January 2011

The gun — preeminent symbol of the impotence of the American citizen

by Paul Woodward 01.09.2011

A paradox embedded in many popular symbols of power is that their greatest appeal is often found among those who perceive themselves as the most weak. Nowhere is this marriage of power and weakness more evident than in the American fetish of the handgun. Jared Lee Loughner is apparently none too enamored with the US [...]

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Arizona has become ‘the Mecca for prejudice and bigotry’

by News Sources 01.09.2011

The New York Times reported: The shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords and others at a neighborhood meeting in Arizona on Saturday set off what is likely to be a wrenching debate over anger and violence in American politics. While the exact motivations of the suspect in the shootings remained unclear, an Internet site tied to [...]

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Israel’s effort to squash the popular struggle movement in the West Bank continues in military court

by News Sources 01.09.2011

The Popular Struggle Coordination Committee in the West Bank just released a statement saying: After ordering to keep Abdallah Abu Rahmah in detention past his release date on the 18th of November, the Military Court of appeals will deliver its verdict on the prosecution’s appeal demanding to aggravate the one-year sentence imposed on Abu Rahmah. [...]

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U.S. subpoenas Twitter over WikiLeaks supporters

by News Sources 01.09.2011

The New York Times reports: Prosecutors investigating the disclosure of thousands of classified government documents by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks have gone to court to demand the Twitter account activity of several people linked to the organization, including its founder, Julian Assange, according to the group and a copy of a subpoena made public late [...]

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Muqtada Sadr strikes a measured tone in his return to Iraq

by News Sources 01.09.2011

Reporting on Muqtada al Sadr’s return to Iraq, the Los Angeles Times said: If his old speeches had been warlike, urging rebellion against the Americans, his tone Saturday was measured and controlled, acknowledging the harshness of Iraq’s war in the streets and the suffering of all Iraqis. “Whatever struggle happened between brothers, let us forget [...]

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The myth of “Good Israel” vs. “Bad Israel”

by News Sources 01.08.2011

Liberal Zionists like Jeffrey Goldberg want to believe Israel is being corrupted by a number of course trends whose combined influence now threatens the secular democratic Israel that supposedly once represented a more authentic expression of the Jewish state. Goldberg says: I’m speaking here of four groups, each ascendant to varying degrees: The haredim, the [...]

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Is Lieberman the new Israeli mainstream?

by News Sources 01.08.2011

Mitchell Plitnick writes: In an interview given to Newsweek, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman made the following, quite chilling statement: “I am the mainstream. When I started with my vision, I was really a small minority. Today we’re the third [largest] party in Israel.” Lieberman is certainly no stranger to bluster, so it’s easy to [...]

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Salmaan Taseer, Aasia Bibi and Pakistan’s struggle with extremism

by News Sources 01.08.2011

Declan Walsh recounts the story of Aasia Bibi, a Christian Pakistani woman convicted of blasphemy, whose most prominent defender, Salmaan Taseer the governor of Punjab, was assassinated last week. A row over a glass of water is at the root of the case against the 46-year-old Christian mother of five. And it is indirectly the [...]

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» Nitin Sawhney – Breathing Light

by Attention to the Unseen 01.08.2011

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Icelandic MP fights US demand for her Twitter account details

by News Sources 01.08.2011

The Guardian reports: A member of parliament in Iceland who is also a former WikiLeaks volunteer says the US justice department has ordered Twitter to hand over her private messages. Birgitta Jonsdottir, an MP for the Movement in Iceland, said last night on Twitter that the “USA government wants to know about all my tweets [...]

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US should exercise green power

by News Sources 01.08.2011

Kevin Gallagher writes: To kick off 2011, the Obama administration has had the audacity to file suit at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) against China’s policies to build green technologies. This action is deeply flawed. The US should not try to beat China down, but should pursue its own green jobs policy and reform the [...]

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Turks see US as biggest external threat, poll results show

by News Sources 01.08.2011

Hürriyet Daily News reports: Some 43 percent of Turks perceive the United States as the country’s biggest threat, followed by Israel, according to a broad survey carried out in December. “This the highest ratio ever on the external threat question among our surveys,” Professor Özer Sencar, chairman of Ankara-based MetroPOLL Strategic and Social Research Center, [...]

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Secrecy is the original sin

by News Sources 01.08.2011

From Truthout: Largely because of his advocacy of psychedelic drugs, Tim Leary became a high-profile political prisoner whom Nixon called “the most dangerous man in America” (the same label Nixon used to describe Daniel Ellsberg). Leary was sentenced to ten years in prison for possession of .0025 grams of cannabis. After escaping from prison in [...]

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Lockheed Martin: the shadow government

by News Sources 01.08.2011

Yahoo Tech Ticker reports: Too big to fail? That’s been the key question asked of Wall Street’s biggest banks since the September 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers, which sent shock waves through the global financial system and led to the worst recession this country has seen since the Great Depression. But, there is another firm [...]

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A legacy Obama should avoid: Allowing detentions without trials

by News Sources 01.07.2011

Tom Malinowski from Human Rights Watch writes: It is an iron law of American government that institutions created to meet a temporary contingency are almost impossible to dismantle once the contingency has passed. If not for the Soviet threat, for example, the United States hardly would have established multiple intelligence agencies, military bases in Germany [...]

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Uncomfortable lessons from the reaction to WikiLeaks

by News Sources 01.07.2011

“Amid the sound and fury of the reaction to WikiLeaks, something is missing. Whether hostile or supportive, politicians and commentators on all sides have managed to miss the real point. The contents of the leaked cables should demand a deep reflection on our foreign policy. That this has not happened tells a sorry story about [...]

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How WikiLeaks could save the internet

by News Sources 01.07.2011

Evgeny Morozov writes: American diplomacy seems to have survived Wikileaks’s “attack on the international community,” as Hillary Clinton so dramatically characterized it, unscathed. Save for a few diplomatic reshuffles, Foggy Bottom doesn’t seem to be deeply affected by what happened. Certainly, the U.S. government at large has not been paralyzed by the leaks—contrary to what [...]

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The man who spilled the secrets

by News Sources 01.07.2011

Vanity Fair tells the story of the fraught relationship between Julian Assange and The Guardian newspaper. On the afternoon of November 1, 2010, Julian Assange, the Australian-born founder of WikiLeaks.org, marched with his lawyer into the London office of Alan Rusbridger, the editor of The Guardian. Assange was pallid and sweaty, his thin frame racked [...]

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Taliban not quite twelve feet tall

by Paul Woodward 01.07.2011

The theory behind President Obama’s Afghan surge (beyond the moronically simplistic “if it worked in Iraq, it should work in Afghanistan”) was the notion that after “sustained pressure,” “a more robust approach” — or whatever euphemism one chooses for an operation designed to kill more people — the US and Nato would be in a [...]

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War with Iran postponed — at least until after the 2012 US presidential election

by News Sources 01.07.2011

Reuters reports: Israel believes Iran will not be able to produce a nuclear bomb before 2015 and a top Israeli official has counseled against pre-emptive military strikes, intelligence assessments published Friday showed. Given in a briefing by Mossad director Meir Dagan upon his retirement Thursday, the assessments pointed to new Israeli confidence in U.S.-led sanctions [...]

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An interview with Nir Rosen

by News Sources 01.07.2011

Nir Rosen, independent journalist and author of Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America’s Wars in the Muslim World, interviewed on Press TV. (H/t Pulse.) Share

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The Israeli equivalent of the burning of the Reichstag

by News Sources 01.06.2011

Yossi Gurvitz writes: The decision taken by the Knesset plenum yesterday, to create a parliamentary investigative committee for “the phenomenon of de-legitimization of the IDF in the world on the part of Israeli organization”, has nothing whatsoever to do with an investigation. Israel has investigative procedures: if there’s a suspicion of a crime, either the [...]

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Egypt Muslims to act as “human shields” at Coptic Christmas Eve mass

by News Sources 01.06.2011

Al-Ahram reports: “Although 2011 started tragically, I feel it will be a year of eagerly anticipated change, where Egyptians will stand against sectarianism and unite as one,” Father Rafaeil Sarwat of the Mar-Mina church told Ahram Online. The Coptic priest was commenting on the now widespread call by Muslim intellectuals and activists upon Egyptian Muslims [...]

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The murder of Salmaan Taseer

by News Sources 01.06.2011

Robin Yassin-Kassab writes: Salmaan Taseer, governer of Pakistan’s Punjab province, has been shot dead by one of his own security detail for the supposed crime of defending Aasia Bibi, a Christian woman threatened with execution under Pakistan’s blasphemy law. The law was introduced by the British and given extra teeth by military dictator Zia ul-Haq, [...]

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