Monday June 29 2009 - 16:17

By Eva Golinger

President Zelaya of Honduras has just been kidnapped

Caracas, Venezuela - The text message that beeped on my cell phone this morning read “Alert, Zelaya has been kidnapped, coup d’etat underway in Honduras, spread the word.” It’s a rude awakening for a Sunday morning, especially for the millions of Hondurans that were preparing to exercise their sacred right to vote today for the first time on a consultative referendum concerning the future convening of a constitutional assembly to reform the constitution. Supposedly at the center of the controversary is today’s scheduled referendum, which is not a binding vote but merely an opinion poll to determine whether or not a majority of Hondurans desire to eventually enter into a process to modify their constitution.

Such an initiative has never taken place in the Central American nation, which has a very limited constitution that allows minimal participation by the people of Honduras in their political processes. The current constitution, written in 1982 during the height of the Reagan Administration’s dirty war in Central America, was designed to ensure those in power, both economic and political, would retain it with little interference from the people. Zelaya, elected in November 2005 on the platform of Honduras’ Liberal Party, had proposed the opinion poll be conducted to determine if a majority of citizens agreed that constitutional reform was necessary. He was backed by a majority of labor unions and social movements in the country. If the poll had occured, depending on the results, a referendum would have been conducted during the upcoming elections in November to vote on convening a constitutional assembly. Nevertheless, today’s scheduled poll was not binding by law (...)
More... If you want to answer... Wednesday April 29 2009 - 05:56

By MICHAEL P. WRIGHT

In April 2009, the Campus Activities Council (CAC) of the University of Oklahoma had a Facebook site announcing that on May 2 CIA agent Michael Scheuer was scheduled to give a speech on campus. Scheuer was described as "the long-time chief of the Bin Laden tracking center."

This is interesting because OU president David Boren, a former U.S. Senator, has many ties to the CIA and is widely known as the mentor and sponsor of George Tenet, who was CIA director when the 9/11 attack happened.

In October 2001, the front page of the French newspaper LeFigaro bore this headline (translated to English): July 2001 — Bin Laden Meets the CIA in Dubai.

The article reported that Bin Laden was a kidney patient in the American hospital in Dubai, UAE, and that the CIA saw him there.
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1 comment Saturday April 4 2009 - 14:13

Strasbourg - France

Police are clashing with demonstrators in Strasbourg where the NATO summit is underway.

Several hundred protesters in eastern Strasbourg are hurling Molotov cocktails, rocks and bottles as they try to push their way into the city’s centre.

Some 100 riot police bearing shields and wearing body armour are responding with tear gas in a bid to break up the melee with the demonstrators, many of whom are clad in black and wearing masks.

Across the river in the German city of Kehl today, some 2,500 protesters have gathered but police say there is no violence.
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2 comments Friday March 20 2009 - 11:36

Record numbers took to the streets of France yesterday in the biggest demonstrations since Nicolas Sarkozy’s election, to protest about his handling of the economic crisis.

Unions estimated that more than three million people took part in demonstrations across the country, in the second general strike over the economic crisis in two months. Police put figures at about 1.2 million. With one in three people supporting the protest, it had the highest public backing for a strike in a decade.

Sarkozy maintains he is the only man who can face down street protests and plough on with his project to reform France, but he is facing an array of different demands and growing anger. Teachers and doctors protested against his long-standing reform plan, saying public-sector job cuts would kill schools and hospitals. University staff are continuing their seven-week strike against higher education reform with sit-ins and occupations.
More... If you want to answer... Wednesday March 18 2009 - 13:34

By Johnny Canuck

Indigenous activist Splitting-the-Sky was arrested in Calgary yesterday. He was protesting the presence of George Bush. Although both Canadian and domestic law compels Canada to bar or arrest Bush as a "credible" war criminal suspect - the government has thus far shielded Bush from any move to do either. Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper is a staunch neocon and supporter of Bush policies.

Splitting the Sky was in the process of instructing Calgary Police as to their obligations when he was arrested and taken into custody. As of the time of writing he is still being held. There is great concern for his well being as his activism is well known to Canadian authorities, including the Gustafsen Lake standoff in 1995 and earlier the Attica Prison Rebellion.

Please help keep him safe and support this courageous fighter for accountability and an end to Canada’s collaboration with US war criminals like Bush and Condi Rice who is also scheduled to speak in Calgary in May.
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2 comments Saturday March 14 2009 - 23:45

By David Glenn Cox

“Some get stoned, some get strange, sooner or later, it all gets real”
(Neil Young)

We live in a cloud with our inputs overloaded, like pool balls bouncing off the bumpers, looking for a hole. The news media tells us about the mean old Chinese that are harassing an unarmed US navy vessel. Those bad old Chinese, how dare they do that to our boys? Except that it is a US spy ship spying off the Chinese coast, and we want to blame the Chinese?

Saddam had to prove that he didn’t have weapons of mass destruction and the Iranians have to prove that they aren’t building a nuclear bomb. No matter what hoops they jump through, we just move the bar. The Iranians signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and India did not. We threaten Iran and try to trade nuclear fuel for mangoes with India.

Hugo Chavez is an evil dictator because he nationalized oil fields after American oil companies refused to pay Venezuela the same royalties that they currently pay to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Of course, the Saudis and Kuwaitis are our friends. After 9-11 Bin Laden’s relatives were allowed to fly home to Saudi Arabia and requests to interview Saudi intelligence agents were refused.
More... If you want to answer... Thursday March 12 2009 - 14:46

April 3rd and 4th — Strasburg.
NATO turns 60.
Let’s celebrate.
An opportunity to seize, a call to be heard.
Counter-summit in Strasburg: not an appointment with the Power, but a meeting with the situation.

Civilization knew it was bound to die someday – but only in theory. After several shocks and attacks, it now feels it through all its fibers, all its vital flows. A feeling of death in the democratic air. It is no longer denied, it has become a threat, a pretext for mobilization. Powers crave for our help – let’s be cruel.

All around the world, it’s all about "building new foundations for capitalism". NATO, as a notable member of the Family, is ready to take its responsibilities. Securing access to vital resources, preventing all appropriations but capitalistic ones, saving a dying Empire. By any means necessary. There’s a war on.
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1 comment Thursday March 5 2009 - 13:53

By People vs. Bush

The American war criminal George W Bush has been invited to speak in Calgary, Alberta, Canada by a large lawfirm connected to the oil industry - Bennett Jones. He will arrive on March 17, 2009. There are more foreign dates planned as well.

He will be travelling for the first time, without immunity, across an international border into a foreign jurisdiction. He should immediately be arrested and held for war crimes. He has much to answer for.

Canada must be made to take action and the necessary steps to prepare for an arrest the moment Bush lands here. There will be protests that are now being organized by locally based grassroots activists.
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5 comments Sunday March 1 2009 - 00:52

By David Glenn Cox

Today we have so many celebrities who take on social causes; it is almost a given that they will each have some charity or cause that they support. That is good, I suppose, but still there is a clear distinction between being socially conscious and being Woody Guthrie.

Woody has been dead almost half a century, and his deeds and exploits have fallen from public memory. Woody wasn’t socially conscious, he was its conscience. In the dark days of depression-era homelessness and migrant camps, Woody sang, “So long, it’s been good to know ya, this dusty old dust is getting my home.” He sang, “It’s a hot dusty road that a million feet have trod. Rich man took my house and he drove me from my door. And I ain’t got no home in this world anymore.”
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2 comments Saturday February 14 2009 - 12:52

What the hell did he do ??

Well, the man is being tried for selling the communist daily "L’Humanité-dimanche" in the street : his trial is to take place on February 18th.

Lounis merely sold the French daily at the Dejean Market, in the 18th ’arrondissement’ in Paris... where he had been selling it for 20 years. And yet, in 2007 -about 8 weeks before the French presidential election- he was questioned by the police for "selling goods in a public place without any authorization".

A petition and a supporting committee have been set to denounce this denial of democracy.

If you think fighting for freedom of expression has no borders, have a look at the article and the petition...
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2 comments Wednesday February 11 2009 - 21:18
By David Glenn Cox

Let the sky fall, let the sun crash and commence with the days of iron rain. Let the blood of the guilty and the tears of the innocent mix and intermingle in the sewers of greed. There is no bipartisanship in Washington; there is only buy partisanship. The President, still in his first month in office, has had dinner with Republican pundits. He has gone to Capitol Hill to meet with both House and Senate Republicans.

He has supported a stimulus bill that he has openly admitted to being less than perfect. House and Senate Republicans complained that the bill was written by the Democrats and that their suggestions were ignored; that President Obama met with them but didn’t hear them. Also that the stimulus bill is filled with pork. Three Republican senators crossed over to vote with the Democrats. One, Arlen Specter, is already being attacked on right wing radio and the others soon will be.
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4 comments Wednesday February 4 2009 - 09:55

By Chris Hedges

The daily bleeding of thousands of jobs will soon turn our economic crisis into a political crisis. The street protests, strikes and riots that have rattled France, Turkey, Greece, Ukraine, Russia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria and Iceland will descend on us. It is only a matter of time. And not much time. When things start to go sour, when Barack Obama is exposed as a mortal waving a sword at a tidal wave, the United States could plunge into a long period of precarious social instability.

At no period in American history has our democracy been in such peril or has the possibility of totalitarianism been as real. Our way of life is over. Our profligate consumption is finished. Our children will never have the standard of living we had. And poverty and despair will sweep across the landscape like a plague. This is the bleak future. There is nothing President Obama can do to stop it. It has been decades in the making. It cannot be undone with a trillion or two trillion dollars in bailout money. Our empire is dying. Our economy has collapsed.
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4 comments Sunday February 1 2009 - 09:53

By Terry Jones

It’s not that I’m keen on killing people. It’s just that the money’s so good.
It’s not that I’m keen on killing people. I haven’t actually killed anyone myself yet. It’s all to do with economics.
You see, I can’t help but notice that the arms industry is doing extremely well. In fact in these times of economic disaster, it’s the one industry that seems to be expanding.

According to the Government’s Defence and Security Organization, the UK has become the top global defense exporter, notching up a golden £10 billion of new business and snagging a walloping 33 percent of the market.

In fact the UK is now the second-biggest player in the global arms market, with a whizzo $53 billion of sales over the past five years, compared with America’s $63 billion and Russia’s measly $33 billion, France’s pathetic $17 billion, and Germany and Israel trailing at $9 billion each.
More... If you want to answer... Saturday January 31 2009 - 21:57

By Ian Traynor

France paralysed by a wave of strike action, the boulevards of Paris resembling a debris-strewn battlefield. The Hungarian currency sinks to its lowest level ever against the euro, as the unemployment figure rises. Greek farmers block the road into Bulgaria in protest at low prices for their produce. New figures from the biggest bank in the Baltic show that the three post-Soviet states there face the biggest recessions in Europe.

It’s a snapshot of a single day – yesterday – in a Europe sinking into the bleakest of times. But while the outlook may be dark in the big wealthy democracies of western Europe, it is in the young, poor, vulnerable states of central and eastern Europe that the trauma of crash, slump and meltdown looks graver.

Exactly 20 years ago, in serial revolutionary rejoicing, they ditched communism to put their faith in a capitalism now in crisis and by which they feel betrayed. The result has been the biggest protests across the former communist bloc since the days of people power.
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2 comments Friday January 30 2009 - 04:26

By Jazz

On July 17, 1998 an assembly of diplomats in Rome created the International Criminal Court and charged it with the responsibility of prosecuting individuals accused of committing crimes against humanity, war crimes, genocide and crimes of aggression.

The Court opened its doors on July 1, 2002, made its first arrest in March 2006 and began its first trial on January 26, 2009. The Court’s jurisdiction is limited to crimes committed after its inception. It has 108 member states sworn to abide by its principles and to be held accountable by its authority.

Along with China, Russia and India, the United States is not a signatory to the ICC for the simple and obvious reason that it does not wish to suffer the indignity of seeing its own leaders prosecuted for a multitude of crimes.
More... If you want to answer... Thursday January 22 2009 - 16:38

By VALUR GUNNARSSON and JILL LAWLESS

REYKJAVIK, Iceland (AP) — Police used tear gas to break up an angry protest outside Iceland’s parliament early Thursday, and two officers were hospitalized after being hit by rocks, the force said.

It was the first time the country’s police had used tear gas in more than half a century, and came as demonstrators mount increasingly violent protests against a government they blame for leading once-prosperous Iceland into economic ruin.

Demonstrators, banging pots and honking horns, have gathered outside Reykjavik’s tiny parliament building since lawmakers returned from their winter break Tuesday

Reykjavik police chief Stefan Eiriksson said about 2,000 protesters surrounded the building late Wednesday, and some hurled fireworks, shoes, toilet paper, rocks and paving stones at the building and its police guard. He said police tried to disperse a hard core of a few hundred protesters with pepper spray before using tear gas early Thursday.
More... If you want to answer... Monday January 19 2009 - 17:13

By David Glenn Cox

I’m too angry to sleep, too weary to hope. I’m too old for optimism and too young to stop fighting. I’d hit someone if only I knew who; I’d march if only I knew where to go. I support the new President and think that he will bring a new vitality to the nation, but my age and anger tells me that vitality is a show business term. That trickle down never reaches us, and political spin is just so much wind passed into our faces.

I have seen tax cuts for the rich passed before lunch and health care debates that have gone on for decades. Wars on drugs, on unions and on terror that have and will go on unabated, soaking the tax payers but never benefitting anyone, save the contractors, the government, big business and the jailers. 20,000 Americans have jobs! Granted as terms of their sentencing in America’s federal prison industries. There are no conservative pundits screaming about socialism in America’s prisons while prisoners toil to manufacture products that are destined to be sent to Iraq in Operation Iraqi Freedom. How is such irony possible?
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1 comment Wednesday January 7 2009 - 18:32

by William Hughes

On Tuesday, Jan. 6, 2009, Antiwar activists dressed all in black, with white death masks, paraded in a steady rain and in single file, past the U.S. Supreme Court, and around the U.S. Capitol, in Washington, D.C., as the new 111th Congress convened inside.

The “March of the Dead” participants wore around their necks the names of those killed in conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Israeli Occupied Gaza.

The U.S. Congress has repeatedly voted hundreds of billions of dollars to support those two wars. Check out: http://www.nationalpriorities.org/costofwar_home. In addition, Congress continues to subsidize, to the tune of billions of taxpayers’ dollar a year, the state of Zionist Israel.
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1 comment Monday January 5 2009 - 13:46

By Philippe Naughton

"Seven Palestinian children and six adults died today in Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip from air, land and sea, as President Sarkozy of France prepared for a unilateral diplomatic mission to the region.

Houses, mosques and tunnels were hit as the Israelis continued to fire into the densely populated Palestinian territory in the hopes of damaging the militant group Hamas.

Ehud Barak, the Israeli Defence Minister, said that "Operation Cast Lead" would continue until Israel achieved "peace and tranquility" for residents of southern Israel.

“Gaza City is partially surrounded,” Mr Barak told parliament’s foreign affairs and defence committee. “We have hit Hamas hard, but we have not yet reached all the goals that we have set for ourselves and the operation continues. We are doing everything that a state must do to protect its citizens."
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1 comment Sunday January 4 2009 - 11:26

By Jeremy Watson

RIOT police had to be deployed last night as a protest outside the Israeli embassy in London over Israel’s invasion of the Gaza Strip erupted into violence.

In a day of global demonstrations over Israel’s military campaign against the Islamist Hamas movement, thousands of protestors gathered outside the embassy with some attempting to storm the Kensington compound.

As tensions mounted in the earlyADVERTISEMENTevening, police officers came under fire from missiles. The barrage, including fireworks and bottles, continued despite a number of protesters being led away by the police, who armed themselves with riot shields.
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