Category: World News

By Marjorie Cohn / Huffington Post / September 19, 2010

Army Pfc. Bradley Manning is accused of leaking military secrets to the public. This week, his supporters are holding rallies in 21 cities, seeking Manning’s release from military custody. Manning is in the brig for allegedly disclosing a classified video depicting U.S. troops shooting civilians from an Apache helicopter in Iraq in July 2007.

Editor: Many gringos and gringas think Cinco de Mayo is THE Mexican Day of Independence. But of course it is not. It’s September 16th – and it’s the 202th anniversary of the beginning of the war against imperial Spain. It’s September 16 and it’s that time of year when all Mexicans from around the world are celebrating Mexican Independence Day.

The attorney for Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, the accused WikiLeaks leaker, says he doesn’t have any information indicating that Manning leaked tens of thousands of pages of documents on the Afghanistan war to the WikiLeaks website.

“I have not talked to my client about that. I have not seen anything, nor have I heard anything that would definitively tie him to that,” said attorney David Coombs in an exclusive interview with CNN.

Manning has not been charged with leaking those Afghanistan field reports, but U.S. military officials have told CNN that he is the prime suspect in that leak.

Greenpeace claims to have shut down offshore drilling by a British oil company at a controversial site in the Arctic after four climbers began an occupation of the rig just after dawn.

The environment campaigners said the four protesters evaded a small flotilla of armed Danish navy and police boats which have been guarding the rigs in Baffin Bay off Greenland since the Greenpeace protest ship Esperanza arrived last week.

By Ray McGovern

President Barack Obama’s aides say his speech this evening marking the end of “combat operations” in Iraq will avoid the vainglorious aspects of President George W. Bush’s infamous “Mission Accomplished” speech in 2003. We’ll see.

On the chance Obama might be open to pivoting away from the reduction of U.S. troops in Iraq and addressing honestly the worsening quagmire in Afghanistan. I have offered him the following text:

My Fellow Americans,

A massive ice island has formed in northern Greenland – it had been part of the Petermann Glacier, but last week it broke free. 92 square miles of ice – four times the size of Manhattan – now floating in the Arctic Sea. It could threaten shipping lanes, oil rigs, and float into the area where the Titanic hit an iceberg in 1912 and sank.

Already, the giant has assumed biblical proportions, becoming part of the slate of environmental evidence of global warming – as the planet heats up, with oil spills, raging fires, devastating heat, and deadly flooding scoring the season as a record-breaker. July 2010, for example, is the hottest July on record. Nothing else that has happened this summer symbolizes climate change as much as the creation of this new Arctic Sea island – the largest ice island in over half a century.

By Jeremy W. Peters / The New York Times/ June 10, 2010

A pilot wanted to take a photographer from The Times-Picayune of New Orleans to snap photographs of the oil slicks blackening the water. The response from a BP contractor who answered the phone late last month at the command center was swift and absolute: Permission denied.

Editor: Verrrry interesting. Britain wants to dismantle its surveillance camera systems while the City of San Diego wants to install them, including a camera on the OB Pier.

By John F Burns/ The New York Times / May 19, 2010

LONDON — Defying those who said it might be paralyzed by internal divisions, Britain’s new coalition government of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats on Wednesday unveiled the most ambitious plan in decades for upending the highly centralized and often intrusive way the country is governed.

The plan, as laid out by the deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, would roll back a proliferation of “nanny state” laws, non-elected administrative bodies and surveillance systems —

by Graham Land / Greenfudge.org / April 22, 2010

Bolivia has been hosting an international summit, named the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, in the city of Cochabamba. The talks began on the 19th and finish today.

From a report by the Environmental News Service:

More than 20,000 indigenous, environmental and civil society delegates from 129 countries were in attendance as President Morales welcomed them to the conference at a soccer stadium in the village of Tiquipaya on the outskirts of the city of Cochabamba.

The tone in Bolivia is decidedly political, with an emphasis on nature, poor and indigenous peoples and ‘climate justice’.

by Jordan Barnes

I could not have anticipated what I was to see, or the affect that our experience in Haiti would have on me.

My fiance Christene and I left from Ocean Beach to join ten others and 1,200 lbs of medicine and supplies that had been donated. This is only a fraction of the donations that “Children’s Hope” has received since the catastrophic quake, but such was our weight allotment, the rest will go down in subsequent trips.

My mother Leisa Faulkner began Children’s Hope, a non-profit/non-religious organization, in 2004 to help the desperate situation of the children of the poorest country in the Western hemisphere. Along with humanitarian aid, my mother has become very involved in the political situation there.

The Afghanistan War cannot be Barack Obama’s war anymore than it is historically correct to call it George W Bush’s war – because there is a history revealed that says different. They inherited a stage in a conquest that has been playing out in modern times from as far back as 1839. It is all part of something called the “Great Game,” a competition to control Central Asia of which Afghanistan is the geographical bridge.

by Katrina vanden Heuvel / The Nation / Dec. 01, 2009

Tonight President Obama will announce his new Afghanistan policy. By all accounts it will be one of military escalation. This is a tragic moment–both for the nation and his presidency–and it is one I had hoped the President would avoid by courageously leading us in a wiser direction, one that views 21st century challenges anew, in fresh and necessary ways.