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Bush to criminalize protesters under Patriot Act as "disruptors" by Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse Thu Jan 12, 2006 at 03:27:26 PM NZDT
Bush wants to create the new criminal of "disruptor" who can be jailed for the crime of "disruptive behavior." A "little-noticed provision" in the latest version of the Patriot Act will empower Secret Service to charge protesters with a new crime of "disrupting major events including political conventions and the Olympics." Secret Service would also be (…)

By Amira Hass
For a month now, since the second week of December 2005, the Israel Defense Forces has severed the northern part of the West Bank from other sections, and prohibited residents from traveling toward Ramallah and points southward.
The ban applies to some 800,000 people, residents of the Tul Karm, Nablus and Jenin provinces. Until January 2, the ban applied just to residents of Jenin and Tul Karm. Since then it has been extended to Nablus area residents.
The IDF did not (…)

By Laura K. Donohue
CONGRESS WILL soon hold hearings on the National Security Agency’s domestic spying program, secretly authorized by President Bush in 2002. But that program is just the tip of the iceberg.
Since 9/11, the expansion of efforts to gather and analyze information on U.S. citizens is nothing short of staggering. The government collects vast troves of data, including consumer credit histories and medical and travel records. Databases track Americans’ networks of friends, (…)

by Haider Rizvi
NEW YORK, Jan 11 (OneWorld) - Forget the ongoing privacy debate over U.S. government spying on telephone conversations—soon you may not have the right to tell cops to wait until you open your door.
In a case involving a private citizen and police authorities of the Midwestern state of Michigan, a team of civil rights lawyers appeared before the Supreme Court this week to challenge the police practice of storming into homes to look for whatever they want as evidence of a (…)

The career of the latest Supreme Court nominee has been marked by his hatred of liberalism
by Sidney Blumenthal
"If the president deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no law that can stop him?" "No treaty," replied John Yoo, the former justice department official who wrote the crucial memos justifying President Bush’s policies on torture, detainees and domestic surveillance without warrants.
Yoo publicly debated (…)

German Chancellor Angela Merkel will not be heading to Washington empty handed on her inaugural visit to the White House this week. Keen to improve ties with the United States, she is reportedly going to offer to expand Berlin’s commitments to Iraq.
George W. Bush has got to be pleased. Finally rid of that irksome Gerhard Schröder — whose staunch opposition to the war in Iraq strained trans-Atlantic ties — the United States president can look forward to a visit from a much more amicable (…)

At least seven House Democrats learned about the NSA’s secret spying program four years ago. So why didn’t anyone blow the whistle?
By G. Pascal Zachary
President Bush deserves plenty of blame for secretly authorizing domestic spying by the National Security Agency. But some of the president’s fiercest critics in Congress gave him the political cover to do so. The question why they did so says much about the nation’s brittle democracy and how Democrats have covertly joined with (…)

By Dave Lindorff
There is an bill in Congress to investigate Bush for impeachable crimes. Did you know that? If not, maybe you should be asking your local media outlets why you don’t know about it.
Rome—There are now eight members of Congress who have put their names to a bill calling for a special committee of the House to investigate impeachable crimes by the Bush administration. To date, all of them are Democrats.
So far, you’d be hard-pressed to know about any of this—including the (…)

by WILLIAM P. JONES
The recent transit workers’ strike in New York City was a vivid reminder that unions maintain considerable leverage despite their shrinking numbers. Buried beneath the stories about tense negotiations, holiday shopping disruptions and commuters hoofing it over the Brooklyn Bridge was one of labor’s past glories—the creation of Martin Luther King Day. When Transport Workers’ Union president Roger Toussaint demanded recognition of the holiday, he cited the Metropolitan (…)

By Manuel Roig-Franzia
NEW ORLEANS, Jan. 11 — Angry homeowners screamed and City Council members seethed Wednesday as this city’s recovery commission recommended imposing a four-month building moratorium on most of New Orleans and creating a powerful new authority that could use eminent domain to seize homes in neighborhoods that will not be rebuilt.
Hundreds of residents packed into a hotel ballroom interrupted the presentation of the long-awaited proposal with shouts and taunts, booed (…)