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September 15 — Turn Up the Heat in Washington DC!
Calendar of upcoming anti-war events
North/Central California "End the War Now" March:
Saturday, October 27, 2007, 11am, San Francisco Civic Center Plaza
Planning Meeting: Thursday, July 12, 7 p.m.
San Francisco Women’s Building, 3543 18th St. (btwn. Valencia & Guerrero)
Let's unite to build the broadest, most diverse and effective anti-war movement!
We want to thank the thousands of people and many organizations that have responded to ANSWER's May 31 Proposal to the Anti-War Movement. The essence of the proposal is for all the anti-war coalitions and organizations to come together to mobilize the largest single mass march on Washington DC under the demand End the War Now!
Most anti-war activists support this idea. At the national level some organizations support the call for building a united mass mobilization. Others are opposing it. The ANSWER Coalition will continue to promote and organize for a united action where organizations and coalitions can come together and organize a march of a million people to show the breadth and support of the anti-war sentiment in this country. March 2008 will mark the start of the sixth year of the Iraq war. If the anti-war organizations desire to unite, it would be an important moment to organize a huge show of force demanding an immediate end to the war. In unity there is great strength—it is that simple.
A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
Act Now to Stop War & End Racism
http://www.ANSWERcoalition.org http://www.actionsf.org
sf@internationalanswer.org
2489 Mission St. Rm. 24
San Francisco: 415-821-6545
(Call to check meeting schedules.)
[For more information see "Articles in Full," number 15, below...bw]
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The Bases Are Loaded
Video of the Week
Alternet Focus
Will the U.S. ever leave Iraq? Official policy promises an eventual departure, while warning of the dire consequences of a "premature" withdrawal. But while Washington equivocates, facts on the ground tell another story. Independent journalist Dahr Jamail, and author Chalmers Johnson, are discovering that military bases in Iraq are being consolidated from over a hundred to a handful of "megabases" with lavish amenities. Much of what is taking place is obscured by denials and quibbles over the definition of "permanent." The Bases Are Loaded covers a wide range of topics. Gary Hart, James Goldsborough, Nadia Keilani, Raed Jarrar, Bruce Finley Kam Zarrabi and Mark Rudd all add their observations about the extent and purpose of the bases in Iraq.
http://www.alternatefocus.org/
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New Orleans After the Flood -- A Photo Gallery
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=795
This email was sent to you as a service, by Roland Sheppard.
Visit my website at: http://web.mac.com/rolandgarret
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Stop the Blue Angels!
Write to the Board of Supervisors today and demand they be banned from our skies!
Here is my letter:
Dear Supervisors,
I am writing to all of you although I live in Bernal Heights. The Blue Angels fly and terrorize all of us in this city and in the Bay Area. Lethal weapons flying close to the ground right over our heads is neither celebratory nor fun. The noise is deafening--and no one can avoid it by choice--just as we can't avoid the war on Iraq and Afghanistan by choice--so much for our "democracy" that ignores the voice of its people!
We shouldn't have to plead with our supervisors to carry out what is surely the will of the people of San Francisco who have already voted twice to end the war and the military recruitment in our city.
We, the people, have made our wishes clear already. We are against the war; against the military industrial complex that is the U.S. Military that is personified by the Blue Angels--the "Angels of Death."
That our war planes are the fastest and that our pilots are the best trained to bring death and destruction does not comfort us or make us proud. It is an abomination and a condemnation of our government and its brutal, world war, domination plan!
And if this isn't enough, the Blue Angels' "performances" are wrought with danger already resulting in 26 fatalities. How can this threat to the wellbeing of the people of San Francisco be considered fun entertainment?
There is no excuse for their presence in our air! They should all be grounded permanently.
Sincerely,
Bonnie Weinstein
San Francisco, CA 94110
415-824-8730
Here is the list of Supervisors:
District 1
Jake McGoldrick
Phone: (415) 554-7410
Fax: (415) 554-7415
Email: Jake.McGoldrick@sfgov.org
District 2
Michela Alioto-Pier
Phone: (415) 554-7752
Fax: (415) 554-7843
Email: Michela.Alioto-Pier@sfgov.org
District 3
Aaron Peskin
Phone: (415) 554-7450
Fax: (415) 554-7454
Email: Aaron.Peskin@sfgov.org
District 4
Ed Jew
Phone: (415) 554-7460
Fax: (415) 554-7432
Email: Ed.Jew@sfgov.org
District 5
Ross Mirkarimi
Phone: (415) 554-7630
Fax: (415) 554-7634
Email: Ross.Mirkarimi@sfgov.org
District 7
Sean Elsbernd
Phone: (415) 554-6516
Fax: (415) 554-6546
Email: Sean.Elsbernd@sfgov.org
District 8
Bevan Dufty
Phone: (415) 554-6968
Fax: (415) 554-6909
Email: Bevan.Dufty@sfgov.org
District 9
Tom Ammiano
Phone: (415) 554-5144
Fax: (415) 554-6255
Email: Tom.Ammiano@sfgov.org
District 10
Sophie Maxwell
Phone: (415) 554-7670
Fax: (415) 554-7674
Email: Sophie.Maxwell@sfgov.org
District 11
Gerardo C. Sandoval
Phone: (415) 554-6975
Fax: (415) 554-6979
Email: Gerardo.Sandoval@sfgov.org
I suggest you send a copy to our Mayor:
Gavin Newsom
gavin.newsom@sfgov.org
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ARTICLES IN FULL:
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1) The Murdoch Factor
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Op-Ed Columnist
June 29, 2007
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/06/29/opinion/29krugman.html?hp
2) Resegregation Now
NYT Editorial
June 29, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/29/opinion/29fri1.html?hp
3) Supreme Court Will Hear Case on Detainees
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:36 a.m. ET
June 29, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Scotus-Guantanamo.html?hp
4) President Touches on Cuba After Castro
By JIM RUTENBERG
June 29, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/29/world/americas/29castro.html
5) Rights Group Accuses Philippine Army of Abuses Against Leftists
By CARLOS H. CONDE
June 29, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/29/world/asia/29philippines.html
6) Protests Affect Canada Rail Service
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:55 a.m. ET
June 29, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Canada-Rail-Block.html
7) Kansas: Doctor Faces Abortion Charges From New Attorney General
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
June 29, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/29/us/29brfs-kansas.html
8) Circle Line Loses Pact for Ferries to Liberty Island
[RE: Hornblower Yachts Inc....bw]
By ANTHONY RAMIREZ
June 29, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/29/nyregion/29ferry.html?ref=nyregion
9) Lower Costs Help Rite Aid to Double Profit
By BLOOMBERG NEWS
June 29, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/29/business/29rite.html
10) Scant Drug Benefits Called Costly to Employers
By MILT FREUDENHEIM
June 27, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/27/business/27copay.html?ref=health
11) Survey Finds 43.6 Million Uninsured in U.S.
By REUTERS
June 26, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/26/washington/26insure.html
12) For Filmmaker, ‘Sicko’ Is a Jumping-Off Point for Health Care Change
By KEVIN SACK
June 24, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/24/us/politics/24sicko.html
13) Mass. Bill Requires Health Coverage
State Set to Use Auto Insurance As a Model
By David A. Fahrenthold
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 5, 2006; A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/04/AR2006040401937.html
14) An Honorable Response
By Fidel Castro Ruz
June 27, 2007
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x291126
15) September 15 — Turn Up the Heat in Washington DC!
Calendar of upcoming anti-war events
http://www.pephost.org/site/PageServer?pagename=ANS_homepage
16) OTTAWA OKAYS ARMED MILITARY TAKEOVER OF CANADA BY U.S.
MNN. June 28, 2007.
http://www.mohawknationnews.com/news/singlenews.php?lang=en&layout=mnn&category=27&newsnr=495&backurl=%2Fnews%2Fnews4.php%3Flang%3Den%26layout%3Dmnn%26category%3D27%26sortorder%3D0%26start%3D0&srcscript=/news/news4.php
17) God is with Cuba and with Fidel
Ousmanne Muhammed Touré
Translation by Ana Portela
Edited by Walter Lippmann
http://www.walterlippmann.com/docs025.html
18) 2 U.S. Soldiers Charged With Murder of 3 Iraqis
By STEPHEN FARRELL
July 1, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/01/world/middleeast/01iraq.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
19) When Is Enough Enough?
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
June 30, 2007
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/06/30/opinion/30herbert.html?hp
20) Castro Reacts to C.I.A. Documents
By REUTERS
Filed at 11:05 a.m. ET
July 1, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/news-cuba-castro.html
21) The Killing Machine
By Fidel Castro Ruz
http://www.granma.cu/ingles/index.html
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1) The Murdoch Factor
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Op-Ed Columnist
June 29, 2007
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/06/29/opinion/29krugman.html?hp
In October 2003, the nonpartisan Program on International Policy Attitudes published a study titled “Misperceptions, the media and the Iraq war.” It found that 60 percent of Americans believed at least one of the following: clear evidence had been found of links between Iraq and Al Qaeda; W.M.D. had been found in Iraq; world public opinion favored the U.S. going to war with Iraq.
The prevalence of these misperceptions, however, depended crucially on where people got their news. Only 23 percent of those who got their information mainly from PBS or NPR believed any of these untrue things, but the number was 80 percent among those relying primarily on Fox News. In particular, two-thirds of Fox devotees believed that the U.S. had “found clear evidence in Iraq that Saddam Hussein was working closely with the Al Qaeda terrorist organization.”
So, does anyone think it’s O.K. if Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, which owns Fox News, buys The Wall Street Journal?
The problem with Mr. Murdoch isn’t that he’s a right-wing ideologue. If that were all he was, he’d be much less dangerous. What he is, rather, is an opportunist who exploits a rule-free media environment — one created, in part, by conservative political power — by slanting news coverage to favor whoever he thinks will serve his business interests.
In the United States, that strategy has mainly meant blatant bias in favor of the Bush administration and the Republican Party — but last year Mr. Murdoch covered his bases by hosting a fund-raiser for Hillary Clinton’s Senate re-election campaign.
In Britain, Mr. Murdoch endorsed Tony Blair in 1997 and gave his government favorable coverage, “ensuring,” reports The New York Times, “that the new government would allow him to keep intact his British holdings.”
And in China, Mr. Murdoch’s organizations have taken care not to offend the dictatorship.
Now, Mr. Murdoch’s people rarely make flatly false claims. Instead, they usually convey misinformation through innuendo. During the early months of the Iraq occupation, for example, Fox gave breathless coverage to each report of possible W.M.D.’s, with little or no coverage of the subsequent discovery that it was a false alarm. No wonder, then, that many Fox viewers got the impression that W.M.D.’s had been found.
When all else fails, Mr. Murdoch’s news organizations simply stop covering inconvenient subjects.
Last year, Fox relentlessly pushed claims that the “liberal media” were failing to report the “good news” from Iraq. Once that line became untenable — well, the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that in the first quarter of 2007 daytime programs on Fox News devoted only 6 percent of their time to the Iraq war, compared with 18 percent at MSNBC and 20 percent at CNN.
What took Iraq’s place? Anna Nicole Smith, who received 17 percent of Fox’s daytime coverage.
Defenders of Mr. Murdoch’s bid for The Journal say that we should judge him not by Fox News but by his stewardship of the venerable Times of London, which he acquired in 1981. Indeed, the political bias of The Times is much less blatant than that of Fox News. But a number of former Times employees have said that there was pressure to slant coverage — and everyone I’ve seen quoted defending Mr. Murdoch’s management is still on his payroll.
In any case, do we want to see one of America’s two serious national newspapers in the hands of a man who has done so much to mislead so many? (The Washington Post, for all its influence, is basically a Beltway paper, not a national one. The McClatchy papers, though their Washington bureau’s reporting in the run-up to Iraq put more prestigious news organizations to shame, still don’t have The Journal’s ability to drive national discussion.)
There doesn’t seem to be any legal obstacle to the News Corporation’s bid for The Journal: F.C.C. rules on media ownership are mainly designed to prevent monopoly in local markets, not to safeguard precious national informational assets. Still, public pressure could help avert a Murdoch takeover. Maybe Congress should hold hearings.
If Mr. Murdoch does acquire The Journal, it will be a dark day for America’s news media — and American democracy. If there were any justice in the world, Mr. Murdoch, who did more than anyone in the news business to mislead this country into an unjustified, disastrous war, would be a discredited outcast. Instead, he’s expanding his empire.
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2) Resegregation Now
NYT Editorial
June 29, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/29/opinion/29fri1.html?hp
The Supreme Court ruled 53 years ago in Brown v. Board of Education that segregated education is inherently unequal, and it ordered the nation’s schools to integrate. Yesterday, the court switched sides and told two cities that they cannot take modest steps to bring public school students of different races together. It was a sad day for the court and for the ideal of racial equality.
Since 1954, the Supreme Court has been the nation’s driving force for integration. Its orders required segregated buses and public buildings, parks and playgrounds to open up to all Americans. It wasn’t always easy: governors, senators and angry mobs talked of massive resistance. But the court never wavered, and in many of the most important cases it spoke unanimously.
Yesterday, the court’s radical new majority turned its back on that proud tradition in a 5-4 ruling, written by Chief Justice John Roberts. It has been some time since the court, which has grown more conservative by the year, did much to compel local governments to promote racial integration. But now it is moving in reverse, broadly ordering the public schools to become more segregated.
Justice Anthony Kennedy, who provided the majority’s fifth vote, reined in the ruling somewhat by signing only part of the majority opinion and writing separately to underscore that some limited programs that take race into account are still acceptable. But it is unclear how much room his analysis will leave, in practice, for school districts to promote integration. His unwillingness to uphold Seattle’s and Louisville’s relatively modest plans is certainly a discouraging sign.
In an eloquent dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer explained just how sharp a break the decision is with history. The Supreme Court has often ordered schools to use race-conscious remedies, and it has unanimously held that deciding to make assignments based on race “to prepare students to live in a pluralistic society” is “within the broad discretionary powers of school authorities.”
Chief Justice Roberts, who assured the Senate at his confirmation hearings that he respected precedent, and Brown in particular, eagerly set these precedents aside. The right wing of the court also tossed aside two other principles they claim to hold dear. Their campaign for “federalism,” or scaling back federal power so states and localities have more authority, argued for upholding the Seattle and Louisville, Ky., programs. So did their supposed opposition to “judicial activism.” This decision is the height of activism: federal judges relying on the Constitution to tell elected local officials what to do.
The nation is getting more diverse, but by many measures public schools are becoming more segregated. More than one in six black children now attend schools that are 99 to 100 percent minority. This resegregation is likely to get appreciably worse as a result of the court’s ruling.
There should be no mistaking just how radical this decision is. In dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens said it was his “firm conviction that no Member of the Court that I joined in 1975 would have agreed with today’s decision.” He also noted the “cruel irony” of the court relying on Brown v. Board of Education while robbing that landmark ruling of much of its force and spirit. The citizens of Louisville and Seattle, and the rest of the nation, can ponder the majority’s kind words about Brown as they get to work today making their schools, and their cities, more segregated.
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3) Supreme Court Will Hear Case on Detainees
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:36 a.m. ET
June 29, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Scotus-Guantanamo.html?hp
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court, reversing course, agreed Friday to review whether Guantanamo Bay detainees may go to federal court to challenge their indefinite confinement.
The action, announced without comment along with other end-of-term orders, is a setback for the Bush administration. It had argued that a new law strips courts of their jurisdiction to hear detainee cases.
In April, the court turned down an identical request, although several justices indicated they could be persuaded otherwise.
The move is highly unusual.
The court did not indicate what changed the justices' minds about considering the issue. But last week, lawyers for the detainees filed a statement from a military lawyer in which he described the inadequacy of the process the administration has put forward as an alternative to a full-blown review by civilian courts.
''This is a stunning victory for the detainees,'' said Eric M. Freedman, professor of constitutional law at Hofstra Law School, who has been advising the detainees. ''It goes well beyond what we asked for, and clearly indicates the unease up there'' at the Supreme Court.
In February, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia upheld a key provision of a law the Bush administration pushed through Congress last year stripping federal courts of their ability to hear the detainees' challenges to their confinement.
On April 2, the Supreme denied the detainees' request to review the February appeals court ruling.
The detainees then petitioned the court to reconsider its denial.
Dismissing the petitions would be ''a profound deprivation'' of the prisoners' right to speedy court review, lawyers for the detainees said.
The administration asked that the detainees' Supreme Court petitions be thrown out.
Many of the 375 detainees have been held at Guantanamo for five years.
In recent months, the main arena in the legal battle over the detainees has been the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
The appeals court is considering how to handle the detainees' challenges to military tribunals that found them to be enemy combatants, which left them without any of the legal rights accorded prisoners of war.
The White House is considering closing Guantanamo and transferring some of the most dangerous suspects to a prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., and a Navy brig in South Carolina.
The detainees' attorneys want the appeals court to allow a broad inquiry questioning the accuracy and completeness of the evidence the tribunals gathered about the detainees, most of it classified.
The Justice Department has been seeking a limited review, saying that the findings of the military tribunals are ''entitled to the highest level of deference.''
The White House has been weighing closing the Guantanamo Bay prison, which has brought global criticism of the Bush administration and condemnation from Democrats on Capitol Hill.
The cases are Boumediene v. Bush, 06-1195, and Al Odah v. U.S., 06-1196.
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4) President Touches on Cuba After Castro
By JIM RUTENBERG
June 29, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/29/world/americas/29castro.html
NEWPORT, R.I., June 28 — President Bush on Thursday raised the anticipated death of the dictator Fidel Castro as an opportunity to push for democracy in Cuba, which he called the “one nondemocracy in our neighborhood.”
“One day, the good Lord will take Fidel Castro away,” Mr. Bush said during remarks here at the Naval War College.
The audience reacted by laughing and clapping at what seemed to be a wink from Mr. Bush. But, in an apparent effort to dispel the notion that he was making light of Mr. Castro’s health, he hushed them, saying, “No, no, no,” and continued, “Then, the question is, ‘What will be the approach of the U.S. government?’
“My attitude is,” he said, “that we need to use the opportunity to call the world together to promote democracy as the alternative to the form of government they have been living with.”
Mr. Bush’s comments came in response to a question about his assessment of the situation in South America.
Mr. Bush also used the opportunity to take a thinly veiled swipe at his other nemesis, President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela.
“In the neighborhood there is a person who is undermining a democracy,” Mr. Bush said, following his regular refusal to mention Mr. Chávez by name. “And therefore we need to be concerned about the loss of democracies in our neighborhood.”
Mr. Bush stopped here on his way to his family compound in Kennebunkport, Me., where he is to meet with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
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5) Rights Group Accuses Philippine Army of Abuses Against Leftists
By CARLOS H. CONDE
June 29, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/29/world/asia/29philippines.html
MANILA, June 28 — The Philippine military has been waging a “dirty war” against leftists that has resulted in the death or disappearance of hundreds of Filipino activists, Human Rights Watch said Thursday.
In a report, the group said that the government had failed to prosecute members of the armed forces implicated in the killings and that witnesses were afraid to testify, contributing to “official impunity.”
Human Rights Watch, based in New York, also said that measures by the government to deal with the killings had been largely unsuccessful and that the administration of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo had consistently failed to uphold international human rights law.
The report came a few days after a Philippine newspaper quoted unidentified generals who contended that they had been present at meetings in which a military policy that involved the assassination of leftists was discussed.
An investigation in February by a United Nations human rights envoy, Philip G. Alston, blamed the military for the killings. A commission created this year by Ms. Macapagal-Arroyo reached the same conclusion.
The government also created special courts to try such cases but witnesses have been afraid to speak out.
The armed forces said the Human Rights Watch report was unfair and one-sided. “We categorically deny the allegations that there is a dirty war being waged by the armed forces of the Philippines, particularly against the leftist groups,” Lt. Col. Bartolome Bacarro, a military spokesman, said Thursday.
Though he conceded that some military elements might have been involved in such killings, Colonel Bacarro said, “It is not a policy to commit extrajudicial activities.”
Sophie Richardson, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia program, said, “There is strong evidence of a ‘dirty war’ by the armed forces against left-leaning activists and journalists.” She said, “The failure to prosecute soldiers or police suspected in these killings shifts the spotlight of responsibility to the highest levels of the government.”
The report said the killings “appeared to shift into a higher gear” in February 2006, after several leftist groups were accused of participating in a coup plot led by renegade members of the military. The report also said that around the same time, Ms. Arroyo also ordered an “all-out war” against Communists.
Karapatan, a Philippine human rights group, some of whose members have been killed, has documented nearly 900 cases of what it describes as extrajudicial killings. There has also been a recent spate of abductions of leftists, some of whose bodies were later found.
The military denies that it goes after unarmed activists, insisting that the killings have been carried out by the Communists themselves as part of a long-running purge.
But Human Rights Watch said that while the rebel New People’s Army continued to violate human rights, its investigation did not uncover evidence of the rebels’ participation in any of the killings.
The group urged Ms. Macapagal-Arroyo to issue an executive order prohibiting extrajudicial killing and called on the United States to suspend military assistance to the Philippines until members of the armed forces those implicated in the killings were prosecuted.
“Actions speak louder than words, and the only real proof of the government’s commitment to end these killings will be when the perpetrators are finally held to account in a court of law,” the group said.
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6) Protests Affect Canada Rail Service
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:55 a.m. ET
June 29, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Canada-Rail-Block.html
TORONTO (AP) -- Scattered Indian protests began Thursday night ahead of a planned day of demonstrations against poverty and a lack of services on Canadian reservations. The country's passenger rail system suspended on two key routes amid a threatened rail blockade.
A group of Mohawks kicked off the demonstrations by using a school bus and a pickup truck to block a highway near Deseronto, Ontario, halting traffic in both directions, officials said.
Protesters in army-style fatigues, some with their hair braided back or shaved in traditional Mohawk style, began arriving at a makeshift camp outside Deseronto around sundown.
Canada's provincial premiers and territorial leaders issued a rare joint statement acknowledging that Indian tribes were understandably disappointed and frustrated with past injustices, but urging that Friday's demonstrations be peaceful.
Most of the events planned for Friday are expected to be peaceful marches, but there were concerns protesters could blockade a rail line.
But Mohawk leader Shawn Brant was the lone voice promoting hard-line militancy during the ''day of action.''
The Bay of Quinte Mohawks, organized by Brant, blocked the railway near Deseronto, Ontario, in April, paralyzing service on that busy route. He threatened to repeat the blockade Friday and also possibly block Canada's busiest highway in Toronto.
The chief of the Assembly of First Nations, Phil Fontaine, called for peaceful actions. he said Indians should use their protests to foster dialogue with other Canadians.
Earlier this month Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper proposed legislation to speed up the legal process to resolve claims by Indians to land taken by the government.
Past Indian protests have become violent. Protester Dudley George, 38, was shot in 1995 by a police sniper after Canadian native activists occupied Ontario's Ipperwash Provincial Park, claiming it was the site of a sacred burial ground.
The train cancelations announced Thursday by Via Rail affected the Montreal-Toronto and Ottawa-Toronto routes. Service was expected to resume Saturday.
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7) Kansas: Doctor Faces Abortion Charges From New Attorney General
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
June 29, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/29/us/29brfs-kansas.html
A doctor who performs abortions was charged with violating state law on late-term procedures, a surprise move from a Democratic attorney general who recently unseated a prominent anti-abortion Republican. The new attorney general, Paul Morrison, left, filed 19 misdemeanor counts alleging that the doctor, George Tiller of Wichita, one of the few physicians performing late-term abortions, got second opinions from a doctor who was not financially and legally independent from him, as the law requires. Mr. Morrison’s predecessor, Phill Kline, had unsuccessfully prosecuted Dr. Tiller for different reasons. At a briefing, Mr. Morrison described the charges as a “technical violation” of a 1998 law restricting late-term procedures.
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8) Circle Line Loses Pact for Ferries to Liberty Island
[RE: Hornblower Yachts Inc....bw]
By ANTHONY RAMIREZ
June 29, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/29/nyregion/29ferry.html?ref=nyregion
The National Park Service said yesterday that it planned to have another company replace the Circle Line, which has provided ferry service to the Statue of Liberty for more than half a century.
The park service, which operates Liberty Island and other national monuments, said it had selected Hornblower Yachts Inc., a California company that provides ferry service to Alcatraz Island, the former federal prison site in San Francisco Bay.
Terry MacRae, a co-founder and the chief executive officer of Hornblower, said by telephone yesterday, “The park service wanted an improved customer experience, they wanted more education and interpretive opportunities for the guests, enhanced protection of the environment” and expanded service to other federal locations, like the Jamaica Bay NationaleRefuge.
Mr. MacRae said Hornblower might use its own boats, which are fitted with plasma television screens and elaborate multimedia presentations, as well as the Circle Line’s seven-boat fleet, which Hornblower must buy as a condition of the contract.
“That’s a discussion I can’t have with myself,” he said. “We need to be sitting at the table with the Circle Line folks, and that should be soon.”
Circle Line-Statue of Liberty Ferry Inc. bid with five other companies for the 10-year contract, potentially worth more than $350 million. The company had come under fire for a declining number of visitors, the age and condition of its fleet, and its limited routes.
In February, J. B. Meyer, president of Circle Line-Statue of Liberty Ferry, said: “We have the best-maintained fleet in New York Harbor, period. These are the right vessels for the route.”
Yesterday, in a statement, Mr. Meyer did not say how much revenue the firm had lost, but said it “looks forward to concentrating on our other New York Harbor tours,” including weekend trips to Sandy Hook, N.J.
In 1981, Circle Line split into two companies: Circle Line 42nd Street, which operates the tours around Manhattan, and Circle Line-Statue of Liberty Ferry, which plies among Battery Park, Liberty Island and Ellis Island. The two companies have different officers and directors.
In part because of the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001 and increased security requirements, the number of visitors to Liberty and Ellis Islands has dropped by nearly a quarter recently. There were 4.2 million visitors last year, down from 5.5 million in 2000.
The Circle Line charges $11.50 for adults and $4.50 for children for a Statue of Liberty round trip. Under the terms of the park service contract, the ticket price may rise to $12 under a new operator.
Since 1953, the Circle Line’s boats have taken more than 70 million passengers to Liberty Island and, since 1990, to Ellis Island. In 2005, the Circle Line’s revenue from the Statue of Liberty service exceeded $35 million, making it one of the six largest commercial operations in the national park system.
In a one-page news release yesterday, the park service said it had selected Hornblower to ferry visitors to the Statue of Liberty National Monument and Ellis Island.
After a 60-day Congressional review period, the service said, the contract will be signed and awarded, and Hornblower could begin operations as early as October.
Darren Boch, a spokesman for the service’s National Parks of New York Harbor, said he could not disclose details of the selection process, or the reasons why the Circle Line was rejected and Hornblower selected, but that more details would be available next month when a contract was drawn.
Hornblower is represented by Nicholas & Lence Communications, a Manhattan public relations and lobbying firm. A named partner and public relations representative for the company is Cristyne L. Nicholas, a former press secretary for Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani. She was the president of NYC & Co., the city’s tourist board, until January.
George Lence, Ms. Nicholas’s partner in the firm is a registered lobbyist. Their 22 clients include Related Cos., Gray Line New York Sightseeing and Zagat Survey.
Mr. MacRae, the co-founder of Hornblower, said his company had about $60 million in annual revenue, about a third of which comes from the Alcatraz operation. The majority comes from dinner cruises, yacht tours and the like, he said.
Organized labor has criticized Hornblower for using nonunion workers on the Alcatraz tour and the rest of its business. But Mr. MacRae said that some operations in Hawaii and Delaware were unionized and that he had not made up his mind about the Statue of Liberty operation, which may be renamed “Statue Cruises.”
As far as using union workers in New York, he said, “We’re used to doing it either way.”
Representative Anthony D. Weiner, a member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure committee and a longtime critic of the National Park Service, described the change as “a fresh start.”
He described the 60-day review period by Congress as largely pro forma.
“Someone once told me this is the most lucrative contract in the entire National Park System,” he said in a telephone interview, “and yet for all of that money we had out there on the line, there wasn’t nearly enough done to make creative use of the Liberty Island service as an engine for service to other places,” like Riis Park, Sandy Hook or Governors Island.
“Hornblower has a great reputation, and people who deal with them out in Alcatraz say they know what they’re doing,” Mr. Weiner said.
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9) Lower Costs Help Rite Aid to Double Profit
By BLOOMBERG NEWS
June 29, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/29/business/29rite.html
Rite Aid, the drugstore chain, said yesterday that quarterly profit more than doubled, helped by lower costs for store closings and labor.
Net income rose to $27.6 million, or 4 cents a share, from $11 million, or 1 cent a share, a year earlier. Sales in the period, which ended June 2 and was the first quarter of Rite Aid’s fiscal year, increased 2.8 percent, to $4.46 billion, the company said.
Rite Aid spent $4 million to close stores, 68 percent less than a year earlier. The company also kept labor costs down during the quarter, the chief executive, Mary F. Sammons, said on a conference call with analysts and investors.
“The big surprise was how well they controlled expenses,” said Meredith Adler, an analyst at Lehman Brothers Holdings. “This was particularly good.”
Analysts estimated Rite Aid would have a loss of 1 cent a share in the quarter.
Rite Aid completed its acquisition of Eckerd and Brooks from the Jean Coutu Group for $2.54 billion this month.
“They hit the ground running,” said Carla Casella, a fixed-income analyst at JPMorgan Securities in New York. “People are getting more confident that they are going to be able to integrate this.”
Rite Aid expects the acquisition to add 18 to 20 cents a share to earnings in the years through March 2009. The company has projected annual costs savings of $225 million by the same date.
The chain said it might spend $1 billion to remodel the new stores and convert distribution centers.
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10) Scant Drug Benefits Called Costly to Employers
By MILT FREUDENHEIM
June 27, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/27/business/27copay.html?ref=health
Health penny wise, medical pound foolish?
Employers that shift too much of the cost of drugs to workers in their company health plans could wind up losing more than they save, through absenteeism and lost productivity, according to a study by health policy researchers.
The three-year study, to be released today, looked at the medical histories of several thousand workers with a diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis. The condition is a painful and incurable disease of the joints, but patients can keep it at bay by taking a special class of drugs.
The cost, as much as $18,000 a year, can be a big expense for employer health plans. Still, putting too much of the cost burden on the employee can evidently backfire.
Among the 17 employers in the study, conducted by the nonprofit Integrated Benefits Institute, more than half the workers with rheumatoid arthritis were not taking their drugs — in many cases because they considered the out-of-pocket co-payments too high.
As a result, the institute’s study found, the employers incurred $17.2 million in costs from lost productivity, 26 percent more than the estimate of what they would have spent if the workers had taken their arthritis drugs.
The workers’ co-payments were relatively low, averaging $26 for a 30-day supply, indicating a fairly low threshold before out-of-pocket costs prompted workers to forgo medication.
“This is an important study,” said Michael Chernew, a health policy economist at Harvard Medical School who was not involved in the arthritis study. “The basic message is very consistent with all the work we have done: co-pays go up, people use their medications less, and bad things happen.”
The Integrated Benefits Institute is supported by insurers, drug companies and employers. The information on drug use came from health and disability claims data provided by UnitedHealth Group’s Ingenix unit, which did not identify the 17 companies in the study.
The researchers looked at the number of claims for short-term disability, lasting from a week to six months. Employees who were taking the arthritis pills or injected medications “were less likely to file a claim,” said Kimberly Jinnett, research director of the Integrated Benefits Institute who directed the study.
She said the institute’s study would be submitted for publication to a peer-reviewed journal.
The arthritis study supports and expands on earlier research that looked at employees of Pitney Bowes, the business services company, and the city government of Asheville, N.C. Those studies found improved productivity and lower medical costs after drug co-payments were reduced or eliminated for diabetes, asthma and heart-related problems.
A growing number of large employers are beginning to consider overall costs, by adding productivity measures to their financial calculus for health care.
“The evidence is compelling that we should be looking at the total health care outcomes picture,” said Dr. Pamela Hymel, the global medical director at the information technology company Cisco Systems, a member of the Integrated Benefits Institute. She said that in her own company’s case, studying employees’ overall health records had alerted Cisco to costly conditions like depression and muscular and skeletal problems affecting some workers’ productivity. The affected employees were encouraged to seek advice from health coaches and to seek treatment, Dr. Hymel said.
Chris McSwain, the compensation and benefits director of another institute member, the Scana Corporation, an electric and gas utility company based in Columbia, S.C., said his company was also mining its health claims data.
Last fall, he said, Scana began combining all its data, including health and medical, pharmacy and disability costs, as well as information from employees’ health questionnaires and programs that manage diseases like diabetes.
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11) Survey Finds 43.6 Million Uninsured in U.S.
By REUTERS
June 26, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/26/washington/26insure.html
WASHINGTON, June 25 (Reuters) — About 43.6 million people in the United States, or 14.8 percent of the population, had no health insurance in 2006, according to a survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released Monday.
The finding, based on a survey of 100,000 people, is lower than previous federal estimates of 46 million.
The estimate is based on those who did not have insurance at the time of the interview. About 54.5 million people in the country, or 18.6 percent of the population, had no insurance for at least part of 2006.
The survey, by the National Center for Health Statistics, found that about 9.3 percent of children under 18 did not have health insurance, a decrease from 13.9 percent in 1997.
Texas had the largest percentage of people without health insurance, with 23.8 percent of the population not covered, the report said. Michigan had the lowest, at 7.7 percent.
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12) For Filmmaker, ‘Sicko’ Is a Jumping-Off Point for Health Care Change
By KEVIN SACK
June 24, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/24/us/politics/24sicko.html
The cameramen shuffled backward through a Capitol Hill corridor, as reporters from Tokyo and Paris strained to capture the campaigner’s every word. An entourage of handlers, with cellphones to their ears, kept the scrum moving toward the door. A van was waiting, its engine running. “Keep moving, people,” one aide barked. “Keep moving. We’ve got to go.”
Barack Obama in the House? Perhaps Fred Thompson?
Try Michael Moore, the guerrilla filmmaker, his plaid shirt untucked in the back, on the latest stop, held Wednesday, in a Barnumesque promotional tour that has taken on the trappings and purpose of a tightly managed political campaign.
As he moved from Sacramento to New York and on to Washington this week, Mr. Moore has not just set out to sell tickets to “Sicko,” his cinematic indictment of the American health care system. He has also pushed his prescription for reform: a single-payer system, with the government as insurer, that would guarantee access to health care for all Americans and put the private insurance industry out of business.
Whether embracing Mr. Moore’s remedy or disdaining it, elected officials and policy experts agreed last week that the film was likely to have broad political impact, perhaps along the lines of “An Inconvenient Truth,” Al Gore’s jeremiad on global warming. It will, they predicted, crystallize the frustration that is a pre-existing condition for so many health care consumers.
Well before the film’s June 29 national release (it opened Friday on one New York screen), politicians on the left began lining up to associate themselves with Mr. Moore.
Representative John Conyers Jr., a Democrat from Mr. Moore’s home state of Michigan, played host to the filmmaker at a Congressional hearing this week to build support for his bill to establish a single-payer system. Fabian Núñez, the speaker of the California Assembly, who is negotiating a health care package with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, held a closed-door meeting with Mr. Moore last week and then joined him at a crowded news conference. After attending a screening on Wednesday night, Representative Bobby L. Rush, a Democrat from Chicago, promptly swore off contributions from the pharmaceutical industry.
“I think one movie can make a difference; I do believe that,” Mr. Moore said Wednesday, while being driven from the standing-room-only Congressional hearing to a puckishly arranged screening for health care lobbyists. “I’m not doing this to market the film. First of all, I don’t need to market my films. Every time I make a film, it breaks the last record. But I’m doing this because I really want to make a contribution to the national debate on this issue.”
Though few people have actually seen the movie, Harvey Weinstein, one of its executive producers, said it had already set off “a political wildfire.” The film, Mr. Weinstein said, “comes at a time when people are fed up with health care and want reforms — and I believe it will be a catalyst for the type of real change people want.”
Mr. Núñez, a Los Angeles Democrat, said the movie would galvanize support for the reform legislation in the California Legislature. “The conclusion you come to after watching that documentary is that you have a health care system on the verge of collapse,” he said. “It’s either going to fall of its own weight, or people are going to rise up against it.”
The movie’s critics argue that it lacks the credibility to move public opinion in a lasting way, and that it will have no more impact than Mr. Moore’s previous films.
“I think it will be like ‘Bowling for Columbine,’ ” said Michael F. Cannon, director of health policy studies for the Cato Institute. “You remember how we all got together afterwards and decided to ban guns.”
Mr. Moore and his producers have hired a team of experienced political operatives to garner publicity for “Sicko” and to respond to anticipated attacks from the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. They include Chris Lehane, an aggressive consultant for the Gore and Kerry presidential campaigns, and Ken Sunshine, a prominent New York publicist who once served as chief of staff for David N. Dinkins, the former mayor.
At stops on each coast, in scenes that seem made for a sequel, the Moore camp has surrounded its standard bearer with chanting health care workers uniformed in red scrubs. The strategists used full-page advertisements to invite 900 lobbyists — by name — to the private screening in Washington (only half a dozen showed) and held another screening on Wall Street for health care stock analysts. They orchestrated a march on the headquarters of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association in Chicago, and sent Mr. Moore into New Hampshire, the first primary state, to demand pledges of support from presidential candidates.
“It’s being run like a war,” Mr. Moore said. “I mean, we’re in a battle with these corporations who want to maintain their position. They don’t want to give an inch on this, and we’re out to upset the apple cart.”
Mr. Moore agrees that he is merely setting a match to fuel that has been welling for years. Recent polls show that universal access to health coverage is by far the country’s top domestic policy priority, and that nearly half of all Americans say they support the single-payer system extolled by Mr. Moore in “Sicko.”
But the success of Mr. Moore’s previous films guarantees “Sicko” the kind of mass audience rarely associated with health care reform. His last movie, “Fahrenheit 9/11,” became the top grossing documentary ever, taking in $119.2 million domestically in 2004 (five times as much as Mr. Gore’s movie in 2006). “Sicko” has a $9 million budget, Mr. Weinstein said.
Though speaking against the film carries the risk of generating more buzz for it, the opposition is also campaigning hard. Representatives of insurance and pharmaceutical trade groups are countering Mr. Moore’s praise for socialized health systems in Canada, Cuba, France and Britain. And as details have seeped out from screenings, they have started disputing some of Mr. Moore’s anecdotes about rejected insurance claims and unnecessary deaths.
Staff members of America’s Health Insurance Plans, the industry’s leading trade group, handed out news releases at Mr. Moore’s events this week emphasizing the need for “a uniquely American solution” and raising the specter of “long waits for rationed care.”
Free-market policy groups like the Cato Institute have held briefings to rebut Mr. Moore, showing short films that find fault with the Canadian system. Health Care America, a group that is financed in part by pharmaceutical and hospital companies, placed an advertisement in a Capitol Hill newspaper stating: “In America, you wait in line to see a movie. In government-run health care systems, you wait to see a doctor.”
Ken Johnson, a senior vice president for Pharmaceutical Manufacturers of America, predicted the movie was “going to energize activists, but I don’t think it’s going to change anybody’s party affiliation.” Yet, Mr. Johnson said the industry did not feel it could ignore the movie because doing so would “admit tacitly that some of what he says is true, and that’s not the case. He holds the camera, he gets the last say, and that’s the problem for us.”
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13) Mass. Bill Requires Health Coverage
State Set to Use Auto Insurance As a Model
By David A. Fahrenthold
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 5, 2006; A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/04/AR2006040401937.html
BOSTON, April 4 -- The Massachusetts legislature approved a bill Tuesday that would require all residents to purchase health insurance or face legal penalties, which would make this the first state to tackle the problem of incomplete medical coverage by treating patients the same way it does cars.
Gov. Mitt Romney (R) supports the proposal, which would require all uninsured adults in the state to purchase some kind of insurance policy by July 1, 2007, or face a fine. Their choices would be expanded to include a range of new and inexpensive policies -- ranging from about $250 per month to nearly free -- from private insurers subsidized by the state.
Romney said the bill, modeled on the state's policy of requiring auto insurance, is intended to end an era in which 550,000 people go without insurance and their hospital and doctor visits are paid for in part with public funds.
"We insist that everybody who drives a car has insurance," Romney said in an interview. "And cars are a lot less expensive than people."
Tuesday's votes approving the bill -- 154 to 2 in the House and 37 to 0 in the Senate -- were the culmination of two years of politicking and several months of backroom negotiations, as rival health-care plans from Romney and the two Democrat-led chambers were hammered into one.
What resulted is a proposal that health-care experts say is unlike any other in the country. What to do about the 45 million Americans without health insurance has flummoxed both the Bush administration, whose proposal for "health savings accounts" fizzled, and that of Bill Clinton, whose broad plan for health-care changes fell flat.
On the state level, Hawaii and Maine have programs that seek to offer near-universal access to health insurance, and Illinois last year approved a subsidy plan that will widely increase coverage for needy children.
But no state, experts say, has taken the step of making health insurance coverage a legal requirement. The idea was applauded by Uwe E. Reinhardt, a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University, who said that he has long believed that the American system of allowing uninsured patients to receive care at the government's expense was nothing more than "freedom to mooch."
"Massachusetts is the first state in America to reach full adulthood," said Reinhardt, noting that the new measure is a move toward personal responsibility. "The rest of America is still in adolescence."
As simple as the idea sounds -- buy insurance or else -- the proposal is complex and, in some cases, still unfinished. For instance, it leaves the task of determining exactly how much some low-income residents will pay for their new, more affordable policies to a new agency that would serve as a liaison between the government, policyholders and private insurance companies.
Because of that uncertainty, some still worry that the residents required to buy insurance would not be able to.
"Who defines what's affordable?" said the Rev. Hurmon Hamilton, a minister in the Boston neighborhood of Roxbury and a leader in an interfaith organization that has pushed for health-care changes.
Another aspect that may change is the $295 annual fee that the bill would require companies to pay for each employee they do not provide with insurance. Legislative leaders have insisted that this money be fed into the pool that would subsidize low-cost policies for the uninsured, but Romney said that would be unnecessary.
"That's likely to be adjusted by me," he said -- potentially through the use of a line-item veto.
This is how Massachusetts leaders envision the plan would work:
Uninsured people earning less than the federal poverty threshold would be able to purchase subsidized policies that have no premiums, and would be responsible for very small co-payment fees for emergency-room visits and other services. Those earning between that amount and three times the poverty-level amount would be able to buy subsidized policies with premiums based on their ability to pay. Though no maximum premium is set in the bill, legislators' intent seems to be for it to top out at about $200 to $250 per month.
All residents will have to provide details about their health insurance policy on their state income tax returns in 2008. Those who do not have insurance would first lose their personal state tax exemption, perhaps worth $150, and later face penalties equal to half the cost of the cheapest policy they should have bought. That might work out to $1,200 per year, officials said. Those who cannot find an affordable plan could obtain a waiver.
Enforcement of the requirement will not be done by hospitals, officials said: They will treat uninsured patients as before.
The bill's passage was celebrated as a victory in the state legislature, with House Speaker Salvatore F. DiMasi (D) telling colleagues that they had succeeded where other states had failed.
"We did something to solve the problem," he said.
The same message might provide a political boost to Romney, who is considering a presidential run in 2008. By proving he can work with Democrats, and find a health-care solution that relies on the private sector, Romney can portray himself as an executive who can work across the aisle in harshly partisan times.
"It might help him to say, 'Look, I have a solution for health insurance,' " said Julian E. Zelizer, a professor of history at Boston University.
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14) An Honorable Response
By Fidel Castro Ruz
June 27, 2007
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x291126
Events follow each other at an incredible pace. Sometimes, several occur simultaneously. Their inherent significance and usefulness as examples is what I wish to, or, better, feel compelled to comment on. I am not referring, today, to what occurred in Geneva, which is considered a well-deserved revolutionary victory for Third World nations. Rather, I shall refer to Cuba's response to the European Council on Foreign Relations, published last Friday, June 22, on Gramna's front page.
The statement was a response worthy of our Revolution and its high political leadership. One by one, all points calling for an immediate response from Cuba were addressed and clarified. Allow me to enumerate and go over them again:
1. “A dialogue between sovereign and equal partners, devoid of any conditions or impending threats, is the only possible dialogue with Cuba. If the European Union wishes to engage in any form of dialogue with Cuba, it must definitively eliminate those sanctions, which have since proved impracticable and unsustainable.”
2. “The ‘Conclusions’ also failed to mention the so-called ‘Common Position,’ hastily agreed upon by EU Ministers of Finance in 1996 under pressures from Aznar and on the basis of a draft drawn up by the U.S. State Department.”
3. “After so many mistakes and failures, the only obvious conclusion that the European Union should fittingly draw is that the so-called ‘Common Position’ must disappear, since there were and there are no reasons whatsoever for its existence and because it hinders any normal, mutually respectful relationship of common interest with our country.”
4. “A group of influential European nations have tried to change this ludicrous situation. Others, such as the Czech Republic, have confirmed to be American pawns on the European map. The ‘Conclusions of the Council’ slanderously meddle in matters that are of Cuba’s strict concern, pass judgment and announce intrusive and hypocritical actions that Cuba regards as offensive and unacceptable and strongly repudiates.”
5. “Cuba is an independent and sovereign country and the European Union is wrong if it believes it can treat it as anything other than an equal.”
6. “The European Union has shown persistent and humiliating subordination to the United States, of a kind that renders it incapable of holding positions based on European interests and turns it into an accomplice, despite all talk to the contrary, to the criminal and inhuman blockade that the U.S. imposes on the Cuban people, and about which the ‘Conclusions’ did not even dare say a single word.”
7. “In the European Union Summit with the United States last April, it stooped to questioning Cuba and accepted a reference that acknowledges the legitimacy of the “Bush Plan.” Known are its collusion with the Empire’s envoys and even with the spurious inspector for Cuba appointed by the United States.”
8. “The European Union is shamelessly hypocritical when it unjustly points its finger at Cuba while it remains silent about acts of U.S.-coordinated torture at the illegal Guantánamo Naval Base, which encroaches upon Cuban territory, and at Abu Ghraib, where these are even administered to European citizens.”
9. “It impudently remains silent about kidnappings by U.S. Special Forces in third countries and has offered its territory to cooperate with the CIA’s secret flights and to harbor illegal prisons. Nor has it said anything about the hundreds of persons who have disappeared as a result of these actions or about the hundreds of thousands of civilians murdered in Iraq.”
10. “It is the European Union which must rectify the mistakes it has made with respect to Cuba.”
At the risk of turning this into an extensive reflection, I wish to add a number of facts. The European Union has been led by Washington to a mighty cul-de-sac. The Cold War ended with the triumph of the real consumerism of developed capitalism, and the frantic impulse to consume that had been awakened in broad sectors of the populations of the socialist block and Soviet Union. They had lost the battle of ideas. The Russian people, the main moving force behind the October Revolution, were violently deprived of important commitments, which encompassed agreements and guarantees for its security and sovereignty: Europe was stripped of over 400 SS-20 missiles, as NATO described them. These mobile missiles, fitted with three nuclear warheads each, were pointed to every corner in Europe where U.S. military bases and NATO forces were located. In its triumphalist intoxication, the aggressive military alliance had taken under its wing many former socialist republics of Europe, a number of which, seeking economic benefits, have made the rest of Europe a hostage of their foreign policy, which unconditionally serves the strategic interests of the United States.
All European Union members have the right to veto a decision. This system is politically dysfunctional and curtails, in practice, the sovereignty of all members. The European Union is today in worse shape than the former socialist block ever was. The vain Tony Blair, manufacturer of sophisticated submarines and a friend of Bush, is already being announced as a potential future candidate to chair the European Union. The cables bring the news today that he was appointed special envoy for the Middle East, where he so amply contributed to that disastrous war unleashed by the United States.
In the energy sector, we see European governments beg for oil in the few regions in the world where the empire has not forcibly appropriated this resource, in much the same way it purchases, with worthless bills, any European company it pleases.
The euro, however, is a stable currency, much more than the dollar, which is constantly being devalued. Even though the dollar is defended by the holders of U.S. bonds and bills, the empire faces the risk of an economic disaster of dramatic repercussions.
Europe, on the other hand, would be one of the areas most severely affected by global warming. Its well-known and modern port facilities would end up underwater.
Today, it desperately proposes free trade agreements with Latin America, which are worse than Washington’s, in search of raw materials and bio-diesel. We are beginning to hear criticisms about this. But Europe’s money is not in the hands of the Community, it belongs to transnational corporations, which may relocate to countries where labor is cheap in search of profits.
Cuba’s proud and honorable response has underscored the essentials.
Though every good strategy includes a good tactic, neither of the two are sound if arrogance and smugness are tolerated.
Europeans themselves will one day come to understand the absurd situation they were led to by imperialism and will realize that a Caribbean country pointed out some necessary truths for them. The wild horse of consumerism cannot continue to gallop madly ahead, for such a race is unsustainable.
The last European Union meeting held to address the future community treaty was further proof of the demoralization of Europe. Last Sunday, June 24, the Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported that Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi expressed his “bitterness” over the Brussels summit, where he accused European Union leaders of staging the spectacle of an emotionless Europe, in an interview for La Repubblica newspaper.
“‘As a European, allow me to be embittered for the spectacle I find myself in front of’, Prodi, ex-chairman of the European Commission, said:
“‘The doggedness of some governments to negate every emotional aspect of Europe has hurt me’, he added, referring to Poland, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands and Great Britain.
“‘And then these are the same governments that rebuke Europe for being far from citizens’, he affirmed.
“‘But how can you involve citizens without involving their emotions? How can you give them pride to be European if the symbols of its pride are negated?’ he asked.”
“Prodi lambasted for ‘conducting a battle’ against the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights.”
“He criticized Polish President Lech Kaczynski, who said he could not share his stances because Italy and Poland were ‘very different nations.’”
“Prodi concluded by saying that ‘never before had Eurosceptics expressed themselves so explicitly and programmatically’ as in the last Summit.”
At the last G-8 meeting, Bush had sent Europeans a chilly message.
At this decisive point in time, the number of enemies one has, which will be fewer and fewer with time, is of no importance. What is important is “the stars we carry on our foreheads.”
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15) September 15 — Turn Up the Heat in Washington DC!
Calendar of upcoming anti-war events
http://www.pephost.org/site/PageServer?pagename=ANS_homepage
We want to thank the thousands of people and many organizations that have responded to ANSWER’s May 31 Proposal to the Anti-War Movement. The essence of the proposal is for all the anti-war coalitions and organizations to come together to mobilize the largest single mass march on Washington DC under the demand End the War Now!
Most anti-war activists support this idea. At the national level some organizations support the call for building a united mass mobilization. Others are opposing it. The ANSWER Coalition will continue to promote and organize for a united action where organizations and coalitions can come together and organize a march of a million people to show the breadth and support of the anti-war sentiment in this country. March 2008 will mark the start of the sixth year of the Iraq war. If the anti-war organizations desire to unite, it would be an important moment to organize a huge show of force demanding an immediate end to the war. In unity there is great strength—it is that simple.
We are convening a meeting on Saturday, July 28 in Washington DC to discuss the proposal for a united anti-war demonstration of one million people. All organizations who are committed to this perspective or who are seriously considering this perspective are invited to join together in a day-long strategy session. If you or your organization is interested in attending the meeting, please indicate so by clicking this link.
The coming months are crucial. We have to intensify our organizing efforts so that the voice of the people is heard loud and clear. The so-called "Surge" has succeeded at nothing but the killing of an ever-larger number of Iraqis in neighborhoods throughout Baghdad. The occupation forces and the puppet government in Iraq cannot pacify the country. Every month, more than 3,000 Iraqis are killed, and the U.S. death toll has been higher in the last three months than in any other three-month period of the war.
September 15 — Join Thousands to Turn Up the Heat in Washington DC
The ANSWER Coalition; Code Pink; Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation; Cindy Sheehan; Navy Petty Officer Jonathan Hutto, co-founder Appeal for Redress; Malik Rahim, founder of Common Ground Collective, New Orleans; Rev. Graylan Hagler, Ministers for Racial, Social and Economic Justice; Ramsey Clark; Latino Movement USA; Hermandad Mexicana Nacional; Michael Berg; National Lawyers Guild; Father Luis Barrios, Iglesia de San Romero de las Americas - UCC; and many others are joining together to sponsor a large protest in Washington DC timed to coincide with the report by General Petraeus on the "Surge" in Iraq. There will be actions in the halls and offices of Congress in the days following the September 15 march.
We urge every organization to join in this effort. To register your support for the September 15 march and the actions scheduled in the days following September 15, click on this link.
Bush and the Pentagon are required to report to Congress on the progress of the "Surge" in Iraq on September 15. Congress will hold hearings the following week. The eyes of the national and international media will be focused on Washington DC and on the words and positions of the politicians and generals. We are determined to make sure that this so-called debate cannot take place inside Congress without them hearing the voices of thousands of angry veterans, students and working people demanding End the War Now!
Funding for the war, which totals $300 million each day, will have to be formally renewed by Congress. It is obvious that the politicians in Congress have become discredited (their approval rating is even lower than Bush’s) because they haven’t voted to end the war. The ANSWER Coalition believes that it is crucial that thousands of people come to Washington DC on September 15 and Turn Up the Heat to demand not one more penny be spent on this criminal war for empire. If the voice of the people is to be heard during this "debate" we must arrive in Washington DC on September 15—not after it is over. This is not the time for symbolic protests—we need to make the politicians and generals feel the heat of the people’s anger. In order to do that, we need as many people as possible to stay in Washington DC. We need to occupy the halls and offices of Congress. We need to raise our voices to demand that Congress stop funding the war immediately.
To endorse the September 15 protest, click on this link.
Schedule of September actions:
* Saturday, September 15: March on the White House and Congress
* Sunday, September 16: National organizers’ meeting and training
* September 17-20: Actions in the halls, hearing rooms and offices of Congress
It is highly significant that ImpeachBush.org and other impeachment organizations will be mobilizing thousands of people to come to Washington DC starting on September 15. ImpeachBush.org will be publishing newspaper ads urging those who support the impeachment of Bush and Cheney to make their voices heard from September 15-20, 2007. The ANSWER Coalition welcomes the impeachment movement. At the March 17, 2007, March on the Pentagon Impeach Bush signs and banners were everywhere.
October 20-27: A Week of Nationally-Coordinated Local and Regional Demonstrations
The anti-war movement and the impeachment movement are joining forces to carry out mass local and regional actions in cities and towns throughout the country from October 20-27. The ANSWER Coalition will initiate many actions and support and promote the actions of all other anti-war coalitions that will take place during this week. These actions will include large-scale demonstrations, rallies, picket lines, mass leaflet distributions at military bases, activities and walk-outs at college campuses and high schools, and other actions. There can be actions in every state and every city and town showing that the anti-war sentiment is the majority sentiment and that the people are determined to end the war now. The Week of Nationally-Coordinated Local and Regional Actions will begin on the weekend of October 20-21, the exact 40th anniversary weekend of the historic March on the Pentagon where tens of thousands marched under the banner "From Protest to Resistance!"
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16) OTTAWA OKAYS ARMED MILITARY TAKEOVER OF CANADA BY U.S.
MNN. June 28, 2007.
http://www.mohawknationnews.com/news/singlenews.php?lang=en&layout=mnn&category=27&newsnr=495&backurl=%2Fnews%2Fnews4.php%3Flang%3Den%26layout%3Dmnn%26category%3D27%26sortorder%3D0%26start%3D0&srcscript=/news/news4.php
Thomas Walkom wrote today in the Toronto Star that the conservative government plans to give U.S. police agents carte blanche to carry guns in Canada. Last June 2006 undercover U.S. agents [U.S. Border Patrol and ATF] were caught monitoring the Six Nations standoff at Caledonia. Their presence was exposed publicly only after native protestors hijacked their car. Strangely, there was no political or public outcry over what would once have been considered a unconscionable violation of Canadian sovereignty. Instead our men were charged with interfering with these agents foreign to Canada.
What’s going on here? The government in Ottawa is handing Canada over to the U.S. The public is unknowingly allowing itself to be absorbed by the U.S. without demanding the rights that U.S. states and citizens have. It is allowing alien U.S. agencies to usurp Canadian policing functions. Is this an acknowledgement that, in reality, Canada has lost its sovereignty to the U.S., or that it never had any in the first place?
Canada has given their own police the right to shoot us even though we never surrendered our jurisdiction to this foreign state. Neither the U.S. nor Canadian foreigners have a right to shoot us without our permission. Now we see that officials in the Canadian state have covertly agreed to hand policing over to a foreign hegemonic power.
The colonists illegally took onto themselves this right to have life and death authority over us. They are not “our” police because we are not Canadian, never have been and never will be. Are Canadians now U.S. citizens without normal citizenship rights? If Canadians can assume that we’re Canadians without our consent, why can’t the U.S. assume that Canadians are U.S. citizens without their consent?
Presently the RCMP, OPP, SQ, even the “Indian” police forces, FBI, CIA, Homeland Security and the Buffalo Police are all answerable to a power that is foreign to the indigenous people of the land. The presence of these foreign police is not new. Canada gave themselves permission to attack us. The right for the U.S. to use arms against Canadians is new.
Stephen Harper quietly published these proposed regulatory changes in its Canada Gazette last weekend. It has not been signaled for discussion by the public at large. It isn’t meant to just accommodate air marshals who fly back and forth across the border. It applies to “other” situations like border enforcement initiatives between Canada and the United States and everything else.
The Six Nations operation by the ATF gives an indication of the kind of “large and liberal” interpretation that is being given to the concept of “border enforcement”. The dispute over the encroachment on the Haldimand Tract at Six Nations by the settlers was under dispute for over 200 years. It does not share any boundaries with the U.S. Yet the U.S. Border Patrol and ATF were involved.
If a U.S. agent killed someone in Canada [both states are on Indigenous soil], who would be responsible to charge, investigate and prosecute? We’ve been raising this issue of violations of our “jurisdiction” forever. We never surrendered any of our jurisdiction over us and our land. We have never granted authority to Canadians or the U.S. to carry guns on the soil that we are holding in trust for our future generations.
So why is Harper loosening the rules? Were they wining and dining him, and now they took him to their dirty bed? Why is he changing the law without the consent of Parliament or Indigenous people without a full, fair and honest public discussion? Ottawa gives no reason. The U.S. colonial agents are policing someone else's colony. The U.S. has already expanded its security and police presence in Canada. The FBI opened high tech offices in Ottawa right across from the Parliament Buildings.
The public inquiry into the imprisonment and torture of Maher Arar revealed that FBI and other U.S. agencies routinely took part in RCMP meetings dealing with his case. This scandalous case should have put people on notice.
Is Harper the “Trojan Horse” that got inside of Canada and took it over on behalf of the U.S.? The dark cloud is pulling over our land. It has no roots here. When Hitler went into Austria during WWII, he prepared them well in advance for his coming. He had sent in secret agents to take over all the levers of power, the corporations, the government, the police and the military. When the time came, the Austrians welcomed him with open arms, parades and waving German flags. The U.S. will march into Ottawa waving the Stars and Stripe with a tiny little Swastika down in the corner. They will be welcomed by the government, the police and the military. The U.S. is following this pattern. They are taking over without firing a shot.
No one is resisting this except the Indigenous people because it’s all ours, the land, the resources, the spirit.
Kahentinetha Horn
MNN Mohawk Nation News
poster: katenies
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17) God is with Cuba and with Fidel
Ousmanne Muhammed Touré
Translation by Ana Portela
Edited by Walter Lippmann
http://www.walterlippmann.com/docs025.html
Recently, while I was flying to my country (Malí), I talked with an African politician, my travel companion, who said, without batting an eye, that he pitied Fidel Castro and the Cubans because they were the only ones who confronted the hegemonic power of Washington. That December 18 we shared the Paris-Bamako flight and when he heard that I had studied in Havana he expressed his compassion. Since I, as a foreign student integrated to the Cuban revolutionary process, decided to explain to my illustrious travel companion certain facts of the reality of the Island and for almost an hour I expressed my unconditional support of Fidel and the cause of his people, while he listened in silence.
Alter a while he said to me, as if corroborating what he already knew: “So you, also, are a revolutionary… Well, I admire you because what the Cubans do we cannot do here in Africa”. That angered me very much: to hear a respectable politician of the Black continent resigning himself to a lack of mobility while millions of his compatriots lived in poverty. He noticed my indignation and hid behind the divine: “Any way God is with Cuba and Fidel because God is always on the side of the truth”. Later I heard my distinguished companion quote on Radio France International (RFI) the example of the largest island of the Antilles as a model to solve many of the problems of the world. That inspired me to continue speaking of the work of the Revolution in such a small and famous nation.
Sometimes I have the need to unburden myself with the role and feverishly set down on paper daily events of those who were born in that country of such a rich culture and sincere joy, but amazing for those who are used to other concepts of what is human, linked to lackey systems, predatory or, worse yet, indifferent.
The Cuban experience surpasses territorial limits and reaches such distant places as the African desert, either with physicians, sports trainers, teachers or through musical notes who cross foreign lands as if they were their own. Also, Cuban imperfections reinforces its human character because those errors are obscured by the confidence the Cubans reveal, their natural charm, their indisputable social achievements.
That is why the attitude of certain power elite (whose names I refrain from mentioning for fear that and un–publishable word escape my lips) awakens the rejection of the poor and the just. Far beyond altruism and charity … who remembers the forgotten and do not treat us as worthy of pity, but as human beings? Only the Cubans for many reasons but, most of all because they are as poor as we are…
How proudly the graduates return to their country to lose their names and be called “the fidelitos” or “the crazy ones”. Most people call “crazy” those who think and act differently. Their madness resides in serving their fellowman instead of swallowing him up that is so instilled in the consumer society. “Blessed madness” I say! He who harms Cuba harms those who want the welfare of the world. The Muslims are clear on this point “if you do one atom of good God will bless you; if you do one atom of evil God will bless you also”. Imagine the reward of the US president, George W. Bush, when God reviews the evil he unleashed during his mandate. Of course, Bush assures he talks with the Lord and that He helps him make his decisions. Does God live in Miami or is he an oilman? Whatever the case, it doesn’t matter. Of one thing I am sure. Bush may talk with God but God is on the side of Cuba and the Cubans.
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18) 2 U.S. Soldiers Charged With Murder of 3 Iraqis
By STEPHEN FARRELL
July 1, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/01/world/middleeast/01iraq.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
BAGHDAD, June 30 — Two American soldiers have been charged with premeditated murder and planting weapons on dead Iraqis, United States military officials said Saturday.
The soldiers, Staff Sgt. Michael A. Hensley and Specialist Jorge G. Sandoval Jr., were detained after their fellow soldiers reported that they had been involved in the deaths of three Iraqis near Iskandariya, a mostly Sunni Arab area south of Baghdad, in separate incidents between April and June this year.
The charges came as American forces and Iraqis gave conflicting accounts of a predawn United States military raid into the Shiite district of Sadr City in Baghdad. Coalition officials said soldiers killed 26 militants, but some residents and Mahdi Army militia commanders accused them of killing civilians.
The murder charges center on Iskandariya, a Sunni insurgent stronghold 40 miles south of Baghdad, where the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division started an investigation after “reports of the alleged wrongdoing made by fellow soldiers to military authorities.”
American military officials say Sergeant Hensley, 27, from Candler, N.C., faces three charges of premeditated murder, obstruction of justice and wrongfully placing weapons with the remains of deceased Iraqis. Specialist Sandoval, 20, received one charge of premeditated murder and one of wrongfully placing a weapon on one of the three Iraqis killed.
Both were serving with the headquarters of the First Battalion, 501st Infantry, of the 25th Infantry Division, which is usually based at Fort Richardson, Alaska.
Specialist Sandoval was picked up while at home on a two-week leave in Laredo, Tex., the military said. Charges were filed Thursday, and both men are now in pretrial confinement in Kuwait.
American officials said the investigation was continuing, and they stressed that the charges remained accusations at this stage, and that both men “are presumed innocent unless and until they are proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of any alleged offense.”
The area, part of the so-called Sunni Triangle, is no stranger to controversy.
In Mahmudiya, a town near Iskandariya, two American soldiers admitted to raping a 14-year-old girl and killing her family in March 2006, and others face trial in the killings. Tension has also been high since insurgents abducted three American soldiers in an ambush on their patrol near Mahmudiya on May 12, leading to a huge manhunt. One soldier’s body was later found but two are still missing.
In Baghdad, Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, an American military spokesman, said that the raid in Sadr City on Saturday was against a militant cell that was smuggling weapons, explosively formed projectiles, and money from Iran to aid Iraqi militias.
He said soldiers killed about 26 fighters and detained 17 suspects, but came under attack from small arms, rocket-propelled grenades and roadside bombs as they withdrew from the area. The Americans returned fire against militants shooting from behind buildings and cars.
“Everyone who got shot was shooting at U.S. troops at the time,” he said. “It was an intense firefight.”
But Iraqi officials said the death toll was much lower, around eight, and some said that civilians were killed in their homes, including a man, his wife and their daughter, who went out to check on the disturbance.
Officials at a nearby office for the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, the nominal leader of the Mahdi Army militia, said that the group was not involved in the firefight.
The battle prompted an immediate statement from the office of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, saying he would demand clarification from the military.
On the political front, Mr. Maliki appealed for Iraq’s largest Sunni bloc, the Iraqi Consensus Front, to end its boycott of his Shiite-dominated government. The boycott began last week as a protest of an arrest warrant issued against one of its members, Culture Minister Asad al-Hashimi, in a murder investigation.
Mr. Maliki said boycotts would only “complicate” matters, and urged them to embrace dialogue as “the only way to solve all the problems now and in the future.”
In a separate case, a command sergeant major, the most senior enlisted member serving in a major command, was sentenced to four months in prison after being convicted of possessing alcohol and pornography, engaging in an inappropriate relationship with a female soldier in his unit, and maltreating a soldier.
Command Sgt. Maj. Edward Ramsdell, of the 411th Engineer Brigade, was working in Diyala Province at the time, and he was given a court-martial in October. During the two-day hearing, prosecutors said that Sergeant Major Ramsdell possessed a “large quantity” of alcohol and pornography in his quarters, attempted to conceal the evidence when discovered and then tried to escape from investigating officers.
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19) When Is Enough Enough?
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
June 30, 2007
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/06/30/opinion/30herbert.html?hp
Chances are you didn’t hear it, but on Thursday night Senator Hillary Clinton said, “If H.I.V./AIDS were the leading cause of death of white women between the ages of 25 and 34, there would be an outraged outcry in this country.”
Her comment came on the same day that a malevolent majority on the U.S. Supreme Court threw a brick through the window of voluntary school integration efforts.
There comes a time when people are supposed to get angry. The rights and interests of black people in the U.S. have been under assault for the longest time, and in the absence of an effective counterforce, that assault has only grown more brutal.
Have you looked at the public schools lately? Have you looked at the prisons? Have you looked at the legions of unemployed blacks roaming the neighborhoods of big cities across the country? These jobless African-Americans, so many of them men, are so marginal in the view of the wider society, so insignificant, so invisible, they aren’t even counted in the government’s official jobless statistics.
And now this new majority on the Supreme Court seems committed to a legal trajectory that would hurl blacks back to the bad old days of the Jim Crow era.
Where’s the outcry? Where’s the line in the sand that the prejudiced portion of the population is not allowed to cross?
Mrs. Clinton’s comment was made at a forum of Democratic presidential candidates at Howard University that was put together by Tavis Smiley, the radio and television personality, and broadcast nationally by PBS. The idea was to focus on issues of particular concern to African-Americans.
It’s discouraging that some of the biggest issues confronting blacks — the spread of AIDS, chronic joblessness and racial discrimination, for example — are not considered mainstream issues.
Senator John Edwards offered a disturbingly bleak but accurate picture of the lives of many young blacks: “When you have young African-American men who are completely convinced that they’re either going to die or go to prison and see absolutely no hope in their lives; when they live in an environment where the people around them don’t earn a decent wage; when they go to schools that are second-class schools compared to the wealthy suburban areas — they don’t see anything getting better.”
The difficult lives and often tragic fates of such young men are not much on the minds of so-called mainstream Americans, or the political and corporate elites who run the country. More noise needs to be made. There’s something very wrong with a passive acceptance of the degraded state in which so many African-Americans continue to live.
Mr. Smiley is also organizing a forum of Republican candidates to be held in September. I wholeheartedly applaud his efforts. But if black people were more angry, and if they could channel that anger into political activism — first and foremost by voting as though their lives and the lives of their children depended on it — there would not be a need to have separate political forums to address their concerns.
If black people could find a way to come together in sky-high turnouts on Election Day, if they showed up at polling booths in numbers close to the maximum possible turnout, if they could set the example for all other Americans about the importance of exercising the franchise, the politicians would not dare to ignore their concerns.
For black people, especially, the current composition of the Supreme Court should be the ultimate lesson in the importance of voting in a presidential election. No branch of the government has been more crucial than the judiciary in securing the rights and improving the lives of blacks over the past five or six decades.
George W. Bush, in a little more than six years, has tilted the court so radically that it is now, like the administration itself, relentlessly hostile to the interests of black people. That never would have happened if blacks had managed significantly more muscular turnouts in the 2000 and 2004 elections. (The war in Iraq would not have happened, either.)
There are, of course, many people, black and white, who are working on a vast array of important issues. But much, much more needs to be done. And blacks, in particular, need to intervene more directly in the public policy matters that concern them.
In the 1960s, there were radicals running around screaming about black power. But the real power in this country has always been the power of the vote. Black Americans have not come close to maximizing that power.
It’s not too late.
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20) Castro Reacts to C.I.A. Documents
By REUTERS
Filed at 11:05 a.m. ET
July 1, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/news-cuba-castro.html
HAVANA (Reuters) - Convalescing Cuban President Fidel Castro charged on Sunday the release of classified CIA documents detailing past abuses was a smoke screen behind which the Bush administration hoped to hide even worse methods.
"I think that this action could be an attempt ... to make people believe that these methods belong to another era and are no longer used," Castro wrote in an editorial published by the communist country's official media.
"Everything described in the documents is still being done, only in a more brutal manner around the entire planet, including an increasing number of illegal actions in the very United States."
The CIA declassified on Tuesday hundreds of pages of long-secret records that detailed some of the agency's worst illegal abuses during about 25 years of overseas assassination attempts, domestic spying and kidnapping.
The documents are known in the CIA as the "Family Jewels" and some describe the agency's efforts to persuade Johnny Roselli, believed to be a mobster, to help plot the assassination of Castro.
"Sunday is a good day to read what appears to be science fiction," Castro began his three-page editorial, titled "The Killing Machine."
He went on to quote extensively from material covering the attempt on his life, as well as a New York Times analysis of all the documents.
Cuba charges that Castro has been the target of hundreds of assassination attempts. The Cuban leader has said numerous times that President George W. Bush has ordered him killed.
Castro also reiterated in detail his long-held belief that U.S. President John F. Kennedy, assassinated in 1963, was the victim of a plot involving elements of the CIA and militant anti-Castro Cuban exiles.
Castro, a master sharp-shooter with a telescopic rifle, insists Lee Harvey Oswald could not have been the only shooter in Dallas.
"You loose the target after every shot even if it is not moving and have to find it again in fractions of a second," he said.
Castro has not been seen in public since undergoing emergency intestinal surgery in July last year, when he handed over power temporarily to his younger brother, Raul.
But the 80-year-old revolutionary has returned to public life since March by writing occasional articles, called "Reflections of the Commander in Chief." He has been writing more frequently in recent weeks, fueling speculation that his health is improving.
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21) The Killing Machine
By Fidel Castro Ruz
http://www.granma.cu/ingles/index.html
Sunday is a good day to read something that would appear to be science fiction.
It was announced that the CIA would be declassifying hundreds of pages on illegal actions that included plans to eliminate the leaders of foreign governments. Suddenly the publication is halted and it is delayed one day. No coherent explanation was given. Perhaps someone in the White House looked over the material.
The first package of declassified documents goes by the name of “The Family Jewels;” it consists of 702 pages on illegal CIA actions between 1959 and 1973. About 100 pages of this part have been deleted. It deals with actions that were not authorized by any law, plots to assassinate other leaders, experiments with drugs on human beings to control their minds, spying on civil activists and journalists, among other similar activities that were expressly prohibited.
The documents began to be gathered together 14 years after the first of the events took place, when then CIA director, James Schlessinger became alarmed about what the press was writing, especially all the articles by Robert Woodward and Carl Bernstein published in The Washington Post, already mentioned in the “Manifesto to the People of Cuba.” The agency was being accused of promoting spying in the Watergate Hotel with the participation of its former agents Howard Hunt and James McCord.
In May 1973, the Director of the CIA was demanding that, “all the main operative officials of this agency must immediately inform me on any ongoing or past activity that might be outside of the constituting charter of this agency.” Schlesinger, later appointed Head of the Pentagon, had been replaced by William Colby. Colby was referring to the documents as “skeletons hiding in a closet.” New press revelations forced Colby to admit the existence of the reports to interim President Gerald Ford in 1975. The New York Times was denouncing agency penetration of antiwar groups. The law that created the CIA prevented it from spying inside the United States.
That “was just the tip of the iceberg,” said then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
Kissinger himself warned, “blood would flow” if other actions were known, and he immediately added: “For example, that Robert Kennedy personally controlled the operation for the assassination of Fidel Castro.” The President’s brother was then Attorney General of the United States. He was later murdered as he was running for President in the 1968 elections, which facilitated Nixon’s election for lack of a strong candidate. The most dramatic thing about the case is that apparently he had reached the conviction that Jack Kennedy had been victim of a conspiracy. Thorough investigators, after analyzing the wounds, the caliber of the shots and other circumstances surrounding the death of the President, reached the conclusion that there had been at least three shooters. Solitary Oswald, used as an instrument, could not have been the only shooter. I found that rather striking. Excuse me for saying this but fate turned me into a shooting instructor with a telescopic sight for all the Granma expeditionaries. I spent months practicing and teaching, every day; even though the target is a stationary one it disappears from view with each shot and so you need to look for it all over again in fractions of a second.
Oswald wanted to come through Cuba on his trip to the U.S.SR. He had already been there before. Someone sent him to ask for a visa in our country’s embassy in Mexico but nobody knew him there so he wasn’t authorized. They wanted to get us implicated in the conspiracy. Later, Jack Ruby—a man openly linked to the Mafia—unable to deal with so much pain and sadness, as he said, assassinated him, of all places, in a precinct full police agents.
Subsequently, in international functions or on visits to Cuba, on more than one occasion I met with the aggrieved Kennedy relatives, who would greet me respectfully. The former president’s son, who was a very small child when his father was killed, visited Cuba 34 years later. We met and I invited him to dinner.
The young man, in the prime of his life, and well brought up, tragically died in an airplane accident on a stormy night as he was flying to Martha’s Vineyard with his wife. I never touched on the thorny issue with any of those relatives. In contrast, I pointed out that if the president-elect had then been Nixon instead of Kennedy, after the Bay of Pigs disaster, we would have been attacked by the land and sea forces escorting the mercenary expedition, and both countries would have paid a high toll in human lives. Nixon would not have limited himself to saying that victory has many fathers and defeat is an orphan. For the record, Kennedy was never too enthusiastic about the Bay of Pigs adventure; he was led there by Eisenhower’s military reputation and the recklessness of his ambitious vice-president.
I remember that, exactly on the day and minute he was assassinated, I was speaking in a peaceful spot outside of the capital with French journalist Jean Daniel. He told me that he was bringing a message from President Kennedy. He said to me that in essence he had told him: “You are going to see Castro. I would like to know what he thinks about the terrible danger we just experienced of a thermonuclear war. I want to see you again as soon as you get back.” “Kennedy was very active; he seemed to be a political machine,” he added, and we were not able to continue talking as someone rushed in with the news of what had just happened. We turned on the radio. What Kennedy thought was now pointless.
Certainly I lived with that danger. Cuba was both the weakest part and the one that would take the first strike, but we did not agree with the concessions that were made to the United States. I have already spoken of this before.
Kennedy had emerged from the crisis with greater authority. He came to recognize the enormous sacrifices of human lives and material wealth made by the Soviet people in the struggle against fascism. The worst of the relations between the United States and Cuba had not yet occurred by April 1961. When he hadn’t resigned himself to the outcome of the Bay of Pigs, along came the Missile Crisis. The blockade, economic asphyxiation, pirate attacks and assassination plots multiplied. But the assassination plots and other bloody occurrences began under the administration of Eisenhower and Nixon.
After the Missile Crisis we would have not refused to talk with Kennedy, nor would we have ceased being revolutionaries and radical in our struggle for socialism. Cuba would have never severed relations with the U.S.SR as it had been asked to do. Perhaps if the American leaders had been aware of what a war could be using weapons of mass destruction they would have ended the Cold War earlier and differently. At least that’s how we felt then, when there was still no talk of global warming, broken imbalances, the enormous consumption of hydrocarbons and the sophisticated weaponry created by technology, as I have already said to the youth of Cuba. We would have had much more time to reach, through science and conscience, what we are today forced to realize in haste.
President Ford decided to appoint a Commission to investigate the Central Intelligence Agency. “We do not want to destroy the CIA but to preserve it,” he said.
As a result of the Commission’s investigations that were led by Senator Frank Church, President Ford signed an executive order, which expressly prohibited the participation of American officials in the assassinations of foreign leaders.
The documents published now disclose information about the CIA-Mafia links for my assassination.
Details are also revealed about Operation Chaos, carrying on from 1969 for at least seven years, for which the CIA created a special squadron with the mission to infiltrate pacifist groups and to investigate “the international activities of radicals and black militants.” The Agency compiled more than 300,000 names of American citizens and organizations and extensive files on 7,200 persons.
According to The New York Times, President Johnson was convinced that the American anti-War movement was controlled and funded by Communist governments and he ordered the CIA to produce evidence.
The documents recognize, furthermore, that the CIA spied on various journalists like Jack Anderson, performers such as Jane Fonda and John Lennon, and the student movements at Columbia University. It also searched homes and carried out tests on American citizens to determine the reactions of human beings to certain drugs.
In a memorandum sent to Colby in 1973, Walter Elder who had been executive assistant to John McCone, CIA Director in the early 1970s, gives information about discussions in the CIA headquarters that were taped and transcribed: “I know that whoever worked in the offices of the director were worried about the fact that these conversations in the office and on the phone were transcribed. During the McCone years there were microphones in his regular offices, the inner office, the dining room, the office in the East building, and in the study of his home on White Haven Street. I don’t know if anyone is ready to talk about this, but the information tends to be leaked, and certainly the Agency is vulnerable in this case.”
The secret transcripts of the CIA directors could contain a great number of “jewels.” The National Security Archive is already requesting these transcripts.
A memo clarifies that the CIA had a project called OFTEN which would collect “information about dangerous drugs in American companies,” until the program was terminated in the fall of 1972. In another memo there are reports that manufacturers of commercial drugs “had passed” drugs to the CIA which had been “refused due to adverse secondary effects.”
As part of the MKULTRA program, the CIA had given LSD and other psychoactive drugs to people without their knowledge. According to another document in the archive, Sydney Gottlieb, a psychiatrist and head of chemistry of the Agency Mind Control Program, is supposedly the person responsible for having made available the poison that was going to be used in the assassination attempt on Patrice Lumumba.
CIA employees assigned to MHCHAOS—the operation that carried out surveillance on American opposition to the war in Vietnam and other political dissidents—expressed “a high level of resentment” for having been ordered to carry out such missions.
Nonetheless, there is a series of interesting matters revealed in these documents, such as the high level at which the decisions for actions against our country were taken.
The technique used today by the CIA to avoid giving any details is not the unpleasant crossed out bits but the blank spaces, coming from the use of computers.
For The New York Times, large censored sections reveal that the CIA still cannot expose all the skeletons in its closets, and many activities developed in operations abroad, checked over years ago by journalists, congressional investigators and a presidential commission, are not in the documents.
Howard Osborn, then CIA Director of Security, makes a summary of the “jewels” compiled by his office. He lists eight cases—including the recruiting of the gangster Johnny Roselli for the coup against Fidel Castro—but they crossed out the document that is in the number 1 place on Osborn’s initial list: two and a half pages.
“The No. 1 Jewel of the CIA Security Offices must be very good, especially since the second one is the list for the program concerning the assassination of Castro by Roselli,” said Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive who requested the declassification of “The Family Jewels” 15 years ago under the Freedom of Information Act.
It is notable that the administration which has declassified the least information in the history of the United States, and which has even started a process of reclassifying information that was previously declassified, now makes the decision to make these revelations.
I believe that such an action could be an attempt to present an image of transparency when the government is at an all time low rate of acceptance and popularity, and to show that those methods belong to another era and are no longer in use. When he announced the decision, General Hayden, current CIA Director, said: “The documents offer a look at very different times and at a very different Agency.”
Needless to say that everything described here is still being done, only in a more brutal manner and all around the planet, including a growing number of illegal actions within the very United States.
The New York Times wrote that intelligence experts consulted expressed that the revelation of the documents is an attempt to distract attention from recent controversies and scandals plaguing the CIA and an Administration that is living through some of its worst moments of unpopularity.
The declassification could also be an attempt at showing, in the early stages of the electoral process that the Democratic administrations were as bad, or worse, than Mr. Bush’s.
In pages 11 to 15 of the Memo for the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, we can read:
“In August 1960, Mr. Richard M. Bissell approached Colonel Sheffield Edwards with the objective of determining whether the Security Office had agents who could help in a confidential mission that required gangster-style action. The target of the mission was Fidel Castro.
“Given the extreme confidentiality of the mission, the project was known only to a small group of people. The Director of the Central Intelligence Agency was informed and he gave it his approval. Colonel J. C. King, Head of the Western Hemisphere Division, was also informed, but all the details were deliberately concealed from officials of Operation JMWAVE. Even though some officials of Communications (Commo) and the Technical Services Division (TSD) took part in initial planning phases, they were not aware of the mission’s purpose.
“Robert A. Maheu was contacted, he was informed in general terms about the project, and he was asked to evaluate whether he could get access to gangster-type elements as a first step for achieving the desired goal.
“Mr. Maheu informed that he had met with a certain Johnny Roselli on several occasions while he was visiting Las Vegas. He had only met him informally through clients, but he had been told that he was a member of the upper echelons of the ‘syndicate’ and that he was controlling all the ice machines on the Strip. In Maheu’s opinion, if Roselli was in effect a member of the Clan, he undoubtedly had connections that would lead to the gambling racket in Cuba.
“Maheu was asked to get close to Roselli, who knew that Maheu was a public relations executive looking after national and foreign accounts, and tell him that recently he had been contracted by a client who represented several international business companies, which were suffering enormous financial losses in Cuba due to Castro. They were convinced that the elimination of Castro would be a solution to their problem and they were ready to pay $ 150,000 for a successful outcome. Roselli had to be made perfectly aware of the fact that the U.S. government knew nothing, nor could it know anything, about this operation.
“This was presented to Roselli on September 14, 1960 in the Hilton Plaza Hotel of New York City. His initial reaction was to avoid getting involved but after Maheu’s persuasive efforts he agreed to present the idea to a friend, Sam Gold, who knew “some Cubans.” Roselli made it clear that he didn’t want any money for his part in all this, and he believed that Sam would do likewise. Neither of these people was ever paid with Agency money.
“During the week of September 25, Maheu was introduced to Sam who was living at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach. It was not until several weeks after meeting Sam and Joe—who was introduced as courier operating between Havana and Miami—that he saw photos of these two individuals in the Sunday section of Parade. They were identified as Momo Salvatore Giancana and Santos Trafficante, respectively. Both were on the Attorney General’s list of the ten most wanted. The former was described as the boss of the Cosa Nostra in Chicago and Al Capone’s heir, and the latter was the boss of Cuban operations of the Cosa Nostra. Maheu immediately called this office upon learning this information.
“After analyzing the possible methods to carry out this mission, Sam suggested that they not resort to firearms but that, if they could get hold of some kind of deadly pill, something to be put into Castro’s food or drink, this would be a much more effective operation. Sam indicated that he had a possible candidate in the person of Juan Orta, a Cuban official who had been receiving bribery payments in the gambling racket, and who still had access to Castro and was in a financial bind.
“The TSD (Technical Services Division) was requested to produce 6 highly lethal pills.
“Joe delivered the pills to Orta. After several weeks of attempts, Orta appears to have chickened out and he asked to be taken off the mission. He suggested another candidate who made several unsuccessful [attempts].”
Everything that was said in the numerous paragraphs above is in quotes. Observe well, dear readers, the methods that were already being used by the United States to rule the world.
I remember that during the early years of the Revolution, in the offices of the National Institute for Agrarian Reform, there was a man working there with me whose name was Orta, who had been linked to the anti-Batista political forces. He was a respectful and serious man. But, it could only be him. The decades have gone by and I see his name once more in the CIA report. I can’t lay my hands on information to immediately prove what happened to him. Accept my apologies if I involuntarily have offended a relative or a descendent, whether the person I have mentioned is guilty or not.
The empire has created a veritable killing machine that is made up not only of the CIA and its methods. Bush has established powerful and expensive intelligence and security super-structures, and he has transformed all the air, sea and land forces into instruments of world power that take war, injustice, hunger and death to any part of the globe, in order to educate its inhabitants in the exercise of democracy and freedom. The American people are gradually waking up to this reality.
“You cannot fool all of the people all of the time,” said Lincoln.
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LINKS AND VERY SHORT STORIES
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Lessons from Katrina
How to Destroy an African American City in 33 Steps
By BILL QUIGLEY
June 28, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.com/quigley06282007.html
PCHR weekly report: "Troops killed 16 Palestinians, including 2 children and 2 brothers"
The Palestinian Center For Human Rights (PCHR) based in Gaza, published its weekly report on the Israeli violations in the occupied territories in the period between June 21 – June 27, 2007. During the reported period Israel continued its violations in the occupied territories, and killed sixteen Palestinians, including two brothers and two children.
http://www.imemc.org/article/49223
Israeli brutality at a checkpoint near the Jordan Valley
Israeli assaults at checkpoints all over the West Bank have a terrible effect on the daily life of Palestinians. Such assaults are both numerous and wide-ranging in nature.
http://www.imemc.org/article/49228
Palestinian killed in ongoing Israeli raid
Israeli troops on Friday shot dead a Palestinian man as the army pressed a second day of operations in the flashpoint West Bank town of Nablus, security sources on both sides said.
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/newsfull.php?newid=15955
Scientists Transplant Genome of Bacteria
By NICHOLAS WADE
June 29, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/29/science/29cells.html?hp
Texas: Immigrant Drowns After Border Agent Is Attacked
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
An illegal immigrant drowned in a border canal after a Border Patrol agent trying to rescue him was hit in the head with a rock thrown by a suspected human smuggler, Border Patrol officials said. The agent fired at least one shot at the suspect and another would-be immigrant, who fled back into Mexico, said an agency spokesman, Patrick Berry.
June 28, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/28/us/28brfs-IMMIGRANTDRO_BRF.html
California: Immigrants Die in Crash
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Two suspected illegal immigrants died in a fiery head-on collision after the driver of a pickup fled the Border Patrol and swerved into oncoming traffic on a winding, rural road east of San Diego, the authorities said. Several people were seriously injured. The Border Patrol halted its pursuit after reaching the 55 m.p.h. speed limit, said a spokesman, Quinn Palmer.
June 28, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/28/us/28brfs-IMMIGRANTSDI_BRF.html
White House Is Subpoenaed on Wiretapping
By JAMES RISEN
June 28, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/28/washington/28nsa.html?hp
Fidel Castro on the 50th Anniversary
of the Chinese Revolution
http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/mayjun_07/0507002.html
Files on Illegal Spying Show C.I.A. Skeletons From Cold War
By MARK MAZZETTI and TIM WEINER
June 27, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/27/washington/27cia.html?ref=us
Canada: Native Protests Planned for National Day
By IAN AUSTEN
Native groups are threatening to cause major travel disruptions at the start of the forthcoming Canada Day holiday weekend . Shawn Best, a spokesman for the Tyendinaga Mohawk Council, said members would block either Ontario’s main highway near Kingston, Ontario, or the rail line between Montreal and Toronto on Friday to protest poverty and land claims. He said that other native groups had told him they planned similar moves in other parts of the country.
June 27, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/27/world/americas/27briefs-native.html
28-Mile Virtual Fence Is Rising Along the Border
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
June 26, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/26/us/26fence.html?ref=us
U.S. Plan to Capture and Kill Insurgents in Baquba Fell Far Short of Goal, Officer Says
By MICHAEL R. GORDON
June 26, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/26/world/middleeast/26baquba.html
Army kidnaps six Palestinians from several parts of the West Bank
The Israeli army invades several cities and towns in the West Bank and kidnapped at least six Palestinians in the early hours of Tuesday morning.
http://www.imemc. org/article/ 49172
The Situation Room: Government officials, including the mayor, are concealing records of disastrously high levels of toxic dust from Lennar’s grading at the Hunters Point Shipyard by Ahimsa Porter Sumchai, M.D., http://www.sfbayview.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=222&Itemid=14
Boom times for banks in Venezuela
By JENS ERIK GOULD
www.latinamericanpost.com/index.php?mod=seccion&secc=4&conn=4860
The Big Profits in Biowarfare Research
Corporate America's Deadliest Secret
By SHERWOOD ROSS
June 22, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/ross06222007.html
How Could Blair Possibly Get This Job?
The Bumbling Envoy
By ROBERT FISK
Weekend Edition
June 23 / 24, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.com/fisk06232007.html
Nationwide, Black children 4-6 times more likely to die of asthma http://www.fpnotebook.com/LUN13.htm .
Nigeria: Strike - 50 Labour Leaders Arrested
Daily Champion (Lagos)
22 June 2007
Posted to the web 22 June 2007
Chukwudi Achife, Ufomba Uzuegbu, Akor Sylvester
Lagos
http://allafrica.com/stories/200706220007.html
Climate change blamed as Lake Superior shrinks
By Leonard Doyle in Washington
Published: 20 June 2007
http://environment.independent.co.uk/climate_change/article2679474.ece
General Strike Over Rising Fuel Price Takes Hold in Nigerian Cities
By SARAH SIMPSON
June 21, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/21/world/africa/21nigeria.html
At Least 12 U.S. Troops Killed in Iraq in 2 Days
By ALISSA J. RUBIN and GRAHAM BOWLEY
June 21, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/21/world/middleeast/21cnd-iraq.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
The General's Report
By Seymour M. Hersh
The New Yorker
25 June 2007 Issue
"How Antonio Taguba, who investigated the Abu Ghraib scandal, became one of its casualties."
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/061707A.shtml
Medical Marijuana Measure Falls With Connecticut Governor’s Veto
By MATTHEW J. MALONE
June 20, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/20/nyregion/20rell.html
AP Blog: Living on Cuba's Rationed Food
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:18 p.m. ET
"AP Havana Bureau Chief Anita Snow is spending the month of June living on the ''libreta,'' a ration book for food consumption in Cuba. Here's her story."
June 19, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-INT-Cuba-Weblog.html?ex=1182916800&en=6f07cb599a5fd992&ei=5070&emc=eta1
The Earth today stands in imminent peril
" ...and nothing short of a planetary rescue will save it from the environmental cataclysm of dangerous climate change. Those are not the words of eco-warriors but the considered opinion of a group of eminent scientists writing in a peer-reviewed scientific journal."
By Steve Connor, Science Editor
Published: 19 June 2007
http://environment.independent.co.uk/climate_change/article2675747.ece
With Rise in Radiation Exposure, Experts Urge Caution on Tests
By RONI CARYN RABIN
June 19, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/19/health/19cons.html?ref=health
Conservancy Buys Large Area of Adirondack Wilderness
By ANTHONY DePALMA
June 19, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/19/nyregion/19adirondacks.html?ref=nyregion
Global: Hidden cancer epidemic kills hundreds of thousands each year
"A worldwide epidemic of occupational cancer is claiming at least one life every 52 seconds, but this tragedy is being ignored by both official regulators and employers. A new cancer prevention guide, reveals that over 600,000 deaths a year – one death every 52 seconds – are caused by occupational cancer, making up almost one-third of all work-related deaths."
http://www.hazards.org/cancer/index.htm
Preventing occupational cancer
"A new cancer prevention guide, reveals that over 600,000 deaths a year – one death every 52 seconds – are caused by occupational cancer, making up almost one-third of all work-related deaths."
IMF / News article
http://www.imfmetal.org/main/index.cfm?n=47&l=2&c=15708
A Harsh Lesson in Finances for After-School Students
By DAVID GONZALEZ
June 18, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/18/nyregion/18citywide.html?ref=nyregion
Long Reviled, Merit Pay Gains Among Teachers
By SAM DILLON
June 18, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/18/education/18pay.html?ref=us
Meadow Birds in Precipitous Decline, Audubon Says
By FELICITY BARRINGER
June 15, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/15/us/15birds.html?ref=science
Strike in South Africa expands
By Geoff Hill
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Published June 12, 2007
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20070611-114232-8445r.htm
Oregon: More Than 165 Workers Are Detained After Raid
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
More than 165 workers were detained to be processed for possible deportation after federal agents raided the Fresh Del Monte Produce food-processing plant and two offices of a staffing company in Portland. Three people were indicted on immigration, illegal documents and identity theft charges. An official at Fresh Del Monte Produce Company headquarters in Coral Gables, Fla., said the company could not comment until federal investigators provided it with more information. Mayor Tom Potter of Portland criticized the raids. The three arrests were understandable, Mr. Potter said, but “to go after local workers who are here to support their families while filling the demands of local businesses for their labor is bad policy.”
June 13, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/13/us/13brfs-immigration.html
Robert Fisk: Lies and outrages... would you believe it?
It was Israel which attacked Egypt after Nasser closed the straits of Tiran
Published: 09 June 2007
http://news.independent.co.uk/fisk/article2636206.ece
Judge Throws Out Sentence in Teen Sex Case
By BRENDA GOODMAN
June 11, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/11/us/11cnd-consent.html?hp
US Military Envisions "Post-Occupation" Force
"US military officials are increasingly envisioning a "post-occupation" troop presence in Iraq that neither maintains current levels nor leads to a complete pullout, but aims for a smaller, longer-term force that would remain in the country for years."
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/061107J.shtml
Lieberman Backs Limited U.S. Attacks on Iran
By BRIAN KNOWLTON
June 10, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/10/washington/10cnd-policy.html
Biologists Make Skin Cells Work Like Stem Cells
By NICHOLAS WADE
June 7, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/07/science/07cell.html?ref=science
Report Confirms CIA Secret Prisons in Europe
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/060807J.shtml
The Dirty Water Underground
By GREGORY DICUM
OAKLAND, Calif.
May 31, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/31/garden/31greywater.html
A Hot-Selling Weapon, an Inviting Target
By ANDREW PARK
June 3, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/business/yourmoney/03rifle.html?ref=business
Surf’s Up, but the Water Is Brown
By MIREYA NAVARRO
June 3, 2007
Los Angeles
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/fashion/03beaches.html
When Should a Kid Start Kindergarten?
By ELIZABETH WEIL
June 3, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/magazine/03kindergarten-t.html?hp
After Sanctions, Doctors Get Drug Company Pay
By GARDINER HARRIS and JANET ROBERTS
June 3, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/health/03docs.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
Somalia: The Other (Hidden) War for Oil
by Carl Bloice; Black Commentator
May 07, 2007
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=12768
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GENERAL ANNOUNCEMENTS AND INFORMATION
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LAPD vs. Immigrants (Video)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/qws/ff/qr?term=lapd&Submit=S&Go.x=0&Go.y=0&Go=Search&st=s
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Dr. Julia Hare at the SOBA 2007
http://mysite.verizon.net/vzeo9ewi/proudtobeblack2/
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"We are far from that stage today in our era of the absolute
lie; the complete and totalitarian lie, spread by the
monopolies of press and radio to imprison social
consciousness." December 1936, "In 'Socialist' Norway,"
by Leon Trotsky: “Leon Trotsky in Norway” was transcribed
for the Internet by Per I. Matheson [References from
original translation removed]
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/12/nor.htm
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Wealth Inequality Charts
http://www.faireconomy.org/research/wealth_charts.html
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MALCOLM X: Oxford University Debate
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dmzaaf-9aHQ
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ADDICTED TO WAR
Animated Video Preview
Narrated by Peter Coyote
Is now on YouTube and Google Video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZwyuHEN5h8
We are planning on making the ADDICTED To WAR movie.
Can you let me know what you think about this animated preview?
Do you think it would work as a full length film?
Please send your response to:
Fdorrel@sbcglobal. net or Fdorrel@Addictedtow ar.com
In Peace,
Frank Dorrel
Publisher
Addicted To War
P.O. Box 3261
Culver City, CA 90231-3261
310-838-8131
fdorrel@addictedtow ar.com
fdorrel@sbcglobal. net
www.addictedtowar. com
For copies of the book:
http://www.addictedtowar.com/book.html
OR SEND CHECK OR MONEY ORDER TO:
Frank Dorrel
P.O. BOX 3261
CULVER CITY, CALIF. 90231-3261
fdorrel@addictedtowar.com
$10.00 per copy (Spanish or English); special bulk rates
can be found at: http://www.addictedtowar.com/bookbulk.html
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"There comes a times when silence is betrayal."
--Martin Luther King
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DEMAND THE RELEASE OF SAMI AL-ARIAN
The National Council of Arab Americans (NCA) demands the immediate
release of political prisoner, Dr. Sami Al-Arian. Although
Dr. Al-Arian is no longer on a hunger strike we must still demand
he be released by the US Department of Justice (DOJ). After an earlier
plea agreement that absolved Dr. Al-Arian from any further questioning,
he was sentenced up to 18 months in jail for refusing to testify before
a grand jury in Virginia. He has long sense served his time yet
Dr. Al-Arian is still being held. Release him now!
See:
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/16/1410255
ACTION:
We ask all people of conscience to demand the immediate
release and end to Dr. Al- Arian's suffering.
Call, Email and Write:
1- Attorney General Alberto Gonzales
Department of Justice
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20530-0001
Fax Number: (202) 307-6777
Email: AskDOJ@usdoj.gov
2- The Honorable John Conyers, Jr
2426 Rayburn Building
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-5126
(202) 225-0072 Fax
John.Conyers@mail.house.gov
3- Senator Patrick Leahy
433 Russell Senate Office Building
United States Senate
Washington, DC 20510
(202)224-4242
senator_leahy@leahy.senate.gov
4- Honorable Judge Gerald Lee
U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia
401 Courthouse Square, Alexandria, VA 22314
March 22, 2007
[No email given...bw]
National Council of Arab Americans (NCA)
http://www.arab-american.net/
Criminalizing Solidarity: Sami Al-Arian and the War of
Terror
By Charlotte Kates, The Electronic Intifada, 4 April 2007
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6767.shtml
Related:
Robert Fisk: The true story of free speech in America
This systematic censorship of Middle East reality
continues even in schools
Published: 07 April 2007
http://news. independent. co.uk/world/ fisk/article2430 125.ece
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[For some levity...Hans Groiner plays Monk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51bsCRv6kI0
...bw]
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Excerpt of interview between Barbara Walters and Hugo Chavez
http://www.borev.net/2007/03/what_you_had_something_better.html
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Which country should we invade next?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3g_zqz3VjY
My Favorite Mutiny, The Coup
http://www.myspace.com/thecoupmusic
Michael Moore- The Awful Truth
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeOaTpYl8mE
Morse v. Frederick Supreme Court arguments
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_LsGoDWC0o
Free Speech 4 Students Rally - Media Montage
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfCjfod8yuw
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'My son lived a worthwhile life'
In April 2003, 21-year old Tom Hurndall was shot in the head
in Gaza by an Israeli soldier as he tried to save the lives of three
small children. Nine months later, he died, having never
recovered consciousness. Emine Saner talks to his mother
Jocelyn about her grief, her fight to make the Israeli army
accountable for his death and the book she has written
in his memory.
Monday March 26, 2007
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,2042968,00.html
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Introducing...................the Apple iRack
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-KWYYIY4jQ
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"A War Budget Leaves Every Child Behind."
[A T-shirt worn by some teachers at Roosevelt High School
in L.A. as part of their campaign to rid the school of military
recruiters and JROTC--see Article in Full item number 4, below...bw]
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THIS IS AN EXCELLENT VIDEO DESTRIBUTED BY U.S. LABOR AGAINST
THE WAR (USLAW) FEATURING SPEAKERS AT THE JANUARY 27TH
MARCH ON WASHINGTON FOCUSING ON THE DEMAND - BRING
THE TROOPS HOME NOW.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6935451906479097836&hl=en
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Defend the Los Angeles Eight!
http://www.committee4justice.com/
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George Takai responds to Tim Hardaway's homophobic remarks
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcJoJZIcQW4&eurl_
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Iran
http://www.lucasgray.com/video/peacetrain.html
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Another view of the war. A link from Amer Jubran
http://d3130.servadmin.com/~leeflash/
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Petition: Halt the Blue Angels
http://action.globalexchange.org/petition.jsp?petition_KEY=458
http://www.care2.com/c2c/share/detail/289327
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A Girl Like Me
7:08 min
Youth Documentary
Kiri Davis, Director, Reel Works Teen Filmmaking, Producer
Winner of the Diversity Award
Sponsored by Third Millennium Foundation
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1091431409617440489
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Film/Song about Angola
http://www.prisonactivist.org/angola/
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"200 million children in the world sleep in the streets today.
Not one of them is Cuban."
(A sign in Havana)
Venceremos
View sign at bottom of page at:
http://www.cubasolidarity.net/index.html
[Thanks to Norma Harrison for sending this...bw]
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
"Cheyenne and Arapaho oral histories hammer history's account of the
Sand Creek Massacre"
CENTENNIAL, CO -- A new documentary film based on an award-winning
documentary short film, "The Sand Creek Massacre", and driven by
Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho people who tell their version about
what happened during the Sand Creek Massacre via their oral
histories, has been released by Olympus Films+, LLC, a Centennial,
Colorado film company.
"You have done an extraordinary job" said Margie Small, Tobient
Entertainment, " on the Colorado PBS episode, the library videos for
public schools and libraries, the trailer, etc...and getting the
story told and giving honor to those ancestors who had to witness
this tragic and brutal attack...film is one of the best ways."
"The images shown in the film were selected for native awareness
value" said Donald L. Vasicek, award-winning writer/filmmaker, "we
also focused on preserving American history on film because tribal
elders are dying and taking their oral histories with them. The film
shows a non-violent solution to problem-solving and 19th century
Colorado history, so it's multi-dimensional in that sense. "
Chief Eugene Blackbear, Sr., Cheyenne, who starred as Chief Black
Kettle in "The Last of the Dogmen" also starring Tom Berenger and
Barbara Hershey and "Dr. Colorado", Tom Noel, University of Colorado
history professor, are featured.
The trailer can be viewed and the film can be ordered for $24.95 plus
$4.95 for shipping and handling at http://www.fullduck.com/node/53.
Vasicek's web site, http://www.donvasicek.com, provides detailed
information about the Sand Creek Massacre including various still
images particularly on the Sand Creek Massacre home page and on the
proposal page.
Olympus Films+, LLC is dedicated to writing and producing quality
products that serve to educate others about the human condition.
Contact:
Donald L. Vasicek
Olympus Films+, LLC
7078 South Fairfax Street
Centennial, CO 80122
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Vasicek,+Don
http://www.donvasicek.com
dvasicek@earthlink.net
303-903-2103
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A NEW LOOK AT U.S. RADIOACTIVE WEAPONS
Join us in a campaign to expose and stop the use
of these illegal weapons
http://poisondust.org/
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You may enjoy watching these.
In struggle
Che:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqcezl9dD2c
Leon:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukkFVV5X0p4
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FIGHTBACK! A Collection of Socialist Essays
By Sylvia Weinstein
http://www.walterlippmann.com/sylvia-weinstein-fightback-intro.html
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[The Scab
"After God had finished the rattlesnake, the toad,
and the vampire, he had some awful substance left with
which he made a scab."
"A scab is a two-legged animal with a corkscrew soul,
a water brain, a combination backbone of jelly and glue.
Where others have hearts, he carries a tumor of rotten
principles." "When a scab comes down the street,
men turn their backs and angels weep in heaven, and
the devil shuts the gates of hell to keep him out."
"No man (or woman) has a right to scab so long as there
is a pool of water to drown his carcass in,
or a rope long enough to hang his body with.
Judas was a gentleman compared with a scab.
For betraying his master, he had character enough
to hang himself." A scab has not.
"Esau sold his birthright for a mess of pottage.
Judas sold his Savior for thirty pieces of silver.
Benedict Arnold sold his country for a promise of
a commision in the british army."
The scab sells his birthright, country, his wife,
his children and his fellowmen for an unfulfilled
promise from his employer.
Esau was a traitor to himself; Judas was a traitor
to his God; Benedict Arnold was a traitor to his country;
a scab is a traitor to his God, his country,
his family and his class."
Author --- Jack London (1876-1916)...Roland Sheppard
http://web.mac.com/rolandgarret]
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END ALL U.S. AID TO ISRAEL!
Stop funding Israel's war against Palestine
Complete the form at the website listed below with your information.
https://secure2.convio.net/pep/site/Advocacy?
JServSessionIdr003=cga2p2o6x1.app2a&cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=177
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Sand Creek Massacre
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FEATURED AT NATIVE AMERICAN FILM FESTIVAL:
http://www.aberdeennews.com/mld/aberdeennews/news/local/16035305.htm
(scroll down when you get there])
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING
WRITER/FILMMAKER DONALD L. VASICEK REPORT:
http://www.digitalcinemareport.com/sandcreekmassacre.html
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FINALIST IN DOCUMENTARY CHANNEL COMPETITION (VIEW HERE):
http://www.docupyx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=28&Itemid=41
VIEW "THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FILM MOVIE OF THE WEEK FOR FREE HERE:
http://twymancreative.com/twymanc.html
On November 29, 1864, 700 Colorado troops savagely slaughtered
over 450 Cheyenne children, disabled, elders, and women in the
southeastern Colorado Territory under its protection. This act
became known as the Sand Creek Massacre. This film project
("The Sand Creek Massacre" documentary film project) is an
examination of an open wound in the souls of the Cheyenne
people as told from their perspective. This project chronicles
that horrific 19th century event and its affect on the 21st century
struggle for respectful coexistence between white and native
plains cultures in the United States of America.
Listed below are links on which you can click to get the latest news,
products, and view, free, "THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" award-
winning documentary short. In order to create more native
awareness, particularly to save the roots of America's history,
please read the following:
Some people in America are trying to save the world. Bless
them. In the meantime, the roots of America are dying.
What happens to a plant when the roots die? The plant dies
according to my biology teacher in high school. American's
roots are its native people. Many of America's native people
are dying from drug and alcohol abuse, poverty, hunger,
and disease, which was introduced to them by the Caucasian
male. Tribal elders are dying. When they die, their oral
histories go with them. Our native's oral histories are the
essence of the roots of America, what took place before
our ancestors came over to America, what is taking place,
and what will be taking place. It is time we replenish
America's roots with native awareness, else America
continues its decaying, and ultimately, its death.
You can help. The 22-MINUTE SAND CREEK MASSACRE
DOCUMENTARY PRESENTATION/EDUCATIONAL DVD IS
READY FOR PURCHASE! (pass the word about this powerful
educational tool to friends, family, schools, parents, teachers,
and other related people and organizations to contact
me (dvasicek@earthlink.net, 303-903-2103) for information
about how they can purchase the DVD and have me come
to their children's school to show the film and to interact
in a questions and answers discussion about the Sand
Creek Massacre.
Happy Holidays!
Donald L. Vasicek
Olympus Films+, LLC
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Vasicek,+Don
http://www.donvasicek.com
dvasicek@earthlink.net
303-903-2103
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FEATURED AT NATIVE AMERICAN FILM FESTIVAL:
http://www.aberdeennews.com/mld/aberdeennews/news/local/16035305.htm
(scroll down when you get there])
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING
WRITER/FILMMAKER DONALD L. VASICEK REPORT:
http://www.digitalcinemareport.com/sandcreekmassacre.html
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FINALIST IN DOCUMENTARY CHANNEL COMPETITION (VIEW HERE):
http://www.docupyx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=28&Itemid=41
VIEW "THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FILM MOVIE OF THE WEEK FOR FREE HERE:
http://twymancreative.com/twymanc.html
SHOP:
http://www.manataka.org/page633.html
BuyIndies.com
donvasicek.com.
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