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By Amira Hass
There are two magic phrases that the government uses to enlist soldiers, pilots and their families for the assault on Rafah: "armed men" and "smuggling tunnels." The sound of those two threatening phrases overcomes the sounds of gunfire by the air force and armored corps, the humming of the unmanned aircraft overhead, the whistle of the missiles, the long bursts of machine gun fire, the bombs and the shelling. And then the sirens of the ambulances.
In the last three and a (…)

By Amira Hass
RAFAH - In every Israel Defense Forces invasion of a Palestinian city, the population has a similar daily schedule of difficulty and anxiety. Here is a partial list:
1. The sounds are first. People wake up to the sound of bullets and explosions, trying to figure out where they are coming from - whether from the air or from the ground - and where to hide.
Yesterday at 1 A.M., the first sounds of shooting in Rafah came from the Egyptian border, and the shriek of the first (…)

Last April, President Bush visited a Timken Company manufacturing plant in Ohio to press for passage of new tax cuts that he said would spur the economy. During the speech Bush said that "the future of this company is bright and therefore, the future of employment is bright for the families that work here" (1). Less than a year after the tax cuts for the wealthy passed, that same factory is shutting down — putting about 1,300 people out of work (2) and inflicting a "devastating" blow to the (…)

By G. PATRICK KELLEY Repository business editor
Hello, Washington? Canton here. We’d like a few words.
"Greed. All it is, is greed," Charles Marling said of the Timken Co.’s plan to close its local bearing operations and eliminate 1,300 jobs.
"I’d tell (President) Bush that to his face," said Marling, a 76-year-old retired LTV worker.
President Bush visited Canton and the Timken Co. just over a year ago, touting the company’s values and efforts to keep people working. Company (…)

International Appeal Promoted Internationally by: * US Labor Against the War (USLAW) * the International Confederation of Arab Trade Unions (ICATU) * the International Liaison Committee of Workers and Peoples (ILC)
WITHDRAW ALL FOREIGN OCCUPATION TROOPS FROM IRAQ! PEACE AND SOVEREIGNTY FOR IRAQ!
We, the undersigned trade unionists and labor activists from around the world, applaud the decision by the new Spanish government to withdraw its troops from Iraq. We call on all governments with (…)

State Terrorism and the United States: From Counterinsurgency to the War on Terrorism by Frederick H. Gareau; Clarity Press; 2004; 254 pp.
In the United States, practically by birthright, we are supplied with all the consumables our digestion will handle, and then some. By birthright also, we inherit a public sphere every last trace of which is or soon will be branded, goading us to satisfy every hunger, and creating many which we would never consider. We have a president who can open (…)

By Julian Bond
Editor’s Note: This speech was presented May 15 at an NAACP education summit in Topeka, Kan.
Fifty years ago this past April , Martin Luther King, Jr. preached his first sermon as the new pastor of Montgomery’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. He was 25 years old.
One month later, on May 17, 1954, the United States Supreme Court, in Brown v. Board of Education, unanimously declared that segregated schools violated the Constitution’s promise of equal protection.
Two months (…)

by Robert Scheer
What a wonderful image of democracy and tolerance the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts has presented to the world by allowing same-sex marriages. At a time when elements of the U.S. military machine have perverted homosexual acts into a form of torture, the sight of responsible and joyful gay adults freely choosing the commitment of marriage could not be more timely.
The lesson is that freedom is indivisible. In Massachusetts, it is up to the individual and not (…)

PARIS, May 19 - Until recently, the French assumed they had solved the issue of gays and marriage in a most civilized manner.
The raw political debates and the spectacle of same-sex weddings in the United States were little more than a source of bemusement, what a Frenchman might call "a tempest in a glass of water."
After all, the French were the inventors of the Civil Solidarity Pact, a creative legal mechanism introduced in 1999 that gives all adult couples - regardless of gender or (…)

Could Bush administration officials be prosecuted for ’war crimes’ as a result of new measures used in the war on terror? The White House’s top lawyer thought so Suspected Taliban and al Qaeda detainees at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base kneel down before military police as prisoners are processed into the detention facility in January 2002
By Michael Isikoff
Investigative Correspondent
Newsweek
The White House’s top lawyer warned more than two years ago that U.S. officials could be (…)