
Pentagon documents
verify torture of prisoners in Guantanamo and show
Rumsfeld is responsible.
I recall also reading that there is specific evidence
to hold Bush responsible.
Chavez has
cancelled the licenses of over 200 radio stations,
almost 40% of the stations in Venezuela, and will require all
but foreign channels to interrupt programming to carry his speeches.
I don't think it is right to require stations to carry the president's
speeches, beyond the minimum necessary to make them accessible to the
citizens — and they already are.
After the US's Afghan allies killed hundreds of Taliban prisoners in
2001, depriving some of food and water, the Bush regime repeatedly
discouraged any investigation.
Charles Taylor
is going on trial for crimes against humanity.
The children his army enslaved find their suffering continues.
US citizens: phone your senators to tell them
not to promote GMOs as part of food aid.
I'm not absolutely against genetic engineering under all
circumstances. But we cannot trust it without careful testing, and
today's megacorporations are more inclined to sweep any problems under
the rug.
Support La Quadrature du Net
by buying 1000 digits of pi.
My digits are
here.
UK judges condemned the defense ministry for
telling lies to conceal information
from trials, in which former Iraqi prisoners are suing because they were tortured.
Sarah Palin's
list of lies
is amazingly long for someone who has been in national politics less than a year.
Bush's
illegal surveillance
(later legalized by Congress) seems to have achieved nothing in terms of national security.
President Sarkozy has is trying to make the HADOPI law costitutional. Instead of punishment with no trial,
he will have a judge do 5-minute rush trials.
This will provide the formality, though not the substance, of justice. The punishment of those whose networks are used by others is a form of collective responsibility: conscripting one person to keep others in line. Collective responsibility is the typical behavior of tyrants.
The US has deported a former army officer in a former Bolivian
dictatorship to Bolivia, where he
will face punishment for murdering dissidents.
An expert on Xinjiang explains how the general tyranny of the Chinese
government
exacerbates Uighur-Han ethnic conflict.
Famous UK authors say they will refuse to get
background checks that the government plans to demand
before letting them speak in schools.
I would refuse also. I've occasionally given speeches in high schools;
I wonder if some day I won't be allowed to do that.
Cell phone tracking is
being used by US police, often without
court orders.
I'm not unhappy that these murderers were convicted,
but government surveillance is not limited to murderers.
In the US it is
often applied to political dissidents too.
A
new form of remote video surveillance airplane:
"You never know when you are being watched or followed."
In general, I am in favor of controlling street crime,
but increased general surveillance is dangerous too.
It is not only criminals who will be "watched or followed"
from a distance with this system.
The Honduran coup forces
arrested the father of Isis Obed Murillo
after he criticized them for killing his son in a protest.
This supports the point of the prominent academics who told the US
government that
fair elections under the coup regime are impossible.
Neonazi web sites have participants that
claim to be in the US military.
Army officials don't seem to be very concerned.
Tearyan Brown spent two years in prison awaiting trial for robbery, on
absurd evidence, before he was acquitted. During that time he lost
his job, and faces homelessness — if he isn't imprisoned for not
paying child support.
Debtors' prison was supposed to be abolished by the US Constitution.
It has been restored through the subterfuge of defining non-payment
as a crime. The same could easily be done for any kind of debt,
fully restoring the concept of debtors' prison. My guess is that debt
to banks will be the next case to get this special treatment.
How Il Ducino maintains
control of Italy through control of the media.
US citizens: tell your senators to
cut funding for the useless and expensive F-22 fighter plane.
US citizens: call your congresscritter to support the STOCK Act
(Stop Trading On Congressional Knowledge) to ban insider trading
by congresscritters and lobbyists.
See
this for more explanation.
Read
Mairead Maguire's open letter to Obama
about the occupation of Palestine. Ms Maguire was one of the passengers arrested recently on the Gaza aid boat.
Massachusetts citizens: tell your state representative to oppose laws going against the decriminalization of marijuana. Hearings will be on Tuesday afternoon. Use
this
to send email. Use
this
to phone. (A phone call carries more weight than an email.)
Matt Taibbi accuses
Goldman Sachs of manipulating market bubbles
and then the bailout. Cap-and-trade does not necessarily have to be a bubblemaker. If the government sold concessions, rather than giving them away, they would really cause CO2 reduction, and if the government regulated this market carefully, nobody would able to make a bubble in it. If Taibbi is right, we can count on the US government to neglect its responsibility.
Scientists can't predict how much
global warming will raise sea level.
As much as 2 meters is plausible, and this would force abandonment of many major coastal cities.
As
Obama replays Bush,
the US Supreme Court may be the only thing standing in the way of imprisoment without trial. But what will Judge Sotomayor say about it? I hope that Obama has not chosen her for her willingness to crush this right.
Ireland has made it a crime to
"cause outrage to religion"
— any religion. I wonder if this makes it a crime to advocate abortion rights, or to teach evolution.
Pakistani officials confirm
that the UK knew about and colluded in torture.
One way to absorb CO2 from the atmosphere, and prevent its acidity from killing all the coral reefs,
is to dump lots of lime into the ocean.
This is assuming we can make the lime without releasing into the air the CO2 generated in the process.
Honduras' coup-installed government and its business backers are
forcing people to participate in demonstrations
in support.
The Yes Men
seek donations
for their next caper.
The G8
reached a climate control agreement,
but it is not strong enough and has vague points. China and other countries demand clearer commitments from the rich countries before they agree to major emissions cuts. I think they are right in this, because clearer commitments from the rich countries are needed anyway.
Supporters of
new Free Exploitation Treaties
say Obama isn't doing enough to get them signed. I hope this is true, but such sighs of despair from business-friendly politicians are the steam escaping from the boiler with which they generate the pressure to put on politicians.
Obama said he wants to
pursue Bush's Free Exploitation Treaty with Colombia, and praised Colombian President Horrible, who has been tied to the murderous paramilitary criminal gangs. I would expect any such treaty to impose injustices comparable to those of the DMCA, and perhaps others worse, while undermining democracy in every country that signs it.
Israeli citizens: oppose
the biometric database.
A Tehran doctor says that the Iranian regime has
covered up killings.
I cannot gauge the reliability of these reports of corruption and disagreements within the regime.
Honduran President Zelaya and Micheletti who ousted him have
agreed to mediation
by Oscar Arias, former president of Costa Rica.
The UK police had enough information to prosecute Rangzieb Ahmed,
but they wanted more.
Rather than arrest him, they let him go to Pakistan, asked Pakistan to arrest him, and gave Pakistan a list of questions to torture him to answer.
Obama's speech in Russia
criticized the things that are wrong in that country's government, but said Russia is not an enemy. Obama's criticisms of Russian policies are right on target. Also, this confirms my hypothesis that Obama is using the plans for anti-missiles in Eastern Europe as a bargaining chip to get Russian cooperation in regard to Iran. The anti-missiles don't make much sense for defense, but if the plan works as a bargaining chip, I won't criticize that.
Obama's speech in Russia
criticized the things that are wrong in
that country's government, but said Russia is not an enemy.
Obama's criticisms of Russian policies are right on target. Also,
this confirms my hypothesis that Obama is using the plans for
anti-missiles in Eastern Europe as a bargaining chip to get Russian
cooperation in regard to Iran. The anti-missiles don't make much
sense for defense, but if the plan works as a bargaining chip, I won't
criticize that.
The UK police had enough information to prosecute Rangzieb Ahmed, but
they wanted more. Rather than arrest him, they let him go to
Pakistan,
asked Pakistan to arrest him, and gave Pakistan a list of
questions to torture him to answer.
Honduran President Zelaya and Micheletti who ousted him
have
agreed to mediation by Oscar Arias, former president
of Costa Rica.
An official UK report
condems police practices at protests, but
falls short of calling for a ban on "kettling" protestors.
It is interesting that the police simply fabricated the expectation
that recent London protests would be violent.
What regulations are needed to
prevent more bank failures and bubbles.
When the government of Israel promises to evacuate "illegal settlement
outposts" — that is, colonies that even Israel acknowledges are
illegal — it plans to
do this very slowly, and the plan involves
extending another colony first.
By contrast, when Israel decides to
force Palestinians out of their homes
and give them to Jews, the police raid them in the dark of the
night, leave them homeless, and won't let ambulances come to save
their lives.
Israel is now planning to
evict many other Palestinians in Jerusalem.
When Israel tries to expand the settlements, this contradicts a
commitment already made.
Israeli police entered Bil'in at night to
arrest Palestinians.
Since Bil'in is a center of nonviolent resistance, those arrested
were almost certainly of nothing more (if even that).
We can judge what insurance companies say about health care reform
by what they do
in order to increase their profits.
US citizens: call for
repeal of the law that requires the US military to discharge gays.
Maybe they could enlist fewer right-wing extremists
if they did not fire the gays.
Have we put women in a position where it
takes courage not to have children?
This pressure seems to be a new problem. In the 70s, some women
complained of pressure from their families to have children, but this
seems to be something more organized and systematic. The pressure
gets support from articles such as
this one:
"Our wonderful world was shattered," she said, merely because she
could not have another baby. She seems to want a baby the way I once
wanted a particular toy, but a disappointment is not a disaster, and
the rest of us should not endorse the exaggeration. People in Gaza
whose homes were bombed are entitled to say their world was shattered.
The hundreds of millions who could be forced to migrate or die, due to
global warming and consequent drought and inundation, will be entitled
to say their world was shattered.
Each human birth makes harder to prevent their world from being shattered.
See
this and click on "The Stork" ogg.
A group of scientists warn that today's
CO2 level is enough to destroy coral reefs, which would cause a
mass extinction of reef-dwelling species and a loss of food for a
billion people.
The Clown regime admitted
lying and misleading a court about Iraqi
prisoners' claims of torture.
An internal US government report warns that the danger of terrorism
from right-wing extremists
is increasing.
I hope the US government will take steps to root out the
right-wing extremists and
theocrats in the military itself.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to support
HR 676, for a single-payer health care system.
(The bill has 83 cosponsors.)
Honduras closed its main airport to
block President Zelaya from returning
to the country. (Can someone lend him a helicopter?)
Everyone: sign
this petition
for a strong climate-protection treaty.
Iraq has banned
organized visits to Saddam Hussein's grave.
Apparently executing him made him a martyr.
Rangzieb Ahmed, imprisoned in the UK after being tortured in Pakistan,
was visited by officials
who offered time off his sentence if he would drop his lawsuit claiming UK officials colluded in torturing him.
The US and Russia have agreed
on a path towards nuclear disarmament,
but it is still not clear they will take a step along the path.
Peaceful protests in Xinjiang
turned into violent riots after police tried to crush them.
The Chinese response to protests is harsh.
Over 1000 Tibetans have been disappeared by the Chinese after the protests there.
Binyam Mohamed's lawyers are trying to protect
a photograph that proves he was tortured
in Guantanamo, as a US court plans to destroy it.
Americans who think of themselves as Jewish can sign
this petition
telling Obama they favor bold initiatives for peace rather than the Israeli Hawks' Lobby.
A fervent Christian cult
taking over drug-trafficking in Mexico.
This can be partially compared with the Taliban in Afganistan. I think that Mexico can only free itself from the devastating effects of the illegal drug trade by legalizing the trade.
Former ministers of several powerful countries call for the US and
Russia to take the lead in
eliminating all nuclear weapons.
The plan would involve
agreement from all countries with nuclear technology
Here is a petition people can sign in favor of this.
The US plans for missile defense systems in Eastern Europe
have
blocked any disarmament progress.
Maybe Obama is hoping Russia will agree to put more pressure on Iran
in exchange for dropping this plan.
This article describes the coup in Honduras and says that the claim
that Zelaya wanted to be able to seek reelected comes only from the
opposition.
Was the coup in Honduras linked to the US government? There is no
specific evidence, but
this article argues that it had to be.
Six months after Israel attacked Gaza, people still live in
ruins because
Israel keeps Gaza under siege.
Other countries should not allow Israel to block humanitarian aid to
Gaza. They should deliver it over Israel's objections and dare Israel
to try to stop them.
People in Costa Rica
live longer and happier lives than people in the US
and use, on the average, 1/4 as much resources.
Maliki is accused of
moving Iraq towards dictatorship.
In effect, Iraq is returning to the days of Saddam Hussein. The main
difference will be that women no longer have equal rights, and the
multinational oil companies will get the profit from the oil.
Jammie Thomas, sentenced to pay almost two million dollars for sharing
copies of published works — which ought to be legal —
will appeal her conviction.
This appeal may be good or bad strategy; it depends on what sort of
precedent the appeal is likely to set.
US mass media are saying that Saddam Hussein falsely claimed, in 2000,
to have weapons of mass destruction.
But that is not what he said.
The reason for this claim is that it would operate to excuse Bush's
conquest of Iraq for the oil companies.
A judge
blocked the presentation of evidence to justify a protest
against a coal power plant, and a
susceptible jury found the protestors guilty.
In cases that might relate to political issues, jurors need to keep an
eye out for the danger that they are being manipulated by keeping them
in the dark, and ask themselves, "What is it the judge won't let me
know." In one case, jurors were aghast when they found out, after
the trial, that the person they had convicted of selling marijuana was
selling to sick people under a state license.
The Taliban
captured a US soldier in Afghanistan.
It seems misleading to call it "kidnapping" when soldiers capture
prisoners from an enemy army, so I won't use that term.
The real issue here is whether the Taliban will treat their prisoner
humanely according to the Geneva Conventions. For years, US military
officers warned Bush that torturing prisoners could result in
retaliation against future captured US soldiers. The US must now
shamefully recognize that it has not acted correctly itself and
therefore is in a weak position to criticize the Taliban if it does
not.
Obama has been
strangely weak in opposing the coup in Honduras.
Obama is protecting CIA torturers, but CIA officials are being
investigated for
destroying evidence of torture. Will Obama protect
this crime too?
Multinational companies have
bought a tremendous area of farm land
in poor countries, enough to endanger their food supplies.
The underlying problem is the government subservience to business
promoted by neoliberal economics. In past decades, most governments
would simply have forbidden this.
An animal rights activist, convicted of being associated with what
used to be considered minor offenses, reports on a
new federal prison that keeps the prisoners nearly incommunicado.
The B'liar regime abolished the principle of no double jeopardy. The
new power to try a person twice for the same crime has now been used
— superfluously — to
convict a killer who was being sentenced to life
in prison for another crime.
Since the second crime, about which there was no doubt at all, was the
occasion for the repeat trial, there was never any possibility that
double jeopardy against Mr Celaire would be crucial for justice in Mr
Celaire's case. In fact, the effect on him is nil. Instead of one
life sentence, double jeopardy gave him two in parallel; but he has
only one life to spend behind bars.
Perhaps some day this power will be used to convict a criminal who
otherwise would have escaped punishment. Any attack on the rights of
the accused will sometimes be used against people who are guilty of
gruesome crimes. But it can also be used to turn an innocent person's
life into a series of trials.
The founders of the Israeli army gave it high ethical ideals even
though it did not always act accordingly. But since it began the
occupation of Palestine it
has been taken over by religious extremists who are overt bigots.
Change Congress is shaming senators into
supporting publicly funded health care even though the
insurance companies paid them to oppose it.
Honduras' government has declared an emergency and
suspended basic human rights.
One of the articles I previously read said that the "unanimous" vote
that named Micheletti president was made "unanimous" by excluding
Cesar Ham's party. I would guess that this party is too small
to have changed the outcome, but claiming it was "unanimous" based
on exclusion of those who would have voted against is dishonest.
More lies by the coup-established rulers are explained
here, including the phony resignation letter from Zelaya.
The right wing are condemning Zelaya
for having an association with Chavez
and say that he has promised to take control of Honduras for Chavez.
Those accusations seem absurd to me, but it seems that the ballots for
the non-binding poll were
printed in Venezuela after Honduran government agencies
refused to do it.
It seems to me that Zelaya ought to have confronted that disobedience
by replacing officials rather than by inviting foreign help. However,
the mere fact of getting such help does not prove anything was wrong.
It doesn't prove the contrary either. Zelaya said, in exile. that if
the constitution were changed to allow a president to be reelected,
that would only apply to his successor, not to him. But this may not
have been clear all along.
An Indian court
has ruled that homosexual sex is not a crime.
After Israel seized the Gaza aid boat,
the crew and escorts are now in prison in Israel.
At least one may face long term imprisonment.
Wild sheep on a Scottish island are
evolving to smaller size,
apparently due to warming climate.
Israel has kept Cynthia McKinney and others from the Gaza aid boat in
prison after they
refused to sign a statement which would have put
them in the wrong.
Pharma's phony
'gift' to Health Care Reform
How Hollywood
systematically makes lousy movies.
I learned about another systematic cause in a book called "Save the
Cat", whose purpose is to explain how to write scripts and sell them
to Hollywood. However, without quite intending to, it also explains
how the system demands stories that can be fully explained in a few
words.
When the movie companies demand more power to control our computers,
saying it is needed to keep them going, this is what they want to keep
going.
These articles charge that the Saudi government covered up Al Qa'ida's
role in the attack on a US base in 1996, putting the blame on Shi'ite
dissidents, and FBI director Freeh gave full support to the deception.
Later he was hired as a lawyer by Saudi royalty.
Article 1
Conservatives pretend to support democracy, but they make
an exception for the coup in Honduras.
Israeli is
stealing boats and nets from Gazan fishermen.
On one occasion Israeli navy shot at fishermen and ordered
them to jump into the sea.
The fossil fuel lobby
undermined the climate bill by harping on what
protecting the environment will cost. This question is ignored when
the right wing wants something more expensive, such as a war.
What is the cost of cities that are uninhabited, because of unbearable
heat, lack of food, a lack of drinking water underground, or a layer
of sea water above it?
Faisal Al-Ani was confused but not violent, until the police attacked
him.
He died from the way they treated him, and then they lied to
cover it up.
Exxon still
funds front groups to deny global warming.
Remember, the "xx" is pronounced like a hard "ch" in German
or "j" in Spanish.
The "defeated" Iranian candidates have
denounced the government as illegitimate.
Those who steal elections do not have legitimate governments.
This applies in Iran just as it does in the US and Mexico.
As for the demand for the EU to apologize so as to restart nuclear
negotiations, this demand shows that Iran has no interested in an
agreement, so the negotiations are futile. If Iran is ever interested
in an agreement, it will come to the table to discuss one.
It is not a good thing for Iran to have nuclear weapons, but it's not
a disaster either. (The the same can be said for several other
countries that have them.)
George Monbiot:
No one dares study the possible effects of drug legalization.
There is a point that Monbiot did not consider, about
decriminalization of use while providing a legal supply to addicts.
If most of the total amount of the drug is used by addicts (since one
addict uses far more per year than one occasional user), this will
probably make the total size of the black market shrink considerably
and reduce profits. Many drug sellers will leave the business. Those
remaining will have little incentive to give free samples to try to
get customers addicted. The result could be a decrease in occasional
use of the drug, as well as a decrease in the indirect harms of
smuggling it.
Two EPA employees whose field is not climatology wrote a report
saying that there is no global warming danger, and the EPA suppressed it.
Their report is
ignorant nonsense.
I can see why the EPA would refuse to be associated with this, but
gagging them was wrong. They should be allowed to state their views,
then used as an example to refute, and disciplined for plagiarism
if they did copied without citation from Mr Gregory.
UK protestors that blocked a coal train say they were trying to
preventing the deaths that result from coal-based power generation.
Among the forms of polution that coal plants emit is radioactive
fallout. The radioisotopes are present in the coal, but harmless as
long as they are inside it; burning the coal spews them into the air.
Krugman: climate danger deniers are
committing treason against Earth.
An increasing number of Bush forces soldiers are
resisting the war that they too consider unjust.
Amnesty International concludes
Israel committed war crimes in attacking Gaza.
The climate bill, so weak that it is more like an excuse for giveways
than a reduction in emission,
has divided the environmental movement.
Environmental groups generally achieve more by criticizing bad laws
than by signing their name to slightly better laws. That is what they
should all do now. If not enough Americans understand the danger we
are putting the world in, how do we change that? Endorsing
non-solutions does not do it.
Engineers' intolerance for ambiguity makes them more likely to
become right-wing extremists
(though it is only a tiny fraction of engineers who do so).
Instead of demolishing 20,000 Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem,
Israel now
says it will only demolish 6,000.
But these demolitions are
continue.
It is a step in the right direction, but it removes just part of one
of the many forms of suffering imposed on Palestinians. And Israel
could reverse this step at any time too.
The UK now has an
Atheist summer camp.
The Bush regime
tortured prisoners to death in Bagram.
Obama condemns Bush regime torture, but wants to continue taking
prisoners around the world and holding them in Bagram without trial,
based on evidence that often amounts to rumor, and sometimes is
extracted by torture.
Neocons hope the Iranian regime's suppression of political opposition
can give them
an excuse to invade.
Invading Iran to establish freedom and democracy would be a good thing
if (1) Iranians want this sort of help and (2) we could trust the leaders
of the invasion to support and establish freedom and democracy.
Obama is not a full supporter of human rights, but maybe we could
trust him to set up a real democracy. However, Iranians do not want
their country to be invaded, and I expect they would loyally support
their government if it were. That's what they did in the 80s when the
US supported Saddam Hussein's invasion of Iran.
The neocons don't have as much influence as they used to. Still, the
world is fortunate that the US army is too overloaded to invade any
but weak countries at present.
Israeli "settlers"
attacked Palestinian villages with guns.
The army came and attacked the Palestinians too.
As the Bush forces move gradually out of Iraq,
the
multinational oil companies are moving in.
Bush did not exactly win his war, but the people he worked for
did win it.
The Bush forces
barred a reporter from being "embedded"
because his reporting was not sufficiently favorable.
China has backed down on
the Green Dam internet filtering program,
apparently in response to a lot of opposition. Users would not have been required to run the Green Dam program on their own PCs, but users of cybercafes might well have found they had no way to avoid it. Thus, it would have censored some Chinese users, while leaving many others unaffected. However, the program has managed to crystalize opposition to all the censorship in China.
US citizens:
Israel seized the Gaza aid ship "Spirit of Humanity".
Call your congressmen and senators demanding they put pressure on Israel to release the ship and let it dock in Gaza.
You can also call these numbers to put pressure directly on the Israeli government.
The UK says that
national ID cards will be optional,
except if you want a passport.
A correction:
Cesar Ham was not killed. Rather, he has gone into
hiding under threat of arrest for supporting the holding of Zelaya's
planned advisory referendum.
It appears that the advisory referendum was specifically about whether
to hold a later plebiscite to authorize a constitutional convention.
It is generally reported that Zelaya's aim was to change the
constitution so he could run for office again, and maybe that was what
he hoped such a convention would do.
Ezra Nawi, an Israeli who helps Palestinians' nonviolent resistance
to the "settlers" that try to drive them off their land,
faces another prison term, apparently framed by biased police.
Keep in mind that the "settlement" whose inhabitants call Nawi a
"troublemaker" was illegal from the beginning, and that the overall
purpose of these settlements was to create excuses for annexation.
A study predicts
4000 square miles around New Orleans
will be submerged by the end of the century, due to global warming
combined with dams that reduce sediment.
This appears to use a cautious prediction for how much sea level will rise.
If Greenland really starts melting, it could be a lot worse.
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Article 2
Article 3
Article 4
Article 5
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The Israeli Ministry of Justice
tel: +972 2646 6666 or +972 2646 6340
fax: +972 2646 6357
The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs
tel: +972 2530 3111
fax: +972 2530 3367
See also here.
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Copyright (C) 2009 Richard Stallman
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