Category: World News

Let this moment be a educational one so let’s have the Debate that the President calls for

By Frank Gormlie

What a dastardly crazy last week and half it’s been.

Beginning Thursday, June 6th, with the Washington Post and the Guardian in London both running with the explosive news about the National Security Agency surveillance programs, we’ve been hit with daily revelations – that are still continuing every news cycle – that have created quiet a long list of whistle blower-delivered disclosures about what the government and the NSA are and have been doing to us – the American people.

By Marjorie Cohn / truthout

Just as Bradley Manning’s court-martial was getting underway, another brave whistleblower dropped a bombshell into the media: The Obama administration is collecting data on every telephone call we make. Nearly 64 years to the day after George Orwell published his prescient book 1984, we have learned that the “Thought Police” are indeed watching every one of us. “They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type,” Edward Snowden told the Washington Post.

A former undercover CIA employee who has worked at the National Security Agency (NSA) for four years, Snowden provided a secret order of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to the Guardian. The order requires Verizon on an “ongoing daily basis” to provide the NSA information about all phone calls in its system both in the United States and other countries.

By Joseph Howard Crews / San Diego Free Press

For 60 years the most celebrated and revered African in history was listed as a terrorist threat to the people of the United States. Who decided this? Why did Americans allow this, and what does it say about what we are?

It’s a sad day in America. The US Navy launched the first carrier-based drone off its deck the other day, off the coast of Virginia. It’s an even sadder day for us in San Diego, as the drone was manufactured – in part, at least – by plants and engineers right here in our own city.

The launching of the drone off that deck demonstrates clearly that as drones become more and more integrated into becoming the armament of the nation’s military, they are becoming more and more accepted – here domestically, back in the good ol’ US of A.

Islamic Totalitarians, the Apocalypse, and Terrorism

By Chip Berlet / Talk to Action

Walk a mile in the shoes of those who claim to honor God and yet cheer the bombing of the Boston Marathon. They represent only a tiny fraction of the Muslims on our planet, yet they see themselves as carrying out the will of God. Fanatics such as these can be found in many of the World’s religions. They shoot abortion providers in the United States; blast apart buses in Israel; and murder Muslims in India (and vice versa).

Children born in Pacific coastal states in 2011 may be at greatest risk.

By Anne Hurley / msn Healthy Living / April 4, 2013

It’s already well known how devastating the March 2011 Fukushima nuclear reactor meltdown was for Japan — dramatic spikes in radiation-related illnesses, an increase in likely cancer deaths over the next several years, and pollution which may never truly be cleaned up.

A new study suggests what many worldwide have feared — that the devastation from the traveling radiation has in fact sickened infants in other countries, including babies born shortly after the incident in Hawaii, Alaska, Washington, Oregon, and California.

Recently, the OB Rag ran a readers’ poll on the use of drones by the US government either in America and/or abroad. The results of the week-long poll are in: 82% of respondents oppose the use of drones in the United States.

36% of the respondents replied that they are okay with the use of the unmanned flying vessels in other countries by our government. 17% indicated that they are okay with their use in America.

45% of the 108 readers who responded specifically feel that the use of drones in America is unconstitutional or that they should not be used in our country. Another 37% replied that they specifically opposed their use overseas as well.

26% said that their use in America is “absolutely unconstitutional”. Another 19% were okay with their use in hunting down terrorists abroad, but opposed their deployment here in this country.

San Diego Has Become “National Capital” of Military Drone Production

From San Diego Coalition for Peace and Justice /April 3, 2013

“National Anti-Drone Days of Action” from April 4 through 7 in San Diego start a month of protests across the United States against the policy and practice of drone warfare and secret surveillance.

Local and national organizations are coordinating a series of events to increase the attention to why drone killings and surveillance are bad practice and policy for the United States.

San Diego’s “Anti-Drone Days” is not one, but a series of events (see listing).

San Diego is where these protests will start based on the region’s role as the “national capital” of military drone production. Killer and surveillance drones pour out of San Diego at increasing rates, matched by the rise in deaths and dismemberment from US strikes across the globe.

Most of this production is tied to two corporate contracting giants — Northrop Grumman and General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, which is headquartered in San Diego.

Newly-released tapes record LBJ saying Nixon committed treason.

By Eric Brown / International Business Times / March 17 2013

Newly released tapes recorded during Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency have confirmed long-held rumors that in 1968, then-presidential candidate Richard M. Nixon worked to sabotage Vietnam War peace talks.

The LBJ tapes were recently declassified and released by the Johnson library in Austin, Texas. According to the BBC’s summary of the tapes, not only did Nixon possibly commit treason, but LBJ knew about it and decided not to expose him in the closing days of an election that Nixon barely won.

From “Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law”

By Marjorie Cohn, 2007

According to sources inside the administration, George W. Bush was planning to invade Iraq and remove its government well before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Such an invasion violates the UN Charter, which the United States signed in 1945 after the bloodiest conflict in history. The Charter permits countries to use military force against another country only in self-defense or with Security Council permission. But the evidence indicates that the U.S.-led invasion satisfied neither condition and is therefore a war of aggression, which constitutes a Crime Against Peace – exactly the kind of war the Charter was meant to prevent.

By John Lawrence / San Diego Free Press

The average temperature for 2012 was 55.3 degrees Fahrenheit, 3.2 degrees above normal and a full degree higher than the previous warmest year recorded — 1998 — NOAA said in a recent report. All 48 states in the contiguous U.S. had above-average annual temperatures last year, including 19 that broke annual records, from Connecticut through Utah.

It was also a historic year for “extreme” weather, scientists with the federal agency said.

Editor: John Lawrence, a regular writer for San Diego Free Press, has teamed up with Frank Thomas, a nationally-known progressive researcher, to lay out a Cultural Comparison between gun violence in America and Europe, in a three part series, all reposted below.

By John Lawrence and Frank Thomas

Introduction

While US gun crime and all crime levels are slowly but almost imperceptibly declining, they still remain relatively astronomically high compared with Europe. In this article, we compare US and European levels of gun violence and gun control to see if we can make any sense of the gun debate in the wake of the increasing frequency of mass murders as well as the almost mundane everyday killings in urban areas like Chicago and Detroit. Frank is an ex-pat who has lived in Europe for over 30 years. John has lived in San Diego for over 40 years.