contributions

de Sam Uretsky
Unless you belong to the select and dwindling group of those with fully employer-paid health coverage-or to the 40-million-and-counting with no health insurance at all-you’ve probably noticed your health insurance premiums rising at a frightening pace. In 2005, premiums for family coverage rose by an average of 9.2%, six percentage points more than the rate of inflation, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation’s Annual Survey Of Employer Health Benefits. The cost of health (…)

BUSH POLICIES ARE "ONGOING CRIMINAL ACTIVITY" UNDER U.S. AND WORLD LAW, LEGAL SCHOLAR SAYS
By Sherwood Ross
If anyone knows anything about international law it’s Dr. Francis A. Boyle of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and he’s more than a little ticked off at the moment at President Bush. Dr. Boyle’s credentials are little short of amazing.
He was the expert who drafted the U.S. domestic implementing legislation for the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 --- (…)

by Ivan Eland
In Saddam Hussein’s war crimes trial for the 1988 Iraqi “Anfal” campaign that gassed Kurdish villages, his defense lawyers have argued that Iraqi forces were really attempting to strike Iranian forces and the Iraqi Kurdish pesh merga militias that were in and supported by the hamlets. In other words, the lawyers are asserting that the innocent Kurds who were killed were collateral damage in an effort by the Iraqi government to rid its territory of Iranian fighters and their (…)

by Nicholas Watt
Europe’s "Christian values" should be enshrined in a new version of the EU constitution, the German chancellor declared yesterday after meeting the Pope.
In remarks which will reopen the debate on religion in the EU, Angela Merkel threw her weight behind Pope Benedict’s campaign to recognise Europe’s Christian heritage. "We spoke about freedom of religion," she said after talks at the Pope’s summer residence near Rome. "We spoke about the role of Europe and I emphasised (…)

By RAMZY KYSIA
Houla, Lebanon.
Yesterday, I shed my first tears for Lebanon.
Yesterday, I visited Houla, a stone’s throw from the Israeli border.
Yesterday, I was discovered by Zainab Fawqi-Sleem - a young, Lebanese woman who was killed in Houla, alongside her sister-in-law, Selma, on July 15th. Zainab is but one of over 1,300 innocents killed in this war, but she is the one who found me.
On October 31st, 1948, in one of the few massacres of the Nakba to occur inside Lebanon, (…)

by Isaiah J. Poole
Isaiah J. Poole is the executive editor of TomPaine.com.
President George W. Bush’s trip to the Hurricane Katrina-ravaged Gulf Coast this week brings to mind a 1992 tragicomedy starring his father, President George H.W. Bush. Struggling to connect with voters who felt neglected by the administration in the midst of a recession, Bush clumsily interjected into a New Hampshire campaign speech a margin note an aide intended to keep the elder Bush focused on what he needed (…)

Many GOP Candidates Part Company With Bush
By E. J. Dionne Jr.
By Election Day, how many Republican candidates will have come out against the Iraq war or distanced themselves from the administration’s policies?
August 2006 will be remembered as a watershed in the politics of Iraq. It is the month in which a majority of Americans told pollsters that the struggle for Iraq was not connected to the larger war on terrorism. They thus renounced a proposition the administration has pushed (…)

By Michael Clarke
It is Canada Day evening, and I can barely hear the whistles, booms and bangs of the fireworks. It sounds a bit like distant bombs exploding, reminding me of the incredible moral paradox our federal government’s aggressive military role in Afghanistan has created for all Canadians. Our government, military, newspapers, television and radio media are efficiently dispersing the official sound bytes: "our troops in Afghanistan have the moral authority"; "Canada is doing the (…)

By Nicola Nasser* In a pattern that reminds of the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement (1), France seems converging to a role that belongs to its previous colonial era in Lebanon and Syria, in harmony with, but under the regional hegemony of the United States’ involvement in other countries of the Arab Levant, in a stark departure from Charles de Gaulle’s post-Algeria legacy. Gone are the days when Paris was briefly perceived early in 2003 as if it was in the shoes of the former Soviet Union as a (…)

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
On August 17 we published a very interesting interview with Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah. A CounterPunch reader had found it on the Marxmail list, moderated by Louis Proyect, and passed it along to us. The interview was translated from Turkish, in which language it had appeared in the Turkish socialist daily, Evrensel, on August 12 and 13. We didn’t publish the full interview, which had some sections on the war that had been somewhat overtaken by (…)