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By ROBERT C. KOEHLER Tribune Media Services
As they slowly hack democracy to death, we’re as alone - we citizens - as we’ve ever been, protected only by the dust-covered clichés of the nation’s founding: “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”
It’s time to blow off the dust and start paying the price.
The media are not on our side. The politicians are not on our side. It’s just us, connecting the dots, fitting the fragments together, crunching the numbers, wanting to know why (…)

Italy’s longest post-war government risks collapse. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is in trouble after two small parties withdrew their support from the governing center-right coalition.
The centrist UDC party, which has four ministers in government, was the first to decide to withdraw its support from the center-right government. Then, the new Italian Socialist party, which has only two minor government posts, followed its example.
The parties had called on Prime Minister (…)

I’ve been asked to speak to you for 5 minutes or so. Please forgive me, but I’m going to take a little more than 8 minutes. The additional time that I’m going to steal from you is dedicated to my son, Casey, whose entire future was stolen from him.
My son was killed in Iraq on this day one year ago, the same day of April on which Martin Luther King Jr. was killed. From a jail in Birmingham, on April 16 1963 Dr. King wrote these words: "We will have to repent in this generation not merely (…)

In an effort to increase its ranks for coming wars, the U.S. military is recruiting - and paying - children as young as 14 years old for future combat duty.
By Tim Schmitt
Colin Hadley spends most of his days after school skateboarding or playing Halo II on his new X-Box with friends. He sleeps until noon or later on weekends and rarely, if ever, does any schoolwork outside the classroom, where he pulls down solid C’s and a few D’s - just enough to get by. He’s the typical 15-year-old (…)

ORIGINAL:
Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Thursday, 14 April 2005. Translated and/or compiled by Muhammad Abu Nasr, member, editorial board, the Free Arab Voice. http://www.freearabvoice.org
Thursday, 14 April 2005.
Al-Anbar Province.
Al-Q’aim.
In a dispatch posted at 9:55am Thursday morning Mecca time, Mafkarat al-Islam reported that after failing on Wednesday night to storm the besieged city of al-Qa’im from four directions, US forces used loudspeakers on Thursday morning (…)

Although studiously ignored by the mainstream news media, last month came reports that the U.S. used napalm and chemical weapons in its assault upon the city of Fallujah
http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/744/1/80/%20
The assault of November 2004 resulted in the near-total destruction of the city, as well as the deaths of thousands of non-insurgent Iraqi civilians. If the reports about napalm and chemical weapons are true, not only would the U.S. be in violation of (…)

Kucinich: New Report From Congressional Research Service Shows US Has Long-Term Plans To Stay In Iraq Report Commissioned By Kucinich Shows US Is Spending Hundreds of Millions of Dollars On "Long-Term" Bases In Iraq
WASHINGTON — April 14 — A new Congressional Research Service (CRS) report commissioned by Congressman Dennis J. Kucinich (D-OH), and released today, shows that the United States is investing hundreds of millions of dollars in the construction of "long-term" bases in Iraq.
The (…)

If Tokyo manages to obtain a permanent seat, it will be a reliable pro-war vote in the foreseeable future, so all leftists, not just patriots in Asia, ought to join the campaign to block Tokyo from the Security Council. Read the Washington Coalition for Comfort Women Issues’ message "Global Petition to Reject Japanese Bid to Obtain a Permanent Seat on the U.N. Security Council," and sign any of the four petitions recommended by the coalition.
FULL TEXT:
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In 13 consecutive opinion polls in the past month, French voters have said that they are planning to reject the EU constitution in a referendum on 29 May. A French Non would in effect wreck the treaty and leave the enlarged EU to struggle on with its existing system of decision-making. This would also deal a near-fatal blow to the continent’s bold unification ambitions.
A French rejection would all but destroy the charter - which European leaders agreed on five months ago after years of (…)

A U.S. company recently sent vials of a 1957 pandemic flu strain to laboratories across the world by accident is only the latest outrage from the billion-dollar boondoggle called the federal biological weapons program.
As you might recall, the Bush administration started its “biodefense” spending spree following the September 2001 deadly anthrax attacks, and one of its first projects was to genetically engineer a super-resistant, even more deadly version of the anthrax virus. (…)