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From Iraq to Iran: Is London Again “Helping” Washington Pursue Regime Change in the Middle East?
There are two countries in the world which are routinely described by American politicians across the political spectrum as having a “special relationship” with the United States — Israel and the United Kingdom. We have all grown more familiar than we probably like to acknowledge with Israel using its channels to Capitol Hill and in […]
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PIIGS Countries, Being Led to the Slaughter, Should Rethink Euro
As the EU summit meeting convenes, Greece is dominating the agenda much more than Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel had wanted. This week she has thrown cold water on the idea that Germany and other EU countries would take responsibility for helping Greece to roll over some of its debt, handing that job off to the […]
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Travel Advice: Don’t Hand Over Your Passport to Israeli Officials (If You Can Avoid It)
UK passport holders should be aware of a recent Serious Organised Crime Agency investigation into the misuse of UK passports in the murder of Mahmud al-Mabhuh in Dubai on 19 January 2010. The SOCA investigation found circumstantial evidence of Israeli involvement in the fraudulent use of British passports. This has raised the possibility that […]
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A Cloward-Piven Strategy for Single Payer?
With the passage in the House of the Obama administration’s health care reform bill, it would seem at first glance that the movement for national, single-payer health insurance has been seriously derailed. After all, if all of the hype and adulation surrounding the bill’s passage is to be believed, the fight for universal health care […]
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The Most Probable Endgame for New Iran Sanctions
The all too predictable dynamics surrounding a potential new Iran sanctions resolution in the United Nations Security Council continue to play out just as we have anticipated. As some commentators are leaping on media stories that one of China’s diplomats took part in a P-5+1 conference call yesterday about a possible resolution, the Wall Street […]
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Israel’s Perspective on Iran: Insights from the AIPAC Conference
Yesterday, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) concluded its annual policy conference in Washington, DC. This year saw the largest-ever turnout for AIPAC’s annual conference, with 7,800 people in attendance, an important percentage of whom were not Jewish but evangelical Protestant Christians. At the climax of the conference, participants deployed to Capitol Hill to […]
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Belgrade Commemorates Victims of NATO Bombing
On Wednesday, eleven years after the start of the NATO bombing, Belgrade remembered the victims. There was mourning in churches (photo), and sirens wailed across the country. On 24 March 1999, the air war against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia began. At first, 430 bombers were deployed. The number climbed, by the tenth of June, […]
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What the EU’s Stability and Growth Pact Means for Greece
Carlos Latuff is a Brazilian cartoonist. This image has been used by Dromos. | | Print
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Walking with the Comrades
The terse, typewritten note slipped under my door in a sealed envelope confirmed my appointment with India’s Gravest Internal Security Threat. I’d been waiting for months to hear from them. I had to be at the Ma Danteshwari mandir in Dantewada, Chhattisgarh, at any of four given times on two given days. That was to […]
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Misreading Khamenei’s Approach to the United States and Iran’s Geopolitics
Most of the Western media failed to report on Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s annual, live Nowruz (Persian New Year) address yesterday in his hometown of Mashhad. Instead they took conventional snippets from his earlier pre-recorded message for state television. In doing so, the Western media have again missed important content and context regarding Khamenei’s […]
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American Police Training and Political Violence: From the Philippines Conquest to the Killing Fields of Afghanistan and Iraq
“In the police you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been flogged with bamboos.” –George Orwell, Shooting An Elephant and Other Essays “. . . the […]
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French Regional Elections 2010
The Guide to the Regional Elections First Round Second Round Le Monde reports: “The Left obtained 59% of the votes in six metropolitan regions where it dueled with the Right, according to TNS-Sofres/Logica. In 12 regions where there were triangle races joined by the National Front, the Socialist Party and its allies scored 49%, against […]
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Militarizing Latin America
The United States was founded as an “infant empire,” in George Washington’s words. The conquest of the national territory was a grand imperial venture, much like the vast expansion of the Grand Duchy of Moscow. From the earliest days, control over the Western Hemisphere was a critical goal. Ambitions expanded during World War II, as […]
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A Postsecular World Society? On the Philosophical Significance of Postsecular Consciousness and the Multicultural World Society
EM: Over the last couple of years you have been working on the question of religion from a series of perspectives: philosophical, political, sociological, moral, and cognitive. In your Yale lectures from the fall of 2008, you approached the challenge of the vitality and renewal of religion in world society in terms of the […]
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Is the U.S. “Offer” to Iran on Medical Isotopes a Pretext for More Coercive Action?
Earlier this week, journalists highlighted U.S. Deputy Secretary of Energy Dan Poneman’s statement that the Obama Administration had “offered to facilitate Iran’s procurement through the world markets of the medical isotopes its citizens need,” but that “Iran’s leaders apparently prefer to reject the most responsible, cost effective, and timely options to ensure access to medical […]
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Excessive Centralization Creates Inefficiency and Prevents Authentic Popular Protagonism
1. There Is No Popular Protagonism without Decentralization Popular protagonism becomes a mere slogan if people do not have the opportunity to make their opinions known and take decisions in areas where they participate: (geographic spaces, workplaces, educational establishments, interest groups). If the central state decides everything, there is no room for local initiatives and […]
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Are the Iranian Poor a Bunch of Welfare Queens?
The picture we usually get of the Iranian poor in the media is one of two extremes: the wretched of the earth, or the equivalent of Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queens.” (If you remember, Reagan attacked the meager US welfare system by inventing a group of people who did not even exist: pink-Cadillac-driving, children-producing, unwilling-to-work black […]
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Interviews with Strikers in Athens, Greece
Athens, Greece, 11.03.10. — Tens of thousands of trade unionists and anti-capitalists demonstrated during a nationwide strike against the cash-strapped government’s austerity measures. People explain why the have taken to the streets. “Today’s 24-hour general strike was called by GSEE and ADEDY (private and public sector unions). They are demanding that working people not […]
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What Are the Real Threats to Democracy in the Americas? A Honduran Constitutional Convention and the New Cold War of the U.S.A.
On March 10, the U.S. House Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere held a hearing to chart the course of their agenda in the Western Hemisphere over the coming year. On March 12-15, the National Popular Resistance Front in Honduras (FNRP) held a national meeting to pave the way for a Honduran Constitutional Convention, even in […]
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The Iran Threat in the Age of Real-Axis-of-Evil Expansion1
It is intriguing to see how whoever the United States and Israel find interfering with their imperial or dispossession plans is quickly demonized and becomes a threat and target for that Real-Axis-of-Evil (RAE), and hence their NATO allies and, with less intensity, much of the rest of the “international community” (IC, meaning ruling elites, not […]