contributions

by Mark Oliver
The home secretary, Charles Clarke, and EU interior ministers were today grappling with how to stop the flood of narcotics from Afghanistan, increasingly a responsibility of the UK.
The UK is under pressure from EU countries to take a lead role in the fight against heroin production in Afghanistan, with Britain taking over the Nato mission in the country next May.
As much as 90% of the heroin from Afghanistan ends up in Europe and there is concern about the impotency of (…)

By John Nichols
Americans who are familiar only with the almost always empty words - and often empty heads - of this country’s political leaders can be a little shocked by George Galloway’s pronouncements.
The British parliamentarian, who came of age in the brawling political landscape of his native Scotland, where a quick wit and a savage debating style are prerequisites for electoral success, does not mince words in the manner that most American pols do.
Consider Galloway’s statement (…)

By Derrick Z. Jackson
PRESIDENT BUSH said these things about Hurricane Katrina in his speech to the nation Thursday:
’’Millions of lives were changed in a day by a cruel and wasteful storm."
’’Federal funds will cover the great majority of the costs of repairing public infrastructure in the disaster zone."
’’As all of us saw on television, there is also some deep, persistent poverty in this region as well. And that poverty has roots in a history of racial discrimination, which cut (…)

By Harold Meyerson
UNITE-HERE has left the AFL-CIO, and what I want to know is whether the name of the union is being changed to UNITE-THERE. On Tuesday, the executive board of the 450,000-member union — the product of a merger last year between UNITE (formerly the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees) and HERE (the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union) — voted at a meeting in St. Paul, Minnesota, to leave the federation. UNITE-HERE joins the (…)

By Steve Connor, Science Editor
A record loss of sea ice in the Arctic this summer has convinced scientists that the northern hemisphere may have crossed a critical threshold beyond which the climate may never recover. Scientists fear that the Arctic has now entered an irreversible phase of warming which will accelerate the loss of the polar sea ice that has helped to keep the climate stable for thousands of years.
They believe global warming is melting Arctic ice so rapidly that the (…)

by DAVE ZIRIN
Sports stars are generally known more for their narcissism than their compassion, but in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, athletes have expressed a tremendous amount of altruism and anguish over the amount of human suffering the storm has caused. That’s not surprising, when you consider that more than 100 professional athletes come from the Gulf Coast, an area whose deep poverty, institutionalized racism and year-round sunshine combine to offer the requisite conditions for (…)

The donation of 300,000 barrels of fuel to U.S southern states probably is a political stunt by Pres.
Chavez Frias but who could blame him, with American christian right leader Pat Robinson urging the U.S govt to ’take him out’ who wouldn’t be worried? Pres.
Chavez is sending a message to Americans poor & working class that he isn’t their enemy,after all he isn’t sending American manufacturing jobs to China or Mexico neither is he destroying the livelihoods of American farmers or (…)

Well, the long-awaited “Grapple in the Big Apple,” as the Guardian dubbed it, has taken place. Here is the link Hitchens, that "drink-soaked, former Trotskyist popinjay," as MP George Galloway of the Respect Coalition party in Great Britain so memorably put it, apparently was on another planet. The event took place on September 14 in the Mason Hall at the Baruch College performing arts center in the Gramercy Park area of Manhattan. Baruch College is one of ten senior colleges of the (…)

WASHINGTON - With Hurricane Katrina already costing the federal government tens of billions of dollars, more than eight in 10 Americans are very or somewhat concerned that the $5 billion being spent each month on the war in Iraq is draining away money that could be used in the United States, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.
The poll also showed that nearly half of Americans say the war is distracting President Bush from addressing problems at home, though an equal (…)

By Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Speech delivered at the Sierra Summit 2005 San Francisco, California
I want to tell you how proud I am to accept the William O. Douglas Award.
Two of my most poignant memories as a child involved Justice Douglas. One of them was when I was 11 years old I did a 20 mile hike with my little brother David and with Justice Douglas and my father, which was a bird watching hike on the C & O Canal which he played a critical role in protecting. We started at (…)