Pages: << 1 ... 1240 1241 1242 1243 1244 1245 1246 1247 1248 1249 1250 ... 1327 >>
Let’s skip Gaza: Pope’s PR blunder
Stuart Littlewood
So the Pope won’t be visiting Gaza on his trip to the Holy Land next month.
The Holy Father's spokesman has told the Israeli press that he’ll refrain from visiting Gaza regardless of attempts to persuade him otherwise. ‘Refrain’ is a telling choice of words: "the Pope will refrain from visiting Gaza...." It smacks of abstinence, as in abstaining from having sex. Setting foot in Gaza would be so sinful that it is forbidden.
Gaza's isolated and besieged Catholic community are none too happy judging by the reaction of their redoubtable priest Fr Manuel Mussallam, who feels the Holy Father’s trip is miss-timed. "We will ask him why he came, what he intends saying to the Christians, the Jews, the Muslims and why he isn't coming to Gaza," he said. "We'll tell him that this is not the right moment to come and visit the holy places, while Jerusalem is occupied."
Jewish settler terrorists rampage at Arab village, casualties reported
Khalid Amayreh in al-Khalil
The Beit Ayn settlement outpost near Hebron
Religious Jewish terrorists on Thursday attacked a small Arab village north of al Khalil (Hebron), shooting randomly on civilians and vandalizing homes and businesses.
Eyewitnesses said as many as a hundred settler terrorists descended on the small village of Safa, 10 kilometers north west of al-Khalil, with the purpose of carrying out a pogrom against local inhabitants.
The terrorists were escorted by several Israeli army soldiers who reportedly made no effort to stop the terrorists who were shouting “death to the Arabs.”The Palestinians, fearing for their lives, hurled stones at the rampaging settlers to prevent them from setting fire to Palestinian property, prompting Israeli soldiers to open fire at the Palestinians.
A Taste of AFRICOM: Somalia did find peace and tried to stop piracy until the US bombed the shit out of it in 2006
by chycho
There has been a lot of talk lately about Somali pirates, so it’s probably a good time for a little summary.
In 2006 “the CIA propagated that Al-Qaeda had made its base in Somalia where three senior leaders were residing. CIA then encouraged Ethiopia to invade Somalia in support of weak TFG forces (Transitional Federal Government) against UIC fighters (Union of Islamic Courts) and promised to provide intelligence and air cover. Ethiopian troops backed by USA invaded Somalia on 28 December 2006. The UIC was quickly defeated in a sweeping offensive and the six-month peace period was shattered. It was believed that the UIC leadership fled into Kenya or to Yemen and the hard-line fighters cached their arms and melded back into their clans leaving the mostly untrained, new recruits to face the Ethiopian troops. Soon after the UIC rout, two US air strikes targeted alleged Al-Qaeda bases in southern Somalia on 13 January 2007 but only innocent civilians got killed.”
Resurrection of Intolerance
by Walter Brasch
The fanatic right-wing, after taking a few days off to catch their breath, is back again with vengeance.
Name anything that President Obama is doing, and this broken wing will try to slap it down, unmindful that more than two-thirds of Americans support the President, with his popularity rising each week, according to several independent polls.
Enabling Acts for an Era of Greed - The Money Party at Work
ENABLING ACTS
FOR AN ERA OF GREED
The Money Party at Work
Huge majorities in both houses of Congress voted for legislation to allow the biggest bank heist of all time. But this time, it was the banks pulling the heist.
Our financial system looks ruined beyond repair. The credit default swaps crisis is 40 or so times bigger than the real estate meltdown over subprime derivatives. The top 25 banks in the United States are loaded down with $13 trillion in credit default swaps and the deal is coming unraveled. If we accept the highly dubious assumption that the debt from the financial meltdown needs to be repaid by us, were looking at $43,000 a citizen right now. And we're just starting.
Revolution Delayed: Remembering Stokely Carmichael
Len Hart
Kwame Ture, better known to the American public as Stokely Carmichael, gave the Civil Rights movement its most memorable phrases and slogans, most notably, 'Black Power" and "Black is Beautiful". It was on the campus of the University of Houston that I heard Carmichael urge the 'radicalization' of every college and university campus in the nation. Many feared that the idea would catch on. But for the local and national media reps, I may have been the only 'white' face in the auditorium --a sign of the troubled times.
Later, white students, perhaps inspired to exercise 'student power', protested the US quagmire against the various 'peoples' in Southeast Asia. When they were fired upon at Kent State, four students were killed and nine others were wounded.
ICRC's Damning Expose of US Torture
Stephen Lendman
On March 12, Mark Danner, in a New York Times op-ed and The New York Review of Books, wrote about the ICRC's revelations of "US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites." He said George Bush (in 2007) "informed the world that the United States had created a dark and secret universe to hold and interrogate captured 'terrorists,' " - at locations outside America, Guantanamo and elsewhere.
Operated by the CIA, it "used an alternative set of procedures....designed to be safe, to comply with our laws, our Constitution and our treaty obligations. The Department of Justice reviewed the authorized methods extensively and determined them to be lawful."
Destroying urban gardens in the wake of peak oil: Will we build sustainable communities or follow the United States off a cliff?
by chycho
During the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries Barack Obama stated that “the world wants to see the United States lead”, and in a recent speech to the US Congress where he received “19 standing ovations”, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown echoed the same sentiment:
“I believe that you, the nation that had the vision to put a man on the moon, are also the nation with the vision to protect and preserve our planet earth.”
These happen to be amazing statements considering that the “American Lifestyle” has been one of the main culprits of our pending global ecological collapse. This lifestyle has been, to this point, dependent on and maintained due to the availability of cheap oil.
The War Against Science While Rome is Burning
Andrew Glikson Earth & paleo-climate scientist Australian National University
The state of the terrestrial atmosphere over the last ~10,000 years (Holocene), when conditions became amenable for agriculture and civilization, and over the preceding ~5 million years (Pliocene-Pleistocene) when prehistoric humans evolved, was constrained by a CO2 range of 180 to 300 ppm (https://wesfiles.wesleyan.edu/home/droyer/web/
Target_CO2_(Hansen_et_al).pdf), developed some 34 million years ago (end-Eocene) when atmospheric CO2 levels declined below 500 ppm (http://www.nature.com/nature/
journal/v446/n7135/pdf/nature05699.pdf; https://wesfiles.
wesleyan.edu/home/droyer/web/KurschnerCommentary(2008).pdf; http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v451/n7176/full/nature06588.html; http://www.soest.hawaii.edu/GG/FACULTY/POPP/Royer%20et%20al.%202004%20GSA%20Today.pdf). A rise of CO2 to 400 ppm at ~3.0 million years ago resulted in 2 - 3 degrees C temperature rise, melting of large parts of Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets and sea levels of +25+/-12 metres higher than the present (http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2008EOSTr..89..501R).
Can Senator Webb Lead America Out of the Drug War Quagmire, Webb Faces Up to the U.S. Incarceration Machine, Seeks to Rethink the War on Drugs
Kevin Zeese
More than 1 in 100 adults in the United States are now behind bars. 1 in 31 are in prison, probation or parole. The U.S. with 5% of the world’s population now has 25% of the world’s prisoners. Incarceration of drug offenders has risen 1,200% since 1980 from 41,000 to 500,000. The appetite of the American prison machine is voracious. Each year 7 million Americans are jailed and approximately 700,000 go on to serve prison sentences. When a racial prism is added to these numbers the stark reality of racial unfairness is impossible to deny. And now women and girls are the fastest growing group of prisoners.
<< 1 ... 1240 1241 1242 1243 1244 1245 1246 1247 1248 1249 1250 ... 1327 >>
