Category: World News

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.

This was a wonderful year for Christmas lights in my City Heights neighborhood. They cheerfully, often exuberantly, illuminated the night from the day after Thanksgiving until the day after New Year’s. It is sad to see them extinguished, put away, for yet another year, although ours stay up in the house year round. You can never have enough illumination in the darkness…

But that is not to say the seasonal celebrations are over- far from it. Sunday January 6th is the Three Kings Day celebration in Mexico and other Spanish speaking cultures; it is also Orthodox Christmas Eve for those religious traditions based upon the Julian calendar, as opposed to our Gregorian calendar. What that boils down to is that I have to order my rosca de reyes so that I can take it to our Orthodox Christmas Eve dinner.

By Joshua Holland /Alternet

On the day before an election that’s supposed to hinge on jobs, taxes and the middle class, Bain Capital, the company Mitt Romney founded, will close the doors of a factory in Freeport, Illinois, and ship 170 good, high-tech jobs to China.

The employees of Sensata Technologies were forced to train their Chinese replacements, and the American flag that long flew over the factory was reportedly removed while the Chinese engineers were visiting the site. A group of workers have set up camp across from the factory — calling it “Bainport” — and some supporters have tried to block the trucks hauling equipment out of the plant. According to Dave Johnson, there have been several arrests.

Bob Filner Among 16 Congressional Members Urging Review of Deadly Force Use by Border Patrol Agents

Since 2010, at least 16 civilians have been killed by Border Patrol agents along the US-Mexico border. Many of those killed were involved in throwing rocks at agents during confrontations with border smugglers.

Yet, since September, there have been three persons killed by agents – including the young mother of 5 who was a US citizen right here in Chula Vista. The three also include 16-year-old suspected rock thrower from Nogales.

But it was the 2010 taser-linked death of Anastasio Hernandez Rojas here at San Ysidro that pushed members of Congress to urge a review of how border patrol agents use deathly force. After a video surfaced showing a customs officer in San Diego using a Taser on Anastasio Hernandez Rojas, who later died of a heart attack, some Congressional members were moved to act and send their letter to the Inspector General.

Chris Hedges gave this talk Sunday night – October 7th – in New York City at a protest denouncing the 11th anniversary of the war in Afghanistan. The event, at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, was led by Veterans for Peace.

By Chris Hedges

Many of us who are here carry within us death. The smell of decayed and bloated corpses. The cries of the wounded. The shrieks of children. The sound of gunfire. The deafening blasts. The fear. The stench of cordite. The humiliation that comes when you surrender to terror and beg for life. The loss of comrades and friends. And then the aftermath. The long alienation. The numbness. The nightmares. The lack of sleep. The inability to connect to all living things, even to those we love the most. The regret. The repugnant lies mouthed around us about honor and heroism and glory. The absurdity. The waste. The futility.

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt / Excuse Me, I’m Writing

It is a no-brainer to predict that the anti-human trafficking ballot initiative in California, Proposition 35, will pass by a landslide in November. The measure’s increased prison sentences and fines for labor and sex traffickers are popular responses to crime.

Even Maxine Doogan, spokesperson for the measure’s primary opposition, said Prop 35 is going to pass: “Everyone is against human trafficking. Of course we need to throw the book at human traffickers.”

But Doogan, the founder of Erotic Service Provider Legal, Educational and Research Project, a sex worker advocacy group, is not at all pleased with the measure’s inevitable success.

Neither are civil libertarians, if the ACLU’s opposition is any indication.

The Deafness Before the Storm

By Kurt Eichenwald / New York Times/ September 10, 2012

On Aug. 6, 2001, President George W. Bush received a classified review of the threats posed by Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network, Al Qaeda. That morning’s “presidential daily brief” — the top-secret document prepared by America’s intelligence agencies — featured the now-infamous heading: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” A few weeks later, on 9/11, Al Qaeda accomplished that goal.

How is climate changing?

Warming of the climate system now is unequivocal, according to many different kinds of evidence. Observations show increases in globally averaged air and ocean temperatures, as well as widespread melting of snow and ice and rising globally averaged sea level. Surface temperature data for Earth as a whole, including readings over both land and ocean, show an increase of about 0.8°C (1.4°F) over the period 1901-2010 and about 0.5°C (0.9°F) over the period 1979–2010 (the era for which satellite-based temperature data are routinely available).

By Michael Moore and Oliver Stone / New York Times / August 20, 2012

WE have spent our careers as filmmakers making the case that the news media in the United States often fail to inform Americans about the uglier actions of our own government. We therefore have been deeply grateful for the accomplishments of WikiLeaks, and applaud Ecuador’s decision to grant diplomatic asylum to its founder, Julian Assange, who is now living in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London.

Ecuador has acted in accordance with important principles of international human rights.

By Barry Ladendorf
In many parts of the world, people will pause to commemorate what happened 67 years ago on August 6, 1945, when the United States unleashed the most diabolical weapon in the history of mankind on the city of Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later on August 9th, the same hellish fire consumed the city of Nagasaki. It is estimated that 250,000 people died as a result of the bombs.