contributions

It don’t mean a thing if their phones don’t ring
First we give the action link, http://www.millionphonemarch.com/impeach.htm
Why an action link first? It’s because our words are useless unless they mobilize people to take some immediate action in direct response. Unless the central goal of all progressive punditry is to engage more people to DO something themselves, then what is the point . . . really? And if the modestly patient reader will bear with us for just a couple of paragraphs, (…)

by Katha Pollitt
September 20’s prime target for press critics, social scientists and feminists was the New York Times front-page story "Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood," by Louise Story (Yale ’03). Through interviews and a questionnaire e-mailed to freshmen and senior women residents of two Yale colleges (dorms), Story claims to have found that 60 percent of these brainy and energetic young women plan to park their expensive diplomas in the bassinet and become (…)

By Harold Pinter who yesterday won the Nobel Prize for Literature
The great poet Wilfred Owen articulated the tragedy, the horror - and indeed the pity - of war in a way no other poet has. Yet we have learnt nothing. Nearly 100 years after his death the world has become more savage, more brutal, more pitiless.
But the "free world" we are told, as embodied in the United States and Great Britain, is different to the rest of the world since our actions are dictated and sanctioned by a moral (…)

By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles
Two leading human rights organisations have accused the United States of in effect throwing away the lives of more than 2,000 juvenile offenders sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole - a punishment out of step with international law but one increasingly popular with tough-on-crime US legislators.
According to a report being published today by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, the United States is the only country to (…)

By André Cicolella
July 22, 1719, the ship Grand-Saint-Antoine left Marseille for the calls of the Levant (as they were described at the time). In Syria, the ship took on a Turkish passenger who died two days later, a victim of the plague that afflicted the region at that time. Eight sailors and the surgeon on board had died when the ship reached Livorno. Nonetheless, the Italian authorities allowed it to return to Marseille, where it arrived May 25, 1720.
Capitan Jean-Baptiste (…)

by Daniel Patrick Welch
Synopsis:
Once again, an old song acts as muse for Daniel Patrick Welch. Repopularized by a current Volkswagen ad, the Donovan lyric tweaks Welch’s sense of the futility of resistance in the quagmire that is today’s American political landscape. From a personal perspective, the writer describes watching as all his European friends flee one by one, a sort of metaphor for the international rejection of the would-be Pax Americana.
To understand fully the nature of (…)

by Abigail A. Fuller and Neil Wollman
Give us three minutes and we can find an op-ed piece in a U.S. newspaper calling for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq, or arguing that they should stay. The arguments are varied and numerous: If the U.S. leaves, anarchy will ensue. Occupation forces are a target for foreign terrorists. Bush should set a timetable for withdrawal. Setting a timetable would embolden those using violence in Iraq. And so on. What is missing from this picture? Any (…)

· G8 protesters claim they were gassed and beaten · New laws could render convictions meaningless
in Rome
Seventy-five people, including some of Italy’s most senior police officers, go on trial in the next two days, accused of taking part in an orgy of brutality against protesters during and after the demonstrations at the 2001 G8 summit in Genoa.
Court papers seen by the Guardian show that one police witness gave a written statement describing his colleagues "beating young people (…)

By Peter Popham in Rome
Italy is about relive two of its most shocking episodes of alleged police brutality as the trial of officers accused of illegal behaviour over attacks on anti- globalisation protesters proceed in Genoa.
The attacks occurred as the G8 summit of July 2001 in the port city was winding down after days of peaceful mass demonstrations by 200,000 people from all over the world, and violently anarchic protests by a small group known as the Black Block.
Today the trial (…)

By Sari Gelzer
What can all Americans do about their desire to see change in America? Practice civil disobedience.
This flavor of action is not just for radicals. Civil disobedience is the role of citizens within the political system and has a much broader legacy than one was taught to think. Civil disobedience, practiced by various movements of people, has been responsible for forcing politicians to comply with the demands of its citizens. Civil disobedience is how "slavery was (…)