contributions

By FRANCES D’EMILIO
ROME — With the Colosseum and a swollen golden moon rising above it as a backdrop, Simon & Garfunkel closed out the European leg of their Old Friends tour with hundreds of thousands of adoring fans stretched before them Saturday night.
Rome Mayor Walter Veltroni told the crowd that 600,000 people had turned out for the free concert, 100,000 more than the crowd for a free concert by Paul McCartney last year in the same setting.
That might make cause some wincing (…)

By Peter Miguel Camejo
There is a mystery to the 2004 presidential election; a silence has fallen on America regarding a glaring contradiction. As we enter the second half of 2004, there is massive popular opposition to the war in Iraq and to the USA PATRIOT Act — possibly a majority of Americans. Yet these same people are about to vote in overwhelming numbers for John Kerry for President.
But John Kerry and his running mate, John Edwards, gave President Bush 18 standing ovations in (…)

ATH: The death toll from Belgium’s worst industrial disaster in recent history has risen to16 and the number is expected to edge still higher as doctors struggle to save victims of the massive gas explosion.
"We fear that the (number of) fatalities will worsen," Renaud Witmeur, the health minister’s chief of staff, said yesterday.
Described by one witness as a "mini-Hiroshima", the chain of explosions on Friday in the industrial zone of Ghislenghien threw massive flames into the air, (…)

http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/news/story/0,4386,264572,00.htmlA MILITANT group has posted an Internet statement in the name of Al-Qaeda claiming responsibility for Friday’s attempt to assassinate Pakistan’s prime minister-designate.
’One of our blessed battalions tried to hunt a head of one of America’s infidels in Pakistan while he was returning from Fateh Jang, but God wanted him to survive,’ the statement said, referring to the town near the Pakistani capital where Friday’s suicide (…)

By Robert Fox and Meera Selva
British soldiers are being put on standby this weekend for possible deployment to Sudan as aid agencies warned that hundreds of thousands of lives could be at risk in the western region of Darfur.
Soldiers of the 12th Mechanised Infantry Brigade, based on Salisbury Plain, are being told that they might have to go to Sudan. Last week the UN Security Council gave the Khartoum government 30 days to take action against Arab militias, known as the Janjaweed, or (…)

By RICHARD BERNSTEIN
The front-page cartoon in Le Monde on Saturday represented the general European preference in the wake of the Democratic National Convention: It showed John Kerry brandishing a Stars-and-Stripes broom and sweeping George W. Bush, along with the detritus of missiles around him, out of office.
Europeans seemed to feel that, with a Thursday night speech that included searing criticism of President Bush’s administration, Mr. Kerry emerged from the convention a (…)

Gaiacomm is up to something! 29.Jul.2004 15:31 Steve Moore link
As a former FBI Agent I can assure you all that this Gaiacomm is real and this Judah Ben-Hur is real and is currently under close watch due to the National Security nature of the technology and the public political opninion that seems to be all over the internet. There is no direct threat to our National Security by Dr. Ben-Hur but there is a chance that the technology could be compromised and used by our enemies aganist us (…)

I think it is time for the real members of the democratic party to start asking themselves....why John Kerry? How did we get to this place where he is our only choice? The very same media that has been lying about the war, told us that he was electable. I think they might have been lying. He is clearly distasteful to anyone paying attention to politics. Hypocrisy and platitude do not make a good candidate. When we have to look back to vietnam to find courage from John Kerry, and (…)

A Question of Character Kerry is a mass-murderer. Bush is psycho. What’s a voter to do? by Justin Raimondo
The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that we’re reliving the last days of the Roman Empire. Of course, that’s not all bad, especially if you like peeled grapes, gladiatorial games, and those cute little tunics on men: but it isn’t all fun and games, either, particularly when you get into the political arena, not to mention the foreign policy realm. All those wars drained (…)

by Greg Palast
[Boston] The millionaires are dancing now. The balloons are falling on John Kerry, John Edwards and their nuclear families.
They’re playing "Johnnie B. Goode" over the loudspeakers. Democrats are hopping up and down like JFK never went to Dallas; like Bill Clinton didn’t blow it for us; like there’s a chance to bring the boys home alive; like America can crawl out of Dick Cheney’s bunker and look at the sun again.
But has Johnnie Kerry been good so far?
He told us (…)