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| Taking a Closer Look at the Stories Ignored by the Corporate Media |
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Archive for the Month of August, 2005.
Viewing ALL NEWS articles 151 through 225 of 509.
- Its time to launch a boycott of the trendy BayWalk chains that are having handcuffs placed on peaceful St. Pete for Peace anti-war protestors exercising their first amendment rights - With U.S. troops currently protecting Halliburton's oil operations in Iraq and the CentGas pipeline in Afghanistan, U.S. troops are now being sent to Paraguay, complete with immunity from criminal prosecution by Paraguay or the International Criminal Court, to protect the millions of acres of Paraguayan water and land resources bought over the years by religious cult leader Sun Myung Moon. - Secret, judge-only courts where the accused has no access to the "evidence"? Changes to the law will include making it illegal to advocate violence to further a person’s belief, justifying or validating such violence, or fostering hatred. - The 14th Intelligence Company and SAS (or Special Air Service) have a sordid history, including organizing massacres of republican fighters in Northern Ireland. It should be noted that the SAS officers commanded some of the infamous "pseudo gangs" that terrorized the civilian population in Kenya during the Mau Mau rebellion-in other words, they created fake terrorist groups - The author contends that a Brazilian man killed accidentally by the British police after the London bombings is just the latest victim of an attitude taken by "white colonial masters" toward people of color, and that the United States in its policies is expressing this same attitude. - We should not expect the Bush administration to make a rational choice; that would be a dramatic departure from every preceding decision of consequence. The President of the United States always has the option of unleashing Armageddon if he so chooses. Normally, however, sanity prevails. When the bombs hit the bunkers in Iran; World War 3 will be underway. - US deeply involved in the gravest of international crimes - No electricity, no water, no fuel, no food rations, no security, no sewage and frequent arbitrary murder with out legal recourse of any kind is what the Gates of Hell look like, as described in this article from Iraqi newspaper Azzaman. - More GM Contamination Found in Crops - Cannabis is proven to be a fairly harmless drug -- so why is the American right still waging a massive war on weed? - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez told thousands of visiting students that if U.S. forces were to invade the South American country, they would be soundly defeated. - ...reports about the recent bomb scare in the subway under the congressional offices at the Dirksen Building—coincidently near where Fitzgerald was holding his grand jury hearings—raised questions as to whether government operatives were sending the zealous prosecutor a "warning message" that he was entering dangerous waters with his investigation. - A growing number of Iraqi boys are being forced to join the commercial sex trade --many forced to do so by criminal gangs through threats and violence, intimidation, and blackmail in a country where "honor killings" of youths who engage in same-sex relations by their families is encouraged by Sharia law and religious fanaticism; and some out of poverty in a country where official government figures for youth unemployment at 48 % (although the real figure is undoubtedly much higher). - The plans of Northcom have their origins not in the terrible events of 9/11, but in longstanding concerns in corporate America about the political stability of the United States. This is a society increasingly polarized between the fabulously wealthy elite at the top, and the vast majority of working people who face an increasingly difficult struggle to survive. The nightmare of the American ruling class is the emergence of a mass movement from below that challenges its political and economic domination. - If George Bush were no longer President, it would add to the power of the PNAC crew. If you think they assumed great power because 3,000 anonymous Americans died, just imagine how much more power they can assume after claiming that terrorists are a great enough threat to get to an American president. - The CIA asked the Netherlands not to detain Pakistani scientist Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan for stealing nuclear secrets from a Dutch facility, former Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers has claimed.
- Reactions to Venezuelan Government’s Split with the DEA - "The DEA was using the fight against narco-trafficking as a mask to, among other things, support narco-trafficking, in order to conduct intelligence operations against the government." - The Iraqis discovered the largest CIA operation in the world in Irbil, northern Iraq. - According to sources within the German Federal Intelligence Service (Bundesnachrichtendienst - BND), the Bush administration has drawn up plans to hit Iran's nuclear, other WMD, and military sites with heavy saturation bombing using bunker buster bombs and tactical nuclear weapons. The attack will be coordinated with urban and rural critical infrastructure sabotage carried out by elements of the People's Mujaheddin (MEK), Pentagon Special Operations units, and other Iranian dissident groups. - Pentagon insiders report that it was Byrnes' policy disagreements with the Pentagon neo-cons over the new recruitment policies and the potential for calling up Army retirees and reinstating military conscription without adequate TRADOC funding that resulted in his firing. The personal misconduct charges were concocted by the Pentagon to cover up the fact that there are serious disagreements with Bush and Rumsfeld among the flag officer ranks in the military. - The video, shown on Australian television after reportedly being aired on Dubai-based Al-Arabiya television, shows the man holding an automatic rifle and warning of attacks while criticising British Prime Minister Tony Blair and US President Geoge W. Bush. - Sherman Skolnick, who spearheaded the investigation into largest judicial bribery scandal in U.S. history in 1969, is now back again to finger crooked judges on the U.S. Supreme Court. Saying the Bush administration wants him arrested as a domestic terrorist, Skolnick claims Bush and his cronies are in hot water involving the Chicago grand jury investigation headed by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. - The US continues its descent into the Third World, but you would never know it from news reports of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ July payroll jobs release. - Canadian troops could stay in Afghanistan for at least 20 years, predicted one of the top generals amidst public criticism of the government decision to expand troops deployment from the Afghan capital to other regions. - Nearly $9 billion of money spent on Iraqi reconstruction is unaccounted for because of inefficiencies and bad management, according to a watchdog report published Sunday.
- The internet property and search engine Yahoo said that its search index now includes some 20.8 billion web pages and images, nearly double that of Google. - What we don't remember, what many of us never really considered, was that this was a mass political action that had no leaders, no apologists, no internal critics. The Watts riot was a spontaneous act of a people who had been oppressed, emasculated and impoverished for too long. It didn't matter if the man being arrested was guilty or not. It didn't matter if the police stood out in the street and said to go home. Who cared what they said or what their laws said? Who cared about property that would never be ours? - Canada is developing a no-fly list in an effort to prevent terrorist attacks and make air travel safer, the federal transport minister has announced.
- Conceding there's no way to know what life will be like in a million years, the Environmental Protection Agency nevertheless proposed limits Tuesday on how much radiation a person should be exposed to from a nuclear waste dump in that distant time. - This war cannot be won by America. Those pathetic Iraqis just will not stand and fight toe to toe. For some strange reason, the Iraqis are fighting to win, not to meet American wishes and expectations. Every day that Americans are in Iraq fighting the insurgency is another day that George Bush is losing ground. Every death of an American soldier is a nail in the coffin of the American Empire.
- Foreign citizens who change planes at airports in the United States can legally be seized, detained without charges, deprived of access to a lawyer or the courts, and even denied basic necessities like food, lawyers for the government said in Brooklyn federal court yesterday. - There are four primary ways in which this can be accomplished and it is my own personal informed opinion that all four techniques will be used simultaneously: - Quietly, in their ones and twos, the professional classes of Baghdad are slipping out of the country to avoid becoming another fatal statistic.
- The Israeli Air Force has completed military preparations for a pre-emptive strike at Iran's Bushehr nuclear facility and will attack if Russia supplies Iran with rods for enriching uranium...Israel may also choose to launch submarine-based cruise missiles from the Persian Gulf at key Iranian targets
- "I will not betray my honour and my conscience and testify against Saddam Hussein," Aziz said - When news anchors are complicit in actions that cause death, or when their negligence is an insult to freedoms of all kinds, including press freedom, they should be held accountable and pay the price. In the case of Jennings, the price should be clear: He was a willing whore of the Corporate Press and that should be his legacy. - Haitian media organizations, quoting Solino residents, reported that machetes were being distributed out of a National Police car to individuals attached to the national police. - Now Bunny Greenhouse may lose her job — and her reputation, which she spent a lifetime building. She is a black woman in a world of mostly white men; a 60-year-old workaholic who abides neither fools nor frauds. But she is out of her element in this fight, her former boss said. - The apparent mishandling of a potentially hazardous radioactive substance by an employee of the University of California-run Los Alamos National Laboratory has resulted in contamination of sites in four states - Everybody has started to pick on the poor Americans: - Troops Equate Civil Disturbances with Terrorism, Citizens are called "rebels" - The Sept. 11 commission knew military intelligence officials had identified lead hijacker Mohamed Atta as a member of al-Qaida who might be part of U.S.-based terror cell more than a year before the terror attacks but decided not to include that in its final report, a spokesman acknowledged Thursday. - Chertoff is the perfect "guy in charge" come the day Bush and his coterie of chickenhawk Straussian neocons declare martial law in the wake of a staged terror attack. It doesn’t matter if Chertoff sits in a DHS office or one in the Pentagon.
- A computer chip will be embedded in passport covers... - High gas prices may not only pinch your wallet at the pump but also at the supermarket - Monsanto's announcement of their plans to purchase Seminis, the largest fruit and vegetable seed producer in the world, was quickly followed by a statement that Monsanto does not intend to apply biotech to develop these seeds-at least not yet. This is a curious assertion from a dominant biotech company. - Unfortunately, children for the most part trust that what they learn in school is true. When a brand name is presented to them in that context, it has almost unassailable credibility. The regrettable result of the corporate invasion of our schools is that kids begin to believe that Coke quenches your thirst, McNuggets make a great lunch and conserving energy is not important. - Attention hackers: Uncle Sam wants you. - "For the first time since we began tracking these activities, younger Canadians are spending more time on the Internet than watching TV..." - Rumors inside the military say that a growing faction of discontented high-ranking officers are attempting internally to try and stop the Bush administration’s imminent plans for war with Iran in an effort to avert global war.
- Siberia feels the heat. It's a frozen peat bog the size of France and Germany combined, contains billions of tonnes of greenhouse gas and, for the first time since the ice age, it is melting. - I find it quite curious that those who opposed Saddam Hussein now are dismembering Iraq. This shows that they had no plan whatsoever for the country, only the pursuit of their own selfish interests. - (Dont forget to say Achtung... And if you have dark skin and your name is Mohammed, you might want to stay home. It's only prudent as Bush Sr. would say) - by Howard Zinn- More Americans are beginning to feel, like the soldiers in Iraq, that something is terribly wrong. More and more every day the lies are being exposed. And then there is the largest lie, that everything the US does is to be pardoned because we are engaged in a "war on terrorism", ignoring the fact that war is itself terrorism, that barging into homes and taking away people and subjecting them to torture is terrorism, that invading and bombing other countries does not give us more security but less. - Empire is expensive. Protecting far-flung "interests" costs money and, inevitably, lives. Do you want to know the price of empire? It's random searches of subway passengers in New York City. And that's just the beginning. - The Bush administration with the support of the so-called EU-3—Britain, France and Germany—has seized on Iran’s decision to restart its uranium conversion facility at Esfahan as the pretext for condemning Tehran and threatening UN economic sanctions. Once again Washington and its allies, with the backing of the international media, are conducting a campaign of provocation and lies that will ultimately lead to open confrontation if Iran does not completely capitulate. - An FCC ruling that internet telephony services must provide the same built-in wiretapping capabilities as conventional phone companies has civil libertarians feeling burned. - Software titan Microsoft enjoys the best media reputation in the United States, with Wal-Mart Stores a somewhat surprising second, according to a new survey. - Guerrillas start from scratch. They need to collect the materials for a bomb, put it in place, and set it off without attracting attention. Imagine doing that in a crowded, noisy Baghdad street and you'll see that it wouldn't be possible without the cooperation of everybody in the neighborhood, from the Radio Shack guy who donates the trigger to the granny on the corner, timing the US patrols as she waves sweetly at the GIs. - Saddam Hussein could be tried and executed over a relatively minor and isolated case, before evidence on the full extent of his regime's crimes can be brought to the courtroom, according to a source close to the special court trying the former Iraqi leader. - The two largest U.S. teacher unions joined a "back-to-school" boycott against Wal-Mart Stores Inc., targeting one of the year's busiest shopping seasons to protest the retailer's labor practices. - Candidates in parties backing President Hugo Chavez won many more seats than opposition challengers in Venezuela's local elections this week, according to preliminary results.
- It's the Great American Jobs Scam: an intentionally constructed system that enables corporations to exact huge taxpayer subsidies by promising quality jobs - and then lets them fail to deliver. The other benefit often promised - higher tax revenues - often proves false or exaggerated as well. - It's easy to forget sometimes - amidst all the lofty talk of geopolitics, of apocalyptic clashes between good and evil, of terror, liberty, security and God - that the war on Iraq is "largely a matter of loot," as Kasper Gutman so aptly described the Crusades in that seminal treatise on human nature, The Maltese Falcon. And nowhere is this more evident than in the festering, oozing imposthume of corruption centered around the Gutman-like figure of Dick Cheney. - U.S. hires notorious mercenary "Tumbledown Tim" Spicer -- veteran of coups and rebellions from Sierra Leone to Papua New Guinea. Now, he's bringing his brand of "security" to hapless Iraq. - In South Florida, housing analyst Jack McCabe said the housing market has reached its pinnacle and as interest rates increase over the next year, prices will begin to decline. The hardest-hit market will be new condominiums, McCabe said. - ACLU Chief Calls Government Secrecy a Further Attempt to Avoid Accountability at Highest Levels - Piece by piece, the central government demanded creation of key components, which, if integrated, could be used to create a virtual surveillance state. That integration is now an explicit objective of the Homeland Security Act. - The important information about Iraqi Order 81 is that it was designed to have a major impact on the way farming is done in Iraq. This order prohibits Iraqi farmers from using the methods of agriculture that they have used for centuries. The practice of saving seeds from one year to the next is now illegal in Iraq. What a break for U.S. corporations, such as Monsanto. - The Bush administration wants to send women seeking abortions for health reasons to the courthouse, not the doctor. - So as we fight to bring liberal democracy to quasi-feudal backwaters in distant lands, we might remember that the fight for individual rights in the American workplace -- and now, beyond it -- is itself a long way from a victorious conclusion. And thanks to the NLRB, it just got longer - All the ways big business is intruding on your campus – from the Kmart Chair of Marketing to threats to U.S. Innovation.
- No oil for blood. The bumper sticker popular among left-leaning opponents of the conflict — no war for oil — has been turned on its head. There is no oil to be had for the shedding of American blood. Not for years anyway. - The majority of people who place bets on gasoline expect prices to keep surging this year.
Pages for August, 2005
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