contributions

The sale of bulldozers by Caterpillar Inc. to the Israeli military could violate Palestinians’ human rights, a U.N. human rights investigator has warned the U.S. heavy equipment maker.
Jean Ziegler, an expert on the right to food in the Geneva offices of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, wrote Caterpillar that Israel used the bulldozers to raze homes and destroy crops, preventing the Palestinians from obtaining adequate food supplies and aggravating their "already precarious (…)

June 30, 2004 the day after tomorrow!
I wonder what are in store for the Iraq people on that day or after? They know what they plot! Iran has nuclear weapons that are almost ready, Korea has them already and is waiting for the right moment, Israel is a bit nervous, Saudi Arabia finances the terrorists, Russia will make the first move, The USA will be spread too thin, France has warned us all, Spain is smart and went back to Socialist rule, South America will be were the Americans hide as (…)

Ronald Reagan—the U.S. president from 1981 to 1989—relentlessly drove this planet to the very brink of nuclear world war—while preaching, with a fundamentalist fervor, that a nuclear Armageddon was "winnable."
He rallied vicious legions of fascists, killers, and mindless religious patriots to his cause—and had them trained, funded and promoted in an unprecedented way.
Everything that opposed the domination by U.S. capitalism, anything that was progressive (or even just vaguely (…)

By Trudy Harris
WHILE driving to work last week, Maha Abdo broke one of the golden rules for Muslim women. It’s not a rule really, more of a community code. Still, Abdo and her sisters in southwestern Sydney understand through bitter experience the importance of sticking to it.
On this particular day, however, the mother and respected community leader had forgotten to wind up her window. While Abdo was stopped at an intersection, a woman with three children in her car leaned out her own (…)

An Australian military officer in Baghdad knew last November about reports of Iraqi prisoner abuse, but documents on the mistreatment by US military police took six months to reach the Australian government.
The government has come under fire for its handling of prisoner abuse reports after Prime Minister John Howard misled parliament in May when he said no Australian knew of the reports before graphic photographs were published.
Australia is a staunch ally of the United States and sent (…)

By JAMES RISEN
A report of a clandestine meeting in Prague between Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence officer first surfaced shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks. And even though serious doubt was cast on the report, it was repeatedly cited by some Bush administration officials and others as evidence of a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq.
But on Wednesday, the Sept. 11 commission said its investigation had found that the meeting never took place.
In its report on the (…)

by Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON ­ In a direct challenge to recent assertions by both President George W Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, the special bipartisan commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks against New York and the Pentagon has found "no credible evidence" of any operational link between Iraq and al-Qaeda.
While the commission, which has had access to highly classified U.S. intelligence, said that al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden had sought contacts with (…)

A REPORT suggesting there was no link between Iraq and al-Qaeda attacks on the United States torpedoed Prime Minister John Howard’s justification for the invasion of Iraq, Labor said today.
In a report released overnight, the commission in the United States investigating the September 11 attacks found there was no credible evidence of a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda in attacks against the United States.
Labor foreign affairs spokesman Kevin Rudd today said the findings appeared to (…)

The world’s 225 richest people now have a combined wealth of $1 trillion. That’s equal to the combined annual income of the world’s 2.5 billion poorests people.
Three billion people live on less than $2 per day while 1.3 billion get by on less than $1 per day. Seventy percent of those living on less than $1 per day are women.
Three decades ago, the people in well-to-do countries were 30 times better off than those in countries where the poorest 20 percent of the world’s (…)

Newsweek
A U.S.-sponsored poll shows Iraqis have lost confidence in the occupying authorities—and that the vast majority of Iraqis want Coalition troops out of the country ‘immediately’
By Michael Hirsh
The first survey of Iraqis sponsored by the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority after the Abu Ghraib prison scandal shows that most say they would feel safer if Coalition forces left immediately, without even waiting for elections scheduled for next year. An overwhelming (…)