courtesy Jamiol’s World
Top Ten Ways the US and Iran could avoid a Catastrophic War
On Tuesday, Iran’s Foreign Minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, presented his government’s proposals for ending the international stand-off over Iran’s nuclear enrichment program. Iran maintains that the program is for the production of fuel for the country’s nuclear reactors. The US, Western Europe, Israel and the Gulf Cooperation Council oil monarchies are convinced that Iran is […]
Celebrating Dirty Gas & Oil is Our Planet’s Funeral (Klare)
Michael T. Klare writes at Tomdispatch.com For years, energy analysts had been anticipating an imminent decline in global oil supplies. Suddenly, they’re singing a new song: Fossil fuels growing scarce? Don’t even think about it! The news couldn’t be better: fossil fuels will become ever more abundant. And all that talk about climate change? Don’t […]
Now the NSA has your Little Black Book
Before the internet, we used to keep the names and telephone numbers of our friends and acquaintances in a little address book. Young people who dated a lot had a ‘little black book’ with telephone numbers of past and potential dinner partners. Nowadays the equivalent is an iPhone address list, often kept in the cloud, […]
Rep. Van Hollen on House Rule Change on Shutdown Vote: “Democracy has been Suspended!”
Representative Chris Van Hollen (D-Md) went viral in a YouTube video he released of his parliamentary inquiries on a change in House rules that forbade individual members to initiate a motion to open the Federal government. Only the Speaker of the House can now do so, in a highly undemocratic step. Here is the Van […]
Arms Industries have Washington lift Restrictions on Weapons Exports (Currier)
Cora Currier writes for ProPublica The United States is loosening controls over military exports, in a shift that former U.S. officials and human rights advocates say could increase the flow of American-made military parts to the world’s conflicts and make it harder to enforce arms sanctions. Come tomorrow, thousands of parts of military aircraft, such […]
Israelis again impose Collective punishment on Palestinians of Gaza
On finding a tunnel from the Gaza Strip into Israel, the Israeli government has again blockaded the strip from receiving shipments of basic building materials.. Half of Gaza’s 1.7 million people are children, and half the population receives food assistance. Israel invaded Gaza in 1967 and tried to plant Israeli squatters there. In 2006 Hamas, […]
Club Dead: EU immigration laws turning Mediterranean into Graveyard- Malta PM
Malta’s prime minister Joseph Muscat said Saturday that the European Union’s inaction on immigration reform is turning the Mediterranean into a graveyard. UPI quotes him as saying: “I don’t know how many more people need to die at sea before something gets done … rules need to change, whether they are tighter or looser is […]
Snowden: Federal Spying makes us Less Secure
Supporters of massive National Security Agency domestic and international electronic surveillance of millions of innocent civilians justify it on the grounds that it makes us safer. It does not. Edward Snowden makes the opposite point, which is that intense government surveillance harms our security. He revealed the secret warrantless monitoring of Americans (which goes beyond […]