contributions

By Fred Kapner
To seasoned observers of Italy’s colourful financial imbroglios, this summer’s Banca Antonveneta affair evokes memories of many of the country’s most lurid scandals.
As details emerge of how Antonio Fazio, governor of the Bank of Italy, sought to favour Banca Popolare Italiana, a small Italian bank, over Dutch lender ABN Amro in the takeover battle for Antonveneta, one past scandal comes readily to mind: the Banco Ambrosiano affair. This culminated with the body of Roberto (…)

by Paul Benedek
Viva la Cubana y Venezuela revoluciones! Our first full day in Venezuela, and the anniversary of the start of the Cuban revolution (July 26 attack on Moncada Barracks, 1953) — a potent combination, reflected in an amazingly revolutionary experience.
it was ¨supposed¨ to be our only ¨sightseeing¨ day before the brigade begins - it WAS that, but in a revolution, everything takes on the flavor of change and possibility. As one placard read at a pro-revolution demonstration (…)

Can you believe Bush? He hasn’t attended a single funeral of the 1838 soldiers reported as killed in action, 20 dead in two days last week, 9 more today- they’re dead because he lied, and now he’s on vacation! And if that’s not bad enough, now he wants to arrest Cindy Sheehan on the grounds that she’s a threat.
Whatever happened to the First Amendment- the FREEDOM to Peaceably Assemble? According to Bush- that is no longer our right. After 9/11 they had to take away that freedom to (…)

Through the veneer that is Washington, with its grand monuments to great men, its hallowed halls of history, its monolithic structures of governance, its corridors of power, its seats of wealth and effervescent illumination as the reincarnation of ancient Rome, can we, if we dare look upon the vision emanating from its shallow pools, see the manifestation of what America, and by consequence Americans, has become. To see inside the capital of modern day Democracy, Freedom, Liberty, Manifest (…)

"That lying bastard, George Bush, is taking a five-week vacation in time of war," Cindy Sheehan told 200 cheering members of Veterans For Peace at their annual convention in Dallas last Friday evening. She then announced she would go to Bush’s vacation home in nearby Crawford, Texas and camp out until he "tells me why my son died in Iraq. I’ve got the whole month of August off, and so does he."
Sheehan left the VFP meeting on Saturday morning and is now in Crawford with a couple dozen (…)

CLEVELAND — On the stage sat a helmet, a pair of worn soldier’s boots and a folded American flag. In the audience were thousands who turned out Monday night to honor 16 fallen Marines and their hard-hit Ohio battalion.
"Our own band of brothers," Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones said during an hour-long memorial service of prayers, bagpipes intoning "Amazing Grace" and montages of the troops from the 3rd Battalion, 25th Marines who died in the past two weeks in Iraq.
"Close your eyes (…)

CoastalPost Article — July 2005
My July 2005 Coastal Post article covers the recent June 2005 casualties in Iraq, the exchange between Rumsfeld and Kennedy of June 23rd, and evidence pointing to strange events surrounding the Wellstone plane crash of Oct 2003. Researching this article was a heartbreak and a half. To arrive at this simple listing of sixty-one names, I visited a most excellent website compiled by CNN (of all the media!) This site listed not only American dead, (…)

"I write this article for the same reason I wrote my book: to tell the American people, and especially American Jews, that Jews from Islamic lands did not emigrate willingly to Israel; that, to force them to leave, Jews killed Jews; and that, to buy time to confiscate ever more Arab lands, Jews on numerous occasions rejected genuine peace initiatives from their Arab neighbors. I write about what the first prime minister of Israel called "cruel Zionism." I write about it because I was part of (…)

Given Rove, Bush actions, what don’t we know?
Copyright © 2005 Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc.
Is it conceivable that when George W. Bush said in 2003, after the identity of CIA employee Valerie Plame was leaked to the press from the White House, that he didn’t already know what is now known, that his political assassin Karl Rove was the "official" who leaked this information?
Rove leaking the identity of Plame was payback for a New York Times article revealing the administration’s (…)

It’s truly amazing what the human spirit can accomplish. From Gandhi’s Salt March to Martin Luther King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, a single person can fight a corrupt establishment and win — when truth and justice is on his or her side.
Now, in 2005, along comes Cindy Sheehan, the California woman whose altar-boy son Casey was killed in Iraq last year. As you may have heard, Sheehan and some supporters have been camping out outside the Bush ranch in Crawford, Tex., refusing to leave (…)