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Time for OTA
When the Republican Gingrich devolution took over Congress in 1995, it stripped the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) of all its funding and left it a shell with no experts to advise committees and members of Congress. Whereupon Congress was plunged into a dark age regarding decisions about trillions of national security, offshore oil […]
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India and Pakistan: Labor, Democratization, and Development
Christopher Candland. Labor, Democratization and Development in India and Pakistan. London: Routledge, 2007. 216 pages. This book, by Christopher Candland, sets out to provide a documented analytical and empirical study of the linkages between organized labor, development, and democratization in India and Pakistan from the colonial period till date. It attempts to explain why […]
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Gaza: Live from the Freedom Flotilla
Update “Israel Attacks Turkish Free Gaza Ship: 16 Killed, According to Israeli Army Radio.” For more information, visit <www.ihh.org.tr>, <www.witnessgaza.com>, and <www.freegaza.org>. | Print
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Thailand: NGO-COD Shows Scandalous Double Standards over the Violent Crackdown
The Thai NGO Coordinating committee (NGO-COD) issued a statement on 20th May 2010 about the violence in Bangkok. The statement blamed both the government and the UDD Red Shirts for the deaths. This is despite the fact that the UDD protestors were unarmed and the government used tanks, snipers and weapons of war against the […]
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Rwandan Arrest of U.S. Lawyer Motivated by Politics
Professor Peter Erlinder, noted criminal defense lawyer and past president of the National Lawyers Guild, was arrested Friday morning in Rwanda for “genocide ideology.” Erlinder’s representation of high-profile defendants before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) has incurred the wrath of government officials, who have charged him with “negation of the Tutsi genocide” for […]
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Arab Domestic Affairs
“We will not allow any country to interfere in our domestic affairs.”(But see who’s swimming in the fishbowl that is the “Arab world.” . . .) Fahd Bahady is a Syrian cartoonist. This cartoon, first published by Al Jazeera, illustrates an interview with Bahady by eHasakeh (16 March 2010); it is reproduced here for non-profit […]
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Breaking the Blockade of Silence: L.A. Art and Advocacy for the Cuban 5
How do you break through the twelve-year blockade of silence that has kept five Cuban political prisoners invisible to the American public? How can art transcend U.S. prison walls and present the truth about these men, locked up in five distant prisons scattered across the United States, to a Los Angeles community? On May 22nd […]
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Rock
Rock! Eneko Las Heras, born in Caracas in 1963, is a cartoonist based in Spain. This cartoon was published on his blog . . . Y sin embargo se mueve on 28 May 2010. Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (@yoshiefuruhashi | yoshie.furuhashi [at] gmail.com). | Print
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Empire against Democracy
After the Second World War, from which the Allied forces emerged victorious, the government of the United States sought to make the most of its military victory. It structured the Assembly of the United Nations to be led by a Security Council composed of the seven most powerful countries, with veto power over decisions […]
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Palestinian Refugees
The imposition of a Jewish state on Palestine in 1948 created a colossal contingent of refugees (currently estimated by the UN to be over 4.5 million). The Palestinian families who were not simply killed by Zionist terrorist groups like Irgun and Haganah had to flee to neighboring countries such as Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, where […]
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Arizona: Grassroots Organizing to Repeal All Anti-Immigrant Laws
Joel Olson is a member of the Repeal Coalition in Flagstaff, Arizona. Repeal spearheaded the grassroots mobilization that successfully pressured the Flagstaff City Council to pass an injunction threatening a lawsuit against the state for its anti-immigrant law SB 1070. SB 1070 has clearly reignited the immigrant rights movement. What is SB 1070 and […]
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CRED: A New Model of Climate and Development
The climate policy debate has largely shifted from science to economics. There is a well-developed consensus, at least in broad outlines, about the physical science of climate change and its likely implications. That consensus is embodied in massive general circulation models (GCMs) that provide detailed projections of average temperatures, precipitation, weather patterns, and sea-level […]
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Someone Is Watching: The Peril and Promise of School Surveillance
Torin Monahan, Rodolfo D. Torres, eds. Schools under Surveillance: Cultures of Control in Public Education. Critical Issues in Crime and Society Series. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010. vi + 264 pp. $72.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8135-4679-7; $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8135-4680-3. In the fall of 2009, Lower Merion High School in Ardmore, Pennsylvania, was caught […]
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No Justice, No Euro!
The current turmoil in financial markets around the world is another illustration of the damage that can be done by a bloated and politically powerful financial sector, combined with finance ministers and central bankers who identify with this sector and have their own right-wing policy agenda. Welcome to Europe, which has become the epicenter of […]
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Vigorous Legal Advocate Arrested in Rwanda
New York — The National Lawyers Guild (NLG) demands the immediate release of its former president, Professor Peter Erlinder, whom Rwandan Police arrested early today on charges of “genocide ideology.” He had traveled to Rwanda’s capital, Kigali, on May 23, to join the defense team of Rwandan presidential candidate Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza. Erlinder is […]
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Only 2 Dems against $60B for AfPak War
The vote to send another $60B of taxpayers’ money to pay for Obama’s AfPak occupation was 67-28-5. But almost all the no votes were conservative Republicans. Only two Democrats, Feingold (WI) and Wyden (OR), voted against. Three Republicans and Lincoln (AR) and McCaskill (MO) did not vote. To their shame, the other 15 Dems and […]
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Israel: Persecuting Ameer Makhoul
A leading human rights activist from Israel’s Palestinian Arab minority was charged yesterday with the most serious security offences on Israel’s statute book, including espionage. Prosecutors indicted Ameer Makhoul, the head of Ittijah, an umbrella organization for Arab human rights groups in Israel, with spying on security facilities on behalf of Hizbollah after an alleged […]
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Electric Capitalism: A Discussion with David McDonald
Prabir Purkayastha: You have written a lot about electricity in South Africa particularly, and you also talked about how this concept of services being priced so the cost of service is recovered is actually starting a complete ideological change in the way infrastructure services are delivered. So what do you think is the real crisis? […]
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Petropolis: Aerial Perspectives on the Alberta Tar Sands
Trailer Interview with Peter Mettler Why did you make Petropolis? There are a lot of paths that led to this, going back already 20 years. I’ve always been interested in the way we humans have the ability to create technology out of our given natural environments. My impression is that the technologies we develop […]
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People’s Voices Must Be Heard in Climate Negotiations
In April 2010 more than 35,000 people from 140 countries gathered in Cochabamba, Bolivia and developed the historic Cochabamba People’s Accord, a consensus-based document reflecting substantive solutions to the climate crisis. We, the undersigned organizations, both participated in and/or supported this historic process. Reflecting the voices of global civil society and the agreements reached […]