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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.
India plans to impose national ID cards.
If the idea is to help people by giving them a new form of identification, there is no reason to make it mandatory. So that reason is bogus. This will not help much against guerrilla groups, because when they are fighting nobody can ask them for ID, and when they are not fighting, they look just like everyone else.
I hope that people will fight this plan.
Drug company influence leads to
falsification of medical studies
and to suppression of those whose results show problems.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
The only fix is to greatly reduce private funding of drug research. If the obstacle is the fact that drug companies have more money to spend on research than the Federal Government, why does the obstacle exist?
Because they have too much patent power.
Because of direct-to-consumer drug ads.
Because they corrupt doctors with freebies.
Because they would rather develop palliatives (which you would take over and over) rather than cures (which you only need once).
Because their taxes are too low.
These things can be fixed.
A prisoner in Abu Ghraib suffered, in effect,
death through crucifiction.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
France is trying to co-opt the new International Renewable Energy Agency to make it support nuclear power.
The US and Egypt are making progress towards
a partial peace deal
including the PLO, Hamas, and Israel.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Iraqis celebrated the mostly-withdrawal of Bush forces troops from Iraqi cities.
Obama is talking about
making an executive order for imprisonment
without trial.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
The military in Honduras overthrew President Zelaya, who was trying to hold a referendum on whether he ought to be able to run for reelection.
During the coup, the military killed a left-wing presidential candidate, Cesar Ham, who was allied with Zelaya.
Other branches of the Honduran government said the referendum was
being done in an unconstitutional manner. However, the referendum did
not purport to have any legal effect; it was just a trial balloon
asking whether to hold a real plebiscite in November.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
I don't know whether the proposed November plebiscite would be constitutional, but this advisory referendum in itself could not have caused any injustice, and it was no excuse for a coup.
Debunking Canadian health care myths.
US citizens: sign this petition for real reform of the financial markets.
One of the things that appealed to me was the plan to make large banks pay higher insurance premiums, thus encouraging splits rather than mergers. Banks "too big to fail" are too big to be allowed to exist!
Haiti had an election, and
Aristide's party boycotted it.
Around 1% of the electorate voted.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
The election protests have caused a split in Iran's government at all levels.
Fishermen demamd the right to drive bluefin tuna to extinction.
It is insane to allow any fishing of stocks that are dwindling. Several times in the past the estimates for an allowable catch turned out to be overoptimistic. Why gamble with permanent loss for a few years of continued fishing?
Those fishermen will need to change jobs anyway, so let's make them do it now. All trade in bluefin tuna should be banned until the species is healthy again.
Obama is readying an executive order for
imprisonment without trial.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Greenpeace
condemns the House's climate bill.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Comics artist Mark Sable was arrested by the TSA for carrying the script for a new issue of his comic book. (It is about fictional terrorism.)
The TSA has no business looking at any textual or graphical material the passenger may have, because it is not a weapon. Nobody would get very far trying to hijack a plane by giving a flight attendant paper cuts.
The fact they singled him out shows that this search had nothing to do with concerns for the safety of that flight. Someone was using the TSA as an excuse for a warrantless search.
I forwarded this to an ACLU lawyer I know.
The UN's inquiry into Israel's attack on Gaza is being carried out remotely since Israel has barred the team's entry to Gaza.
US citizens: sign
this petition to congressional leaders to repeal
the Defense of Marriage Act which denies equality to same-sex marriages.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
The ACLU is fighting Pat-Riot act gag orders in court, and the FBI responded secretly with arguments that the ACLU's lawyers are not allowed to see.
I do not trust the FBI to respect human rights, and I don't trust Obama to do so either.
A UK commission including retired high officials warns against anti-terrorist methods, such as control orders and condoning foreign torture, that "subvert the rule of normal law".
I wonder whether the report criticizes laws that also subvert established principles of justice, such as the UK law that makes it a crime to be the object of "reasonable suspicion".
A Brasilian law to legalize squatters in the rainforest seems likely to encourage dangerous deforestation.
Letting squatters own the land they have occupied is often a good thing. But letting them sell it again defeats the purpose — they will only become "landless" once more, and have to occupy another part of the forest.
The real solution is to reduce population growth and help the poor in other ways, while at the same time penalizing anyone owning large amounts of land. This will result in selling already-farmed land to the poor.
An appeals court in Sweden denied a retrial to the Pirate Bay, ruling that the judge's conflict of interest was unimportant.
The copyright lobby's propaganda machine exposed: it creates and funds multiple organizations that cite exaggerated claims from each others' reports.
Exaggerated claims are one part of their system. Propaganda terms, such as calling copying "piracy" and "counterfeiting", and calling copyright "intellectual property", are another part. To repeat those terms without denouncing them as invalid gives the copyright lobby support.
The ACLU asked the UN to investigate
the case of Abou Elkassim Britel
who the CIA handed over to Morocco for torture. He was tortured
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Everyone: participate in protests on Sep 12 against internet surveillance of people who are not criminals.
The Bush regime took prisoners from other countries
to Bagram in Afghanistan
where were imprisoned for years and tortured. Obama continues to deny these prisoners the chance to see a lawyer.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Sarkozy has proposed to ban women from veiling their faces in France.
I think people should have the right to conceal their faces in public if they wish. In particular, they must have the right to do this when protesting. If they do it because of religious conviction, that too is their right.
However, Muslim women face pressure to conceal their faces, pressure from adherents of a form of fanaticism that can turn violent. Making women hide their faces is an insult which paves the way for worse attacks such as genital mutilation and "honor killing". If some eventually decide to surrender to this pressure, that does not alter the fact that they were more or less coerced. We must search for some way to neutralize and defeat the pressure.
But Sarkozy's response would not help these women. The pressure on them comes mainly from their own families. Trying to "protect" them by prohibiting them from wearing veils will not decrease the pressure or help them resist it. On the contrary, this ban combined with the family pressure to wear a veil could result in their never leaving the house. This would isolate them further from anyone who is not the source of the pressure, and push them further into the trap.
I don't think I know the right solution, but it occurs to me to look for ways to require recent immigrants to spend a substantial amount of time, over a period of weeks or months, in an indoor activity where they get to know people with various lifestyles and views, and in which veils are not allowed. At the same time, women could organize to firmly oppose pressure to hide their faces.
The Shah's militiamen seem to target women protestors specially for killing.
A weak climate bill with giant give-aways to business is all one can expect from the corrupt US political system, where business own's Congress.
Obama is trying hard to pass a climate bill that has already been substantially weakened by business pressure.
Iraqi Kurdistan is asking citizens to vote on claiming terroritory from Iraq, in effect acting as an independent state.
Health insurance companies' goal is to minimize their "medical losses", i.e., the benefits they must pay to their subscribers out of the premiums they get.
I disagree with one point in this article. The fact that insurance companies seek to make a profit is the one main cause of the problem, and the other is the idea that it is acceptable for businesses to seek profit and only profit no matter what the social cost.
The Pentagon says it has
learned its lesson
and will not describe protests as "low-level terrorism".
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
The Bush regime repeatedly attacked journalists in Iraq, but didn't admit it. Now a neocon openly calls for war against journalists. Any state that "wins" a dirty war against journalists would possess both the conditions and the inclination to do great evil.
Farid Hilali was tortured in various countries, apparently on instructions from the B'liar regime, then spent the rest of a decade in prison on nebulous terrorism charges.
The censorship-mad Australian government now plans to censor games.
What must be changed in the TSA to make it respect basic civil liberties. I disagree on one point: we must not accept as perpetual and inevitable the pointless security measures now in place. The right of anonymous travel must be restored.
US citizens: sign
this petition
from Jewish Voices for Peace to make a freeze on construction of its colonies in Palestine a condition of further US aid to Israel. This does not go far enough; the US should demand that Israel agree to hand over the buildings of these "settlements" to Palestine as part of a peace deal. But it goes in the right direction.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
A major group of US rabbis
has condemned Israel's extension of settlements. Since the purpose of the settlements was to make an excuse for annexation, Israel has no excuse for keeping them at all. It should hand them over to Palestine as part of a peace agreement.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Wendell Potter, former health insurance PR executive, quit his job to campaign for publicly funded health care.
Everyone: sign this call for countries to denounce the repression in Iran.
An Israeli soldier has
gone to prison rather than participate in
oppressing Palestinians.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-13 because the old link was broken.]
He said that the actions of soldiers in his unit reminded him of stories of how antisemites in Russia treated his progenitors.
700 doctors have demanded that Yoram Blachar
resign as head of the World Medical Association
on grounds that he condoned Israeli doctors'
participation in torture of Palestinian prisoners.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-13 because the old link was broken.]
Neda Soltan's family was forced to move so neighbors could not talk to them.
I wonder if they are in something tantamount to a prison. That would be the "safest" place for Shah Khamenei to put them.
A security camera proved that undercover cops tried to frame people for a drug deal, but the judge was reluctant to believe what he saw,
The War on Drugs corrupts police and officials. It exposes citizens to the danger of dangerous and violent raids, which have killed people who were raided by mistake. It has given the US the biggest percentage of population in prison of all countries on Earth. It is unjust and must be ended.
Israel's government demonstrates its contempt for peace by proposing sleazy excuses for expansion of its "settlements" (really colonies) on the territory of Palestine.
To speak of "natural growth" of these colonies is an oxymoron since there is nothing natural or legitimate about them. All of the settlements violate international law; their sole purpose was to make it hard to end the occupation.
Israel should hand all of them over to Palestine.
While Israel pleads to excuse houses already illegally built
on Palestinian territory, it
threatens to demolish Palestinian homes that have existed for
a lot longer.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-13 because the old link was broken.]
Americans may be amazed to compare the costs of bailing out US banks and investment companies with the cost of various past wars and crises.
Shah Khamenei has forbidden the standard Shi'ite mourning ceremonies for Neda Soltani, who was shot by government forces while attending or watching a protest last week.
Former Scientology leaders who have quit the church say that the
leader was
frequently and surprisingly violent.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
The UK investigation of how B'liar decided to attack Iraq will be held in public, but with a hitch and a loophole.
I fear that the exception for testimony that might "embarrass allies" will be an excuse to conceal precisely the information that is most crucial, since the plan was made together with Bush.
In addition, the testimony will not be given under oath. If Bliar cannot be prosecuted for perjury, he will lie again.
Tell Tom Daschle to
stop undermining public funding for health care.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Hospitals in Namibia are sterilizing HIV-positive women without telling them.
There is no excuse for tricking patients, but an explicit requirement for sterilization may be justified. A country which can't afford to provide necessary medical care perhaps ought to require women not to have more babies with a 25% chance of HIV infection each one.
In general, people should be free to do whatever they like, but there are some activities that create a burden society cannot handle, and have to be limited.
The US Army has changed rules for air strikes in Afghanistan in the aim of avoiding more massacres of civilians.
It is the right thing to do, but it may be too little or too late.
Militia
death squads are operating in Basra. Most militias are inactive,
but waiting to fight again.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
If the Iraqi Army does not take sides in these fights, it might offer some hope. But it is mostly Shi'ite, so it may take sides with Shi'ites against Sunnis.
Western companies made the systems that Iran and China use to censor the Internet. Prohibiting such systems might make it harder for countries such as Denmark, Germany, France and Australia to establish censorship.
Bush and B'liar decided privately in January 2003 that they would invade Iraq regardless of whether the UN found any of the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction.
Massachusetts residents: phone your state representative to oppose the bills intended to reverse the results of the referendum that decriminalized marijuana. You can use this web site to find out your representative's phone number.
Videos show the Shah's militia shooting to death a girl who was watching a protest.
UK doctors are upset that Dignitas, in Switzerland,
helps people commit suicide
even when their suffering might last a long time. These doctors think Dignitas should only help people escape brief suffering.
I agree that anyone helping people commit suicide should first make sure they are aware of all treatment options. It would be a shame if someone rushed into escape through death without trying some treatment that might have made his life worth living.
However, the fact that one person finds meaning in life as a quadruplegic does mot mean others can, or should be forced to try.
The DOD
classifies protests
as "low-level terrorism."
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
UK police violently arrested two protestors for photographing a policeman who was hiding his identity by not showing a badge number.
When manuracturers claim that products protect the environment in some way, they are nearly always lying.
A Canadian reporter in Iran describes how police arrested him and beat him. He says that Iranian reporters are in more danger.
Brazil has begun to prosecute companies that have cut down the rainforest to grow cattle.
Shah Khamenei's police have crushed the protests in Iran, by killing ten, injuring dozens, and arresting hundreds or thousands.
With this obvious act of tyranny, the Shah has sown disgust among a large part of the Iranian people.
It often takes more than one uprising to bring down a totalitarian dictator. Four were needed to bring down the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe. Each attempt, even if it does not succeed, is a step towards victory, as the dictator can only hold on by ever-greater oppression, provoking ever greater opposition.
US citizens: sign
this petition
to the EPA in favor of regulating CO2 emmissions.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
The civilians remaining in Swat are suffering from a lack of almost everything, including food. But the Pakistani Army seems to be defeating the Taliban. As long as the government of Pakistan followed a policy of appeasement of the radical Islamists, they continued gaining power. The only way Pakistan could avoid falling to them eventually was to go to out-and-out war against them before it was too late.
Berlusconi's multiple sex scandals are costing him support among right-wing Italians. This makes me wonder whether "starlets" really means "Star, let's". It also reminds me of a pattern common in the US: politicians support nasty policies but nonetheless remain popular, then lose support for private acts that didn't really hurt anyone. I wonder if it relates to partial control of the media. In the US, business mostly controls the media; in Italy, Berlusconi himself controls most of the media. Perhaps this control is sufficient to squelch criticism of bad policies, and only a sex scandal is too exciting for the media to neglect.
As the Clown regime plans to build new nuclear power plants (and has changed laws so that people cannot block them), it lacks enough inspectors to assure safety at the existing plants.
Two million Iraqis are still refugees in neighboring countries. They do not dare go home.
The ACLU has sued the TSA for carrying out searches that are irrelevant to keeping weapons off planes. This is not the only injustice in the TSA's behavior. The arbitrary "no fly list" and the requirement for passengers to identify themselves are also tyranny.
B'liar asked Clown to have a phony investigation into the Iraq war, fearing that a real investigation would expose his complicity. Since Obama does not want an investagation, Americans also depend on the UK to investigate the criminal conspiracy that was used to launch the conquest of Iraq. A real investigation must be able to subpoena anyone whatsoever to give public testimony.
Some of the banks bailed out last year are having great profits now and will pay huge bonuses. They should have to use these profits to pay back their bailouts. Banking practices are the result of government policy and laws. If banks tend to accept too much risk, it is because they expect to be bailed out if they lose the bet. The way to prevent this is for the owners of the bank to lose ownership if they get bailed out.
Al-Maliki says the Bush forces will withdraw from Iraqi cities by June 30 as agreed, despite
attacks in cities.
The withdrawal won't be fully honest, because they have gerrymandered the borders of some Iraqi cities to exclude Bush forces bases. Nonetheless, maybe Obama will carry out the promised withdrawal by the end of 2011.
If so, the deaths of a million Iraqis and the expendature of a trillion US dollars will have given Iraq a government which is not clearly better than that of Saddam Hussein.
The fact that the Democratic party has taken over responsibility for the occupation of Iraq, and the one in Afghanistan, has nearly eliminated the anti-war movement.
Since Obama has announced an exit strategy for Iraq, and since two and a half years is not a terribly long time, perhaps there is no need to fight to speed it up. But there is no exit strategy for Afghanistan and no sign of victory either, and the government that the US is supporting is almost as cruel to women as the Taliban.
A massive mobilization of Shah Khamenei's police crushed protests in Tehran, which were smaller than before. I hope the massive protests resume once the Shah relaxes his grip.
Jammie Thomas-Rasset was sentenced to pay almost two million dollars to the music factories for file sharing. I expect that the members of the jury were influenced by propaganda terms such as "piracy" and "intellectual property" and the claims that sharing is "theft". How people frame an issue has a big effect on what conclusions they draw. We must not allow the music factories (which the RIAA works for) and movie companies to shape people's thinking without giving them a fight over it.
The World Bank plans a project to try to prevent the extinction of tigers. I support the goal, but I mistrust the World Bank. Meanwhile, I wonder if the best way to save tigers is to spread information about modern medical remedies. Tiger parts must be getting very expensive by now, and they probably don't really work either.
The Yes Men strike again, reporting that world leaders have signed a strong pact to avert climate disaster.
Will the real leaders do their job?
Uri Avnery: Netanyahu "accepted" the idea of a Palestinian state with 7 preconditions designed to make sure it can't possibly happen.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to support the "Personal Use of Marijuana by Responsible Adults Act of 2009"; also send a message through this page.
And support the Medical Marijuana Patient Protection Act.
A suspected criminal in the UK has been denied a jury trial based on police statements that might be motivated by revenge.
Obama's package of banking reforms includes more federal oversight of companies that are "too big to fail".
However, what is necessary is to break them up into pieces that are small enough that it would be safe to let them fail.
After Clown was heavily criticized for a secret investigation into how his predecessor decided to attack Iraq, he denies it is a "u-turn" to consider making minor secondary parts of the investigation public.
He's right. To make the investigation anything but a cover-up requires a real u-turn.
Another grave flaw in Clown's plan is that the testimony won't be given under oath, and the investigation won't be able to subpoena people (such as B'liar himself).
The forecast for the UK in 2080 includes frequent temperatures over 40C (104F). And much less water to cool off with.
Obama is using bogus "terrorist" concerns to conceal the location of toxic dumps of coal power plant waste, which present a substantial danger of accidents.
As protests continue in Iran, the regime is arresting hundreds more opposition figures.
Protestors have taken Ahmadinejad's insult, that they are "dirt and dust", and turned it into a badge of pride.
I wish Americans had protested in the streets like this in 2000 when Bush stole the election.
Was Berlusconi involved in paying women to attend parties, or was he just the "end user" of them?
US citizens: sign this petition to
repeal the US federal rejection of same-sex marriage.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
After complaints that London police were using their power to search anyone — with no specific basis — mainly against non-whites, they set up a quota for whites to search, just to balance it out.
The real injustice in this power is not that the victims are mainly of Asian descent, but that they victims — and nearly all innocent of the crime they were suspected of. This power is unjust in the UK and it is unjust in the US.
B'liar approved a policy that led British agents to collude with foreign torturers.
Shah Khamenei is trying to crush massive protests by arresting and murdering opposition figures, paralleled by censorship.
As Germany plans to censor Internet access, freedom activists have launched a strong campaign of protests, but it has brought out of the woodwork various different interests that want to censor something or other.
Obama's plan for regulating the financial industry
does half the job very well,
but neglects the other half. Part of what it neglects is to reduce the power of the banks, which are so powerful that they may be able to block even this weak measure.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Support a massive poll in Iran
to verify how people actually voted.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Shah Khamenei has arrested some opposition leaders and banned news reporting from the streets.
Iraqi prisoners are on hunger strike to protest torture including rape.
Hamas agrees to coexistance with Israel along the official international border.
Netanyahu will probably respond by insisting on his absurd, impossible conditions. It's not enough to "recognize Israel"; Netanyahu demands recognition "as a Jewish state", meaning recognition of second-class citizenship for Arab citizens. The US has not recognized Israel "as a Jewish state"; I expect that no country has done so.
As Netanyahu announced these impossible conditions,
police attacked protestors and journalists on the street outside,
seriously injuring some of them.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-13 because the old link was broken.]
A few years ago, Israeli peace activists started meeting informally
with Hamas peace activists. Israel
imprisoned the latter to make sure this could not lead to peace.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-13 because the old link was broken.]
The Israeli Army
demolished Palestinians' homes, where some have lived
since the 1950s, on the grounds that their village is a security threat to
an Israeli colony which was illegal in the first place.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-13 because the old link was broken.]
The Clown regime refuses to explain the policies by which its agents participatd in interrogation-by-torture.
The stated reason is to save the UK government from the consequences of its wrongdoing.
Tasers give police an excuse for running amok.
The Iranian Election:
Sure They Stole It...Up Front and Honestly.
Shah Khamenei's men have
killed more protestors,
as large protests continue.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Although Netanyahu gave lip service to the idea of a Palestinian state, he demanded absurd conditions before even starting the negotiation. Uri Avnery has explained the difference between "recognizing Israel" (which the US and the PLO have done) and "recognizing Israel as a Jewish state", which would be racist and which no country has done.
Jose Padilla, who was imprisoned as an "enemy combattant" for 3 years and tortured, will be allowed to sue James Yoo for authorizing the torture.
Dalits whose ancestors converted to Christianity centuries ago face constant mistreatment from the other Indian Christians in their village.
President Garcia obtained permission from his masters in Washington to cancel the two laws that he had decreed to allow oil drilling and deforestation in Amazonia. While it is good that Obama is a gentler master than Bush was, Peru deserves to be independent. Peruvians should celebrate June 5 every year as Peru's Dependence Day until Peru is independent once more.
Neo-nazis and other right-wing extremists join the US Army
to get training for possible future gang violence.
Regulations are supposed to keep those people out, but the recruiters disregard the regulations, because the army is scraping the bottom of the barrel.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Avoiding meat one day a week could reduce global warming, since producing meat causes almost 20% of greenhouse gas emission.
Urgent Note: Resist
a sleasy management takeover
at WBAI in New York (
flyer 1,
flyer 2 ).
[References updated on 2018-04-07 because the old links were broken.]
Armed militia have killed pro-reform protestors in Teheran. I don't believe that Shah Khamenei seriously intends to count the votes correctly. So the investigation he has agreed to must be intended to sap the strength of the protests for a week.
It is not forbidden to deinstall the Chinese internet-filtering application Green Dam, but it may still have the effect of tightening censorship, especially in Internet cafes, where the users cannot deinstall anything.
Argentina has launched an economic war to try to conquer the Falkland Islands.
The inhabitants of the islands have no relationship with Argentina, and do not want to be conquered.
Greg Palast: stealing oil from poor Indians is a global practice for oil companies.
Some supporting evidence that the Iranian presidential election was stolen.
The movie companies threatened to boycott digital TV if it didn't have DRM built in. It was a bluff.
Businesses always claim that laws they don't like will naturally make them fail, and we'll regrert it. This sort of claim works well as a bluff because occasionally it is true. But it's more often false. When businesses say what they "need", they have every incentive to exaggerate and distort. We must not trust them.
Antonio Castro, son of Fidel, got into an Internet romance with a prankster who pretended to be his type of woman, and in the process demontrated the fancy life of Cuba's ruling elite.
US citizens: phone Eric Garduno of the House Judiciary Committee to oppose the "Design Piracy Prohibition Act", which would establish a sort of copyright for clothing designs.
You can also send a message to Congress through
this page, but a phone call has more effect.
If you use the page, make sure to
remove propaganda terms such as "protection"
and "intellectual
property" from your message. The second paragraph of their suggested
message text legitimizes the general idea of imposing copyright on
clothing designs, so I recommend replacing it entirely.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
You can find more information in
a petition but I don't think anyone should sign that petition,
because at the end it describes copying as "piracy".
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Support stronger protection for government whistleblowers.
Clown aims to prevent a thorough public inquiry into why Britain joined the conquest of Iraq.
North Korea has responded to increased sanctions by threatening war.
It would be a gross mistake for the US to act eager for a deal. To give North Korea anything for having made these threats would be a surrender comparable to Ronald Reagan's arms-for-hostages swap.
One response might be to visit North Korean ships on the high seas and give each crew member the opportunity to move to South Korea. If the regime has threatened to punish their families, there is a simple response: "Your family, in the prison which is North Korea, will wish to make a sacrifice so one of its members can escape. Don't let them down by wasting your chance."
300 detectives in Scotland Yard stand accused of charging large luxury expenses to the government.
The University Teachers for Human Rights, in Sri Lanka, describes how the LTTE crushed the human rights of Tamils, and how the government has taken over from them, including discrimination against Tamils as well as attcks on journalists.
The full report.
The Islamic fanatics declared themselves victors in the Iranian presidential election without bothering to count the votes. Khamenei is the new Shah, and little better than the last one. Iranians can state this by marching and chanting "Death to the Shah", reprising the protests that led to the downfall of the previous Shah.
Around the world, the megacorporations are taking natural resources from indigenous people's lands, often by force, often killing them, and often with the backing of the US.
The Clown regime
refuses to say how much it harasses photographers,
or where it authorizes policemen to search people for no reason.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Lawyers have sued the RIAA to demand return of the hundred million dollars it claims to have taken from music sharers.
An important Iraqi Sunni politician, who was cooperating with Shi'ites in support of human rights for Iraqis, was assassinated just after condemning al-Maliki.
US citizens: sign this petition for immediate release of the US report on the domestic right-wing terrorist threat.
US threats in 1995 made the World Health Organization cancel and bury a study which had found that cocaine was not very dangerous.
China's mandatory censorship software is full of security holes: unintended evil that accompanies the intended evil.
The UN imposed sanctions on North Korea, calling for all states to search North Korean ships for weapons.
A study by the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa (HSRC) finds that Israel's occupation of Palestine fully qualifies as colonization and as apartheid, according to the standard definitions.
Everyone: sign this petition to Peru's President Garcia to stop the violence and start talking with protestors.
Israeli politicians are telling Obama, implicitly, "Forget about
peace; there's
no one in Israel to talk peace with."
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Stiglitz warns that the role of the supposedly democratic US in creating the economic crisis could sour parts of the world on democracy. People will only make that mistake if they believe the US has had a functioning democracy. At some point in the 70s, the control of business became almost irresistible. We need to spread the word that it was the corruption of US democracy, by the power of business, which led to the crisis.
China will require
censorship malware on PCs (in addition to
Windows, which is malware in itself).
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
What will this imply for computers with GNU/Linux?
US citizens: go to
StrengthenIt.org to call for a stronger energy bill
and resist the oil and coal companies.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
The laws which indigenous Peruvians are protesting were decreed by the president in the name of a treaty with the US.
I admire Alberto Pizango for resisting the empire, but he should not exaggerate by calling the massacre of protestors "genocide". Tyranny and mass murder are bad enough; there is no need to seek a worse name to call them. (Later: someone suggested to me that he may have been talking about the general treatment of indigenous peoples rather than this one event. If so, it was not an exaggeration.)
President Garcia is right to blame foreign agents for this violence. He ought to know, since he is one of them. He is working for Washington, and Washington is working for the multinational companies. Expoitation is their goal, and murder is their frequent tool.
Peru should celebrate June 5 as Dependence Day, the day on which the surrender of its independence became manifest.
Did Obama vote to approve this treaty? If so, he is responsible. Will Obama tell Garcia, "Don't murder for the sake of those companies"? Or will he quietly let the empire's writ be enforced?
The French Constitutional Council vitiated the HADOPI law, the plan to disconnect people from the Internet if they are accused of sharing, on grounds that it is unconstitutional punishment without trial.
The UK Law Lords (comparable to the US Supreme Court) have ruled that those subject to "control orders" restricting their movements and communication must be shown the evidence these are based on, in order to challenge those orders in court.
This is a positive step, but not enough to make the system legitimate. Restricting specific people's activities is punishment, whether you call it that or not; punishing people without convicting them of a crime cannot be excused.
If there is probable cause to suspect these 20 people of planning serious crimes, that is valid grounds for a court to order every kind of surveillance and search, and keep it up for as long as the evidence suggests they are doing so. This will stop them from carrying out the hypothetical crime, if indeed that was their intention, while respecting their rights.
Exxon is still
funding global warming denialists, in contradiction to its
claim to have ceased.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
The American chestnut tree may make a comeback.
As for effects on CO2, that can't hurt, but I don't think we could plant enough chestnut trees to make much of a dent in that problem.
The Obama regime, to cover up Bush regime torture, makes the argument that the greater the abuse, the more important it is to cover it up.
A Japanese man who was
tortured into confessing to murder has been freed from
prison due to DNA evidence.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Torture is good for extracting confessions if you don't care whether they are true or false.
Peru's army is fighting Indian protestors in Amazonia who object to logging and oil drilling that he unilaterally permitted.
China has tripled its 2020 targets for renewable electric generation, to 15% of total energy generation.
I think this has a second motive of economic stimulus, to use idle capacity and workers for something very much worth doing.
Police in the UK are being investigated for torturing suspects.
The suspects were accused of importing pot; an activity which ought to be legal, just as importation of more dangerous drugs such s alcohol and tobacco must be legal.
The head of Countrywide, a leading actor in the real estate
bubble, has been
charged with lying to investors about what the company was
doing.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: phone key members of Congress and urge them to vote against the bill which (1) funds the occupation of Iraq, (2) funds the IMF, which imposes cruel cutbacks on poor countries, and (3) covers up torture of prisoners of the US government.
China's excuse for mandatory censorship software is "protecting children", just as in "free" countries.
Poaching by Chinese gangs is going so fast that it can wipe out the rhinos of Zimbabwe in a few years.
Shell Oil has agreed to pay compensation to killed and injured protestors that it apparently paid the Nigerian army to get rid of. This settlement is meant to avoid a trial, at which the facts of Shell's involvement in the killing would become known.
A prisoner from Guantanamo has been put on trial in the US, in a civilian court where he has a chance of a fair trial. May justice be served.
Obama's speech: What does it mean?
The Bush forces have freed a prisoner connected with al-Sadr, hoping an Iraqi militia will free one of its prisoners. The prisoners held by the militia are described as "hostages", which implies there was no legitimate reason to capture them, but that's not necessarily so. Security personnel in Iraq are doing a job that is military in nature. Perhaps the captured programmer is really a hostage.
Obama tried to
sneak money to the IMF through a bill for war funds, and is running into trouble.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Bush continues to defend the torture that he ordered.
Sri Lanka has
imprisoned doctors who treated wounded Tamil civilians,
accusing them of helping the LTTE.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
A right-wing radio personality experienced waterboarding and now agrees that it is torture.
The Swedish Pirate Party won a seat in the European Parliament.
20 years ago, millions of Chinese supported protests for democracy until the tyrants crushed them with an act of terrorism.
For the past 20 years, China's government has used economic growth to distract people from the issue of tyranny.
Chinese internet users protested the government censorship by taking their sites down for "Chinese Internet Maintenance Day".
It's interesting to note a common pattern of state-sponsored terror: stopping people from counting the dead. The Bush forces in Iraq have also done everything possible to prevent authoritative figures from existing, so that they can deny what they have done. Sri Lanka is doing the same thing now.
The terrorists want the victims to have a general idea of danger, so that they feel terror, but they want to keep the world in ignorance so as to escape the odium their deeds deserve. Thus, policies that cover up the number of casualties are an indicator of probable mass murder.
The Taliban used a suicide bomber to attack a mosque in a Pakistani town which had resisted them.
Berlusconi regularly uses air force planes
to bring starlets to his casting couch.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
US health insurance companies have
invested lots of money in tobacco companies.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
A group of MPs called on the UK to donate more to help poor countries cope with the effects of climate change.
I think the donations should go to reducing population growth, because that is crucial in the long term.
Note how it is futile to try to choose our purchases to reduce CO2 emission, because we don't have enough information to make good decisions. What we need is to enable prices to guide our decisions towards less emissions. A hefty tax on CO2 emissions would do it.
Chinese internet
censorship and surveillance have been increased
in honor of the massacre at Tiananmen Square 20 years ago.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
The Conference Board of Canada tried to blame its dishonest report on "piracy" on a staffer who had left 10 months before, and whose last draft did not include the plagiarized material.
Governor Bush told Houston Journalist: If Elected. "I'm Going to Invade Iraq".
The media were scared to publish this because of fear Republicans would call it a lie. As a result, a million Iraqis were killed.
Obama has openly rejected Israel's policy of extending settlements, and criticized other cruelties of the occupation.
I'm favorably impressed. Earlier it looked like he would completely bow down to Israel, but now it seems he just wanted to broach the issue slowly.
Still, he has a long way to if he is to support a just policy that could lead to a peace agreement. For instance, he demands that Hamas accept past agreements, but doesn't demand the same of Israel.
Chinese police have blocked off Tiananmen Square and are keeping journalists out.
New surveillance technology makes it even easier to track and localize people.
I am skeptical that the army can get much use out of these methods in Afghanistan. Locating the tag may work well, but putting a tag on someone in the Taliban is likely to be hard. On the other hand, these methods could be devastatingly effective against dissidents, for any government which seeks to trample their rights.
Michael Moore's recommendations for restructuring GM
to do what society needs doing.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Sign the petition to
Caterpillar to stop selling bulldozers to Israel.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Israel uses these bulldozers to destroy Palestinian homes, sometimes on short notice, sometimes killing people.
Take action for
abortion rights in honor of murdered Dr. Tiller.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Dr. Tiller's abortions saved women's lives.
Ryanair plans to charge passengers a large fee to use the toilet on a plane, and they will have to pay with credit cards.
The arguments Mr O'Leary are irrational. To remove some of the toilets does not require charging to use the remaining one. What will they do if one passenger holds the door for another?
If Ryanair goes ahead with this, male passengers should piss into a cup and hand it to the flight attendant. They can do this without leaving their seats. Women, however, may find this more difficult. They should refuse to fly Ryanair — and so should men.
Will the Senate question General McChrystal about torture under his command?
The Amazon rainforest is being destroyed by illegal farms that send beef products to rich countries.
Obama is openly pressuring Israel to
stop extending the settlements
on Palestinian land.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Israel has completely frozen construction in the Palestinian parts of Jerusalem, and in parts of the West Bank. It implements this policy in a very firm (and harsh) way. So it cannot claim this cannot be done.
Meanwhile, when the Israeli government removed a settlement "outpost" (built by settlers as an excuse for later expansion), the fanatics protested by attacking Palestinians.
The fanatic who murdered Dr Tiller
probably murdered many women with
the same shot. He was the only hope (in the US) for many women whose
pregnancies had gone very wrong.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
The UN Human Rights Council totally
endorsed Sri Lanka's treatment
of Tamil civilians, including blocking access to the ICRC.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Countries that voted in favor include Angola, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, China, Cuba, Djibouti, Egypt, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Madagascar, Malaysia, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Qatar, Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, South Africa, Uruguay, Zambia.
Shame on them.
The bankruptcy of GM will cause
unnecessary pain and unfairness
— for instance, to people who bought cars with defects —
and could easily have been avoided. Even worse, although the US will
take majority control of GM, Obama has no interest in changing the
foolish priorities that landed GM in bankruptcy.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
And it is
union-busting worse than what Bush wanted to do.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Obama has done nothing to restrain fanatical Christians from taking over the US military.
The band Advance Patrol placed a torrent for their latest album to the Pirate Bay,
to rebuke the record companies for citing their music to prosecute
the Pirate Bay.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
20 years after the massacre of student protestors in Tiananmen Square, China forbids any mention of what happened, trying to force people to forget it.
Obama's plan for GM's bankruptcy would raid workers' pension funds to give some banks 100% of their loans. So who is Obama really working for?
An anti-smoking senator confirmed that Philip Morris co-wrote the current weak tobacco control bill.
Bush told Chirac his planned invasion of Iraq was "willed by God" to "erase" enemy peoples. And Rumsfeld tried to manipulate him with biblical references.
My cartoon about this was meant as a humorous extrapolation from the facts, but it turns out to be almost 100% literal truth.
Obama is
helping to prevent inquiry into financial connections between
the 9/11 attackers and the Sa'udi royal family.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
The Bush family has ties with the Sa'udi royal family, too.
I don't think Obama would give a fig for Bush, but he doesn't want the sort of radical reexamination of US policy that might come from disproving the official story of what happened on 9/11/01.
US officials are trying to control the Lebanese election by
threats.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Congress is working on a bill specifically to cover up evidence of
Bush regime torture, by
overriding the Freedom of Information Act.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Melting permafrost threatens to make a
big contribution to global warming
starting in a decade or two, and getting worse.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
At Latin American commission on drug policy, headed by the former president of Brazil, calls for decriminalizing marijuana and cocaine use.
This does not go far enough. To end the corrosive effects of the War on Drugs, it is necessary to legalize some kind of sale as well. As long as addicts can only get their drugs from outlaws, it will be extremely profitable for outlaws to sell drugs.
The government of India is setting up censorship of news and politics on web sites.
The right-wing Israeli government is attacking democracy and political freedom on a broad front.
Big pharma funding is corrupting a large fraction of cancer research.
In Mogadishu, after Ethiopia ended its US-supported intervention,
rival factions fight for control once again.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Cruel Islamic law almost brought peace to Somalia. Thanks to the intervention, Somalia instead has cruel Islamic law and civil war.
As the UK refuses asylum to refugees from the Congo, evidence emerges that one such deportee was tortured there.
North Korea threatened to attack South Korea if its ships are searched for nuclear weapons.
Sugar-free cookies convinced an al Qa'ida prisoner
to give useful information.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Obama said that expansion of Israeli settlements in occupied Palestine endangers US security -- defying the Israeli hawks' lobby.
Desmond Tutu says that the occupation of Palestine is in some ways worse than apartheid, and that if the world doesn't solve this problem, many other problems can't possibly be solved.
Although Obama said he will withdraw the Bush forces from Iraq by 2011, the army is planning to stay for a decade.
The Tamil civilians imprisoned by Sri Lanka are
getting no
help in making contact with their family.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
A US comic collector will go to prison for owning comics that visually depict sexual abuse of children.
I understand the idea of obscenity. I considered the movie Pulp Fiction revoltingly obscene (for violence, not for sex), and I will try to avoid seeing anything like it ever again. But revulsion for a work cannot justify censoring it. Censorship on the grounds of obscenity is pure, unadulterated evil, and there is nothing more obscene.
A Guatemalan man is facing 10 years in prison for telling friends what he heard people saying about an allegedly corrupt bank.
The Taliban are fighting to hold on to Mingora, and reportedly threatening civilians too.
Classic guerrilla tactics are to melt away when facing a strong conventional army. Their decision to stand and fight could lead to a real defeat.
Jamil Rahman, who was tortured by Bangadeshi captors with the
complicity of MI5 agents,
is suing the UK's minister in charge.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Tell the DOD to prosecute KBR for deadly inadequate work in
Iraq.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Yes, this is not as bad as killing a million Iraqis. But the reason Bush did that is to benefit cronies such as KBR.
The permanent war economy in the US
undermines and militarizes
every area of life.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Chomsky explains the US' long history of torture. The main change under Bush was that Americans did it directly rather than through proxies.
Chomsky's main point is to show the disparity between US ideals and US conduct. I think we should be careful to fault the conduct and not the ideals.
Israel is systematically persecuting dissidents, sometimes attacking
them physically, sometimes framing them on the usual false charges
police bring against protestors.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Israel's parliament gave
preliminary approval to a law to imprison
people for speaking against "Israel's existence as a Jewish and
democratic state" in ways that might "lead to a lack of loyalty".
[Reference updated on 2018-05-13 because the old link was broken.]
To stand in favor of this bill is to oppose israel's existence as a democratic state, and will inspire a lack of loyalty to that state in the mind of anyone that upholds human rights. So will all those who speak in favor of the bill be prosecuted if it passes? I doubt it. The bill is meant to censor opposition.
Sri Lanka
plans to hold Tamil civilians in prison camps for up to
2 years, blocking aid and causing them to go hungry. It plans to try
former
rebel soldiers for murder.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Will Sri Lankan soldiers who shot Tamil soldiers or bombarded Tamil civilians be tried?
Israeli police are persistently harassing Israeli Bedouin to
force
them to move out of their homes.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-13 because the old link was broken.]
The Iraqi government is increasingly attacking the Sunni militias that Bush bought off a couple of years ago.
Israel has
blocked a team of European judges and lawyers from going to
Gaza to investigate accusations of Israeli war crimes.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-13 because the old link was broken.]
As long as Israel blocks the investigation, we must hold Israel to be guilty as charged.
Support the campaign to relegalize same-sex marriage in California.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
The Bush forces, now under Obama's command, continue to keep Iraqi journalist Ibrahim Jassam in prison — the latest in a long series.
Children in Irish catholic schools were systematically beaten and even raped, through the 90s.
More dishonest drug marketing: Bristol-Myers pays patients to say what a great job its products do, whether it's true or not.
Obama's supreme court justice must above all uphold the bill of rights, which means limiting executive privilege and executive power.
Is Obama likely to appoint such a person?
A UK court ruled that police surveillance practices at protests are illegal.
An Italian court convicted a lawyer of taking a bribe from Berlusconi to tell lies.
Berlusconi cannot be prosecuted for giving the bribe because he adopted a law to give himself immunity. So Italy now has a prime minister who has been estabilshed by a court as corrupt and cannot be punished for it.
Last.fm says it didn't hand over customer data to the record company thugs. Strictly speaking, it wasn't Last.fm, it was CBS.
Don't trust any Internet service for accessing music or video if it requires you do identify yourself.
Smithfield Foods, whose operations provided
the breeding ground for swine
flu,
contracts lots of farmers to raise its pigs. As a result, it avoids
responsibility for the illnesses caused by its toxic wastes.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
The
Bush forces raped teenage prisoners in Abu Ghraib.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Obama, will you prosecute? Or will you keep the videos secret to protect these rapists?
The Bush regime paid bonuses to crony-company KBR
for the
substandard work that electrocuted soldiers.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
The UK's system of cameras that track all car travel is already being used to persecute political opposition.
This system should not be permitted to record information about any car in the absence of a court order obtained based on evidence of a crime. And the person who was tracked must be notified within a reasonable time.
Obama now advocates perpetual imprisonment without trial, on mere suspicion.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Although he says this is for "security", that does not mean security for Americans. Nothing is more dangerous to any country's security than the abolution of human rights.
I thought for a while that Obama was somewhat less evil than Bush, but I no longer believe this. Governments that imprison people without trial are tyranny. Obama is less crazy and less stupid than Bush, and less focused on short term gain. But he is no less evil, and he is just the person to make some of Bush's damage to our rights permanent.
Sri Lanka's army finished defeating the Tamil Tiger army, and the president declared they had "liberated the country from terrorism", though other officials recognize that a military victory can't do that.
A quarter of a million Sri Lankan Tamils are in prison camps, where they are not being given enough food. Aid is being blocked on absurd excuses.
Meanwhile, Sri Lanka also faces state-sponsored terrorism, such as the murder of journalists.
Students in the UK walked out of classes, and wore masks, in protest against CCTV in their classroom.
They should protest the fingerprint scanner too, by refusing to use it.
Does anyone know what those masks looked like? I wonder if they were Guy Fawkes masks as in V for Vendetta.
The
US is having peace talks with the moderate Taliban.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
A few
powerful companies are buying up lots of land around the world.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Amory Lovins demonstrates that
nuclear electricity generation is
obsolete — small renewable generating stations and improvements
in efficiency are cheaper and can do the whole job, more safely and
more reliably.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Interestingly, he also shows that investors know this, and refuse to invest in building nuclear plants even with tremendous subsidies.
A scientific paper which reported the drug Ecstacy is very dangerous was completely mistaken, its authors admit.
Their experiment was supposed to use Ecstacy but actually used methamphetamine.
Berlusconi has proudly ordered the Italian coast guard to take boat people directly back to Libya without giving them a chance to apply for political asylum.
A human rights lawyer aims to challenge this, but il Ducino does not care much for laws that get in the way of his power.
The US and the Pakistani government are expanding the war against the Taliban, and the US has placed a death and torture squad chief in charge.
Fighting the Taliban is not wrong in and of itself. They are murderous religious fanatics, or at least some of them are. Some have become more moderate, on the Afghan spectrum — no worse than the mysogynist warlords the US is fighting for — and just want the US out of Afghanistan. It would be better to make peace with those, and help them overcome the power of the militants.
If we must fight the Taliban, it has to be done in a way that respects civilians, or it becomes both wrong and futile. It is sad news that the US forces are just as dishonest under Obama about killing lots of civilians as they were under Bush. I can't imagine that McChrystal would honestly admit such killings; if his attitude towards torture is to deny it, he will surely deny that the corpses are civilians.
India has an opportunity now to reduce its hostility with Pakistan by offering humanitarian aid to help the million refugees.
The US congress voted to prevent the closure of Guantanamo prison.
Most of the prisoners never intended terrorism or any crime. They were the victims of lies, followed by the government-can't-admit-mistakes syndrome, and some were tortured into false confessions. The US congress does them wrong when it presumes they are guilty of anything, and it wants to imprison them for the rest of their lives.
The FCC claims the power to raid your home without a warrant if you have a cell phone or a wireless network.
Powers to inspect equipment are tolerable only if they strictly cannot be used to prosecute for anything else.
Petition the WHO to investigate the danger of pig factories.
The International Committee of the Red Cross stopped
aid
operations in Sri Lanka due to new government restrictions.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Three doctors who treated injured civilians have been arrested, and people fear they will be killed so they cannot talk. I fear they may be tortured.
Binyam Mohammed's attorney says waterboarding is the "tip of the iceberg".
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to demand a strong bill to control greenhouse gas emissions. And sign this petition too.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Merck employees planned to discredit and sabotage the careers of MDs who criticized the company. Merck also bullied the UK government into denying legal aid to people harmed by vioxx.
The proposal for a right-to-repair law illustrates the harm done by proprietary software in cars.
UK employers are using drug tests as an excuse to fire people and cut their unemployment benefits.
There is no reason to suppose that these victims' use of marijuana affected them in any way while they were at work. Such drug testing should be illegal. Companies that are concerned employees might be using drugs (legal or not) which interfere with their job performance should test their performance instead. There are video games designed to do this in a couple of minutes.
The US climate bill seems to be headed for real short-term cuts in CO2 emissions.
But fossil fuel companies spent $44 million in three months to lobby against it.
BP tries to present itself as "responsible" based on spending a tiny percentage of its budget on renewable energy. And it is cutting that.
Israeli activist Ronnie Barkan talks about how Palestinians
came to accept him as a real supporter for their nonviolent peace
movement — and about fellow protestor Bassem Ibrahim Abu Rahma,
who was killed by an Israeli soldier while telling soldiers about
another injured protestor.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
The Bush forces freed many Iraqis who had been held (sometimes for
years) without trial. Now the
Iraqi government wants to arrest them
and imprison them again without trial.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
The CCTV cameras installed all around Britain in the name of stopping crime fail to have much effect, except in parking lots.
Danger Mouse will sell blank CDs, telling buyers to download his music and write the CDs themselves.
Nina Paley is going even further by giving away "pre-downloaded" DVD copies of Sita Sings the Blues.
A woman in Montreal was
arrested and fined for not holding the handrail
on the escalator.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
This is not the worst thing that policemen do to act out their hostility. It is not as bad as hitting protestors and injuring them or killing them. But it is still too much.
US citizens:
Sign the petition to tell Congress: don't donate more
arms to Israel since it violates the conditions on the
arms it has already been given.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Sign the petition to Attorney General Holder to vacate the politically motivated charges against Don Siegelman as he recently did against former Senator Stevens.
Tsvangirai seems to have ceded the battle of wills to Mugabe, who maintains his tyrannical control unchanged in Zimbabwe.
Israeli settlers continue attacking nearby Palestinian villages in an attempt to drive off the inhabitants and take their land.
Burma is putting Aung San Suu Kyi in prison again.
Bad conditions in US factory pig farms enabled the ancestor of today's swine flu to evolve.
And scientists warned 10 years ago that this could happen.
Obama should stop dawdling and nationalize the failed banks.
The
New York Supreme Court disagreed with Wisconsin;
it ruled that GPS tracking requires a warrant.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
US citizens:
sign this petition to the senate to establish
protections for credit card holders against credit card companies.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Step by step, Obama has undertaken to conceal evidence of
the Bush regime's crimes, stating reasons which would support
unlimited government dishonesty.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
The IRF squads at Guatanamo regularly attack helpless prisoners. They blinded Omar Deghayes by spraying pepper spray into his eyes while holding him down.
These thugs remain active under Obama.
General Miller asked the Iraq Survey Group to use torture to find
(i.e., fabricate) evidence of Saddam's nonexistent weapons of mass
destruction.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Although the information in this article is important, the opinion in its first sentence can't be allowed to pass. There is no situation in which torturing prisoners is acceptable, or even effective for finding out the truth. What torture is good for is extracting false confessions.
Israel has turned the Palestinian village of Nuaman into a prison. Its inhabitants have been arrested at times for living there. The aim is ethnic cleansing.
Sri Lanka expelled a journalist who reported on the horrible
treatment of Tamil civilians in internment camps.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Uri Avnery: Israel fans the feud between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, presenting the former as collaborators to keep it weak.
Avigdor Lieberman, who believes human rights do not apply to Palestinians, wants a law to prohibit the annual protests about losing their homes when Israel was established in 1948.
Regardless of one's position on the events of 1948, a state that prohibits protests is tyranny.
Almost 370 farms
in England are still restricted due to pollution from the
Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Nuclear power is so expensive that no one will invest in it without a tremendous subsidy. But the big companies that build the nukes have been very effective at winning the support of politicians such as Obama for the subsidies they want.
Israelis dump
toxic waste in Palestine without precautions, and the Israeli army
protects the culprits them from the PA.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
This shades off into the general problem of rich countries' selling waste to poor countries, where people who are desperate pick through it for something valuable to recycle. The only full solution is a fairer economy and an end to population growth. But the Israeli case is a special case, since the desperate poverty of Palestinians is as much due to Israeli occupation as to any indigenous factors.
Israel is going to destroy more Arab homes in East Jerusalem.
Obama has broken his promise to release photos of Bush regime torture.
A Sri Lankan bombardment killed around a thousand civilians in the area where the army told the civilians to go to be safe.
For criminal charges against individuals, the rule is "Innocent until proven guilty." That's because it is too easy for the state to falsely accuse. However, for accusations against the state, the rule is "Guilty until investigation permitted."
Given the Sri Lankan government's exclusion of independent journalists from the battle, we must find that government guilty as charged.
On the definition of terrorism, who does it, and why (1998).
The pre-protestors arrested for "planning terrorism" before the G20 meeting were quietly released since there was nothing to charge them with. But the arrests prevented them from protesting.
The Israeli army took Adlah Yasseen hostage to try to make her son surrender.
Everyone: send a message to the Japanese government to use
its influence to
stop Sri Lanka from bombarding civilians.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Thousands are fleeing the fighting in Swat.
Food is more expensive in Gaza than before the Israeli attack, due to
the Israeli siege. Some families are down to one meal a day.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
I won't say that the inhabitants of Gaza have absolutely none of the responsibility for this problem. They are having too many children, and that is always asking for trouble. But that is no excuse for the siege, and the siege is the main cause of this hunger.
Palm oil is grown on stolen land in Indonesia to make biodiesel fuel,
but it ends up
contributing more to global warming than petroleum.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Sign this petition for a special prosecutor to investigate the Bush regime's torture planners.
A blind interpreter, arrested on a plane where he was forced to sit for two hours while it taxied around, says he has nightmares of waking up in cell.
The "security theater" with its accompanying paranoia is often galling, but usually the only substantial harm it does is to the spirit of freedom. As we get worn down and accustomed to obedience, we become more suited to living in a dictatorship than in a free society. But this instance shows that it is liable also to do major harm to individuals.
Note the fundamental injustice of arresting people for criticizing the way they are being treated.
Note also how airline personnel use absurd accusations as a way to distract attention from their mistreatment of the passengers. They are trained to put the passenger in the wrong.
Israel's bombardment of Gaza destroyed 25,000 buildings.
Israel's siege does not allow building materials in,
so Gazans have to
rebuild using mud bricks.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-13 because the old link was broken.]
The Electronic Police State collects (or fabricates) tremendous amounts of evidence about nearly everyone, with which it can prosecute any chosen target. This survey rates the US among the worst.
Jesse Ventura: You Give Me a Water Board, Dick Cheney and One Hour, and
I'll Have Him Confess to the Sharon Tate Murders.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
I disagree with Ventura on one point: I see no virtue in having fought for the US in Vietnam. I don't blame anyone for trying to avoid going to Vietnam to fight to defend a compliant dictatorship against an unfriendly dictatorship. However, when the same person subsequently launches an equally unjust war, equally based on lies, he does open himself to charges of hypocrisy.
The Pentagon commissioned an investigation and report to whitewash the Pentagon Paid Political Propaganda Pundits Program. Then it decided to bury the report and say nothing.
Police in Canada and Scotland are offering large bribes to activists to spy on environmentalist groups.
If activists could offer police money to tell about their plans to sabotage protests and attack protestors, perhaps democracy would be able to protect itself from the police.
While Merck publishes fake medical journals, Pfizer is using another sleazy method to disguise its advertisements for drugs.
The ways to reduce the money these companies can use to gull the public include unified national drug purchase (normal in wealthy countries other than the US), reduced patent powers, and increased taxes. It is established that research into drug effects is untrustworthy when funded by drug manufacturers.
So why let them do it? The government should increase their taxes and fund the research itself.
The French national assembly voted for a law to give the media companies the power to cut off people's internet connections on mere accusation.
The same law will also require people to install non-free software in order to make their networks "secure".
US treatment of the remaining prisoners in Guantanamo contrasts shamefully with the treatment of over 400,000 German prisoners of war.
I think the article is mistaken on one point: it is too late to hope to win the friendship of these prisoners, because the US has shown them too much cruelty already. German prisoners responded well to the US because they were treated decently (as prisoners of war) from the beginning. Someone who has been tortured, or held for years in solitary confinement, will hold a grudge that can't be overcome by ordinary decent treatment. But this grudge is no excuse to continue the injustice which caused the grudge.
These prisoners deserve to be freed or given fair trials.
A Wisconsin court ruled police don't need search warrants to attach
tracking devices to anyone's car.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
The logic which led to this decision wasn't invented by this court. It is the usual criterion for such questions. This is one of many consequences that show it is inadequate today. If police are allowed to use computers to gather all the information that they might have obtained if they had 500 million policemen watching everyone's public movements all the time, we will have an effective police state.
I wonder if it is illegal for you or me to put a tracking device on someone's car — perhaps the car of Justice Scalia, who thinks the constitution does little to protect people from such tracking.
A Guatemalan lawyer murdered on May 10 recorded a video accusing the president of Guatemala of killing him.
A US air raid in Afghanistan killed over 100 civilians.
Uri Avnery: comparing Iran to Nazi Germany, as the president of Israel did, is trivializing the holocaust.
Although the US government has failed to help many New Orleans refugees get back on their feet, it is repossessing the trailers it gave them, in order to sell them again for very little.
It seems to be a matter of principle for FEMA that its aid be withdrawn at some arbitrary time.
Lake Mead, behind the Hoover Dam, is rapidly emptying despite some conservation measures.
China is now ready for efforts to reduce CO2 emissions
now that it
sees the US is willing.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
The term "intelletual property" in this article is a gratuitously vague way of referring to patents.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to call for an investigation
of whether Israel violated US arms export conditions when attacking
Gaza.
And send a message through this site.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
For legislators, phone calls carry more weight than emails.
Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641, and 888-355-3588.
An MP accused the London police of sending agents provocateurs to incite crowds.
Australian government Internet censorship forced Electronic Frontiers Australia to remove a link to a political web site which is on the censored list.
Here is the article in which the link was deleted.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
I think the site linked to is an anti-abortion site. I totally disagree with that position, but we (and governments) must respect the right to express whatever views and present whatever facts.
Elsevier publishes at least six fake scientific journals as advertising for drug companies.
Criticism of the way the Gates foundation spends its money.
A proposed US law would make it a crime to send emails to "cause emotional distress".
US citizens: call your congresscritter to support HR1466 which would eliminate mandatory minimum federal sentence for violating drug laws. Also send a message through this page.
You can also support this bill proposing a commission to consider reducing the US prison population.
Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641, and 888-355-3588.
A photographer on the San Francisco Muni railway was
threatened with
arrest for taking a photograph.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
A new idea for peace in the Middle East: parallel step-by-step concessions by Israel and Iran.
It is a clever idea, but it has a limited window of possibility: until Iran has nuclear weapons. I am sure Netanyahu and Lieberman will reject it unless the US essentially forces it on them, and all they need to do to wreck it is delay.
A recent poll says most Americans favor legalization of marijuana.
A court decision may require the wholesale destruction of records about Guantanamo prisoners' trials, including the prisoners' own letters.
What worries me most is the destruction of the prisoners' letters. There is no criminal case to be made against most of these prisoners. If they are freed, they will be able to tell whatever secrets they know, which mainly means how they were tortured. Of course, Bush wanted to deny them any chance to do this, by holding them incommunicado for the rest of their lives. But if that is no longer the US government's intention, why should they not get their letters back?
The US system of food inspection. is almost ineffective.
An Israeli peace activist says that Israel has launched a war on dissent.
The European Parliament voted to reject the punishment-on-accusation plan of the War on Sharing, but failed to defend net neutrality.
Human Rights Watch says US interrogators
tortured 12 prisoners to death
and killed 34 others.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Justice Scalia said he thinks privacy rights are unimportant. So teacher assigned his class the project of making a dossier about Scalia.
If Scalia doesn't learn anything from this, others may. I agree that aggregation of available data makes the problem worse. But restricting people from aggregating data that is available to the public is a worse threat to their freedom. So what I propose is to restrict the systematic collection and maintenance of data — for instance, security cameras should be allowed only if the recordings are systematically destroyed in a reasonable time except when there is a court order to preserve the recordings of specific events.
14 workers in Venezuela who protested for back pay face prison sentences of up to 10 years. The company was subsequently nationalized, but that only caused them to lose the support of their union.
Massachusetts citizens: phone your state representative to
oppose a
law that would criminalize erotic photos of people over age 60.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Not satisfied with imprisoning teenagers who share nude photos of themselves, Massachusetts wants to imprison old people too. Apparently they demand that old people be asexual.
London police search someone on the street without probable cause every 3 minutes.
Obama is still hiding ACTA negotiations.
Given his and Biden's past attitudes towards copyright, Americans should feel very worried about what he will do.
Freedom House has
downgraded its rating of press freedom in Israel
from Free to Partly Free, due largely to continuing interference
with independent journalism in Gaza.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-13 because the old link was broken.]
Obama is showing some signs of intention to pressure Israel to make
peace.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
This is a turn for the better, but Netanyahu is determined to reject peace and continue taking Palestinian land. He may treat gentle pressure as a bluff.
Hamas has stopped firing rockets
to support its offer of a ten-year truce
on the 1967 borders.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-13 because the old link was broken.]
This is not enough for a final peace agreement; for that, Israel would be justified in insisting on recognition of its right to exist as part of such an agreement. But it is enough basis for commencing negotiations.
US citizens: sign this petition to include Public Citizen in Senate hearings about health care reform.
These hearings have so far excluded everyone that favors single-payer funding.
Iraqi prisons
continue to be places of torture.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Remember when Bush said the conquest of Iraq had achieved the elimination of Saddam's torture?
The Taliban attacked the police in Swat, sinking the peace agreement with the government of Pakistan.
The killing (almost certainly murder) of a nonviolent protestor in
Bil'in comes after the Israeli border police have ignored orders
to investigate previous incidents of gratuitous violence.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-13 because the old link was broken.]
Nigel Inkster, who was MI6 deputy director when MI6 gave the bogus intelligence report that was used to justify conquering Iraq, says that there were doubts about it at the time, and that the UK was "dragged into war".
It was dragged by Tony B'liar, who would do anything at all for Bush, even kill.
A UN report condemns Israel for 7 attacks on UN facilities in Gaza. It also condemns Palestinian fighters for using "indiscriminate weapons", i.e. rockets, one of which damaged a UN warehouse.
Peace activists protested in the AIPAC conference.
Israel is building a fenced-off "security road" through a Palestinian village, as an excuse to steal its land.
The combination of sugar, salt and fat causes brain changes that crave more of the same.
Indian public schools
discriminate cruelly against Dalits, and this bigotry
leads many of them stay out of school.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Berlusconi is preemptively smearing his wife, who is divorcing him for associating with other women, so as to protect himself from whatever revelations of dirty dealing may come from her.
I see nothing to criticize if a man (or a woman, if so inclined) associates with pretty, young women — or pretty, young men, or both — or goes to bed with them. I would not reject my lover for having other lovers. I don't believe in exclusivity as a principle or moral obligation in love relationships, and I don't ask for it from those I love.
However, choosing candidates for public office for youth and beauty shows disrespect for the mission of the state.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter in support of closing US tax
loopholes for corporations that "locate" themselves in foreign tax
havens.
Also sign this petition.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Nepal's elected Maoist prime minister has resigned, bringing down the government, after he was blocked from firing the army commander.
The army commander has sabotaged the peace deal that ended the civil war. Obama's decision to call the governing party "terrorist" gave him US support under false pretenses, and thus risks a breakdown of the peace deal and renewed civil war.
A group of businessmen — those being the real rulers of the Clown regime — has joined the opposition to extending Heathrow airport.
Warner Music had Warner Music's postings taken down for "piracy".
I put the word in quotes because it is a propaganda term that we should firmly and consistently reject.
When the Clown regime said it would not directly spy on all internet
traffic,
it was lying.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Obama has kept the democratically elected Maoist ruling party of Nepal on the "terrorist list". This in effect encourages a military coup.
If the US "terrorist" list is used for political reasons unrelated to terrorism, it is simply a dishonest excuse for sanctions against other states.
Sanctions are sometimes justified, but not dishonest ones.
Arlen Spector has become a Democrat, illustrating how
both the
Democratic and Republican parties are becoming more right-wing.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
If this is what a Democrat is, I am not one.
US citizens:
phone your congressman to support the National Security
Letters Reform Act introduced by Congressmen Jerry Nadler and Jeff Flake.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
But don't call use the word "patriot" to refer to the unjust existing law. In a nation based on human rights, there is nothing more unpatriotic than to undermine them. The law's official name is the U.S.A.P.A.T.R.I.O.T. act. If we are to subdivide that acronym with spaces, any way is as valid as any other. I call it the U SAP AT RIOT act.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Here is more information about the police raids on the Israeli nonmiitarist organization New Profile.
These Israeli organizations have carefully obeyed the Israeli law against urging people to refuse conscription, and expected that they would be allowed continue operating thus. That expectation was based on the supposition that the government would honestly obey its own law in this issue, even though in so many others it does not.
Since I am outside Israel, and safe from this threat of censorship, I can say what any Israeli must fear to say. As long as the Israeli Army's principal mission is the occupation of Palestine, the most heroic thing a young Israeli can do is refuse to enlist.
Abu Dhabi's torturer prince is implicated in 25 more attacks.
The US will be in a better position to insist other countries punish powerful people for torturing if it does so itself. The US must launch an investigation of Bush's personal role in torture to make sure he does not escape justice.
Obama is convinced torture is never useful (which is true), but declined to say it is outright wrong.
The UK dropped its plan to set up a centralized big brother database to track all communications. Instead it will use a decentralized big brother database.
This could be a small step forward, but only if police must get a court order to examine the communications records of specific parties. I cannot tell from this article whether that is the case. If the police can get anything in the database whenever they wish, it gives the citizens no protection.
Human Rights Watch says
Mexico fails to act against soldiers that rape
and kill civilians.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Tell the US govt to overturn Bush's environmental
sabotage regulations.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Merck set up a phony medical research journal and got Elsevier to publish it, so it can give more credibility to its drug marketing.
US citizens:
Petition Obama to nominate a Supreme Court justice that will defend everyone's rights.
The FDA has been corrupted — by Bush, it appears — into
helping companies
rush medical devices out the door without testing
them.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Part of the reason for the corruption of the FDA
is making the companies whose products are tested
pay for the tests.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
A similar policy has corrupted the US patent office and the European patent office: they regard patent applicants as their customers and therefore try to cater to them.
The idea of "making the companies pay" is superficially attractive, but they will pass the price along to their customers. Government safety functions, including research into the effects of drugs, should be funded directly from tax money so as to reduce the influence of the manufacturers.
The UN condemned Israel's steady demolition of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem.
Israel's excuse, that the homes violate urban planning rules, is no excuse at all given that the planning policy visibly discriminates against them.
A major Swedish ISP says it will cease to keep IP address records so that it cannot be used to inform on what its customers share.
US citizens: phone key senators to support a single-payer health care system.
Congress has held nearly 20 hearings on health care reform this year, but only one witness has been invited to testify on a single-payer solution. See here for the testimony.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
AIPAC employees will not face US charges of spying.
If the US government intended Israel to get this information, then I agree their activity was not spying. However, whether or not the Israeli hawks' lobby committed a crime, the US needs to break its power, or there will never be peace between Israel and Palestine.
Netanyahu's condition for peace: Palestinians must endorse Israel's delegitimation of its Arab citizens.
When the Clown regime was asked for its legal position about Phorm, a privacy-invading Internet advertising scheme, it asked Phorm what position would please it.
The B'liar/Clown policy towards business is, "Give business as much as the people will let us get away with." This is typical of the governments serve as subalterns for the corporate empire.
Irish university students are protesting plans to make poor students pay tuition fees which will exclude them from education.
When the UK arrests children to be deported, it subjects them to a wide range of gratuitous cruelty, such as giving them just 3 minutes to pack whatever they can.
The government spokesman says we shouldn't be concerned, because they have made "further progress" since that inspection a year ago. Anyone that would describe that cruelty as "progress" obviously is not fit to comment on the matter.
An
FBI internal discussion, now published, referred to an executive
order signed by Bush himself directly authorizing torture by the
military.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
No such executive order has been published, and the Bush regime denied there ever was one. But those denials are hardly credible now. Why does Obama continue protecting sadists?
UN:
Iraqi women suffer regular domestic violence.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
160 women murdered in Kurdistan is a small number, on the scale of the violence that Bush unleashed on Iraq; however, lesser levels of violence — as well as the intimidation of the threat of murder or violence — affect nearly all the women there.
Swiss citizens:
vote against biometric passports.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Vote against them for the digital fingerprints. Vote against them for the RFIDs.
The
Green Party's report card for on Obama: small change, so far.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
The US Chamber of Commerce wants "save the environment" by eliminating the regulations that protect it.
The restrictions those companies object to are the only obstacle to the tremendous harm that they would do.
Transparency means nothing without justice.
Pakistan has gone on the attack against the Taliban everywhere except in Swat, where it made a peace deal. The Taliban claim that this is unfair.
Sri Lanka has gone back to bombing and shelling the thousands of Tamil civilians trapped in the middle of the battle.
The US could easily use unmanned reconnaissance drones to find out and tell us what is really happening, if Obama cared.
The Bush forces, now working for Obama, are continuing the occupation
of Iraq. They reconcile this with the agreed-on requirements to
withdraw
by redefining words.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Krystian Zimerman, a famous pianist, rebuked Obama in a concert for continuing Bush's plans to station missiles in Poland.
I can't blame Zimerman for deciding not to return to the US. The US practice of taking fingerprints of visitors is enough reason for self-respecting person to refuse.
Israel disregarded a Palestinian peace proposal to launch its attack
on Gaza.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-13 because the old link was broken.]
Apple has used the DMCA to censor discussion of how to use Apple products to do things Apple does not like.
While we must defend the right to post technical information on the net, the right way to deal with the iScrod and other Apple products is don't have anything to do with them. Apple is as nasty and vicious as Microsoft, and people should think of it as an enemy.
Obama
wants to eliminate restrictions on dealing with a Palestinian
government that might include Hamas ministers.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-13 because the old link was broken.]
The Israeli hawks' lobby is already gearing up to oppose it.
The carbon lobby is using futuristic geoengineering ideas
as an excuse for inaction on CO2 emissions.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
In the past, a carbon lobby climate change denial group disregarded its own scientific advisors when it claimed there was doubt about whether human activity was causing global warming.
The US is keepimg 25,000 prisoners in long-term solitary confinement, which often causes long-term psychological damage.
Some Iraqis say that Maliki is setting up a dictatorship. They recognize the signs.
They may be opposed to him so they may be exaggerating. Yet this development may be given the violence and people's desire for security, and given the corruption of Iraq.
If this happens, it will be the final absurdity for Bush's supposed gift of freedom and democracy to Iraq. A million Iraqis were killed — to replace one dictator with another? Maybe it's ok if Bush's cronies get the oil?
The US government is on the verge of nationalizing General Motors as part of a plan to eliminate its debt.
The US should start nationalizing banks rather than just giving them cash.
The Pakistani army is fighting the Taliban in regions near Swat, but still abiding by the peace deal for Swat itself.
How the Taliban took control in Buner, and maintain it despite a so-called withdrawal.
US special forces were torturing prisoners in Afghanistan in 2002, and planned to transfer the practice to Iraq before the Bush invasion.
Turkey has arrested many members of the unofficial Kurdish party after it had surprising success in local elections.
Climate change protestors glued themselves to a statue in Parliament.
They intentionally mimicked a womens' suffage protest 100 years ago so that any violent response, or unreasonable prosecution, will immediately demonstrate the government's opposition to peaceful protest.
The Tomlinson family have asked the Independent Police Complaints Commission to investigate the media disinformation campaign which sought to cover up police involvement in Tomlinson's death. It seems this commission is not independent at all.
The Sri Lankan government has admitted it has been bombing and shelling the Tamil areas, by saying it will stop. Doctors report that these attacks have killed thousands of civilians.
Why Iraqi oil output is likely to disappoint.
The Economist: the economy will not recover until the banks are cleaned up.
Everyone: use
this page to rebuke the Israeli police for raiding an
Israeli peace organization that gives support to conscientious objectors.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
You can send a fax to the Israeli Attorney General at +972-2-6467001.
The US forced an Air France plane to fly outside US airspace because one of its passengers, a respected journalist, was on the "terrorist watch list".
This is yet more proof that US "anti-terror" measures are really "anti-dissident" measures — which makes them "anti-human-rights", "anti-democracy" and "anti-citizen".
Omaha's
head of crime scene investigation is charged with
planting evidence to frame innocent people for murder.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Harvard alumni:
For the board of overseers, vote for the candidates whose priorities are in areas other than business. In particular, don't vote for the candidate who wants Harvard to make "more intellectual property". He apparently is interested in scientific advances, and in writings, only as something to own.
The Myth of a Free Market sounds like an interesting book.
(I have not seen a copy, however.)
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Uri Avnery: If Ahmadinejad were working for Israel, he would do exactly what he is doing.
Bush himself was the first to authorize torture, and the motive was to extract falsehoods from prisoners.
Two weeks ago, the UK arrested 12 men (mostly foreign students) for a supposed bomb plot. The Clown regime gave the impression that they were an immediate danger and just about to attack.
Now it turns out there is no evidence of this plot, and they will not be charged — but 11 of them face deportation.
I wonder what grounds there are for deporting them, since they were in the UK lawfully and there is no evidence they were doing anything illegal.
Drought caused by global warming is forcing the Uru Chipaya to flee their land and move to the city.
As global warming advances, the same thing will happen to people who live in many other areas, including the Mediterranean lands and the US Southwest.
A third police attack on a London protestor is
now being investigated.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
One piece of good news is that police that concealed their badge numbers may be fired — if they did so with intent to avoid criminal responsibility.
That condition allows for a lot of interpretation, so this policy may or may not have a practical effect. Perhaps it is only meant to sound strict.
A policeman confessed on Facebook, before the protests, that he was eager to attack some protestors.
I'm sure hundreds or even thousands of other cops felt the same way, but avoided telling anyone except fellow police who would lie for them.
This illustrates the fact that privacy on Facebook is a myth. Don't post anything on Facebook unless you want the whole world to know it.
Also, think twice before posting writing or images on Facebook, since their terms of service say Facebook gets unlimited rights to use them. Post your creative writings and photos on your own web site under an appropriate one of the Creative Commons licenses. Then Facebook will be able to use your works under that license, like everyone else.
The UN says 6500 civilians have been killed in the fighting between the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil Tigers, and both sides deny the facts of their responsibility2A.
The motive for Bush regime torture was to extract false "intelligence" to excuse the conquest of Iraq.
A thorough investigation that can subpoena anyone in the Bush regime can surely find proof of this.
The Taliban, having persuaded Pakistan's government to give them control of Swat, are now attacking neighboring regions of Pakistan.
Condoleezza Rice authorized torture in 2002.
The
UK plans to promote electric cars to reduce CO2 emissions. It
is a good plan, provided the electricity isn't made by burning coal.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
The UK just announced that any new coal plants will have to sequester a significant fraction of their carbon output from the outset. (Other articles say this will be 1/5 or 1/4 of the output.)
This is a significant step, since it requires "clean coal" rhetoric to be at partly implemented as reality. But coal plants will still contribute much more to global warming than renewable electric generation. The rest of their polluution, including radioactive dust that gets into people's lungs, will also continue to be substantial.
Congress should hold a hearing study policy options in Afghanistan rather than rushing headlong into a bigger war.
The Taliban are a grave problem, not just in Afghanistan but in Pakistan too. However, it is not at all clear how we can deal with the problem.
Several bombings in Iraq demonstrated that arresting one al Qa'ida leader doesn't change much.
The Red Cross reports mounting civilian casualties as Sri Lanka's army closes in the last remaining LTTE-controlled zone.
It is not clear which side is to blame for these casualties, but both sides are discreditable. Sri Lanka's governmemt must be responsible for excluding independent journalists, which renders all its statements suspect. A heroic editor who defended human rights was assassinated last year, and blamed his killing on the government in a posthumously published article.
Meanwhile, the Tamil Tigers are terrorists of the worst sort; they originated the suicide bomber as a tactic. Neither side is likely to care much about hundreds or even thousands of civilian casualties if it can pin the blame on the other side.
The judge in the Pirate Bay case is
directly tied to the copyright industry.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
The Sun has got slightly dimmer than it has been for recent centuries, but the change is too small to overcome human-caused global warming.
The Bush forces report capturing an al Qa'ida leader whom they previously said they had captured, that they hadn't captured, and that he did not exist.
I won't claim the previous statements were lies, since it hard to get reliable information about such things. Perhaps the Bush forces have been guilty of exaggerating the state of their knowledge of the situation.
The main point is that eliminating a leader of an underground movement with sufficient popular support rarely damages the movement much. Few leaders have special abilities; most are the man was willing at the time. There are always plenty of new leaders just as able as the one who was captured or killed. Al Qa'ida can't be defeated this way.
US citizens: sign this petition to impeach Judge Bybee for his part in planning torture.
Fighting is increasing between the Sunni militias, that the Bush forces no longer pay, and the Shi'ites that control the Iraqi government.
Although this fighting means trouble for the Bush forces, I am sad to see trouble of this particular kind. Not only does it mean the death of Iraqi civilians (as well as fighters); it also increases Iraqi disunion, which is the only thing that has enabled the Bush forces to keep control of Iraq. If Iraqis had united in resistance to the conquest of their country, they could have made the occupation untenable.
Five Terrible Truths About the
CIA Torture Memos.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
EU citizens:
Act now to oppose copyright extension for phonorecordings at the EU level.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Spain's judge Garzón is
keeping up the pressure on the Bush regime
torture planners.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
How AIPAC buys influence at the highest level of the US Government.
A sheih in the United Arab Emirates tortured a man, even driving over him with a vehicle, and had an associate make a video. The tape was smuggled out by the associate's brother.
The US has the ethical obligation not to tolerate torture, and ethical behavior begins at home. The US must prosecute the torturers, and those who organized them to torture, so it can be in a good ethical position to condemn torture by others.
Vice President Biden is still the MPAA's champion and wants to escalate the War on Sharing globally.
The senators that attended the MPAA gala must surely be inclined to attack the freedom American citizens on behalf of Hollywood. According to the article, they included Richard Durban (D-Illinois); Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.); Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), Judd Gregg (R-N.H.); Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota); Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont); Roger Wicker (R-Mississipi); and Ben Nelson (D-Nebraska). If you live in those states, it would be good to organize opposition to them.
I don't intend ever to vote for anyone who was in the US Senate last fall when it unanimously passed the bill to create the office of "intellectual property" enforcement coordinator. The name of that office is enough to warn you that it is up to no good.
Many Americans are being compelled by money lenders to buy cars with remote shutoff devices, which also contain GPS's that can report the car's location. It is not clear from this article whether they can be used to find out where the car is even if it is not being shut off.
I have heard that all recent GM cars contain a cell phone that constantly reports where the car is, whether the customer pays for any features to use it or not. If I bought a GM car, I would make sure to remove it.
An Israeli soldier killed a protestor at the weekly nonviolent Bil'in protest.
Hitting protestors with tear gas cartridges is no accident. It happens when soldiers choose to fire them at people instead of firing at the ground.
Obama has semi-reluctantly accepted the idea of prosecuting the Bush regime officials that set the policy for torture.
Of course, this must be done, but those who obeyed these orders must not be shielded.
How Israel split Gaza from the West Bank by
violating the Oslo agreement.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-13 because the old link was broken.]
How Netanyahu will use delay to prevent any peace agreement.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
UK police gave their secrets to a coal power company so as to sabotage a nonviolent protest.
The police also told lies so as to make the protest seem dangerous.
The ANC's opponents in South Africa say that it is pervasively corrupt and trying to sabotage democracy.
The US is increasingly taking and keeping DNA samples of people who are arrested, whether or not they are convicted of any crime.
Maliki's attempts to suppress the Sunni militias that went over to Bush's side in 2007 may be causing renewed intersectarian violence.
US citizens:
sign this petition urging Obama to regulate CO2 emission
now, and not wait for lobbyists to permit Congress to act.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Border patrol beat up a man and smashed his car because he insisted on his constitutional rights.
Some comments say the victim professes absurd religious views. If that is true, it is no excuse for the way he was treated.
Does the US border patrol really label its stops as "anti-terrorism checkpoints"? If so, that itself is dishonest. It is as unlikely for an illegal immigrant to be a terrorist as for someone you pass on the sidewalk to be a murderer.
US citizens:
sign this petition to end the intervention in Afghanistan
if it insists on the law that denies women basic human rights.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
More about the heroic protest by Afghan women.
The National Union of Journalists in the UK is planning a photo protest against photographing police.
The condition in the law — "likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism" — is not about the photographer's intentions or plans. Rather, it makes the photographer responsible for what someone else might do with the photo once it is published. It is a question of speculation rather than fact, so it is ideal for punishing the innocent.
A Boston student's computer was seized by police because he uses two different operating systems, on one of which he types commands at a command line.
It seems likely that one of those systems is GNU/Linux. I wonder if this is the first time a person has faced persecution for using it.
A second post-mortem found Tomlinson died from an abdominal hemorrhage, which almost certainly means the policeman's attack killed him.
The operators of the Pirate Bay web site have been convicted of making copyrighted works available without permission. The decision is questionable since their site did not actually do this, but rather linked to sites that did it. They plan to appeal the decision.
This is a victory for the businesses that have launched the War on Sharing, but I think they will find its ultimate effect is to rally people on our side.
Having cited an article that refers to works of authorship as "content", I must point out that the term insults those very works. It presumes their importance is to fill some container — whether filling a DVD with Hollywood crap, or filling a bank account with money.
That may be the attitude of the movie companies which brought this prosecution. We should reject that attitude, and the term "content" with it.
Mainstream columnists are daring to notice that the police have a
systematic practice of covering up their crimes against innocent people
while smearing their victim.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
London police don't kill, they destroy people's photos of famous buildings in London. Their excuse for this interference is "stopping terrorism", which evidently this is irrelevant for.
The police say they are "investigating". I predict they will find an excuse to reach no conclusion and change nothing. We cannot expect these bullies to rein in their own depradations. It will have to be done to them with a force they cannot stand up against.
Obama promised full support to CIA torturers.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
The US government will go all out to defend them from any sort of investigation or punishment. If their victims sue and win compensation, the US government will pay it. According to Obama, under no circumstances should torturers have to suffer.
Aid for Gaza
rots in Egypt, which won't let it into Gaza.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Australian politicians are whipping up hostility to the people fleeing danger in their home countries and applying for political asylum. What are the facts?
US citizens: sign this petition against forced arbitration in certain kinds of issues (including civil rights, employment and consumer protection).
The US quietly established special prisons for people convicted of crimes of a political nature, such as operating charities or running web sites, especially if people have organized to support them.
Rocket launches could become the main cause of destruction of ozone in the ionosphere.
California proposes to buy electricity from a space solar power satellite by 2016.
Solar power satellites do not totally avoid contributing to global warming, since the energy they transmit to Earth eventually turns into heat. But this is tiny compared with what the CO2 from fossil fuels causes. They also produce no waste once in operation — though someone should compare the pollution from the rocket launch with the pollution of other alternatives.
Why build an Oil Terminal right under Redoubt Volcano?
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Seizing this oil terminal without compensation, and making Chevron pay all the costs of cleaning it up, would be just the way to teach Chevron and other callous corporations a vital lesson that they had better care about the dangers they impose on others.
But the US government has no inclination to do that, because it does not want to address this problem. Compare the way Exxon got away with never paying for the damage of its great Alaskan oil spill.
A Bush forces soldier has been found guilty of murder for killing helpless Iraqi prisoners.
This is what should happen whenever soldiers wantonly kill for no reason, but it is very hard to do. There are many ways to hide the facts or make excuses, and the military will tend to defend its own except in the most flagrant cases. Thus, predictably, soldiers nearly always get away with murder of civilians during war. Anyone who starts an occupation of a hostile populace is responsible for these predictable consequences.
At a vigil on behalf of Tomlinson, the bystander killed by London police, another London policeman hit a protestor twice with no justification at all. He concealed his badge number in an attempt to evade justice.
It looks like Obama is slowly starting to assert disagreements with Israel's right-wing government.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
There is a long way to go from there to advocacy of peace, but at least it is a positive step.
The London "independent" police investigating agency claimed there were no surveillance cameras in the area where police fatally attacked Tomlinson. Until citizens found cameras there.
It is strange that these cameras failed to show police attacking a civilian. But not really so strage, given that the police are the ones who check the recordings. Police systematically lie to support the crimes of the police, and that naturally includes failing to notice evidence of these crimes.
Scientists say it is still possible to stop global warming at 2 degrees C, but are losing hope that politicians will do it.
Over 2 degrees C of warming means major global disaster.
Obama has confirmed his support for the copyright bullies against the public, by appointing another RIAA lawyer to public office. By doing this shortly after many organizations asked him not to do so, he made his support for the cruel War on Sharing more pointed.
The Thai protestors being attacked and killed by police want a more equitable society, and perhaps a republic.
Fujimori was sentenced to 25 years for organizing murder, but his daughter is running for president and says she will pardon him.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Obama has liberalized visits to Cuba by Cuban-Americans.
This is a change for the better, but there is no excuse for stopping other Americans from visiting Cuba. Cuba's government is not democratic and supresses dissent, but many others which are worse do not get this treatment.
London police lied to Tomlinson's family, while citing that family as an excuse to prevent press investigation into Tomlinson's death. The organization responsible for investigating police misconduct participated in the cover-up and thus destroyed its credibility.
This is one more in a long series of outrages, which generally are followed by cover-ups.
Citizens' photos and movies of police at work are starting to make the UK wake up to what lying bullies their police are. No wonder Clown has made it possibly illegal (under conditions impossible to predict) to photograph them.
Police in Nottingham arrested over 100 protestors before they could start their planned nonviolent protest. They are accused of "conspiracy" to do things such as chain themselves to fences.
The UK government, along with its police, is an occupying force that primarily serves business, and tolerates democracy only to the extent that it can't abolish it.
A person unknown to me says the government of Moldova is arresting lots of people without warrants.
Bush may be out of office, but Obama is continuing Bush's struggle for long-term control of Iraq's oil industry.
The US owes Iraq 53 billion dollars for the oil it has been unable to sell since the conquest, due to the looting and destruction of the oil facilities. I wonder if anyone has added up the total reparations that the US owes to Iraq for its war of conquest.
Dubai was built and is run by workers who are effectively slaves. Just like trafficked prostitutes, they were forced to give up their passports to their new masters. If they escape and find their consulates, the consulates refuse to help them unless they can get their passports back. Meanwhile, toxic pollution floods the beaches, and the government's response is to censor reports.
I suspect that people in other countries and their governments have been paid or intimidated into supporting this scheme. Why don't agencies and newspapers in Bangladesh explain how dangerous it is to go to Dubai to work?
Why does the Ethiopian consulate refuse to help slaves who escape without their passports? It is not very hard to verify they are Ethiopians. When US citizens lose their passports while traveling, the US consulate gives them new passports. Why not the Ethiopian? Has it been bought or pressured by Dubai to collaborate in keeping the slaves there?
And why does Canada do nothing to help expats such as Karen Andrews? It could send a warship and some marines to rescue Canadian nationals. Has the Canadian government been bought, too?
What the slaves of Dubai need is a Spartacus to lead them in revolt. Even if they do not win their own freedom, they will put an end to the schemes that lure new slaves to Dubai.
Uri Avnery writes about reconciling the battle for Israeli independence with the disaster this caused for the Palestinians.
The IMF is still imposing crush-the-poor polcies on the countries it pretends to "help".
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
The French assembly narrowly rejected the punishment-on-accusation anti-sharing law.
However, I am told that the president is going to try hard to push the measure through, one way or another.
Iraq reduced Zaidi's sentence to one year in prison.
That is a step in the right direction, but any Iraqi government that stands for its people would free him and give him a medal.
Most Somalis support the pirates, who they see as their sole defense against fishing their oceans empty and replacing the fish with nuclear waste.
Somalis are entitled to defend themselves from these wrongs, but in order to make their defense legitimate, they have to separate the "volunteer coast guard" from the gangsters.
US citizens: sign this petition against Obama's broad new secrecy policies.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
US law requires putting failed banks immediately into receivership. Bush ignored this law and Obama is ignoring it now.
Cargo ships are a major source of toxic air pollution.
If shippers had to pay the costs of preventing these emissions, maybe there would be more room for manufacturing in the US.
The US government admits that Ramirez Peyro will be murdered by drug-dealing police if he is deported to Mexico, but is splitting legal hairs to deport him anyway.
Witness testimony shows that the London police attacked Tomlinson twice, not once; both times as he was walking away.
Eric Hobsbawm: Socialism has failed. Now capitalism is bankrupt. So what comes next?
Unfortunately, he does not suggest an answer to his question.
Police in Phoenix, AZ, seized Jeff Pataky's computer hardware in retaliation for his blog campaign to criticize police misconduct. Pataky has already sued the police for previous harassment.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
I disagree with Pataky on one thing: it is wrong to criticize a police officer (or anyone) for "promiscuity". What police do in their sex lives is no one else's business unless it affects how they treat the public.
US citizens: sign this petition to remove the excutives of the bankrupt banks that caused the financial crisis.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Replacing the executives is part of the Prompt Corrective Action already required by law.
The president of Georgia is facing massive protests demanding that he resign. He started a war with Russia last year, thinking Russia would not fight back.
Saakashvili was brought into power by similar massive protests, partly funded and organized by the US government, that were a reaction to attempted election fraud. Election fraud must be defeated, but a US-leaning president who wants to reduce government regulation of business can also be dangerous.
London police have suspended the policeman who hit Tomlinson for no reason from behind, but they still have not arrested him, as they certainly would have arrested anyone else who committed an attack with a deadly weapon. A former police commissioner warns that this double standard will erode "public confidence in the force".
These occasional provable instances of police violence are just the tip of the iceberg. Anyone who still has "confidence in the force" must not know what this force tends to do.
Prison corruption in Bolivia goes to a point which is astonishing.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Ian Tomlinson's death at the G20 protest was caused by a random, crazed attack by rioting police.
Tonlinson's death reflects systematic injustice in the way police deal with protests.
Paper companies are burning diesel fuel just to qualify for a subsidy on mixing renewable fuels with petroleum. It looks like they will get an 8 billion dollar handout.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
The House of Representatives is preparing to limit the interest on "payday loans" and stop certain abuses.
The limit on interest is 391 percent at an annual rate. That exaggerates because it is projected out to a full year, but the loan probably lasts half a week, so the actual maximum interest rate might be 8% or 4% depending on how that interest rate would be extrapolated to a full year. It would be more like 3%, if it is extrapolated to 391 based on compounding of weekly interest. An interest rate of 8% seems excessive to me; an interest rate of 3% seems unobjectionable.
The extrapolated rate is relevant when borrowers "roll over" the loan and carry it for longer periods of time, which this bill would prohibit.
But that is the better alternative bill. The alternative bill shows how Congress is still largely for sale to business. If Americans want self-rule, they must put an end to this.
Meanwhile, the existence of such a big "payday loan" business in the US is a symptom of the precarity of many workers. It is an exploitative band-aid for a deep social wound which needs proper treatment.
A study projects that legalizing now-prohibited drugs would save UK society and government billions, as well as providing a lot of tax revenue.
Whether to legalize drugs is not a question solely of money. If prohibiting drugs important benefits for society, perhaps the cost would be money well spent. In fact, it mainly does harm, both to the drug users and to the rest of society.
Most of the acute medical harm caused by prohibited drugs results from the unpredictable strength and unknown contaminants of underground supplies. If the drugs were legalized and regulated, these problems would almost disappear.
Another major source of harm to drug users is punishment. Legalization would eliminate that.
Non-users suffer from prohibition too, through crime committed by addicts as well as through terrifying (and sometimes deadly) drug raids. The immensely profitable underground drugs traffic also corrupts police and politicians and fuels gangs (and gang wars). Legalization would sweep this away.
Some prohibited drugs are fairly safe — safer than tobacco or alcohol. Others are rather dangrous. Either way, they do some harm to some users, but it's minor compared with the harm caused by prohibition. Still, it would be good to reduce this harm. Paradoxically, legalization can be the way.
Legalization does not necessarily mean complete deregulation. In the Netherlands, heroin addicts can go to clinics to get an injection, but general sale is not allowed. Addicts would rather go to a clinic than steal to buy on the (small) black market, but the prospect surely does not encourage people to start using heroin. This policy has kept herion use to a low level which the warriors on drugs promise but can never deliver.
War is always dangerous. A drug-intoxicated war can attack people indiscriminately, so the war on drugs is dangerous to everyone. Can we help this war get off drugs?
Fujimori, formerly president of Peru, has been sentenced to 25 years in prison for authorizing a military death squad.
For America's honor, we must try Bush for his crimes.
Proposed legislation to regulate tobacco is so weak that it will mainly serve the tobacco companies as an excuse.
Smoking in movies is a major factor in enticing teenagers to become tobacco addicts.
Terrorists are now an excuse not to let you know what poisonous chemicals are stored near you and could kill you.
If you knew about them, you might insist they be moved to a less populated place, where they would be less dangerous in the unlikely even of a terrorist attack, or in the far more likely accidental spill.
The TSA threatened a man with arrest for carrying cash onto a domestic US flight. When the TSA agents asked where the money came from, he asked whether he was legally required to answer. The TSA agents persistently ignored the question and tried to bully him.
Some of the comments in the page try to claim that carrying a few thousand dollars in cash is grounds for suspicion of a crime. That claim is absurd, but even if it were true, it would not excuse the TSA for prying into the matter. Its only proper activity is to make sure people do not carry arms onto planes.
Some have pointed out that Faux News is a supporter of right-wing causes. It is, but that doesn't alter these events or their meaning.
Obama is pushing government secrecy even beyond the extremes of Bush.
The Tennessee Valley Authority lied about a big toxic spill, and apparently fudged scientific data to support the lie.
This reminds me of what happened when there was a big toxic spill in a river in China.
The Dalits of Periakaappan Kulam in India are forced to bury their dead next to their houses, because the caste Hindus deny them access to the cemetary. Dalits in many places are also blocked from hospitals, food aid, and land.
Sectarian fighting between Sunnis and Shi'ites is increasing in Baghdad.
Iraqi Christians also face religiously motivated killings. Violence between Iraqi sects is what enabled the Bush forces to subdue Iraq. If Iraqis had remained united, the could have kicked the conquerors out. So I wonder whether there was a plan for the Bush forces to provoke this.
London police apologized for misusing the law to stop press photographers fromcovering the protest and its police repression.
The apology is worthless unless it is accompanied by something to protect photographers from a repetition of the same abuse.
Obama says that the Bush forces will leave Iraq by 2011, but generals are saying they will stay for 20 years. And that decision refers only to the official part of the forces, saying nothing about the 100,00 mercenaries which are the unofficial part of the Bush forces.
EDF, the government-owned electric company of France, apparently tried to break into Greenpeace's computers.
US citizens: phone your senators (or sign this petition) in support of Obama's judicial nominees that are in favor of abortion rights.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
London police fatally attacked a bystander walking in the vicinity of a protest.
Naturally the police did not admit the attack, but there is now proof.
The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan sees no hope in the Afghan government which the US has set up, saying it is composed of crime kingpins that have no respect for justice or freedom.
RAWA really stands for human rights. It opposed the Soviet occupation, opposed the criminal warlords who took over that occupation ended, and opposed the Taliban.
Americans, are you afraid of terrorists? Relax, the danger from underground terrorists is tiny compared with other everyday risks.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
US state-sponsored terrorism is a real danger — in Iraq it caused a million deaths. But it has not killed people in the US recently, except possibly on September 11, 2001.
London police besieged protestors and attacked protestors. Then, as police commonly do, they lied about it.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Medical professionals participated in CIA torture.
Here is a commentary on the Zeitgeist Movement's statement of principles.
Drug companies' gifts to doctors have influenced the American Psychiatric Association's standards for use of drugs for mental illness.
US Citizens: Call on Obama to have the EPA regulate CO2 emissions.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
It looks like Thermite, it burns like Thermite — and it was found in residue from the World Trade Center.
This is the smoking gun which makes it nearly certain that someone not in an airplane helped to carry out the attacks. Who will investigate to find them?
Economist William Black, who helped clean up after the 1980s S&L failures, says that the current crisis represents massive fraud and that Geithner is covering it up.
Pressure on Karzai to reject the unconstitutional law that attacks women's rights.
The Bush forces procured relative calm in Iraq by buying off the nonidealistic parts of the Sunni resistance. But they stopped the payments in October, and now the Shi'ite-controlled Iraqi government is starting fights with those Sunni forces.
Lt. Boudreau resigned his commission in the Marine Corps to dedicate his efforts to veterans and Iraqi refugees, victims of the invasion he participated in.
Lieberman has shown he effectively controls the Israeli government, and Obama has effectively bowed to his agenda of war until conquest.
South Korea is the next target for the guilt-by-accusation Internet law that has been rejected in New Zealand.
A Welsh musician was strip-searched on the street at gunpoint, and his wife and daughter were arrested too, over false accusations of "terrorism".
The armed and dangerous gangsters who are really spreading terror in Wales are easy to identify. Note how they find menace in any innocent object which they do no recognize or understand — as in the persecution of Star Simpson.
Obama is appealing to the public in favor of renewable energy spending.
The legislators that are "skeptical" are responding to corporate pressure. To be "fiscally conservative" at a time like this is to prevent recovery.
Mix international lending, local dictators and foreign greed, and you get explosive poverty.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
There is a proposal in Congress to mostly eliminate the warrantless searches introduced by the U SAP AT RIOT act.
The Taliban have conquered a province in Pakistan, and states the intention to impose its cruelty on the rest.
Here's the cruelty that the Taliban stand for.
I supported the war in Afghanistan as a combat to end such cruelty. However, Afghanistan's US-established government has adopted a law which is almost as bad.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Iran, which has never been friends with the Taliban, has offered to help stabilize Afghanistan.
It could be a very good offer, if the Afghan government is worth defending. But there is no point continuing to defend this government if it is little better than the Taliban. I would rather arm Afghan and Pakistani women to kill Taliban.
The US and UN, having collaborated in destroying Haiti's democracy, now propose to exploit Haiti for labor paid so little that it barely covers the cost of having lunch at work.
A US court ruled that non-Afghans that the US took to Afghanistan as prisoners have a right to sue to be released.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
To hamper Obama's apparent plans to substitute Bagram for Guantanamo is a victory. However, every time I see that Obama supports Bush's tyrannical policies, I despair for the US. With both major parties enemies of human rights, there is little hope for freedom or justice except in courts, and they are also lukewarm about human rights.
Bruce Schneier: if we don't want technical advances to erase privacy both practically and legally, we need a new criterion.
I don't think the police should be allowed to find out who you have phoned, or sent email to, without a warrant.
The UN has appointed a team to investigate Israeli war crimes in Gaza.
When Israel accuses Hamas of using "human shields", it is stretching the term; what it means is that Hamas fighters were present in towns. By contrast, Israeli troops use human shields in the strict sense of the term: forcing civilians at gunpoint to walk in front of soldiers.
Consumer boycotts of Israeli goods are being noticed by Israli exporters.
London police are making an all-out attack on democracy: attacking protestors with dogs when they wish to remain, and detaining them for hours in improvised prisons when they wish to move, then temporarily arresting each and every person.
The police pretend that that is not what they are doing, but that is what their actions amount to. I refuse to repeat a falsehood just because it comes from the police.
Keeping protestors imprisoned for hours is a form of harassment, designed to discourage most people from exercising their rights, in the hope that the rest will be too few to matter. Forcing protestors to identify themselves to leave the prison is a form of intimidation, intended to scare most people out of protesting at all.
If the motive for imprisoning groups of protestors were to stop them from moving on or from doing something, the police would leave protestors unmolested when they voluntarily stay in one place and do nothing. The night attack on the protest camp shows that the police's only constant intention is to block democracy.
Every one in Britain should take note: the police and the regime they defend are their main enemy of freedom, your democracy, and your safety. Don't let them distract you by making a fuss about other lesser threats.
Obama has surrendered to the insurance company lobbies and now proposes only minor "reforms" for health care.
An Israeli military whitewash investigation concluded that Israel committed no war crimes in Gaza, disregarding the testimony of civilians, the UN, and Israeli soldiers.
I will have more confidence in the conclusions of the International Criminal Court.
UN attempts to force sweatshop production on Haiti.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Obama has deftly co-opted and silenced the peace movement.
Coal company lobbyists are trying to prevent regulation of their CO2 emissions until the day they can produce "clean coal", meaning we could destroy our civilization first.
Coal-burning power plants also emit large amounts of dangerous radioactive fallout. It would be best not to allow any new ones.
Arundhati Roy: The silent horror of the war in Sri Lanka.
A few months ago, a great Sri Lankan journalist was assassinated, apparently by government agents, for his criticism of government attacks on human rights. The claim that the press there has been silenced is therefore quite credible.
To condemn the government for trampling human rights does not mean support for Tamil independence. The Tamil Tigers are the ones who established suicide bombing as a tactic, and I have nothing good to say about them. But it appears that the government's atrocities dwarf the Tigers' atrocties.
The IMF's former chief economist agrees: the US must destroy the oligarch of banks that have taken control, if it is to have any chance of recovering from the crisis they have imposed.
When mentioning the IMF, we must not fail to note that its recommendations have often been aimed more at the poor than at oligarchies. For instance, the IMF made many countries charge fees for elementary school.
You can see the absurdity of Geithner's bank bailout plan by imagining what it would be like to treat the auto companies the same way.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Escape from the foolish choice between free trade and protectionism... with the Simultaneous Policy.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Islamist fanatics attacked a police training academy in Pakistan.
These fanatics, in various forms, have been supported for decades by Pakistan's intelligence agency, which also founded al Qa'ida, and it still supports them. Perhaps this attack will give Pakistan's government the political will to shut it down.
The total melting of Greenland's ice is a bit further away than was previously predicted.
If we are real fools, we will use this as an excuse to let things get closer to the limit.
Spain is on the verge of prosecuting Torture Gonzales and other Bush regime officials for their role in authorizing torture in Guantanamo.
This should wake Obama up to the need to do his duty. For the US to leave it to another country to prosecute Americans in the name of the US would be a shame for the US forever.
20 years later, most of the oil spilled by the Exxon Valdez remains where it was spilled, and remains toxic. It will take decades or centuries to degrade naturally.
Exxon succeeded in getting the right-wing Supreme Court to reduce its fine, which it has never paid anyway. I think it ought to have to pay more.
Climate change is destroying thousands of archeological sites around the world. Our past as well as our future are in danger.
Some propose to extract polar methane hydrate deposits for fuel.
Burning the methane will contribute less to global warming than letting it leak into the atmosphere. If a substantial fraction leaks, the warming could destroy civilization.
However, burning it is not really a solution, because there's no way to get anyone to stop extracting oil and use methane deposits instead. If we use them, we will use them in addition to the oil, and that means an increase in now-expected global warming, and even more likelihood that the bulk of the methane will leak.
The UN Human Rights Council voted to crush freedom of speech, by recommending laws to prohibit criticism of religion.
The UN would like me to be punished for stating that many religions are dangerous mind-viruses.
A drought in Iraq has exposed previously flooded archeological sites, which are now in danger of looting.
Obama, will you protect them?
Uri Avnery: Netanyahu hopes Obama will play along with pretend peace initiatives that are designed to fail, like previous US presidents.
Binyam Mohamed says, don't make the MI5 agent who supported torturing me into scapegoat while letting the ministers off the hook.
With many Americans now homeless and many homes vacant, cities should help squatters.
Of course, some cities would rather just Hoover up homeless people and toss them in the dump.
Swiss citizens: vote against biometric passports.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Privately, the Pentagon recognizes that burning toxic materials in Iraq is dangerous and makes people sick. Publicly, it continues to deny the problem.
The police in London are asking citizens to go through each other's garbage, and report anyone looking at the CCTV cameras.
If you are in London, make a practice of regularly looking at CCTV cameras. Occasionally discussing them with your companions or passersby would be a good habit too. If everyone gets accustomed to seeing people look at them, and photograph them, no one will find it unusual.
The US Congress is considering a bill to require every WiFi network (and every ISP) to keep records of all users, for the police.
I suspect opposition will fasten on the absurdity of imposing this requirement even on people's home networks. That would be a mistake: if the bill is changed to exempt home networks, it will still be an attack on our freedom. We must oppose the bill head-on, not get sidetracked into quibbles about details.
US Citizens: call your congresscritter and call on Congress to officialy end the "state of emergency" that Bush has perpetuated since 2001.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
US citizens: sign this petition to pass a strong climate change control law.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
The idea of burying charcoal has been twisted by some into an absurd plan to chop down rainforests for charcoal plantations.
Police raided Wikileaks.de domain owner's home over leaked 'censorship lists'.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Iraqis still condemn the occupation of their country and want the Bush forces removed.
Food companies are taking the path followed by the cigarette companies, which asked the public to trust them to make sure cigarettes were safe.
The Bush regime offered to release Binyam Mohamed from Guantanamo if he would plead guilty to false accusations and keep silent about how he was tortured. He refused the deal.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Shell has dumped renewable energy for biofuels.
This despite the fact that biofuels use the scare resources for agriculture, leading to food shortages and destruction of rainforests in Brazil and Indonesia.
The CIA has 3000 documents related to the torture videotapes it destroyed. This seems to show that the torturers were in close communication with headquarters.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
The US congress proposes total surveillance of internet usage.
The US and other countries plan to spend billions on an arms race for space weapons. The way to avoid this would be a disarmament treaty. Russia and China called for such a treaty, but the US blocked it.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Obama's Department of "Justice", full of former RIAA lawyers, has come to the support of the RIAA.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Democrats have long had a tendency to be nastier on copyright issues than Republicans. Many of them get paid by the media companies.
Israeli soldiers in Gaza used Palestinian children as human shields.
There is overwhelming evidence of Israeli war crimes in Gaza. Will the perpetrators face justice?
Every international institution that has a responsibility to prosecute war crimes will lose its moral authority if it shields those responsible for these crimes.
New Zealand has canceled the plan to punish internet users with disconnection based on (unproved) accusations of forbidden sharing.
This is only a temporary partial victory. The New Zealand government has not given up its War on Sharing, and threatens to try again. Meanwhile, other unjust provisions of the new copyright law, such as prohibition of free software to play a DVD, remain in force.
Organized networks of looters, who find antiquities in the ground and sell them, cause irreparable loss of information about our past.
The victims of Bush torture polcies included children.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Even adult prisoners must not be tortured, because torture can easily force an innocent suspect into a false confession. (That's what torture is best for.)
In large areas of London, all gatherings of 3 or more people on the street have been banned, including protests.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
Kentucky election officials have been charged with rigging several elections by changing the vote counts in computerized voting machines.
After protestors fighting massive evictions for the sake of large companies occupied a building in Seoul, the police attacked them and set fire to the building, killing five of the protestors.
The root cause of this is too much regard for big business and too little regard for everyone else.
Mainstream media are outraged that Obama's press secretary dared to speak with levity about Cheney. That was in response to grave false accusations made by Cheney against Obama.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-07 because the old link was broken.]
There are many things wrong with Obama's policies, but naturally what Cheney criticizes is the good side of them.
Although Cheney acted as vice president, he was never legitimately elected to the office. It is established how Bush and Cheney stole the election in 2000, and there is good evidence of dishonesty in Ohio in 2004.
Israeli troops report they witnessed wanton killings of civilians in Gaza, sometimes explicitly ordered by commanders.
Here is more information.
I do not have high hopes that the Israeli army's investigation, carried out under the current Israeli government, will see much abuse. And I am not the only one.
An American activist at a Palestinian non-violent protest was shot in the head with a tear gas canister and critically injured.
Soldiers are trained to fire accurately. When they shoot someone in the head, it is most likely intentional. Tear gas is supposedly "non-lethal", but a shot in the head with a canister can kill.
Australia's web censorship list has been leaked. The censorship agency acts arbitrarily, censors political discussions, and lies about its actions.
Censorship is tyranny and must not be tolerated.
In the battle to reverse global warming, surrender is not an option: our backs are to the rising ocean.
Freedom of speech faces a new global threat from attempts to prohibit so-called defamation of religion.
Former UK diplomats and intelligence officials demand full publication of how the UK decided to invade Iraq, saying it will reveal dishonesty.
US timidity in any criticism of Israeli government policy threatens to make it a patsy for Lieberman's ethnic cleansing policies.
Everyone: sign this petition to Ban Ki-Moon for the release of Burmese political prisoners.
Climatologist Hansen says that coporate lobbying has paralyzed democracy on the issue of climate change. Governments give only lip service and propose ineffective measures.
Evidence now connects the B'liar regime with torture in Egypt (as well as in Pakistan and the US).
Clown will publish new guidelines to stop intelligence agents and soldiers from colluding in torture, but continutes to pretend they have never done anything wrong.
This means that an investigation into past crimes is still required. The criminals responsible must be punished, or the new rules will be ignored.
Mexico plans to retaliate for a US decision not to allow Mexican trucks to travel in the US.
I think the US should allow Mexican trucks and drivers, provided the trucks meet US safety standards and the drivers are paid on US pay standards.
By 2030, shortages in food, water, and energy are likely to cause major conflicts around the world.
Beyond stopping the bonuses: proposals for real reform in the financial industry.
Sean Hodgson has been released based on DNA evidence after 27 years in prison, for a rape and murder he confessed to — but did not commit.
Although DNA testing was not possible when he was tried, the trial should have considered his tendency to make false confessions as casting doubt on his confession to this crime. The other evidence was no proof of anything.
Australian government will impose big fines for linking to censored web pages, including pages that talk about censorship of the net. Australians should set up their web sites in other countries.
Who says sex workers want to be saved?
US citizens: sign this petition for a 100% tax on bonus payments from companies that received a bailout.
1/3 of DMCA takedown notices are invalid harassment, says Google.
Bailing out AIG so it can pay its creditors in full is just a way of handing more taxpayer's money to those creditors: banks equally responsible for the problem.
Diebold admits its voting machines are susceptible to indetectable wholesale deletion of ballots.
The only way to do voting that we know is more or less trustworthy is on paper. Society must be very cautious about adopting any new technology for voting.
The UK government, which is becoming increasingly Orwellian, has said that it is considering snooping on all social networking traffic including Facebook, MySpace, and bebo.
Rally to nationalize, reorganize, and decentralize the failing banks, instead of bailing out their owners.
US citizens: tell Obama to keep his promise and extend federal benefits to spouses in same-sex marriages.
Bush's lies about Saddam's nonexistent weapons have been carried forward into the Obama administration by his secretary of defense.
The UK foreign office admits it did nothing to support the UK citizens being tortured in Pakistan and Egypt.
When officials refuse to explain how they treated someone who has accused them, and pretend this is to protect his privacy, that in itself is proof that they are evil. They should be sacked for this, then investigated.
Israeli peace activists say that Tristan Anderson was hit intentionally with an illegal kind of tear-gas weapon, as he participated in a nonviolent protest.
Desmond Tutu and prestigious war crime investigators have called on the UN to investigate Israeli war crimes in Gaza.
Israel continues seizing Palestinian homes, along with land and water.
The right-wing extremists about to govern Israel will provide Obama with an opportunity to establish a clear US policy for peace and two states, if he will take it.
Have you noticed the similarity between China's slow takeover of Tibet and Israel's slow takeover of the West Bank? To be sure, there are some differences between these two cases: for one thing, Arab culture exists in a large territory whereas Tibetan culture exists only in Tibet and small neighboring areas. There are differences in other details. But the two situations are broadly similar.
Charles Freeman denounces the Israeli hawks' lobby.
Later he told Robert Dreyfuss
"The only thing I regret is that in my statement I embraced the term 'Israel lobby.' This isn't really a lobby by, for, or about Israel. It's really, well, I've decided I'm going to call it from now on the [Avigdor] Lieberman lobby. It's the very right-wing Likud in Israel and its fanatic supporters here. And Avigdor Lieberman is really the guy that they really agree with."
I call it the "Israeli hawks' lobby", for basically the same reason, but I think it represents a larger group of politicians than just Avigdor Lieberman.
Dean Baker: it is now safe to let big banks go bankrupt in a controlled way.
Sudan's president Bashir has ordered all aid groups to leave Sudan. In effect, he is holding the people of Darfur (and perhaps other areas) hostage against the ICC.
The only way I see to defeat this move is to make Darfur effectively independent, with its own army, which could then provide security to aid workers.
Police in the UK have systematically attacked climate change protestors while lying about them.
This shows why laws giving governments additional flexible powers are dangerous. They will be used against democracy.
One cause of the economic crisis: right wing policies that boosted the productivity of US workers but kept their wages down.
Obama is continuing some of the nastiest of Bush policies, including imprisonment without trial, "signing statements", and secrecy from the public.
Worse, he is starting to do these things in ways that contradict what he says.
Pakistan's president conceded to protestors and reinstated the chief justice that Musharraf had unconstitutionally fired.
In a narrow political sense, this weakens President Zardari. But in a deeper sense, it strengthens Pakistan's democracy.
The Texas governor rejected federal unemployment benefits, because he would rather offer business lower taxes.
Republican voter-suppression efforts now aim at future elections in Texas.
Perhaps they believe the only way the governor can get re-elected, after showing contempt for poor citizens, is to disenfranchise them.
Uri Avnery: the dismissal of Charles Freeman means that the Israel hawks' lobby went up against Obama and he caved to them immediately.
This in effect tells the Israeli hawks they can do whatever they like to the Palestinians.
The Dalai Lama warned that Tibetan culture is close to extinction under the Chinese boot.
Turning wood into charcoal in giant microwave ovens might be a way to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.
Obama continues using Bush's bullshit excuse to keep ACTA away from all chance of democracy.
Chinese use amusing subterfuges to criticize their government.
Lesbians in South Africa are often raped and murdered by men who are oppose to women's freedom.
Secret B'liar regime emails prove conclusively that they distorted intelligence reports to justify invading Iraq.
Practically speaking, we knew already this was the case. But now it is proof enough to convict someone of crimes against the peace.
US citizens: phone your senators in support of helping homeowners threatened with bankruptcy. Also sign this petition.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
Zaidi, the shoe-thrower of Baghdad, has been sentenced to 3 years in prison.
His supporters should keep up the pressure.
If emissions are not stopped, global warming will make parts of the US physiologically uninhabitable for humans.
Israel is demolishing Palestinian houses in order to confiscate Palestinian land to build colonies ("settlements").
Other land is confiscated to build roads that only Israelis are allowed to use.
Protestors in the UK destroyed equipment in a factory making arms for Israel, saying this is legal since they acted to prevent a worse crime.
Aid workers in Suda have been kidnapped and held hostage, apparently at the initiative of the government.
EU citizens: write to your MEPs to oppose a directive to extend copyright on sound recordings.
US doctors are trying to gag patients by making them sign contracts agreeing not to publish anything about their treatment.
Progressives predicted that Clinton's "welfare reform" would lead states to use cruel measures to cut costs, condemning poor families to starvation. This did not imeediately happen, but it is happening now.
Wall Street and Congress ignored lots of warnings about the danger of deregulation.
The UK Conservative leader calls for a full investigation of B'liar's complicity in US torture.
The Israeli hawks' lobby demonstrated its power by forcing one of Obama's intelligence officials to resign.
Global warming by 4 degrees C will kill 85% of the Amazon forest's trees. Even 2 degrees will destroy large parts of the forest.
Pakistan's president, who has not restored the judges that Musharraf sacked, has arrested opposition leaders before a protest in support of those judges.
Seymour Hersh says that Bush set up assassination teams that reported directly to Cheney.
Some Guantanamo prisoners are reported to have signed a statement saying they participated in planning the 9/11 attacks.
I suppose it is too much to hope that nay of them will inculpate Cheney. To find out whether he was involved, we need a real investigation.
Zaidi's family called on the Iraqi government to release him.
The UN accused various countries of condoning torture by cooperating with the US in rendition and Guantanamo.
Exxon aims for a big role in Iraq's oil sector.
If it gets one, Bush will have won his war to extend the empire of the megacorporations.
Companies are stealing land in Borneo to cut down the rainforests to build palm oil plantations to sell as biodiesel fuel.
Aside from the theft, it's even more damaging than burning petroleum.
Italian law, as interpreted recentlt, effectively
prohibits blogs unless they register as "newspapers". In particular this
means they cannot be anonymous.
There is a campaign
to change the law.
The UN's chief climate negotiator has given up on asking the US to cut CO2 emissions — and therefore on any deal to convince India, China, and Brazil to make cuts.
In effect, his statement is that US opposition to CO2 cuts has doomed civilization. Perhaps he hopes this will spur Americans to change the political picture.
Extremists in Northern Ireland who killed a few British soldiers (and some pizza delivery workers at the same time) are meeting condemnation from Catholics as well as Protestants.
A suicide bomber attacked a reconciliation meeting at Abu Ghraib.
Philip Morris is again pushing a bill ostensibly to regulate tobacco, but actually designed to protect that company's market.
The Clown regime is supporting a campaign to abolish net neutrality in all Europe.
In a few more decades, atmospheric CO2 will make the oceans acidic enough to dissolve coral reefs.
This could eliminate most reefs, and thousands of marine species with them. As a byproduct, it could devastate fish that we eat. But those might mostly be wiped out by then anyway.
The shame of Iraq's parish widows.
The monster at work here comes from Arab culture and Islam, but it was Bush's invasion that let the monster loose: Saddam Hussein's regime kept it in check.
A drought in Amazonia in 2005 caused large emissions of CO2 by killing a percentage of the trees.
Global warming is expected to reduce rain there over the long term. Large parts of the forest may then burn up.
55% of Iraqi women say they have been victims of violence. 55% have been displaced since the Bush occupation. And most of them are now poor.
Everyone: sign the petition calling for release of Zaidi, the shoe-thrower of Baghdad.
The observations of bird watchers across Europe show that global warming is affecting populations and ranges of birds.
Obama is provoking a constitutional conflict with the federal judiciary, in the name of secrecy, all to trample the legal rights of a charity which is trying to challenge in court its arbitrary closure.
Obama plans to raise taxes on the rich and cut taxes for other Americans. The mainstream media's slanted depiction demonstrates its right-wing bias.
Studies forecast that the Mediterranean sea could rise by up to 2 feet in this century — and that is without counting the effect of melting ice in Greenland and Antarctica.
Meanwhile, floating ice in the Arctic is melting so fast that it looks like there will be no summer ice in just 4 years. The melting of floating ice has no effect on sea levels, but the iceless sea will absorb more sunlight. This is sure to speed up the melting of non-floating Greenland ice.
A few years ago, scientists predicted the glaciers would disappear from Glacier National Park by 2030. Now they say it looks like this will happen by 2020.
US citizens: fax your medical bills to congress in support of a single-payer health care system.
You can find more information on your representative here.
Fringe groups in Gaza launched rockets against Ashkelon.
Although these cannot be compared with the Israeli bombardment that killed hundreds of civilians, nor with the siege that has killed hundreds more, it would still be good to stop them. A well-organized Palestinian government could police the territory and prevent such attacks — if Israel makes peace.
GlaxoSmithKline has announced it will cut the price of medicines by 75% in 50 of the poorest countries.
The description of India as a "middle income country", when 86% of Indians live on under two dollars per day suggests that this is a plan to deflect public criticism. By exempting a fraction of the world's poor, they hope to continue making medicine too expensive for most of them.
The article confusingly uses the term "intellectual property", treating it as a synonym for "patents". This term spreads confusion every time it is used. It doesn't matter whether you use it on your own initiative, or quote or follow someone else — just treating the term as if it made sense is enough to encourage people to formulate their thinking on a confused foundation.
Thousands of Iraqi mothers have sold their teenage daughters into sex slavery.
Perhaps that was the lead bad option available under the circumstances in Iraq. If so, the blame falls on those who created these circumstances: Bush and Bush forces.
Karl Rove has agreed to testify before Congress, but the agreement lets him maintain executive privilege about what he discussed with Bush.
This is a step forward, but still insufficient to achieve justice, since it lets Rove shield Bush from responsibility for his actions. Past presidents should not be allowed special power to conceal their wrongdoing, and when the current president protects a previous one, that is a deriliction of duty.
The ACLU has obtained proof that the CIA destroyed videotapes that were evidence of torture.
The people responsible must be punished or the government will do this again.
Christian fanatics, now in opposition, have resumed the sort of dishonest accusations that they made against Clinton.
I must note that I don't greatly admire what Obama's justice department is doing — in regard to defending Bush's policies of secrecy and arbitrary rule. But that's not what the fanatics criticize them for.
The Economist calls for legalization of drugs.
Wall Street's Best Investment II: 12 Deregulatory Steps to Financial Meltdown.
Inspired by Zaidi, another protester has reportedly thrown a shoe at Iran's president.
Every president that tramples human rights and supports religious tyranny is a fitting object for such protests.
Another protester threw green custard at UK minister Mandelson for supporting expansion of Heathrow airport while pretending to support protecting the environment.
Unlike Zaidi, Ms Doon has not been arrested — yet. It looks like that may yet occur.
With the new Israeli government determined to oppress Palestinians, and the great powers unwilling to criticize, Uri Avnery sees no hope that Israel will make peace.
Tell the governor of North Dakota that the world is watching if it tries a subterfuge to ban abortion.
The ACLU is fighting to overturn a law that allows the US to shut down organizations by fiat without putting them on trial.
When organizations are shut down by decree, they are told they can sue to reverse the decision. Then when they try to do so, the government finds an excuse to dismiss the case. In effect, the US government has contrived to abolish freedom of association.
This is the sort of dishonest policy we learned to expect from Bush. Now we must learn to associate it with Obama as well.
TheInternational Criminal Court has indicted Omar Bashir, president of the Sudan, for war crimes in Darfur.
Bashir responded by ordering humanitarian aid agencies including Oxfam and Medecins Sans Frontiers to leave Darfur.
To rescue the hostages, the aid must continue. One way or another, the West must prevent these orders from being carried out.
Hillary Clinton made a tiny step forward in US policy by criticizing Israeli plans to demolish Arab homes in Jerusalem.
I have a hunch that her strong statement of support for a two-state solution is meant to put Netanyahu in a difficult position if he tries to officially reject that goal. However, the Israeli government is expert at blocking peace by blaming the Palestinians.
9/11 widows tell Senator Leahy: hold a real investigation and prosecute anyone in the US government who conspired in the attacks.
UK citizens: talk to your MP to oppose clause 152, which would let the government reuse all personal information it holds for any purpose whatsoever.
US financial companies spent 5 billion dollars on lobbying and political campaigns to procure the deregulation that allowed them to create the financial crisis.
I don't see any sign that Obama wants to change the system which lets businesses control our so-called democracy.
Russia has blocked the publication of a book on Stalin and seized archives documenting his murderous rule. It seems to be part of a concerted plan to improve the image of Stalin and of dictatorship in general.
Every state has pages of evil in its history, and every state needs to talk about them and why they were wrong, or it is likely to have more of them.
US citizens: sign this general petition in favor of fixing the US health care system without undue delay.
Australia's attempt to censor the Internet seems to have been blocked.
Nuclear power companies want to make the public pay in advance the tremendous costs of new fission power plants.
Computerized voting machines have been ruled unconstitutional in Germany because they gave the voter no way to verify their votes were not altered.
The article presumes they should be replaced with other machines that would meet the constitutional requirement, but it is not clear to me what sort of machine might be acceptable.
A prestigious international panel has recommended decriminalizing marijuana worldwide.
The mortgage derivatives bubble was made possible by a formula that gave bankers the impression they had a shortcut for measuring risks.
However, none of this would have happened with proper regulation.
Protesting Haitians called for President Aristide to be allowed to return.
Paul Krugman says Obama's budget is progessive, and feasible for the next 10 years, but does not deal with the long term problem of paying for health care.
The only way to make health care substantially cheaper is to remove the private insurance companies from the system.
Human skin can be converted into stem cells.
The real medical importance of this discovery results from the possibilty of making stem cells compatible with any patient. It also provides an opportunity to sidestep the dispute with irrational opposition, but this is really no opportunity, since we would be fools to use it. We must not concede validity to the absurd religious claim that a small ball of cells deserves the rights of a human being.
The US has pledged a lot of aid to rebuild Gaza, but this is all meaningless as long as Israel does not allow Gaza to be rebuilt.
Meanwhile, it continues its double standard, harping on the ineffectual missiles occasionally launched from Gaza, while shutting its eye to Israel's much bigger war crimes.
In the US and the UK, privatization of prisons leads to imprisoning a lot more people.
The International Criminal Court is looking at how to justify jurisdiction over Gaza so as to prosecute Israelis responsible for various war crimes.
Obama's speech about Iraq whitewashed Bush's crimes there and pandered to the pressure to praise the soldiers who killed so many Iraqis while ruining their country.
I disagree with some of the article's points. Since Obama said he would withdraw all the Bush forces by the end of 2011, I will not accuse him of breaking a promise just because he extended the period of the first part of the withdrawal by a few months.
But that's a separate issue.
French president Sarkozy is one of the nastiest exponents of the War of Sharing. He has also been sued for large-scale copyright infringement.
The French usually call him "Sarko". I call him "Sarcome", i.e., cancer.
US citizens: sign this petition to bring the ex-officials of the Bush regime to justice.
US citizens: sign this petition in favor of HR 1106, which lets judges order banks to re-evaluate failed mortgages so people won't lose their houses.
After a Tibetan monk set himself on fire as a protest, Chinese police shot him and took him away.
After three years of drought, California is very short of water. Some farms have been shut down, and cities are having trouble too.
While we cannot say this drought was caused by global warming and only global warming — there's an element of chance fluctuation too — global warming is expected to make drought increasingly frequent in parts of the US, as in parts of other continents.
The US Army cooperated in running secret prisons, and tortured prisoners — occasionally to death.
Despite Obama's commitment to transparency, US lawyers continue to oppose a lawsuit that calls for compliance with Federal law in finding and preserving emails which Bush did his best to lose.
Uri Avnery: over and over, Israeli actions have strengthened Hamas. Is this a cunning plan, stupid folly — or the expression of an unconscious unwillingness to make peace?
China expects Tibet to celebrate, or else.
The US right-wing is attacking some of Obama's nominees, calling them "extremists" for defending mainstream positions.
This is how the right-wing media has operated since the 1980s: labeling any opposition as "extremist" and "Liberal". (They had first given the public a misguided idea of what "Liberal" means, by falsely associating it with extreme positions that real Liberals generally did not support.)
However, it is perfectly rational for right-wing extremists to treat that anyone Obama appoints to the Supreme Court as suspect. Democrats should have assumed that anyone Bush I or II appointed was suspect.
Obama's budget focuses heavily on protecting the envrionment.
US citizens: sign this petition to require Karl Rove to testify.
A new system asks the public to monitor and report internet censorship.
Britain's "Convention on Modern Liberty" opposes the B'liar/Clown system of surveillance and disrespect for human rights.
The TSA says that park workers who lead mules pulling a canal boat around the park must get "transportation worker identification credentials".
While this is absurd, the real outrage is that they impose this demand on truck drivers. What next, clerks at McDonalds?
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