Category: World News

By R. Erickson / Special to the OB Rag / July 27, 2011

PARIS, FRANCE: Americans who manage to avoid «American Idol» and see some films from France, see some photos or commercials of Paris, or even travel there, might have the image of women in flowing spring skirts or dresses, or in professional skirt suits.

By Mike Davis / TomDispatch.com / July 26, 2011

When my old gang and I were 14 or 15 years old, many centuries ago, we yearned for immortality in the fiery wreck of a bitchin’ ’40 Ford or ’57 Chevy. Our J.K. Rowling was Henry Felsen, the ex-Marine who wrote the bestselling masterpieces Hot Rod (1950), Street Rod (1953), and Crash Club (1958).

Officially, his books — highly praised by the National Safety Council — were deterrents, meant to scare my generation straight with huge dollops of teenage gore. In fact, he was our asphalt Homer, exalting doomed teenage heroes and inviting us to emulate their legend. One of his books ends with an apocalyptic collision at a crossroads that more or less wipes out the entire graduating class of a small Iowa town. We loved this passage so much that we used to read it aloud to each other.

It’s hard not to think of the great Felsen, who died in 1995, while browsing the business pages these days.

There is a growing movement in America that equates godliness with hatred of our government — in fact, hatred of our country.

By Frank Schaeffer / AlterNet

The Norwegian police on Saturday charged a 32-year-old man, whom they identified as a Christian fundamentalist with right-wing connections, over the bombing of a government center and a shooting attack on a nearby island that together left at least 91 people dead.

It has taken me more than 30 years as a journalist to ask myself this question, but this week I find that I must: is the Left right after all? You see, one of the great arguments of the Left is that what the Right calls “the free market” is actually a set-up.

The rich run a global system that allows them to accumulate capital and pay the lowest possible price for labour. The freedom that results applies only to them. The many simply have to work harder, in conditions that grow ever more insecure, to enrich the few. Democratic politics, which purports to enrich the many, is actually in the pocket of those bankers, media barons and other moguls who run and own everything.

Sean Hoare, the former News of the World showbiz reporter who was the first named journalist to allege Andy Coulson was aware of phone hacking by his staff, has been found dead, the Guardian has learned.

Hoare, who worked on the Sun and the News of the World with Coulson before being dismissed for drink and drugs problems, is said to have been found dead at his Watford home.

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

You know that thing we used to have to do at the end of summer, the thing that whopped you upside the head with the brutal inevitability that vacation was over, that tar-bubble popping adventures and rhubarb-sucking loll-abouts were done, done and gone with the finality of a bee between your naked foot and the clover that enticed the insect to its death and you, to your hopping pain?

By Karla Adam / Washington Post /  June 30, 2011 LONDON– Airports, courts and more than 10,000 schools were among…

In response to a deadly Border Patrol shooting by this week in the Tijuana River Valley, Mexico’s president confronted Secretary of State Hillary Clinton over the incident, and later demanded punishment for whomever was responsible.

Soccer is the great global game: the closest thing we have to a connective cultural tissue that binds our species across national and cultural borders. But only in a world so upside down could “the Beautiful Game” be run by an organization as corrupt as FIFA [international federation of football (soccer) association] and by a man as rotten to the core as FIFA President Sepp Blatter. Only Sepp Blatter, whose reputation for degeneracy approaches legend, hire a war criminal like Henry Kissinger to head “a committee of wise persons” aimed at “rooting out corruption” in his organization. And only these two twinning avatars of amorality would use “the Beautiful Game” as an instrument of Islamophobia.

BERLIN — Europe’s economic powerhouse, Germany, announced plans Monday to abandon nuclear energy over the next 11 years, outlining an ambitious strategy in the wake of Japan’s Fukushima disaster to replace atomic power with renewable energy sources.

Chancellor Angela Merkel said she hopes the transformation to more solar, wind and hydroelectric power serves as a roadmap for other countries.

Gunwalking Across the Border Promises to Be the Next Scandal

By Laura Carlsen/ counterpunch

A secret operation to run guns across the border to Mexican drug cartels — overseen by U.S. government agents — threatens to become a major scandal for the Obama administration.

The operation, called “Fast and Furious,” was run out of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) office in Phoenix, Arizona. ATF sanctioned the purchase of weapons in U.S. gun shops and tracked the smuggling route to the Mexican border. Reportedly, more than 2,500 firearms were sold to straw buyers who then handed off the weapons to gunrunners under the nose of ATF.

This video news clip is about the unknown Japanese workers who are putting their lives in peril to avert a nuclear disaster. This is a sobering reminder about what workers do.

The right in this country has declared war upon the working class. It is hard for me to imagine the Koch brothers putting their lives in peril to avert nuclear disaster. Maybe that’s worth thinking about too.