Gaither Stewart

(Rome) ISTAT, Italy’s Statistical Office, has announced that for the first time the nation’s population has passed 60,000,000. The disconcerting reality behind the statistic is that while Italy ages and Italians produce less children, immigration is providing the growth of the nation that until a few decades ago was an emigration country and Italian workers spread over north Europe. Today, as usual, immigrants do what Italians don’t. Over 1,000,000 Romanians are in Italy today, followed closely by Albanians and Moroccans. immigrants make front page news. Usually negative news. Not a day passes that foreigners (until the crisis immigrants were the manpower necessary for Italian industry), are not accused of nefarious crimes.

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Mary Shaw

President Obama has nominated Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius to be Secretary of Health and Human Services.

In addition to the other challenges that Sebelius will face in this new role, I hope she will be able to implement the affordable health care for all which Obama has promised us. To that end, Sebelius will be working closely with Nancy-Ann Deparle, who will direct the White House Office for Health Reform.

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Sheila Samples

Sometimes it's hard to come to grips with the truth -- especially if that truth is about our own country, and is in direct opposition to everything we've been taught since childhood. Patriotism is in our genes, and through the years it has been a national conviction that, if our country needed us, serving in the military to protect our freedom was not only the right thing to do, but the only thing to do. We still believe that. We still leap to our feet at the first beat of a drum at a military parade, clutch our hearts at the sight of the Stars and Stripes, weep at the refrain of the National Anthem. However, far too many of us succumb to the pomp and pageantry of war -- of mission accomplished -- with little concern for the human beings who made that possible -- what they went through, what they're still going through -- so we can maintain our arrogant national pride.

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Stephen Lendman

After the 1929 October 24, 28 and 29 market crash, the weekly entertainment industry magazine Variety (on October 30) published its most famous ever headline: "Wall Street Lays an Egg." In October 2008, history repeated, and since the October 2007 peak, equity prices plunged over 50% after the Dow and S & P (in February) posted their second worst ever monthly percentage declines - topped only in 1933 during the depths of the Great Depression. So far, the current market drop matches its 1929 - 1932 pace, and like then, shows no signs of abating.

With world economies collapsing, stocks are still overvalued by every metric - dividends, price to book, sales, free cash flow, or earnings based on GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principals) or "reported" earnings, not "operating" ones, easily manipulated to exclude "write-offs." By the mid-late 1990s, companies switched to the latter method to hide over-valuations. The practice still continues to let expensive stocks masquerade as cheap ones and make the market overall look attractive to the unwary.

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by chycho

Importance of The Big Three

“General Motors, Ford and Chrysler weren't labelled the Big Three just because they produced the most vehicles in North America. As giant employers, they had big influence, energizing entire economies with their big union wages and benefits packages. As giant manufacturers, they created style. Status was instantly signalled by black Lincolns and pink Corvettes. Seatbelts, reduced vehicle emissions and electric cars had to wait until the carmakers were good and ready. As giant political contributors, they had big power. The L.A. Times recently calculated that since 1990, the auto industry as a whole has donated $100 million US to Republicans and $34 million to Democrats.”

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Michael Collins

I first wrote about Susan Lindauer's struggle against the Bush-Cheney regime in October 2007, "American Cassandra: Susan Lindauer's Story." This was initially published in "Scoop" Independent Media (complete series) and carried by a wide variety of concerned Internet news sites and blogs. This interview follows the full dismissal of charges against her just before President Obama's inauguration on January 20, 2009. This is the first in depth interview that Lindauer has offered regarding 911. Below is part one of the interview.

I asked Ms. Lindauer to make her own statement about why she's willing to go into detail now about 911 and the governments handling of pre 911 intelligence.

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eileen fleming

[Occupied East Jerusalem, March 1, 2009] Mordechai Vanunu wrote the Nobel Peace Prize Committee in Oslo:

Dear Nobel Peace Prize Committee in Oslo,

I am Vanunu Mordechai, who has been nominated several times to Nobel Peace Prize, also this year’s 2009 award.

I am asking the committee to remove my name from the list for this year’s list of nominations.

My main reason for this is that I cannot be part of a list of laureates that includes Simon Peres. He is the man who was behind all the Israeli atomic policy.

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Angie Riedel

Pretend, if you would for a short moment, that I have in my hands a magic camera which will allow us to take a snapshot of this moment in time, and freeze everything in the whole wide world in place. We'll then be able to step into the photograph and with everything frozen around us, we can explore and investigate, up close and personal, anything and everything we like.

The aim and purpose of doing this would be to figure out once and for all who's who and what's what and what goes on where and how, so that we will finally know why things are the way they are in this world. Because things are all messed up. Why are our stated values lived in direct opposites? Why do we claim to be moral people when the world around us, in many and varied ways, has devolved into phalanges of pornography?

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by Walter Brasch

Barack Obama was determined that the only way anyone was going to take away his BlackBerry was if they pried it from his cold dead hands. Or, something to that effect.

The President justifiably relies upon his BlackBerry, but many rely upon electronic communications as a status symbol or as a crutch so they don’t have to make decisions or engage in face-to-face conversations. Such was the case at a party I thought I might have attended.

It might have been an enjoyable party, but I didn’t experience much of it since pagers, cell phones, Palm Treos, and BlackBerries were going off all evening, and all I heard were excuses of why used car salesmen, real estate agents, and grocery store clerks had to break off conversations to answer the calls of nature.

“So, what’s your sign?” a striking brunette asked me, only to excuse herself when one of her cell phones chimed some hip-hop music. Apparently her sign was Ice-T, with AT&T rising.

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Norm Lowry

As a US citizen, I am personally responsible for the worldwide murders of 200,000+ people…Every Day. Commonly labeled as “Excess Deaths” (just as starving people are said to be “Food Deficient”); the truth would have it that these deaths are admittedly avoidable. Pathetic descriptors, coined by oligarchic leadership, do not erase the fact that lives are purposefully being erased for mostly selfish & illicit ends.

My country was supposedly founded on “Christian” principles; principles that would cause a person to die so that others might live; not to live so that others may die. Somehow, these grand ideas have mutated into the creation of a society which seems to see itself as being more honorable or moral than all others. This allows us an illicit luxury: purposeful deafness & blindness to the use of blatantly vile power & control to purchase an illusion of ease & comfort.

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