contributions

by Ted Glick
Peter Camejo was the first one I heard put it out, back in April: "Kerry will do what Bush wants to do better." In other words, Kerry and the Democrats are the greater evil, not the Republicans which, followed to its logical conclusion, means that Camejo hopes that Bush/Cheney will win re-election.
Since that time I’ve heard and seen others put forward this same point of view. There’s not a lot of them on the Left but they’re out there. The Counterpunch website seems to be a (…)

Support Pledged by Civil Rights Presidents from NAACP and National Council of La Raza
(Washington, DC) - Thousands of hotel and restaurant workers in three major American cities have voted by overwhelming margins to authorize a strike. Contracts in San Francisco and Los Angeles expired in April and September, and the Washington DC contract expires today. Despite extensive negotiations, hotel industry representatives have refused to drop their demands that workers accept reduced health (…)

Tony Woodley, general secretary of the TGWU union
A COUPLE of years ago I’d have said it would be difficult or unlikely that we could make the kind of gains we are beginning to see.
A year ago you saw people like me being vilified for raising policies like a pension protection scheme to defend workers from losing their pensions when companies go bust.
Twelve months on and it is now Labour Party policy. We have seen some really important changes and victories.
The big task now is not (…)

by Kim Zetter Voting activist Bev Harris and a computer scientist say they found more vulnerabilities in an electronic voting system made by Diebold Election Systems, weaknesses that could allow someone to alter votes in the election this November. Diebold said Harris’ claims are without merit and that if anyone did manage to change votes, a series of checks and balances that election officials perform at the end of an election would detect the changes. Harris demonstrated the (…)

As It turns out Dennis Kucinich has been right every step of the way on this war, perhaps our leaders should think to listen to him now. Dennis Kucinich seems to be the only one speaking the truth with a clear vision of how to get the world out of the mess Bush has created. This was written after 500 deaths.
"The war in Iraq is over and the occupation has turned into a quagmire. The United States troops have become the targets of criminals and terrorists who are flowing into Iraq for the (…)

by Mark Hookham
IRAQ hostage Kenneth Bigley last night begged Tony Blair to help save his life, saying: "You are the only person now on God’s earth that I can speak to."
In a dramatic video released by his kidnappers, the 62-year-old from Liverpool pleaded with the Prime Minister to "show compassion" for his plight..
Four hours later, Mr Bigley’s family appealed to the extremists to show mercy and spare his life. His son, Craig, 33, said: "You have proved to the world that you are (…)

by Philip Pullella
Italy’s government tried to reassure an anguished nation Thursday that two women hostages in Iraq were most likely still alive, saying an Islamist group’s claim to have killed them was "unreliable."
The government moved swiftly after a group calling itself the Jihad Organization said in a statement it had killed the women because Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi had not bowed to demands to withdraw Italian troops from Iraq.
The speaker of the lower house of (…)

A car bomb has exploded near two US military vehicles in Baghdad’s upmarket Mansur area hours after another attack targeted Iraqi police recruits.
A witness said the attack late on Wednesday afternoon apparently targeted two US Humvees patrolling the area. Police said there were several casualties.
The blast was Baghdad’s second car bomb attack in a single day.
Earlier a car-bomb in west Baghdad’s busy Rabia Street killed at least 15 and wounded 50. Husayn al-Shammari, an Iraqi (…)

By Matthew Davis
More than 1,000 US soldiers have been killed since the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Other coalition allies are mourning dozens of their own fighting men and women.
Thousands of Iraqi civilians have also died as a result of conflict and its bloody aftermath - but officially, no one has any idea how many.
Human rights groups say the occupying powers have failed in a duty to catalogue the deaths, giving the impression that ordinary Iraqis’ lives are worth less than (…)

Mentally scarred by the horrors they’ve endured in Iraq, many returning U.S. soldiers say the military isn’t giving them the help they deserve.
By Lynn Harris
Sept. 22, 2004 | Mike Lemke, a 45-year-old Army National Guard police sergeant from Colorado Springs, Colo., volunteered for active duty after seeing the twin towers fall on TV. "I wanted to, you know, kick some tail," he says. He was sent home from Iraq in August 2003 because of orthopedic and cardiovascular problems — and with (…)