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Australia is a corporate-, US- and Zionist-perverted country in which neocon, pro-war, pro-US, pro-Zionist, corporatist Australian Mainstream media (including the taxpayer-funded ABC, the Australian equivalent of the taxpayer-funded UK BBC) remorselessly censor news and reader comments (e.g. see “Censorship by The Age”: , “ABC Censorship”: and “Mainstream Media Lying”: ).
Below is an example of censorship by The Age newspaper. Melbourne, of non-anonymous, credentialled reader (…)

Support Separation Between Religion and State: A Petition and Open Letter to Human Rights Watch
Friday 10 February 2012
In an Open Letter to Kenneth Roth, we express our concern that the director of Human Rights Watch has used his introductory essay in the 2012 Human Rights Watch World Report to urge support for newly elected governments of the Islamic right in the Middle East and North Africa. Our letter points out that he does not need to urge engagement where there is no threat of a (…)

Bio
Born on June 15,1951 into a working class family in the south-western city of Ahvaz in the Khuzestan province of Iran, Hamid Dabashi received his early education in his hometown and his college education in Tehran, before he moved to the United States, where he received a dual Ph.D. in Sociology of Culture and Islamic Studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on Max Weber’s theory (…)

The world is celebrating the 200th anniversary of the birth of arguably the greatest Victorian era English novelist and genocidal racist Charles Dickens (born 7 February 1812, died 9 June 1870).
Charles Dickens’ works include “Sketches by Boz”, “The Old Curiosity Shop”, “Oliver Twist”, “Nicholas Nickleby”, “Barnaby Rudge”, “A Christmas Carol”, “Martin Chuzzlewit”, “A Tale of Two Cities”, “David Copperfield”, “Great Expectations”, “Bleak House”, “Little Dorrit”, “Hard Times”, “Our Mutual (…)

Health workers in Kilkis, Greece, have occupied their local hospital and have issued a statement saying it is now fully under workers control.
The general hospital of Kilkis in Greece is now under workers control. The workers at the hospital have declared that the long-lasting problems of the National Health System (ESY) cannot be resolved.
The workers have responded to the regime’s acceleration of unpopular austerity measures by occupying the hospital and outing it under direct and (…)

Zionist-beholden US, Apartheid Israel, NATO US Alliance countries and US lackey Australia are becoming increasingly shrill in their threats of war against remote and peaceful Iran as well as against Iran–linked Syria which is a haven for religious tolerance and for Muslim and Christian refugees. In view of the flood of anti-Iranian and pro-war propaganda from the West it is timely to take a reality check and consider some facts on Iran as compared to the US, Apartheid Israel, NATO and (…)

For progressives and populists around the country who take an interest in Congressional races there are always a few good challengers we might hope to send to Washington. Incumbents, we assume, can take care of themselves.
But in Northern Ohio, redistricting has thrown two incumbents into one district. It’s a heavily Democratic district created purposely to guarantee a number of other districts to Republicans. The incumbents are both Democrats, both white, both 65, and many imagine that (…)

OVER A million Iraqis are dead from America’s war.
That sentence is a cognitive litmus test. Some people’s immediate reaction is, "That can’t be right," because the United States couldn’t do that. Or because crimes on that scale don’t still happen. Or because they do happen, but only in horrible places that the United States hasn’t rescued.
One million is a "Grandpa, what did you do to stop it?" number. It’s a number that undeniably puts the American state among history’s villains. Those (…)

live from Porto Alegre (Brazil)
From January 24-29, the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre was again the staging ground for the World Social Forum (WSF), an annual international gathering of anti-globalisation and anti-capitalist activists. Among the various movements present, one of the most visible was Brazil’s Movement of Landless Rural Workers (MST), possibly the largest social movement in Latin America.
During the WSF, ALBA TV, a Venezuelan initiative to bring together community TV (…)

Australia: By far the most important nuclear news for this week is the Bill before the senate tomorrow February 8, - the National Radioactive Waste Management Bill. This will impose a nuclear waste dump on Aboriginal land in the NT. It’s likely to be rubber-stamped by the Senate, as the Australian media dutifully shuts up about this – as usual. Only the Greens will fight this one.
Grattan Institute, largely funded by BHP, comes out with a pro nuclear report, and subtly downgrades (…)