contributions

Was George W. Bush aware that a hijacking was in progress BEFORE the first plane struck the WTC at 8 : 46 am Eastern Time , the morning of 9/11/01 ? ......... A report from ABC News White House correspondent John Cochran strongly suggests this was the case............ " Peter , as you know ,the President’s down in Florida talking about education. He got out of his hotel suite this moring , was about to leave , reporters saw White House Chief of Staff Andy Card whisper into the (…)

by Mike Schiller
Recently, the state of Massachusetts passed a universal health care bill which is being hailed by the media as an ideal model for federal and state level legislation to extend health care to all Americans. While congress and state governments across the nation should start taking action to achieve the goal of extending health coverage to all those who deserve it, they would be better advised to formulate a different approach. The legislation championed by Mitt Romney is (…)

By BEN FOX
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) - The U.S. government released the first list of detainees held at the Guantanamo Bay prison on Wednesday - the most extensive accounting yet of the hundreds of people held there, nearly all of them labeled enemy combatants.
In all, 558 people were named in the list provided by the Pentagon in response to a Freedom of Information lawsuit by The Associated Press. They were among the first swept up in the U.S. global war on terrorism for suspected (…)

By JOHN ROSS
Outgoing Mexican president Vicente Fox’s long-treasured pipedream of an immigration agreement with Washington went up in smoke in early April when Republican senators torpedoed a compromise measure that would have legalized millions of undocumented workers living north of the border and guaranteed hundreds of thousands of unemployed Mexicans short-term jobs in the U.S.
But the proposed reform carried by Senators Ted Kennedy (Dem Ma.) and John McCain (Rep. Ariz.) would have (…)

The Emerging New Euroleft
by Hilary Wainwright Manchester
From my desk in the north of England, the grass seems considerably greener—or the poppies redder—across the water in Europe. Here in Britain political look-alikes compete frenetically for the center ground, and politicians of the radical left are sidelined by a grossly disproportionate electoral system. In contrast, Norway’s Left Socialist Party is part of the government; Italy’s radical Partito della Rifondazione Comunista (…)

By Saul Hudson
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States on Tuesday failed to secure international support for targeted sanctions against Iran and President George W. Bush refused to rule out nuclear strikes if diplomacy failed to curb the Islamic Republic’s atomic ambitions.
Bush said he would discuss Iran’s nuclear activities with China’s President Hu Jintao, who has been cool toward sanctions, during his U.S. visit this week.
Asked if his options included planning for a nuclear (…)

by Rick Wolff
France’s leading bureaucrats, from President Jacques Chirac on down, have been defeated. French neo-liberalism — the dismantling of its welfare state in favor of business — has suffered a serious blow. A powerful alliance of high-school and university students and of organized labor achieved the victory against the government’s law that undercut job security for workers under 26 years of age. The alliance forced Chirac to annul the law — exactly what he and the other (…)

By Greg Palast
Well, here they come: the wannabe Rommels, the gaggle of generals, safely retired, to lay siege to Donald Rumsfeld. This week, six of them have called for the Secretary of Defense’s resignation.
Well, according to my watch, they’re about four years too late — and they still don’t get it.
I know that most of my readers will be tickled pink that the bemedalled boys in crew cuts are finally ready to kick Rummy in the rump, in public. But to me, it just shows me that these (…)

UFPJ: ’Don’t Attack Iran’
United for Peace and Justice opposes any military action against Iran, as well as covert action and sanctions. We reject the doctrine of "preventive war." All diplomatic solutions must be pursued.
Send a clear message to the Bush Administration: Don’t Attack Iran! As a first and immediate step, we urge you to add your signature and comments to AfterDowningStreet’s petition to President Bush and Vice-President Cheney opposing an attack on Iran.
Many UFPJ member (…)

Lovelock: The Point of No Return is Behind Us
Environment in crisis: ’We are past the point of no return’
Thirty years ago, the scientist James Lovelock worked out that the Earth possessed a planetary-scale control system which kept the environment fit for life. He called it Gaia, and the theory has become widely accepted. Now, he believes mankind’s abuse of the environment is making that mechanism work against us. His astonishing conclusion - that climate change is already insoluble, (…)