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Congressman Kucinich has introduced articles of impeachment against Dick Cheney.
Democratic party leaders refuse to support the effort. Shame on them!
The TV show Supernanny teaches that parental dictatorship is good, but doesn't measure the harm it does.
Fighting between Ethiopian troops and Islamists continues in Mogadishu.
Since this article says nothing about the departure of Ethiopian troops, which they previously said would happen very soon, I wonder if Bush has convinced them to make their occupation of Somalia permanent.
Sunni-Shi'ite killings are back in Baghdad.
Note that the Al Qa'ida attacks described in this article are not terrorism. "Iraqi" soldiers and police are collaborators, working for the Bush forces, and attacking them is attacking the occupying army. It happens that most of these collaborators are Shi'ites.
Mugabe is systematically rigging the next election in Zimbabwe, even as his thugs arrest and attack the opposition.
Attacking opposition leaders and activists is not a new thing for Mugabe.
Since the white colonizers took the land by force, I don't think they have much of an argument to make for retaining it. But there are good and bad ways to nationalize an enterprise. Zimbabwe's way wrecked them.
The Iraqi government has started to withhold figures on civilian deaths. Apparently it was ordered not to show that Bush is lying.
The African force which is supposed to protect the people of Darfur from the Janjaweed is so undersized that it can barely protect itself.
The Bush wants army news announcements to cooperate with propaganda operations, just as they did in the Vietnam War.
Of course, the "facts" provided for army news announcements are often pre-cooked for propaganda purposes. The US government systematically ordered troops to lie about the death of Pat Tillman from friendly fire, just as they systematically lied to make Jessica Lynch out as a hero. Now the Democrats are showcasing these lies.
How Bush's "military tribunals" will treat confessions obtained by torture as evidence.
This means they are designed to function as part of a system for torturing and "convicting" people regardless of the facts.
A bomb was found at an abortion clinic, designed to kill.
It surely was been planted by Christian theocratic fanatics. Other such fanatics are suing the University of California for refusing to recognize creationist "biology classes" as filling the lab science requirement.
The Panchen Lama, imprisoned by China at the age of 5, is now 18 (if indeed he is alive), and is still in prison.
Al Qa'ida successfully attacked Bush forces troops in Iraq.
This will enable Al Qa'ida to win more support among Iraqi Sunnis, nearly all of whom want to fight the occupiers of their country. They don't all support Al Qa'ida's other mission, which is killing Iraqi Shi'ites. But even those who dislike sectarian war may give Al Qa'ida more support if it conspicuously fights the Bush forces.
UK troops returning from the Bush forces have spoken out to denounce the war. Their base in Basra is under siege by the resistance.
Large supermarket chains are so powerful that they are driving down wages for farm laborers in India.
This article refers to the UK, but I'd expect it is even more true of the US.
Summing up the US' movement toward a police state.
I have not checked all of these references, and some could be mistaken, but I know that most of them are accurate.
The fighting in Mogadishu has driven 300,000 people to flee the city.
The Ethiopians, and the US-constructed "provisional government", have little popular support, and thus no chance of defeating the Islamists.
A brief history of fake news in the US.
Tens of thousands protested in the US to demand reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.
Sunnis protest against Baghdad's 'prison wall'.
Bush is using skewed statictics to prove that Iraq is safer.
But car bombs are not the only form of killing that Bush omits from these figures. Aerial bombardment by the Bush forces kills lots of Iraqis, and they systematically underreport it.
Mongolian herder Tsetsegee Munkhbayar launched an environmental movement that made many mines stop polluting.
The UK's national health service won't pay for drugs to treat macular degeneration until the victim goes blind in one eye.
However, privatized medicine is no solution. The private sector won't treat most of these victims at all (they can't afford it).
Bill Gates gives some of his money to charity, hoping thus to persuade society to overlook the harm he does to get that money.
But how good is this charity really?
Pacific leatherback turtles are headed for extinction, wiped out by human fishing and habitat destruction. A migration "race" with turtles as competitors is trying to get children interested in their fate.
The threats that these turtles face can be found in the "threats" section of this page.
A part of Greenland is revealed as a separate island after the ice shelf connecting it to Greenland melted away.
The Greenland ice sheet is melting faster and faster, threatening to raise sea level by 23 feet and inundate many major cities.
Nigeria's ruling party rigged the elections there.
The opposition has denounced the elections as fraudulent and calls for a new election.
The US elections in 2000 and 2004 were also rigged, and Greg Palast says they are working on rigging the next election already.
In the US: join the rally in Washington on June 10/11 to end the occupation of Palestine.
The Sunni inhabitants of a Baghdad neighborhood don't think that building walls will make them safer. (Perhaps because the death squads that kill Sunnis are Iraqi police and can go where they wish.)
Iraqi prime minister al-Maliki says that the construction should stop, but he can't do anything to stop it, showing how powerless he is.
Mugabe has threatened to expel western diplomats unless they stop meeting with opposition figures and going to their trials.
It is better to have the ambassadors expelled than have them remain while neutralized. However, what this shows is that diplomacy is useless. Only armed intervention will save the people of Zimbabwe.
As a dictator and a murderer, Saddam Hussein was no worse than Mugabe. Yet Bush, who called for an attack on Iraq because Hussein was such a tyrant, has no interest in liberating Zimbabwe from Mugabe. Perhaps Zimbabwe has no oil.
B'liar has abandoned Iraqi interpreters who worked for the Bush forces in Iraq, and now need to flee for their lives.
I don't have much sympathy for Iraqi collaborators, who are rightly being attacked as traitors by their countrymen. But this policy shows the moral corruption of B'liar — the same moral corruption that led to his participation in the attempt to conquer Iraq.
Many Iraqis hold the Bush forces (which they think of as the US) responsible for the violence in their country.
B'liar is trying to undermine public schools with a system of company-run publicly-funded schools. Popular opposition has blocked one of them.
Iran has made progress in uranium enrichment, but is still a few years away from having the uranium needed for a bomb.
I share the suspecion that Iran is planning to make nuclear weapons, but since they seem to be the only thing that can deter an attack by the US, I can't be very critical of this. Iran might use them for attack, but so might the US. The US refuses to promise not to be the first to use nuclear weapons, even against countries that don't have any.
After a 6-year drought, Australia is about to ban irrigation, essentially wiping out agriculture. This drought is unpredecented and is probably due to global warming. Howard, who had ignored warnings that global warming would reduce rainfall in Australia, now reluctantly recognizes that global warming may be real.
The European Union took a small step towards political censorship by making it a crime to deny that various genocides took place, when done in a way that constitutes "incitement to racial hatred".
The added second condition makes the step smaller, but it still goes in a dangerous direction. Even Nazis have the right to advocate their views, and to make "incitement to hatred" a crime is dangerous censorship in itself.
B'liar's recipe for winning hearts and minds away from Al Qa'ida is to work harder at propaganda. However, it is hard for propaganda to overcome setting a bad example.
Chinese political prisoner Wang Xiaoning has sued Yahoo! for giving the Chinese government information that led to his being imprisoned and beaten.
If there is no way for companies to operate in China without supporting torture, then they shouldn't operate in China. (The same applies to the US.)
Uri Avnery: Why Israel should release its Palestinian prisoners.
A well-known Palestinian non-violent activist was raided at night by Israeli troops who sought to intimidate him into stopping.
The mother of a Palestinian prisoner was imprisoned and shackled so as to put pressure on her son.
An Israeli sniper shot a Palestinian teenager, and then shot another Palestinian who went to rescue him. The teenager died.
Nobel peace prize winner Mairead Corrigan joined in the weekly protest at Bil'in and was injured by a rubber bullet and tear gas.
Another non-violent protest, near Bethlehem, was able to break up part of the annexation wall under construction.
The Bush forces are getting so desperate that they are sending seriously injured soldiers into combat.
Bush and B'liar called for stronger sanctions against Sudan, for massacres in Darfur.
They can't actually do anything, because their armies (and their international prestige) have been worn down by Iraq.
Bush's appointees on the Supreme Court upheld the ban on a specific late-term abortion procedure, even when it is the best way to protect the pregnant woman's health.
In effect, they have found a way to make Roe v Wade meaningless while pretending to uphold it. (Dishonesty from the right-wing is normal practice.) The law is vague enough to be stretched to cover all abortions after 12 weeks.
The neocons who planned the invasion of Iraq are not the leaders of the plot. Others more powerful than they asked them to plan it, and made the decision to carry it out.
The US news media systematically and intentionally slanted the news to support Bush's invasion of Iraq. Opposition to the war was labeled "unpatriotic", and talk show host Phil Donahue was fired for not looking "patriotic" enough.
I would like to know more about the "patriotism police" — how it operated, and who organized it.
In Bangladesh, Aralia Island is gradually being drowned as global warming makes sea level rise.
Iran officially encourages vigilantes to kill people who don't obey Islamic rules. The Supreme Court just ruled that vigilantes that killed 18 people-- for crimes such as having sex-- can't be executed as murderers. They may however face imprisonment for the killings.
I don't criticize the outcome as such, since I think the death penalty is wrong. But it comes from a combination of two wrongs (having the death penalty, and supporting lynching). They cancelled each other out in this case, but that isn't usually so.
Both of these wrongs come out of Islamic law, which is just another name for brutal tyranny. Respecting individuals' religious freedom does not mean tolerating Islamic law.
Demand for merbau wood for floors is destroying the forests of New Guinea. In 35 years, this will stop, because that species will all be all but gone.
Four million Iraqis have already become refugees, and more are trying to flee, but they are finding it increasingly hard to gain admission anywhere (even in other parts of Iraq).
Large explosions in Baghdad killed many civilians, and showed that the Bush forces cannot bring security to Iraq.
My proposal for restoring peace in Iraq is to pull the Bush forces out, cancel all actions to steal Iraq's oil and privatize its state assets, and give both the Sunnis and the Shi'ites armed help-- in the form of troops from Islamic countries they can trust-- in maintaining defensive perimeters around their parts of Iraq (and their parts of Baghdad).
In Ecuador, 78% voted to endorse President Correa's plan for a new constitution.
US telephone companies are corrupting many consumer groups into lobbying for them.
As Bush wins favor among Americans by bemoaning the massacre of some 30 people, Americans mostly do not hold him responsible for massacring 600,000 Iraqis.
Last year, the Bush forces pointed to Tal Afar as a picture of success. This year it fell apart into sectarian bloodshed.
Muqtada al Sadr has pulled his party's ministers out of the Iraqi coalition. He has also recently called for protests against the Bush occupation of Iraq.
In Kandahar, ordinary citizens prefer the Taliban to NATO for simple safety.
They might be happy with a strong secular government too, but they don't see any possibility of that.
A dispute about electronic voting has become an issue in the French presidential election.
It is utterly foolish to use electronic machines for elections. The practical advantages are insignificant compared to what we lose: confidence in the outcome of the election.
After US marines in Afghanistan wantonly killed civilians, they seized journalists' cameras to cover it up. The US government continues to defend their destruction of evidence.
Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein has been imprisoned for a year by the Bush forces in Iraq, with no charges filed.
It's too bad that the AP won the Pulitzer Prize, rather than Bilal himself. If he had won such a prize, the heat on the Bush regime might be enough to make them release him.
Democratic leaders seem to be standing firm against Bush regarding their flawed but useful bill for Iraq troop withdrawal.
The Bush regime has turned disinformation through the mainstream meda into a weapon, and the world has become aware of this. Now it is trying to disinform the Internet as well.
Fake drugs are sold in large quantities, and have taught the malaria parasite to develop resistance to the real drugs.
Former Republican Congressman McCloskey left the party, saying "A pox on their values", and became a Democrat.
While this is good news in the short term, it is partly a reflection of the fact that today's Democratic Party largely has adopted values and policies that once belonged to the Republican Party. As people who sincerely support the former Republican values become Democrats, we who sincerely support the former Democratic values become Greens.
B'liar has done one good thing: a campaign to win control of the International Whaling Commission away from Japan and maintain the controls on whaling.
A court decision in the US, made in the name of copyright law, will shut down Internet radio unless it is reversed. Its retroactive application will bankrupt the netcasters.
The UN as well as Ecuador recognize that human activities are threatening the ecology of the Galapagos islands.
I think that controlling the human population of the islands must be part of the solution.
Bush plans to turn Baghdad into a semi-prison to end the violence (and the resistance). It is not likely to work.
Tens or hundreds of thousands of Iraqis heeded Muqtada al Sadr's call and protested peacefully, calling for the Bush forces to leave their country.
Courageous ex-Muslims in Europe have founded an organization to oppose religious bullying by Muslims. The death threats they have received illustrate the evil they are trying to oppose.
British MP Norman Baker is assembling evidence that Dr Kelly was murdered by the British government. He already has plenty of evidence to disprove the official story of suicide.
11 retired US generals say: cut greenhouse gas emissions today, or fight wars tomorrow.
The B'liar regime is letting Sudanese government officials interrogate Darfuri refugees in the UK.
A federal law that violates the Roe v Wade decision by prohibiting abortions in many circumstances will soon be considered by the Supreme Court. Bush's appointees there were most likely chosen for their willingness to take away abortion rights.
An article in a major Canadian newspaper denounces the US "war on terror" as a fraud for stealing oil, and says Canada should pull out of it.
Why Israel has no grounds for rejecting the Arab peace offer.
Israeli soldiers attack Jenin refugee camp every day, just to be cruel. When they took over the family of pharmacist Ahmed Hourieh, they admitted that nobody in the family was to be arrested. So they just made the family stay out in the cold half the night, while they trashed the house.
In Qalqilia, Ali Shukri was wanted for arrest. Since he wasn't home, police shot some of the women in his family, then blew up their home, damaging the neighbors homes. That'll teach them not to live near anyone who is a suspect!
Members of the Palestinian Parliament have been in prison for a year, charged with the crime of having run as members of Hamas.
Hamas was built up by Israel in the 1980s so as to undermine the influence of Arafat's secular Fatah organization.
In Nablus, Israeli troops following their usual practice of taking civilian hostages and using them as human shields were caught on video. This led to a scandal, which surprised them, because they normally expect to get away with this.
Oxfam International calls for an end to the financial blockade of Palestine, because it is causing starvation.
Police in Baltimore arrested a 7-year-old child for riding a motorbike on the sidewalk. Then they handcuffed him and took him to the police station.
I shudder at the thought of what they would do to an adult caught riding on the sidewalk.
Police in Pittsburgh attacked peaceful protestors, then arrested them. One protestor tried to photograph a policeman who had just made a nasty remark and the policeman beat him up. Others who tried to photograph the attack on the first one were then attacked and arrested. This is part of a long-term systematic campaign of violence and sabotage against antiwar activity in Pittsburgh.
The police are probably right-wing extremists who believe that dissent is treason. This is par for the course, for police, but Bush is also responsible since he created a climate of disrespect for human rights and dissent.
A suicide bomber attacked the Iraqi parliament, having penetrated 8 lines of Bush forces security checkpoints. It is a dramatic indication that Bush's troop increase has failed to crush the resistance.
Gordon Drown arranged for reports to exaggerate the success of doing government activities with private financing (and private profit).
A UN campaign aims to make "sacred" sites double as wildlife preserves.
Bush has systematically appointed the graduates of a school for theocratic Christians, many of whom are incompetent or dishonest. And they are already planning to keep this up after Bush is gone.
Garry Kasparov, chess champion turned dissident, was arrested in Moscow for a peaceful march to criticize the antidemocratic policies of President Putin.
Leading Democratic candidates have refused to debate on Faux News.
Several Serb nationalists have been found guilty of killing Bosnian Muslim prisoners in Srebrenica. Bush forces soldiers who have done similar things have mostly gone unpunished.
How did Iran treat its British prisoners? Some of the ex-prisoners describe treatment that is rather nasty, though not as bad as what Bush does.
However, there is some reason to think the ex-prisoners were pressured into by the B'liar regime into making false accusations.
I don't find this evidence conclusive. I would not be surprised if the Ahmadinejad regime abuses prisoners, nor if B'liar made the ex-prisoners lie. In any case, we should focus our criticism on the bigger and worse offender: the Bush regime.
Uri Avnery: the Israeli Shin Bet now considers democratic political dissent from the definition of Israel as a "Jewish state" as a security threat.
Police in India tortured Choles Ritchil to death. Mr Ritchil was a leader of the Garo indigenous people.
Evicting people to make a nature preserve is sometimes necessary, but India needs above all to do a better job of protecting its existing nature preserves.
Bush forces casualties this month are going at the highest rate in the four years of the occupation.
The prosecutor firings was part of a scheme to cover up Bush's rigging of elections by distraction. And the cover-up resembles the Watergate cover-up.
Bush's wars have so drained the army that he hijacked to conquer Iraq that he has decided to extend tours of duty. That will not help morale.
Lots of West Point graduates are leaving the army as soon as they can -- the highest rate of leaving since the Vietnam war.
The weakening of the US Army is a good thing. It is far stronger than it needs to be to face any actual military threats to the US, and any additional strength it has is used for unjust wars on behalf of the corporations our government serves.
There are a number of places in the world where governments oppress people so badly that they justify a war of liberation. They include Darfur, Zimbabwe, and Uzbekistan. (Afghanistan was one of them, but Bush failed to follow through because he really wanted to attack Iraq instead.) But there's no chance Bush would use the army for such a worthy cause. What he wants to do is attack Iran.
Bush has a new plan for sabotaging federal agencies whose job is to regulate business. It seems to authorize the OB to rewrite reports produced by agency scientists.
A PBS program by Bill Moyers shows how the US press systematically went along with the lies Bush told to justify his conquest of Iraq.
Bush's new spy chief wants even more power to do surveillance in the US.
I have a suspicion that "monitoring foreigners...by tapping phones and email accounts" includes tapping the phones and email accounts of US citizens that the foreigners talk with, or might talk with. In other words, absolutely anyone.
Iran is increasingly selling its oil in currencies other than the US dollar. This may puncture the power of the US.
If the US loses its ability to borrow from the rest of the world through commerce conducted in dollars, the full weight of the US economic weakness will come home to roost, and the burden will probably fall on ordinary Americans, as the rich people who benefited from the policies which caused this weakness will evade it. Injustice after injustice.
Wolfowitz, installed by Bush as president of the World Bank and disliked by nearly everyone there, is now in trouble for having kept his girlfriend on the payroll.
I don't think the initial situation was actually wrong; I think it is unfair to fire someone because "Your lover just became head of the organization." On the other hand, the World Bank / State Department shuffle that they set up to disguise the situation cannot be excused at all.
The FBI's focus on terrorism leaves it short-handed for dealing with swindlers.
How convenient for Bush's cronies.
A group of scientists and 9/11 victims' relatives have asked the NIST to for corrections in its report on the collapse of the WTC towers.
John Pilger: Iran may be the greatest crisis of modern times.
Iranian diplomat Jalal Sharafi, who was kidnaped early this year and released just before Iran released the British Bush forces personnel, says that while a captive he was tortured by CIA agents. His body bears witness to this.
Speaker Pelosi's visit to Syria threatens to undermine Bush's desire to isolate Syria just as Speaker Wright's discussions with Nicaraguan President Orgeta brought an end to Reagan's policy of arming the Contras to try to overthrow him.
Jimmy Carter praises her visit.
Tigers are on the way to extinction, because the government of India has failed to protect them.
Iran announced that it has begun large-scale nuclear enrichment. President Ahmadinejad says that if Iran is threatened it will pull out of the treaties that block it from producing uranium for nuclear weapons. Iran is not close to building a nuclear bomb -- and due to the IAEA supervision it has accepted, it can't even start preparing uranium to make bombs unless it first rejects that supervision.
If it is true that Iran trains Iraqi resistance fighters, that is not surprising, since the CIA funds groups that carry out terrorist attacks in Iran.
If Bush is serious about punishing terrorists and their supporterds, he should start with himself.
The antivehicle mines used by the Iraqi Resistance produce shock waves that can cause brain injuries in people who are not visibly injured.
One can compare the unseen effects of TBI from the resistance's IEDs with the unseen effect of radiation from the Bush forces' DU (dirty uranium) weapons, or the unseen effect of standing in "stress positions" for hours or being denied sleep for days.
The official story is that Martin Luther King Jr. was killed by James Earl Ray, acting on his own for no particular reason. King's relatives do not believe this story, and in 1998 they won a wrongful death suit against others who admitted to conspiring to kill King.
Supporting evidence about this conspiracy.
Bush's "war on terrorism" includes releasing terrorist Luis Posada on bail. Venezuela is seeking to extradite him so as to try him for the bombing of a Cuban airliner.
Legal scholar and professor emeritus Walter Murphy has been placed on the "no fly" list for criticizing Bush.
The "authorities" will probably not admit that that was the reason for putting Murphy on the list. But since they refuse to justify what they do, we are entitled to judge them based on surmise.
Proposal: put a warning on ads for air travel: "flying causes climate change".
Al Jazeera stands firm for freedom of the press, despite murder and imprisonment of its correspondents by the Bush regime.
Israeli prisons regularly torture Palestinians 16 years old, and sometimes down to 14 years, just the way they torture adults.
Over half of the tropical coral reefs for which data is recorded are being degraded by overfishing.
Cheney is trying once again to claim that Saddam Hussein worked with Al Qa'ida.
B'liar is planning to keep troops in the Bush forces for 5 years.
A substantial new nature reserve established in Indonesia provides hope for preservation of hundreds of bird and mammal species. However, this is a small fraction of Indonesia's forests, and the overall forest situation in Indonesia remains bleak.
The porbeagle shark has been so nearly wiped out by fishing that the EU decided it could not deserve to be protected.
Ecuador's President Correa has won a confrontation with Congress, permitting the referendum for a new constitutional convention to go forward.
A coming UN report will detail the many threats to humanity and the natural world if we don't cut the CO2 emissions.
Israel took a Palestinian mother hostage to pressure her sons into making a confession.
If they do make a confession, we won't know whether it is true or false, but Israel will surely present it as truth.
Israel's retired chief interrogator proudly discussed his torture techniques in an interview. As he pulled the life support tubes out of a wounded Palestinian in the hospital, the doctor willingly turned his back.
Bassam Amin is a Palestinian nonviolent activist. His 10 year old daughter Abir was shot and killed from behind by an Israeli soldier this year. The Israeli "authorities" lied about it in the usual way. This article is by Bassam's Isreali colleague.
300 residents of a Palestinian refugee camp near Jerusalem have been made refugees a second time; Israel has declared their homes illegal. This is a common practice of the occupation.
As violence rages in Darfur, the B'liar regime wants to deport Darfuris back to Sudan. A judge blocked these deportations, but the government plans to appeal the decision.
The Bank of Credit and Commerce International, set up by the CIA under Bush I, provides the missing link between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. It funded them both, in the 1980s.
For Bush, sabotaging prosecutors who are willing to apply laws that hurt Bush's cronies is nothing new. He did it as governor of Texas.
The Guardian gives the story behind the Iranian capture and release of British sailors in the Bush forces, and the negotiations involved.
Amnesty International says the prison in Guantanamo is even nastier than before.
A whole town in Australia was poisoned by a lead mine, but even after all the birds died, the authorities insisted nothing was wrong.
This sort of thing happens when governments value big businesses above the citizens, which is common with today's sick democracy.
Making ethanol fuel from straw instead of corn may be on the verge of commercial feasibility. But it is not quite certain.
Bush told the EPA to claim that it has no authority to regulate CO2 pollution. The Supreme Court ruled that it can.
However, as long as Bush is in charge, he will probably not let the EPA really do anything.
Canada, Eritrea and Sweden are pressing Ethiopia for information about their citizens among the hundreds that Ethiopia holds prisoner secretly on behalf of the Bush regime.
At least one US citizen is believed to be among these prisoners, but his government won't do anything for him.
Democrats in Congress decided not to refer to the "war on terrorism" in the military budget.
This change is both correct and important. Since terrorism is a tactic, not a movement or a people or a nation, the idea of fighting a war "against terrorism" is basically absurd. It is not good to endorse absurdities, in laws or anywhere else.
Meanwhile, Bush uses that expression to keep Americans scared, so that they will support measures that hurt themselves or others. Cutting down this practice is very important.
Thailand has "banned" Youtube for a video that insults Thailand's king. So Youtube (a product of Google) says it will implement a special feature so Thailand can block just those videos.
That's not what I would call resolute defense of freedom of speech.
A setback for theocratic Christians: Bush's anti-birth-control appointee to family-planning post has resigned!
Mugabe's thugs are killing and maiming journalists -- including the one believed to have smuggled out footage of opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai.
The US Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal of the Guantanamo prisoners who have been denied due process -- for now. It left open the possibility of hearing the case later.
MoveOn's founders explain why they supported the flawed Democratic bill that sets a time limit for removing the Bush forces from Iraq. It's not what they really want, but it is progress.
Veterans for Peace is organizing US military personnel (some of whom have actually participated in the Bush forces) to call on Congress to end the occupation.
The US-backed Afghan government is preparing a press censorship law.
Continuing the War on Integrity, Bush wants to appoint three officials to control pollution who have represented the polluters they would be supposed to regulate.
The Iraq withdrawal bill passed by Democrats in Congress states various conditions for the Bush forces to remain for more than a few months. One shameful condition is passage of the law that would hand over Iraq's oil to western oil companies.
An Australian who briefly fought for the Taliban in Afghanistan, and was held in Guantanamo and described by the Bushmen as "the worst of the worst", is to be sent to Australia for 9 months imprisonment. This proves that the US does not really consider him much of a threat.
Part of the deal is that he cannot tell what was done to him in Guantanamo for a year. This is to help the Bush-supporting government of Australia in the next Australian election.
Bush and the US Congress are going to fight it out over pulling the Bush forces combat troops out if Iraq.
The Democrats in Congress are in a weak position because they don't dare criticize Bush as he deserves to be criticized.
The UK has some 4 million TV cameras watching people in public. Most of them perform surveillance, but some are used to scold people immediately for fighting and littering.
I don't much mind TV cameras when the limit of what they do is enable someone to watch for fighting, littering or theft. They become a threat to freedom when they are used to make permanent records of where people go. Many of the cameras in the UK are doing just that: the police aim to record all car travel.
UK resident Mahmoud Abu Rideh has won a court battle against a "control order" which greatly denied his freedom even though he was never charged with a crime.
I would like to find out what the new control order says.
The Bush forces tried in January to capture Iranian diplomatic envoys that had gone to Iraq to meet with Iraqi and Kurdish officials. They captured only underlings, but angered Iran enough to spur retaliation.
Iran's retaliation showed restraint, since it captured military personnel that had arguably entered Iranian waters without permission.
Iran said recently that the Bush forces will allow its representatives to meet with the Iranians captured in January.
The EU's carbon trading scheme is failing to curb emissions from big polluters.
It seems to be yet another case of the subservience of government to business.
If our governments don't find the will to stand up to business and impose major cuts in their emissions, the rich people that own the large businesses will buy their way out of the resulting problems -- but that will be impossible for everyone else.
New Mexico has passed a law saying that the state must supply marijuana to sick people that need it.
In other states, which have authorized sick people to grow their own marijuana, the federal government sometimes arrests them. I wonder what it will do in New Mexico.
Henry Kissinger says that victory for the Bush forces is impossible. He also hints at a solution along the lines previously suggested here, in cooperation with neighboring countries.
No plan that is based on establishing permanent control of Iraq will be accepted by the Iraqi people.
Iraq veterans who oppose the war showed Americans what it's like to be occupied by the Bush forces -- with street theater in Washington DC.
The Taliban executed three Afghans for giving information to NATO forces. They want Afghans to regard those three as traitors. If Afghans do see it that way, NATO cannot possibly win.
The Maoist rebels have joined Nepal's government, to prepare for a vote on abolishing the monarchy.
Hussam Shaheen, a Palestinian nonviolent peace activist, was arrested by Israel for a protest chant, and faces 24 years imprisonment.
A former prisoner in Guantanamo is now running for parliament in Australia, to spread awareness of torture.
Uncivilized Iran humilliates its Bush forces prisoners, because it fails to apply the latest Bush regime norms. (By Monty Python.)
A report perhaps coming from Russian intelligence says that Bush is planning to attack Iran on April 6.
There is speculation that the Iranian capture of some British members of the Bush forces may have been intended to prevent an attack.
A foreign resident of Thailand has been sentenced to 10 years in prison for spray painting over pictures of the king.
Nobody has a right not to be criticized -- not a king, not a prophet. Nobody.
Heavy fighting has broken out in Mogadishu between the Ethiopean troops and the Islamists.
Lots of people predicted this would happen.
After the US released some Russian citizens from torture in Guantanamo, it sent them back to Russia, where some have been tortured into confessing crimes.
Russian officials gave diplomatic assurances that it wouldn't do this, but I am sure they knew that the Bush regime would wink at noncompliance. This is why diplomatic assurances that "we won't torture them", coming from a regime that regularly practices torture, are worthless.
San Francisco is moving to ban plastic shopping bags from supermarkets and drugstore chains. Paper bags are made from cutting trees, it is true, but these trees are renewable resources.
The UK's CO2 emissions are soaring, showing that all of B'liar's talk about reducing them is just B'lies.
B'liar's government plans to reverse its US-imitating policy of more and longer prison sentences, and aim for rehabilitation instead.
Remember the cute baby seals that were killed in Canada for their fur? Thanks to global warming, all the baby seals in the Gulf of St Lawrence died this year. This problem, together with several years of unsustainable hunting, has devastated the population.
But Canada will allow hunting there anyway.
The other populations of these seals are not yet affected by the warming, but they will be in the future. Global warming is leading to the elimination of permanent ice in the arctic, and this could cause the species' extinction -- along with that of polar bears.
In Denmark, anyone found near a protest can be arrested, and is considered guilty unless proved innocent.
As the Amazon rainforest is cut down for soybean production, often illegally, the shutdown of an export terminal could be a substantial victory, if it is not reversed.
RFIDs are being secretly snuck into many products, including credit cards. You can detect them with an RFID detector, and you can smash them with a hammer.
Bisher al-Rawi, who has been imprisoned in Guantanamo for 5 years despite having worked for British Intelligence, may be released to return to the UK.
The UK government for a long time refused to even try to get him out.
A joint committee of MPs concluded that the UK's asylum system is "inhumane".
Mugabe's police are arresting large number of the opposition in Zimbabwe, and beating them up just out of spite. Others in his own party seems to be looking for a way to get rid of him.
The US mass media repeatedly and systematically attacked Gore using false and distorted quotations. They accused him of "lying" for words he didn't say.
I don't support Gore, and I didn't in 2000, because he bows down to big business almost as much as Republicans do. He supports antidemocratic "free trade" treaties. When he was vice president, he tried to pressure South Africa not to authorize licenses for generic medicines for AIDS -- acting, in effect, on behalf of the drug companies. (Nowadays the Bush regime does the same thing.)
However, Gore's real faults don't make the media's dishonest campaign against him any more excusable. It was in no way based on Gore's real shortcomings. It was simple character assassination. I would expect it was planned by the executives of the media companies, who know which candidate they favor.
Gore is not the only victim of this. Remember how Howard Dean was attacked, when he was the front runner for the Democratic nomination, by playing his shout of victory in a distorted way? He had recently criticized media concentration, so the media lied about him nonverbally.
I can testify myself to the arrogance of reporters. Many of them insist on calling the GNU system "Linux", and present the shallowest of reasons to justify this unfairness -- and then they expect me to be desperate for their attention.
Many US sources support Iran's contention that the US is already engaged in acts of war against Iran.
As the Amazon rainforest is cut down for soybean production, often illegally, the shutdown of an export terminal could be a substantial victory-- if it is not reversed.
The US Senate joined the House in passing a requirement to remove the Bush forces from Iraq. But it lacks the binding deadline of the House bill.
These bills are not what ought to be done. What ought to be done is to pull out all the troops, without delay. Nonetheless, they are much better than nothing, as evinced by Dubya's reaction.
It is interesting to analyze the fallacious Bush responses -- all based on trying to confuse the issue.
B'liar says the captured Bush forces marines and sailors were in Iraqi waters. This article argues that, although no one can be sure, it is more plausible that that location constitutes Iranian waters.
However, the Iranians could have just told those Bush forces personnel to leave. That they did something more serious might be a response to threats of war, undercover forces infiltrating, terror attacks, etc.
Former Congressman Bob Barr, former extreme prohibitionist, is now lobbying for the Marijuana Policy Project to end federal anti-marijuana activity.
Bangladesh is being affected by climate change in many disastrous ways.
Darfur aid relief 'close to collapse', UN chief warns.
When businesses face criticism for mistreating the environment or the public, they have a large toolbox of arguments they use, whether valid or not, to deflect pressure for regulation.
Japanese Prime Minister Abe made an inadequate apology to the women that the Japanese Army used as prostitutes. not recognizing that the Army forced them into this.
In Indonesia, the Japanese occupiers convinced families to send their teenage daughters for "education in Japan", but the ships took them to military zones where they were forced to act as prostitutes. After the war, those who survived were too ashamed to try to go home. Pramodya Ananta Toer encountered some of them while a political prisoner, and later collected testimony which shows how widespread and systematic this practice was.
The Bush regime has decided to reinterpret the Endangered Species Act so as to negate much of its effect.
A highly respected Spanish judge who has been involved with the trials of many important terrorists, has called for war crimes charges to be filed against Bush, B'liar, and their former Spanish supporter, Aznar.
The Bush regime intentionally sabotaged the DOJ's case against the big tobacco companies.
Native groups from Alaska have joined many others to ask Congress to put limits on CO2 emission.
A large coal company is lobbying to replace that with research on "clean coal" technology--research which might, perhaps, provide an acceptable alternative. An absurd idea.
What it is like for Iraqi refugees fleeing to Syria.
The New York Times published a picture of threatening message from a wall in Baghdad. This article claims that the message must have been written by someone that didn't really speak Arabic.
The EU may try again to write a constitution (without using that name).
With current political leadership, no good can be expected from this. The proposed constitution enshrined the power of business, and they are likely to try that again.
A US lawsuit accusing Rumsfeld of presiding over the torture of prisoners was thrown out on the grounds that the prisoners have no right to sue.
A system that refuses to hold officials that allow torture responsible for their actions is a system that endorses torture.
After The Lancet published a study estimating that the invasion of Iraq had caused the violent deaths of 600,000 Iraqis, B'liar's scientific advisors told him that the study's analysis was valid. B'liar and his men then told the public that the report was invalid.
The B'liar regime has still not admitted the truth. I have read elsewhere that the BBC used the Freedom of Information act to find out what the advisors said. No wonder B'liar wants to destroy the Freedom of Information act.
For more information see here.
In Ulster, the leaders of the Catholics and Protestants have made real peace, and now will go into government together.
The Bush forces use around 50,000 private mercenaries in addition to the soldiers who are officially soldiers. Around 800 have been killed, but they are not included in the casualty lists. Since military regulations do not apply, it is hard to get any information about them.
Mugabe has imposed a state of emergency, sending police hit squads against opposition leaders.
Somalis who fled to Kenya were interrogated by the US and then flown to secret prisons in undisclosed locations.
Iran captured some Bush forces marines and sailors who were inspecting a civilian ship.
Iran says they were in Iranian waters, while B'liar says no. Neither side can be trusted, though.
International double standard: Iran and the US.
The government of Iran is no champion of human rights either; it arrests people without trial and sometimes tortures them. However, it has not started wars of aggression.
Iran's democracy is rather limited, since elected officials can be overruled by the mullahs, and candidates cannot even run without their approval. The US' democracy is rather limited, since elected officials can be overruled by the "free trade" treaties that transfer power from the state to business, and candidates have little chance of winning national office without support from business.
Former Bush forces Sergeant Provance, who was gagged when he tried to push the Abu Ghraib torture investigation to the higherups that instigated the torture, reports on what he saw at a screening of "Ghosts of Abu Ghraib": Senator Lindsey Graham openly endorsed torture.
The governors of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, Republicans of course, are planning to rob the treasury by privatizing the turnpikes.
After opposition activist Tendayi Goneso fled Zimbabwe, the police killed his wife because they couldn't get him. Now, as Mugabe's rule heads for absolute cruelty, the UK seems to be preparing to deport him back to Zimbabwe.
That site has badly designed HTML; you may need to go to the 18th article by hand.
Uri Avnery: Palestinian school textbooks don't recognize Israel and its frontiers. And Israeli school textbooks don't recognize Palestine and its frontiers -- so they are even.
Genetically modified crops could be responsible for wiping out bee populations. They don't kill bees directly, but seem to destroy their immune systems.
Dr. Hansen testified to Congress about how NASA gagged him.
The orders were given verbally so as to be able to deny they were given.
It appears that Khalid Sheik Mohammed was tortured into false confessions--like many other Guantanamo prisoners. Even worse, Senator Lindsay Graham knew about the torture of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, and did nothing to stop it.
The US House of Representatives approved a law requiring combat troops from the US to be withdrawn from the Bush forces, by September 2008. But this doesn't include all the troops in the Bush forces, so it doesn't really require a withdrawal, or an end of the occupation and colonization of Iraq.
The Israeli police had arrested a Palestinian, without charges of course. To put pressure on him, they humiliated his family and made them pretend to be prisoners.
Congressional democrats have backed down on plans to block Bush from attacking Iran, thus in effect consenting to a war at any time.
Congressional democrats have backed down on plans to block Bush from attacking Iran -- obeying AIPAC over the objections of most American Jews.
Belgium has passed a law banned Dirty Uranium shells and armor. After two years, the US will not be allowed to bring such weapons into Belgium or ship them through Antwerp.
Dubya's War on Integrity continues one that was started by Reagan.
One point that this article does not mention is Reagan's destruction of anti-trust law, which was only partly reversed by Clinton. This, together with the transfer of power to large companies brought about by Clinton's "free trade" treaties, has made the general politcal situation much worse for progressives in a long-term way.
In the Siria Valley of Honduras, a gold mine takes all the water, so that poor people have to buy water to drink. The government hardly taxes the mine at all, so they get very little in exchange for the loss of their water.
Birds in the US are staying north for the winter -- possibly due to global warming.
An Italian journalist, held by the Taliban as a spy for two weeks when he sought an interview, tells a story of bloody cruelty alternating with hospitality. Before the Taliban decided he was a journalist and let him go, they beheaded his driver.
Later it was revealed that the journalist had been exchanged for Taliban prisoners.
The occasions when FBI has got personal information beyond even the weak limits of the U SAP AT RIOT Act may number 3,000, and 600 of the cases may be flagrantly illegal.
This does not count the times when the U SAP AT RIOT Act legally authorized the FBI to trample our rights. They number almost 1000 a week.
Gordon Drown announced plans to cut taxes on some low-paid workers, but increase taxes on the lowest-paid workers.
What poor people need is not a tax cut (assuing their taxes are fairly low already), but rather increased social services paid for by taxing the rich.
Uddhav Bhandari, who fled to the UK from Nepal after exposing police corruption there, went to a hearing that could have decided to deport him back to Nepal. Rather than plead his case, he set himself on fire and died.
Refugees like Bhandari should not have to fear deportation. Shame on the UK!
Proyecto Varela is a campaign for human rights in Cuba. Oswaldo Payá obtained more than 10,000 signatures on a petition for a referendum for basic freedoms, such as freedom of the press and association, and release of political prisoners. According to the Cuban constitution, that means the referendum must be held -- but it has not been.
Payá seeks peaceful reconciliation among Cubans, and wants to preserve the achievements of the Cuban revolution (health care, education, elimination of extreme poverty, and independence from the US and multinational business). As a result, the right-wing Cuban exiles in Miami don't like him either.
Most reports say that Castro regime holds 284 people prisoner without trial in Cuba, but the last reliable figures are from late 2005: 70 political prisoners.
The bulk of the prisoners held without trial in Cuba -- almost 400 -- are not held by Castro's government. They are prisoners of the Bush regime, in Guantanamo.
All of these prisoners, whichever government holds them, deserve to be freed, or given fair trials.
A Bush official who came from the oil business made hundreds of changes in US government reports, all to deny global warming.
Even more disgusting, some Republicans in Congress support it.
I disagree, however, with the accusation that Cooney acted out of loyalty to Bush, who had appointed him. I would say that Cooney continued was working for the oil companies once he was nominally working for the US government -- just like Bush and Cheney.
Four years after Bush's invasion, Iraq is a blood-drenched disaster. A rare journalistic visit outside Baghdad shows the level of violence in the rest of Iraq, and how little the Bush forces (whether nominally American or Iraqi) can do about it.
Congressional democrats are trying to reverse part of the Bush regime's policy of secrecy.
Supermarkets in Venezuela have been pushing up prices of basic foodstuffs--doubling them in some cases. Chavez told them that if they do this, they will be nationalized.
Price controls have a tendency to cause shortages, so they may be part of the cause of the problem. However, businesses that take advantage of such situations with speculation are not innocent. Nonetheless, I would probably prefer to break up the big supermarket chains, introducing more competition, rather than control prices.
Zimbabwe's dictator is arresting opposition leaders as they try to leave the country.
The opposition has walked out of the Egyptian parliament in protest against new laws to suppress political opposition.
Professor Zimbardo, past president of the American Psychology Association, says that torture in Bush's prisons resulted from a system that encourages it, and that Bush should be tried for war crimes.
Hear, hear!
A secret Bush regime plan, written for the State Department by oil company executives, called for using the occupation of Iraq to raise the price of oil, so as to make a windfall for the oil companies.
A high oil price promotes conservation, so in itself it is good. But it ought to be accompanied by a windfall profits tax, so that the windfall goes to the treasury and not to Bush's cronies. However, that's not what Bush would want. Enriching his cronies is his aim.
Tony B'liar may someday face trial in the International Criminal Court for the crime of starting the war in Iraq.
A court ruled in favor of prosecution on drug charges of a sick woman, whose doctors say only marijuana can keep her alive. If she is convicted and sentenced to prison, it would amount to a death sentence with a very painful method of execution.
Two activists who vocally supported Palestinian rights in the 1980s have been persecuted by the US government for 20 years. When judges dismiss charges, the US government files new charges.
They have just won dismissal of the charges against them, but will Bush allow that to stick?
The nuclear power industry has hired spokesmen formerly associated with the environmental movement, and presents them as environmentalists for nuclear power.
The Bush regime says that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has confessed planning the 9/11 attacks in the US and other terrorist attacks.
Since this confession was presented in a secret trial, we have no way of telling whether he really confessed at all. If he did, we cannot be sure the confession is true. Torture will make people confess to crimes they did not commit, and we know he was tortured.
Beyond general suspicion, there is evidence that this confession is not true: he confessed to planning to bomb a bank which was founded only after he was captured.
Bush regime continues to torture prisoners, in Iraq as well as in Guantanamo.
Bush deserves a fair trial before he is imprisoned for this. And he should not be tortured.
Police in Pakistan rampaged through a newspaper and TV station's office, to stop them from showing videos of protests.
A statement by the organization attacked.
The old Union Carbide plant in Bhopal is poisoning the public again. The Indian government is ignoring its own laws and court judgment by failing to supply them with potable water.
A new Palestinian national unity government might end the fighting between Hamas and Fatah. It has also won recognition from Norway.
The conditions that the US and EU demand of the Palestinians would be fair if they were demanded also of Israel. Israel must recognize the existence and territorial integrity of Palestine in exchange for a similar recognition from Palestine. And it makes no sense to demand that Palestinians end their rather small level of violence without demanding that Israel end its much greater level of violence.
Halliburton is planning to move to Dubai, apparently so as to thwart investigation of how it robbed the US treasury with Cheney's help.
Zimbabwean opposition leader Tsvangirai points to the injuries from his beating in prison to galvanize opposition.
Chiquita Banana funded paramilitaries in Colombia, and shipped arms to them. They killed union organizers, which Chiquita must have found useful. Eventually Chiquita informed the Bush regime, and continued supporting the paramilitaries for almost a year after.
The article says Chiquita sold its Colombian subsidiary, but I wonder what relationship they continue to have. Perhaps it is enough relationship that Chiquita remains morally responsible for its current conduct, though I do not knoow.
Compare this with the world-wide boycott of Coca Cola Company for using paramilitaries to kill union organizers in Colombia.
The US is now spending over a trillion dollars a year on security, defense, and offensive war.
UN investigators place the responsibility for massacres in Darfur squarely on the government of Sudan.
Torture Gonzales is in political trouble for the political firing of US attorneys that had too much integrity.
Gonzalez was operating on orders from Harriet Miers, a close aide of Bush.
It seems plausible that Miers discussed this with Bush, even though we have no proof yet. But even if he did not specifically approve this plan, he is responsible for it, because it comes out of the general climate of corruption created by his War on Integrity.
A Sikh faces jail in India for 'singing about human rights'.
In a wealthy area of Sao Paulo, poor squatters who live in an abandoned building wait to be evicted.
They are squatting because they are poor, not on principle. They would surely be happy to be bought out for a price that would be small potatoes to the rich people that want to use the site. Their refusal to pay that amount just reinforces the nastiness of their greed.
An Iranian blogger who was arrested for reporting on a police raid has been freed -- but other human rights activists have been arrested.
I've seen reports that the US does support violent separatist groups in Iran. And the US does have a practice of feeding money to opposition groups even in democratic countries, for motives that have nothing to do with human rights. This is a disaster for human rights workers, since it means that US funds are tainted.
Bliar has put forward a bill setting up a framework for major reductions in CO2 emissions in the UK. However, it lacks the penalty provisions necessary to make sure it is enforced, and doesn't spell out policies to reach the targets.
Pakistan's ruler Musharraf has arrested the chief judge, who was taking his job too seriously in a case about hundreds of human rights activists that have been disappeared, Bush-style. Lawyers protested this, and were attacked by policemen, receiving the treatment usually reserved for poor and unprestigious people that protest.
B'liar's callous response to greater poverty in the UK compared with the rest of Europe is to reduce aid to the poor.
The Bush forces soldiers accused of beating prisoner Baha Musa to death have been all acquitted. No one will be punished for his murder.
A colonel was acquitted based on evidence that higher officers had approved the forms of violence that killed Baha Musa. "Just following orders" is not supposed to be an excuse!
Another Bush forces soldier testified that his commander ordered him to kill prisoners, then create fake evidence of a struggle.
What this means is that the Bush forces can murder civilians with impunity, and can establish policies that encourage such murder with impunity.
Amnesty International reports on how the paramilitaries of Colombia have built corrupted much of Colombian society.
These paramilitaries were supported by the Colombian government which was in turn supported by the US government.
Companies are paying thousands of bloggers to promote products and not admit it is paid advertising.
Australian mining companies are using copyright law to suppress satirical criticism of their policies.
Rite Aid drugs works closely with the tobacco companies and lobbies against measures to reduce smoking. So when the American Heart Association cooperate with Rite Aid, is that honest?
To me, it is an instance of the systematic corruption of civic institutions in the US by corporate money.
Serbs were not the only ones to commit acts of brutality in Kosovo. After the Albanian Kosovars won, they more or less chased out the Serbs. The former leader of the KLA is now accused of ethnic cleansing.
(I think that it was less bad to have the Serb minority chased out than to have them oppressing the Albanian majority. So the de-facto independence of Kosovo was a good thing. But this does not justify mistreating unarmed Serbs.)
We all know how Wal-Mart mistreats its own workers, but that's just the tip of the iceberg of the harm it does. Through its size, it almost compels producers to run sweatshops, making Wal-Mart a substantial producer of poverty world-wide.
As captive women raped and used as prostitutes by Japanese troops increasingly speak out to condemn what was done to them, the Prime Minister of Japan is lying to deny it.
China's report on human rights in the US.
The first section, about levels of violent crime not committed by the government, seems like a side issue to me; go past that to see the real meat of the report.
Isn't it a shame that the US has sunk so low that it is no longer in a position to criticize China?
Indians like Harriett Nahanee aren't the only people trying to stop British Columbia from building a new highway and destroying rare ecosystems.
Police in Tacoma violently attacked a nonviolent protest against the embarcation of army combat vehicles to join the Bush forces in occupation of Iraq. The protestors are undeterred.
Police in the US must decide whether to serve the people or the traitor in the White House.
Please do not look at the videos on Youtube, because you would have to install a non-free program (the Flash player) to do that, and installing non-free software is not ethical. I am unhappy with the fact that some of my speeches have been posted on Youtube, where they act as inducement for people to do exactly the thing I believe they should not do.
I hope to write to the people who run the indybay site and ask them to post videos on their own site rather than on youtube.