October 2011

Wall Street’s financial war against Wikileaks

by News Sources 10.24.2011

The Guardian reports: Julian Assange, co-founder of WikiLeaks, has announced that the whistleblowing website is suspending publishing operations in order to focus on fighting a financial blockade and raise new funds. Assange, speaking at a press conference in London on Monday, said a banking blockade had destroyed 95% of WikiLeaks’ revenues. He added that the [...]

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Why Occupy Wall Street wants nothing to do with our politicians

by News Sources 10.24.2011

Heather Gautney asks: Is this what democracy looks like? That’s perhaps the first question prompted by the swirl of tents, signs, news choppers and police motorcycles that have colored the Occupy Wall Street protests. But there are two other questions we should be asking as well. Is democracy even possible in a context of extreme [...]

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Occupy newsrooms

by News Sources 10.24.2011

David Carr on the parasitic behavior of newspaper executives: Almost two weeks ago, USA Today put its finger on why the Occupy Wall Street protests continued to gain traction. “The bonus system has gone beyond a means of rewarding talent and is now Wall Street’s primary business,” the newspaper editorial stated, adding: “Institutions take huge [...]

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Libya: Apparent execution of 53 Gaddafi supporters

by News Sources 10.24.2011

Fifty-three people, apparent Gaddafi supporters, seem to have been executed at a hotel in Sirte last week, Human Rights Watch said today. The hotel is in an area of the city that was under the control of anti-Gaddafi fighters from Misrata before the killings took place. Human Rights Watch called on Libya’s National Transitional Council [...]

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Why Libyans don’t really care how Gaddafi died

by News Sources 10.24.2011

Vivienne Walt reports: Should Libyans care how Muammar Gaddafi died? As the debate continues over whether rebel fighters executed Gaddafi after capturing him — in violation of international rules of war — the issue has raised stark differences between Libya’s new leaders, who suffered for decades under a suffocating dictatorship, and the views of some [...]

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In Egypt, corruption cases had an American root

by News Sources 10.24.2011

The Washington Post reports: Beginning two decades ago, the United States government bankrolled an Egyptian think tank dedicated to economic reform. A different outcome is only now becoming visible in the fallout from Egypt’s Arab Spring. Formed with a $10 million endowment from the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Egyptian Center for Economic Studies [...]

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Imprisoned blogger Maikel Nabil admitted to mental hospital

by News Sources 10.24.2011

Al-Masry Al-Youm reports: The Interior Ministry’s prisons administration on Sunday ordered the admission of blogger and activist Maikel Nabil, who has been on a hunger strike for nearly 60 days, to the mental hospital in Abbasseya, according to security sources. Nabil, a Coptic Christian, was arrested by military police on 28 March at his home [...]

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CIA kidnapped, tortured “the wrong guy,” says former agency operative Glenn Carle

by News Sources 10.23.2011

Jason Leopold reports: Rob Richer, the No. 2 ranking official in the CIA's clandestine service, paid a visit to Glenn Carle's office in December 2002 and presented the veteran CIA operative with an urgent proposal. "I want you to go on a temporary assignment," Carle recalls Richer telling him. "It's important for the agency, it's [...]

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Revolution won, top Libyan official vows a new and more pious state

by News Sources 10.23.2011

The New York Times reports: The leader of Libya’s transitional government declared to thousands of revelers in a crowded square here on Sunday that Libya’s revolution had ended, setting the country on the path to elections, and he vowed that the new government would be based on Islamic tenets. The sea of flag-waving citizens reacted [...]

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Tony Blair views Arab desire for democracy as a threat to Mideast peace

by News Sources 10.23.2011

Forever the slick salesman, Tony Blair says evolution is better than revolution — which sounds like saying change is good so long as there isn’t too much of it and it doesn’t come too fast. That’s the kind of change he can believe in. Just like a peace process which in the eyes of most [...]

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Arms trade: Business before human rights?

by News Sources 10.23.2011

Al Jazeera reports: Earlier this year, as mass popular uprisings spread through the Middle East and audiences across the world sat transfixed by images of unarmed citizens confronting iron-fisted security forces in the streets of Arab capitals, powerful governments from Russia to the United States were forced to begin accounting for the weapons they had [...]

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Huge turnout in Tunisia’s Arab Spring election

by News Sources 10.23.2011

Reuters reports: Tunisians turned out in huge numbers to vote in the country’s first free election on Sunday, 10 months after Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in a protest that started the Arab Spring uprisings. The leader of an Islamist party predicted to win the biggest share of the vote was heckled outside a [...]

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Occupy everywhere: protesters in their own words

by News Sources 10.23.2011

From Frankfurt to Madrid, Wall Street to Athens, people are taking to the streets to rage against greed and inequality. The Guardian records some of their messages: Share

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Barbara Ehrenreich: Homeless in America

by TomDispatch 10.23.2011

Reprinted with permission of TomDispatch.com Last weekend, at the dedication of the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial on the Washington Mall, two of King’s children gave shout-outs to Occupy Wall Street, now spreading around the country and the world.  His daughter Bernice spoke of it as “a freedom explosion” and his son Martin eloquently [...]

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U.S. backs probe into circumstances of Gaddafi death

by News Sources 10.23.2011

Reuters reports: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Sunday backed a possible U.N. investigation into the death of deposed Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and called for the convicted Lockerbie bomber to be jailed again. There is growing international disquiet about the chaotic scenes surrounding Gaddafi’s apparent summary execution following the fall of his hometown of [...]

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Inside the Mideast prisoner swap

by News Sources 10.23.2011

Ali Abunimah writes: In recent days, we’ve witnessed the rare spectacle of Israelis and Palestinians celebrating at the same time. Ironically, this was the result of negotiations between the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Palestinian resistance organization Hamas, which Israel and the United States describe as “terrorists.” It was a moment [...]

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The bankers that rule the world

by News Sources 10.22.2011

New Scientist reports: As protests against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters’ worst fears. An analysis [PDF] of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy. The study’s assumptions have attracted some criticism, [...]

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Listening Post – From Occupy Wall Street to Occupy Everywhere

by News Sources 10.22.2011

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How to make banks really mad: occupy foreclosures

by News Sources 10.22.2011

Mike Konczal asks: Could the next step after camping in Zuccotti Park be camping out in homes facing foreclosure? As people think a bit more critically about what it means to “occupy” contested spaces that blur the public and the private and the boundaries between the 99% and the 1%, and as they also think [...]

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A skeptical physicist ends up confirming climate data

by News Sources 10.22.2011

The Washington Post reports: Back in 2010, Richard Muller, a Berkeley physicist and self-proclaimed climate skeptic, decided to launch the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project to review the temperature data that underpinned global-warming claims. Remember, this was not long after the Climategate affair had erupted, at a time when skeptics were griping that climatologists [...]

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Death of Gaddafi revives opposition, and hope, in Syria

by News Sources 10.22.2011

Anthony Shadid reports: The death of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi reverberated across Syria on Friday, reviving protests that had begun to stall and focusing attention on a newly organized, unarmed opposition group seeking to challenge the Assad family’s four decades of rule. With an ordinary name and ambitious task, the Syrian National Council, announced in Istanbul [...]

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How Gaddafi died

by Paul Woodward 10.22.2011

Even before it has been conclusively established how Muammar Gaddafi died, a debate has begun about the implications of him having been killed by his captors. A bullet wound to his left temple seems to be widely regarded as conclusive evidence that he was swiftly and illegally executed. There is however a more obvious explanation [...]

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Libya prepares for liberation ceremony

by News Sources 10.22.2011

The Guardian reports: Libya’s transitional government will finally declare the country liberated on Sunday following the capture and killing of the ousted dictator Muammar Gaddafi. Military official Abdel-Rahman Busin said the governing National Transitional Council (NTC) had begun preparations for a liberation ceremony on Sunday in the eastern city of Benghazi, birthplace of the Libyan [...]

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After Gaddafi, exhaustion and elation on the streets of Tripoli

by News Sources 10.22.2011

Ian Black reports: Martyrs Square in the heart of Tripoli has seen many celebrations since the revolution in August, but the mood on Friday was different. There was jubilation, certainly, but a sense too that something even more profoundly liberating has taken place. Libya’s first day without Muammar Gaddafi was one for angry reflection about [...]

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