"War is Necrophilia" by Robbie Conal
www.robbieconal.com
Friday, August 15, 2008
Sunday, August 10, 2008
Young, gifted, black ... and leading America
Barack Obama's success reflects the rise of 'post-racial' black politicians who distance themselves from the old politics and civil rights of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. But many fear this new generation fails to understand the concerns of some black Americans.
read more...
Sunday, August 10, 2008
Palestinians mourn national poet
Palestinians on Sunday mourned the death of poet Mahmud Darwish who gave voice to their decades-old struggle and is widely considered one of the Arab world's greatest writers.
Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas declared three days of official mourning in a televised address after Darwish died on Saturday in a US hospital from complications following open-heart surgery.
read more...
Sunday, August 3, 2008
CNN anchor Campbell Brown dismisses the current impeachment movement in Congress as "stagecraft". FAIR notes that Brown is far from impartial in this story, as she is married to a former deputy Press Secretary to the Bush Administration.
Ask CNN why an investigation of abuses of power by elected officials was treated as fodder for humor and not serious reporting. And ask Campbell Brown why she didn't recuse herself from commenting on an inquiry into wrongdoing by her husband's political associates.
Click for more on this story; plus links to contact CNN and Campbell Brown
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Lawbreaking kayakers try to change an urban river's sad course
While most Angelenos were trapped in cars on rush-hour freeways July 26, a group of 13 kayakers and canoeists took to a hidden stretch of the Los Angeles River most people have never seen in the Sepulveda Basin, which traverses the San Fernando Valley between Balboa Boulevard and the Sepulveda Dam. While the Valley fried in the upper 90s, the group glided through shaded waters, as lush greenery and a cool breeze eased their journey.
read more...
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Industry Gushed Money After Reversal on Drilling
Campaign contributions from oil industry executives to Sen. John McCain rose dramatically in the last half of June, after the senator from Arizona made a high-profile split with environmentalists and reversed his opposition to the federal ban on offshore drilling.
read more...
Sunday, July 13, 2008
A Warning From the Sea
QUILCENE, WASH. -- For decades, the unwritten motto at shellfish hatcheries in the Pacific Northwest was "Better oysters through science."
Scientists mated the heartiest, fastest-growing stock to produce plumper, sweeter oysters for slurping raw on the half-shell or frying up to dip in tangy sauces.
With selective breeding and genetic fingerprinting, they were on their way to developing a super oyster resistant to summer mortality, keeping one step ahead of a warmer, more polluted planet. Or so they thought.
read more...
Sunday, July 6, 2008
Jesse Helms, American Bigot
Did he plan it? Did he struggle on life support until after the midnight hour, timing his last breath? Or had he been dead for days, his associates keeping the body on ice for the holiday announcement? Jesse Helms, dead on the 4th of July.
Helms would have appreciated the symbolism, confirming the his own mythic identity as a Proud American, but Helms other legacy as a big fat bigot is well established. From his racist tirades on the radio and television in North Carolina during the 1950s and 60s, to his vicious homophobic rants of the 1980s and 90s, he left a highly quotable record of hate.
read more...
Sunday, June 29, 2008
India's Coca-Cola Problem
Polluted drinking water and toxic waste have plagued the small Indian village of Plachimada since Coca-Cola first opened a plant next to the residents' homes. Local activists are now calling on the Indian Supreme Court to protect their water rights from international corporations.
read more...
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Call for Change Ignored, Levees Remain Patchy
Gerald E. Galloway Jr., a former brigadier general with the Corps of Engineers, said in an interview that few broad changes were made once the floodwaters of 1993 receded and were forgotten.
We told them there were going to be more floods like this, said Dr. Galloway, now an engineering professor at the University of Maryland. Everybody likes to go out and shake hands on the levee now and offer sandbags, but thats not helpful. This shouldnt have happened in the first place.
read more...
Sunday, June 22, 2008
These wars are about oil, not democracy
PARIS -- The ugly truth behind the Iraq and Afghanistan wars finally has emerged.
Four major western oil companies, Exxon Mobil, Shell, BP and Total are about to sign U.S.-brokered no-bid contracts to begin exploiting Iraq's oil fields. Saddam Hussein had kicked these firms out three decades ago when he nationalized Iraq's oil industry. The U.S.-installed Baghdad regime is welcoming them back.
Iraq is getting back the same oil companies that used to exploit it when it was a British colony.
As former fed chairman Alan Greenspan recently admitted, the Iraq war was all about oil. The invasion was about SUV's, not democracy.
read more...
Sunday, June 8, 2008
New Laws Aim to Limit Reproductive Rights
DETROIT - Every year thousands of anti-choice laws aimed at eliminating or restricting abortion rights are introduced into state legislatures around the U.S. The result is that a majority of states now have one or more onerous laws which impede womens right to make and carry out crucial health care decisions about their reproductive capacity. These include waiting periods before a doctor can perform an abortion, being forced to read or hear a scientifically unsound propaganda script about the dangers of abortion [sic], and parental notification and/or consent laws aimed at young women.
read more...
Sunday, June 8, 2008
Russian Leader calls U.S. Selfish
ST. PETERSBURG, Russia -- President Dmitry Medvedev said on Saturday that the United States has fueled global troubles, portraying Russia's growing economic might as a force for worldwide stabilization.
Recklessness by big banks and what he called "the aggressive financial policies of the biggest economy in the world" haven't just hurt corporations, he said. "Unfortunately, most people on the planet have become poorer," he said.
Medvedev made his comments to the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, a gathering of thousands of businessmen, a month after his inauguration.
read more...
Sunday, June 1, 2008
Risking it All to Find Safety
Juliuss sheer power is just unsettling. It starts with the 22-year-olds evident beautythe bright smile, the cherub-like innocence of his round face, his smooth, dark skin and baby dreadsall of which work alongside a sharp, speedy mind and a disarming charm to concoct a potent, volatile brew. His physicality is unquestionably malehes nearly six feet tall, with square shoulders and rounded if unsculpted musculature that he shows off in tight shirts and tank tops. But he wields his manhood in an overtly feminine way; where other guys strut, Julius swishes. And this recasting of male form in female style creates a gender play thats more take-no-shit diva than nelly boy.
read more...
Sunday, June 1, 2008
Black Bloggers Fight to Make Voices Heard
With its power-to-the-individual approach, the new media world promises anyone with a laptop the possibility of a publishing empire. But, as some black bloggers are finding out, the new media world is a lot like the old one: racially segregated, with many prominent black voices still fighting to be heard.
read more...
Sunday, May 25, 2008
Amazon Indians lead battle against power giant's plan to flood rainforest
The Amazonian city of Altamira played host to one of the more uneven contests in recent Brazilian history this week, as a colourful alliance of indigenous leaders gathered to take on the might of the state power corporation and stop the construction of an immense hydroelectric dam on a tributary of the Amazon.
At stake are plans to flood large areas of rainforest to make way for the huge Belo Monte hydroelectric dam on the Xingu river. The government is pushing the project as a sustainable energy solution, but critics complain the environmental and social costs are too high.
read more...
Sunday, May 25, 2008
Will black people's lives ever be as interesting as white people's?
When I first read about Spike Lee's attack on Clint Eastwood in Cannes last week, my initial thought was why should a man like Lee be so concerned about a man like Eastwood not having any black characters in his movie Flags of our Fathers? Is this not the kind of movie I would expect Spike Lee to make himself?
But the more I thought about it, the more I came round to Spike Lee's point of view.
read more...
Sunday, May 18, 2008
Cubas gay community celebrated unprecedented openness - and high-ranking political alliances - with a government-backed campaign against homophobia on Saturday.
The meeting at a convention center in Havanas Vedado district may have been the largest gathering of openly gay activists ever on the communist-run island. President Raul Castros daughter Mariela, who has promoted the rights of sexual minorities, presided.
read more...
Sunday, May 4, 2008
Giant agribusinesses are enjoying soaring earnings and profits out of the world food crisis which is driving millions of people towards starvation, and speculation is helping to drive the prices of basic foodstuffs out of the reach of the hungry.
The prices of wheat, corn and rice have soared over the past year driving the world's poor – who already spend about 80 per cent of their income on food – into hunger and destitution.
read more...
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Many South L.A. students frightened and depressed, survey finds
"They see that their school is failing them, their teachers are failing them, there's racial tension and gang violence, and also many feel that their schools are not schools -- their schools look more like prisons," said Anna Exiga, a junior at Jordan High School who was one of the organizers of the survey.
Jordan High Principal Stephen Strachan took exception to some of the results, saying the survey was skewed to provoke negative responses. He said his school has made great strides in preparing students for college and has created a "safe haven" from a violent community.
He did not, however, dispute the findings about depression. "This morning at 10 o'clock at Simpson's Mortuary, a 16-year-old was buried. That's one of my students who was shot in the community," he said. "I hear kids say, 'Too many people are dying in our community.' And that plays on the psyche. . . . It's really hard to focus on Algebra 2 when your friends are getting shot in the community."
read more...
Monday, April 21, 2008
Tuesday Is Earth Day: The drops of life
Next year, the United Nations will release its assessment of global access to water in a report titled "Water in a Changing World." Here's an early headline: Forget oil. In part, because of global warming, future wars will be fought over water.
Earth Day includes measuring risk -- and no threat is greater to humanity than catastrophic water shortages.
read more...
Thursday, April 17, 2008
ABC Hosts Heckled After Debate
"Oh, the crowd is turning on me, the crowd is turning on me!"
Reflecting what seemed to be the main consensus of the night - that ABC botched this debate, big time - Charlie Gibson tells the crowd there will be one more, superfluous commercial break of the night and is subsequently jeered.
read more, plus a sampling of comments to ABC regarding the debate...
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
The first World Pillow Fight Day -- where people in about 35 different cities gathered in public spaces to engage in brawls -- is part of a broader phenomenon known as the urban playground movement. Its goal is to promote the creative use of public spaces through free and fun events, says Kevin Bracken, cofounder of Newmindspace, the group that organized the pillow fight in New York.
read more...
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Rocketing global food prices are causing acute problems of hunger in poor countries and have put back the fight against poverty by seven years, the World Bank said today.
Robert Zoellick, the Bank's president, said that while consumers in rich countries were worried about the cost of filling the fuel tanks in their cars, people in poor countries were "struggling to fill their stomachs. And it's getting more and more difficult every day."
Zoellick said the price of wheat has risen by 120% in the past year, more than doubling the cost of a loaf of bread. Rice prices were up by 75%.
read more...
Tuesday, April 8th
TV's New Diversity?
On April 2, the New York Times noticed a trend that, if true, would indeed be worth celebrating. Under the headline "Like the Candidates, TVs Political Pundits Show Signs of Diversity," reporter Felicia Lee told readers: "With campaign coverage center stage on the cable channels, producers and critics are again assessing the diversity among pundits, who talk (and talk) about things like Mr. Obamas pastor, the Hispanic vote, Iraq and the economy." Lee added: "Both MSNBC and CNN this election season have given new prominence to a handful of contributing commentators from varied backgrounds and perspectives: blacks, Hispanics and women."
That sounds good--until the Times gets around to telling you more about these fresh new faces. And then you learn that diversity has a somewhat limited definition in the corporate media.
read more...
Sunday, April 6, 2008
The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo
by Jessica Mosby
"Rape has always been used as a weapon of war" is the opening line of the new documentary film The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo. For 76 minutes the film exposes the incredibly brutal civil war that has raged for over ten years in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Not only have over four million people been killed, but over 250,000 women and girls have been raped, kidnapped, and tortured.
read more...
Saturday, April 5, 2008
Notes on Torture
This memorandum is a disgrace, not just morally, but legally as well. In fact its not really a legal document at all
by Jameel Jaffer
Since 2003, my organisation, the American Civil Liberties Union, has been litigating for the release of government documents concerning the abuse and torture of prisoners at Guantnamo and other US facilities overseas. The litigation has resulted in the release of more than 100,000 pages, including interrogation directives, witness statements, autopsy reports, and legal memos. One of the most important of these documents was released to us this week.
The document (pdf) is a legal memorandum authored in 2003 by the office of legal counsel, part of the US justice department, for the department of defence. The memo reinterprets statutes to argue that an act does not rise to the level of torture unless it inflicts the kind of pain associated with death, organ failure, or the permanent impairment of a significant bodily function. It argues that, even if a statute bars a particular interrogation method, the president has the authority to ignore the statute. And it argues that, even if an interrogator were to be prosecuted for torture, the interrogator would be able to defend himself by arguing that the torture was not inflicted maliciously but rather as a means of obtaining information.
The memorandum is a disgrace, not just morally, but legally as well. In fact its not really a legal memo at all...
More at www.commondreams.org
Guardian News and Media Limited 2008