Category: World News

When the OB Rag website first started publishing three years ago, the massive October 2007 fire was raging across San Diego County. Our blog/ website was hatched in the midst of fire, born under fire, so to speak. The fire and the responses to it raised all kinds of issues that we began addressing.

Here are a few of the posts that we wrote and published about the fires – and a few other issues – during that period:

COME INSIDE FOR HEADLINES AND LINKS …

Some San Diegans are trying to find a San Diego location for reasonable and progressive leaning people to gather to rally/watch the Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert Washington D.C. rallies on October 30th. The event will be broadcast from 9 am to noon west Coast time. [SEE LINKS INSIDE}

by Bill McKibben / 350.org / October 11, 2010

How do you say ‘thank you’ 7,347 times?

People got to work yesterday in at least that many places around the world — the planet has never seen anything quite that widespread. Or quite that beautiful.

I hope you’ll take a few minutes to visit 350.org to look through some of the thousands of pictures that we have managed to sort through so far:

by Michael Moore / OpenMike blog

So … it turns out President Eisenhower wasn’t making up all that stuff about the military-industrial complex.

That’s what you’ll conclude if you read Bob Woodward’s new book, Obama’s War.

In fact, after you read Woodward’s book, you’ll split a gut every time you hear a politician or a government teacher talk about “civilian control over the military.”

The following is an article from the October 15, 2010 issue of Rolling Stone.

We arrived at the southwest gate of the white house a little after one o’clock on the afternoon of September 17th. It was a warm fall day, but the capital felt quiet and half-empty, as it does on Fridays at the end of summer, with Congress still in recess.

As Mexicans celebrated the 200th anniversary of their independence from Spain last week, evoking a history of resistance against colonialism, a disturbing development unfolds on the country’s northern border: a fleet of US Predator B drones has been deployed on constant patrol.

Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have cast their faux dueling Washington rallies as a kind of grand satire of the current state of media and politics.

“It’s just like everything they do – it’s really for the joke,” said one person familiar with the planning of the October 30 event, who asked – in the spirit of the “Daily Show” – to be described as a “senior administration official.”

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,