contributions

Caracas, Venezuela - U.S. Reverend Jesse Jackson, Congressman Dennis Kucinich, Historian and writer Howard Zinn, activist Naomi Klein, and others sent a letter to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez offering their support ahead of the upcoming recall referendum.
Dear President Chavez,
We are writing to express our solidarity during this important moment in Venezuela’s history. It is our hope and expectation that, on August 15, you will once again win an electoral mandate from the Venezuelan (…)

As leaders of the legal profession in our respective countries, we wish to state our concerns about the continuing detention of non-US "enemy combatants" in Guantánamo Bay (Leaders, August 12). We welcome the supreme court’s ruling on June 28 allowing the detainees to challenge the validity of their detention in US courts. We call on the US to abandon the "review panels" now being held in Guantánamo Bay.
In view of the considerable time that these detainees have been held, without access (…)

The leading man as torturer and good guy? Something bad has happened in film, writes Alex Cox.
Recently I had to take a long plane journey and, though I try to avoid these things, my eye was drawn to the American films scrolling by on the seat-back televisions that surrounded me. One of the films caught my attention - first by its frenetic, jerky style, which seemed to resemble that of experimental filmmakers like Bruce Conner; and second, because it was shot in Mexico, a place where I (…)

By Alan Ramsey
Alfred Shout was a New Zealand carpenter we claim as "Australia’s most decorated soldier to serve at Gallipoli". We do this because, when he died, aged 34, on August 11, 1915, Shout was an officer with the Australian 1st Battalion in the hills above Anzac Cove, having emigrated to Sydney in 1907. Shout was a bomb thrower, literally. He would light the fuses and throw his bombs at the Turks, or he would dash about the Australian trenches picking up fizzing Turkish bombs and (…)

by Abid Ullah Jan
"Those who want us to believe that the American invasions and occupations abroad and curtailing civil liberties at home are merely the work of a frustrated Neo-con fringe and a few bigots like Pipes are weakening the world’s ability to recognize the scope of the threat and to defend itself from a new totalitarian onslaught."
Our continued silence over the daily death of hundreds of Iraqis at the hands of occupation forces in Iraq and tens of Palestinians in occupied (…)

By BEN ENGLISH
SEVEN years after Princess Diana’s death, a French court has decided that doctors accused of covering up a plot to murder her have a case to answer.
A French judge will soon begin a fresh investigation into Diana’s mysterious death in a Paris road accident, Britain’s Daily Express revealed yesterday.
The inquest will focus on disputed blood samples central to the earlier French conclusion that Diana’s car fatally crashed because her chauffeur Henri Paul was high on (…)

By Jerry Mazza
According to the July 27 Miami Herald, "President [sic] Bush had a minor mountain biking accident on his Crawford ranch but dusted himself off, waved the medics away and kept rolling." Helluva guy.
With only a small cut on his knee and dirt on his back, he admitted he was a bit shaken up. Yeah, me too. Especially when I heard this was the head of the free world’s new hobby, a way "to get his heart rate up and spend time outdoors without aggravating achy knees" (probably (…)

Uh oh! It’ll soon be that time of year again! The season when New £abour descends on an unsuspecting seaside resort, and tries to pass itself off as a party of social justice and equality. So, which corporations will be pulling the strings and distorting the agenda of debate at the Labour Party Conference this year?
Once again, Tony Blair’s favourite neo-liberal think tank, the Social Market Foundation (nice double-speak name huh?), is sponsoring a series of fringe discussions at the (…)

PRESIDENT BUSH has been repeating his mantra about a sound economy for months now, despite numbers that reveal a more alarming truth. Last week’s employment report showed that only 32,000 jobs were created in July, stunningly short of forecasts that predicted more than 200,000 new jobs.
Other indicators also undercut the White House’s rosy spin. Overall economic growth slumped to a 0.3 annual rate in the second quarter, down from 4.5 percent in this year’s first quarter. Consumer spending (…)

A ceasefire has been holding in the Iraqi city of Najaf to allow for peace talks between Muqtada al-Sadr and US troops after more than a week of clashes, a spokesman for the Shia leader said.
The open-ended ceasefire was to allow time for negotiations to end the showdown between al-Sadr’s al-Mahdi army and a joint Iraqi-US force, Shaikh Ahmad al-Shaibani said.
Talks are taking place between the occupation forces, Iraqi security troops, the government’s pointman on security, Muwafaq (…)