contributions

by Uri Avnery
"This is a well-known phenomenon in many countries: the most discriminated class of the ruling nation provides the most radical enemies of national minorities and foreigners in general. Those who are trampled-upon trample those beneath them. After being robbed of their self-esteem, they can regain some self-respect only by belonging to a "master race". Thus the poor whites in the United States. The same in France."
NORTH AFRICAN immigrants on the periphery of French cities (…)

By GARDINER HARRIS
WASHINGTON - Top federal drug officials decided to reject an application to allow over-the-counter sales of the morning-after pill months before a government scientific review of the application was completed, according to accounts given to Congressional investigators.
The Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress, concluded in a report released Monday that the Food and Drug Administration’s May 2004 rejection of the morning-after (…)

by Simon Tisdall
Jack Straw put his finger on it. Speaking after a disputatious Middle East summit in Bahrain at the weekend, the foreign secretary said: "It would be a disaster if this region thought democracy was an American idea." Many in the region appear to think exactly that - and have ideas of their own.
Washington’s latest disappointment came when a 30-country Middle East "democratic manifesto" statement was torpedoed in Bahrain. Backed by Saudi Arabia, Egypt insisted that (…)

Returning soldiers and their spouses, parents, and children are the backbone of the antiwar movement spreading today in the United States. And they’re speaking louder than ever.
By Nan Levinson
CARLOS ARREDONDO, a wiry man with expansive gestures, circles the Cambridge Common, handing out copies of letters his son Alexander wrote in January 2003 as he shipped out for his first tour of duty in Iraq. "I feel so lucky to be blessed with the chance to defend my country 6 months after I (…)

France now accepts the need for social justice. No petition, peaceful march or letter to an MP could have achieved this
by Gary Younge
’If there is no struggle, there is no progress," said the African American abolitionist Frederick Douglass. "Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation are men who want crops without ploughing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters ... Power concedes (…)

By Michael Massing
In late September, the Government Accountability Office-a nonpartisan arm of Congress-issued a finding that the Bush administration had engaged in "covert propaganda," and thereby broken the law, by paying Armstrong Williams, a conservative commentator, to promote its educational policies. The GAO also faulted the administration for hiring a public relations firm to distribute video news segments without disclosing the government’s part in producing them.[1] The (…)

By Jonathan Lis, Haaretz Correspondent
Israeli Ambassador to Britain Zvi Hefetz was questioned Friday by the police international investigations unit over suspicions he was involved in money laundering of the Bank Hapoalim accounts of businessman Vladimir Gusinsky.
Hefetz recently acted as Gusinsky’s agent in Israel.
Police began an investigation into the affair about six months ago, after suspicions were raised that the bank’s Hayarkon branch in Tel Aviv had allegedly been involved in (…)

Wednesday, November 16, 2005
REASONED HATRED 1
By Peter Fredson
November 14, 2005
A reader of one of my blogs critical of George W. Bush remarked that I was expressing unreasoning hatred of our President. I would like to say that I believe I am expressing reasoned hatred of Bush. I did not always hate the man. Sometimes I despised his smirk, his swagger or his very strange verbalisms, but years ago I did not hate him. I often reflected on the circumstances where his rich and powerful (…)

by The MEDIALENS Editors
To:
peter.horrocks@bbc.co.uk (head of TV news) kevin.bakhurst@bbc.co.uk (head of 10 O’clock news)
I hope things are fine with you. I was pleased to see the Ten leading last night with a report on the use of white phosphorus in the assault on Falluja last year.
Could you possibly provide the source of Paul Wood’s assertion that "this deadly substance [WP] was fired directly at trenches full of insurgents." That was misleading. As you are likely aware, there is (…)

Did you get confused or lost in the hurricane of bits of information during the time of Katrina?
Have you made up your mind about what FEMA did or did not do and trust your information?
Are you trying to write about Katrina/FEMA/Rita and finding the research overwhelming?
For dramatic, far reaching stories, such as the Katrina and Rita hurricanes, the new ePluribus Media Timelines let you go behind the blockbuster headlines to connect the dots between the minor stories that led to (…)