contributions

With more than enough manpower to subdue this individual, police choose instead to use their torture toys.
Dziekanski stands with his back to the counter and the officers fan around him. Crack - the sound of the 50,000 volts of electricity zapping from an officer’s gun can be heard. Dziekanski winces and starts screaming, his hand waving a stapler madly in the air. He grabs at his chest and lunges through a doorway, howling. Crack - a second shot, electricity sizzles, and Dziekanski (…)

By Bruno Waterfield in Brussels
Referendums on the new European Union Treaty were "dangerous" and would be lost in France, Britain and other countries, Nicolas Sarkozy has admitted. - EU subsidies ’shifting away from real farmers’ - Your view: Are referendums dangerous? - Paris faces strike gridlock
The French president’s confession that governments could not win popular votes on a "simplified treaty" - drawn up to replace the EU constitution rejected by his countrymen two years ago - (…)

Just how oppressive must a government become before we can justifiably say that it has turned a country into a police-state?
Midnight knocks on the door? Security squads in black uniforms? The indefinite imprisonment of innocent individuals in prison cells and the immediate assumption of their guilt until proved innocent? Imprisonment for thought crimes? The use of torture to extricate information which may never otherwise be given? The permanent surveillance of a population at large?
If (…)

Outrage in a Time of Apathy
by Aaron Glantz
SAN FRANCISCO - Unlike most U.S. journalists who went to Iraq to cover a war, Dahr Jamail went to try to stop it.In his new book, ‘Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq‘, Jamail writes of volunteering as a rescue ranger at a Denali National Park in the U.S. state of Alaska while news of the invasion and occupation of Iraq played on the radio.
He had to get out of Anchorage, and in November 2003, (…)

Simmering discontent among Iran’s ethnic Kurdish minority - aided by the government’s conflict with a Turkish PKK offshoot - could spell major trouble for the Iranian government. The US government is fully aware of these tensions, and, according to published reports, is preparing several contingency plans to capitalize on mass discontent in these areas.
12 November 2007
By Kamal Nazer Yasin in Tehran for ISN Security Watch (12/11/07)
The Iranian government is taking aim at a shadowy (…)

“The Iraqi Red Crescent voiced ‘deep sorry’ for statements recently made by Iraqi officials on the situation of displaced people in Iraq, underlining that has nothing to do with the real situation of those displaced.
“The Iraqi body voiced in a statement received by the independent news agency Voices of Iraq (VOI) that it is ‘deeply sorry’ for the statement made by some officials regarding the real situation of displaced people inside Iraq, mainly downplaying the sufferings and harsh (…)

By Ramine Abadie
Energy. Experts and NGOs are concerned about the perverse effects of this type of production in a world that faces hunger shortages.
While the European Union plans to promote biofuel, experts in food, development, and NGOs are sounding the alarm bell about the risks linked to its production - more particularly the harmful effects on food production. According to FAO (Food and Agriculture Organisation) figures, there are more than 850 million people in the world who face (…)

by Jim Lobe
U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could cost U.S. taxpayers as much as $3.5 trillion through 2017 if both direct and indirect, or "hidden," costs are taken into account, according to a new report released Tuesday by Democrats in Congress.
The 27-page report, entitled "War at Any Price?" [.pdf], concluded that the total economic costs incurred to date – including "hidden" expenses, such as higher oil prices, interest on borrowing, and the long-term care of injured soldiers – (…)

It is the kind of news that everybody had been dreading. An outbreak of cholera in Iraq, which started in two northern provinces, has already reached Baghdad and has become Iraq’s biggest cholera outbreak in recent memory. This "frightening and dangerous situation," as stated by Bahktiyar Ahmed, a Unicef emergency health facilitator, serves to underscore the unrelenting threat to people already affected by a devastated healthcare system;
Statistics from the World Health Organisation (…)

NO AFP on BELLACIAO please, they don’t want... Bellaciao
Commondreams From AFP, November 13, 2007 World Body Warns Over Ocean ‘Fertilization’ To Fix Climate Change http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/11/13/5193/print/