contributions

ZNet’s Selected Anti War Song :
http://www.zmag.org/Songs/songarchive.htm

Steven McGiffen interviewed by Ed Lewis March 21, 2006 UKWatch
An updated version of The European Union: A Critical Guide, by Steven McGiffen[1], was recently published by Pluto Press. Ed Lewis of UK Watch put some questions to him about it.
Lewis: Could you briefly describe the content of your book and your main reasons for writing it?
McGiffen: Some years ago one of my sons, who was at university at the time, told me that if students wanted to find out anything about how the (…)

From forcing through ID cards to the erosion of parliamentary scrutiny, a determined clique is hijacking our democracy
In January the commissioner of the Metropolitan police got into enormous trouble for saying that he couldn’t see why the Soham murders had become such a big story. Like every other journalist, I marvelled at his inability to see what makes a story run. But now, as I follow the news, I have developed a blind spot of my own. Piece by piece, month by month, Tony Blair’s (…)

ZNet | Europe
Turkey’s Displaced by Sinem Yilanci; March 21, 2006
Turkish Republic is not a country that has a good reputation for its attitude and discourse towards minority groups. One of the recent controversial problems about minority rights is the issue of displaced people.
In East Anatolia, during 80s and 90s lots of people but specifically the most crowded minority group, Kurds, was forced to migrate by the state systematically. At the verge of the new millennium, even though (…)

ZNet | Europe
Against All Odds Human Rights Activism in Turkey by Khatchig Mouradian; April 05, 2006
“I refuse to buy my freedom of speech by paying money,” said Eren Keskin, the Head of the Istanbul Branch of the Human Rights Association of Turkey, during a press conference in Istanbul on the 22nd of March. A few days earlier, a Turkish court had sentenced her to 10 months’ imprisonment for insulting the country’s military. The sentence was then converted to a fine of 6000 New Turkish (…)

ZNet | Colombia
by Garry Leech; Colombia Journal; April 02, 2006 While the U.S. mainstream media widely-reported the U.S. Department of Justice’s recent indictment of 50 rebel leaders belonging to the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), an announcement by the State Department the next day received surprisingly little coverage. On March 24, Assistant Secretary of State Anne Patterson told Colombia’s Radio Caracol that, while the United States would not initiate any (…)

Surveillance for the Common Man: A Global Infrastructure for Mass Surveillance
by Nolan K. Anderson
March 24, 2006 Informatiun Clearing House http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=AND20060324&articleId=2162
We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark. The real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light. - Plato
Today’s news is made up in large part by media hysteria in which the media can enhance their ratings or readership by (…)

By Julian Borger
April 2, 2006
Pentagon plans in Washington Saturday April 1, 2006
Guardian
The Pentagon is preparing to set off a record-breaking bang, detonating 635 tonnes of high explosives and sending a mushroom cloud into the sky over the Nevada desert. The blast, on June 2, codenamed Divine Strake, is likely to be the biggest controlled conventional explosion in military history, experts said, and is designed to test the impact of bunker-busting bombs aimed at underground (…)

The administration’s proposal would modernize the nation’s complex of laboratories and factories as well as produce new bombs. By Ralph Vartabedian, Times Staff Writer April 6, 2006
The Bush administration Wednesday unveiled a blueprint for rebuilding the nation’s decrepit nuclear weapons complex, including restoration of a large-scale bomb manufacturing capacity.
The plan calls for the most sweeping realignment and modernization of the nation’s massive system of laboratories and (…)

· Economists say official estimates are far too low · New calculation takes in dead and injured soldiers
Jamie Wilson in Washington
The real cost to the US of the Iraq war is likely to be between $1 trillion and $2 trillion (£1.1 trillion), up to 10 times more than previously thought, according to a report written by a Nobel prize-winning economist and a Harvard budget expert.
The study, which expanded on traditional estimates by including such costs as lifetime disability and (…)