China cracking down on protests, rights group says BEIJING: China has mounted a violent crackdown on protests and arrested political activists in a bid to curb dissent during the annual session of its parliament, Human Rights Watch said in a report on Wednesday.
The human rights group said protests in the central province of Hunan and another in Guangdong province in the south had been violently suppressed earlier this week.
In Beijing, the report said, the authorities rounded up hundreds of ... (more)
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House Democrats drop effort to close GuantanamoHouse Democrats have dropped plans to use the coming Defense Supplemental Appropriations legislation to permanently close the terrorist detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, RAW STORY has learned. One House Democrat sitting on the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee promised the party would return to the issue later in the year when taking up the standard Defense funding bill.
"Guantanamo is not included in this bill," confirmed an Appropriations aide to RAW STORY yesterday.... (more)
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An Interview with Sibel Edmonds: What if the FBI Hired Someone Honest to Look into 9-11?Edmonds discusses what she knows, whom it implicates, and what she's been through and what hope there is in the new Congress to start an investigation.Here's the audio.
Swanson: This is David Swanson with Sibel Edmonds. It's great to talk with you, thanks for being here.
Edmonds: Thanks for asking me for this interview, David.
... (more)
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ABC Unmasks “Curveball” Four Years Too Late ABC News is surprised, simply flabbergasted. In a “special report,” Brian Ross tells us about the Curveball “intelligence failure” and quotes flummoxed officials, including an outraged Collin Powell, who will go down in history as the fool who presented a passel of neocon lies and fairy tales in dog and pony show format before the United Nations, thus providing a transparent pretext to invade Iraq and systematically slaughter more than 650,000 of its citizens.
... (more)
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The Seymour Hersh Mystery Let me see if I've got this straight. Perhaps two years ago, an "informal" meeting of "veterans" of the 1980s Iran-Contra scandal – holding positions in the Bush administration – was convened by Deputy National Security Advisor Elliott Abrams. Discussed were the "lessons learned" from that labyrinthine, secret, and illegal arms-for-money-for-arms deal involving the Israelis, ... (more)
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An expert asks: Do we all have an evil, dark side?Photographs from Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison sickened eminent psychologist Philip Zimbardo when he saw them on TV three years ago, but it wasn't the first time he had seen such sadism imposed by prison guards.
"It was eerie and all too familiar," he says.
In an experiment 33 years earlier on the Stanford University campus where he taught, Zimbardo created his own little prison of horrors. He randomly assigned 24 male college students to be guards or prisoners in a two-week stu... (more)
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Closing the gap between torturer and victim In Andrew Cockburn’s new book, Rumsfeld, the gap between rampant power and its faraway victims is closed. Donald Rumsfeld, US secretary of defence until last year and a designer of the Iraq bloodbath, is revealed as personally directing from his office in the Pentagon the torture of fellow human beings, exploiting “individual phobias, such as fear of dogs, to induce stress” and use of “a wet towel and dripping water to induce the mis... (more)
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Israel, U.S. storm out of UN nuclear forumThe Israel and U.S. delegations walked out of the United Nations' disarmament forum in Geneva, Switzerland yesterday after Iran said Israel was the "real source of nuclear danger in the Middle East" and had a "dark record of crimes."
Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki told the Conference on Disarmament that Israel's nuclear weapons posed a "uniquely grave threat to regional and international peace and security" requiring action by the international community.
... (more)
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Watch TV? Feds want to pay youWatch TV? Feds want to pay you JONATHAN TAKIFF
Philadelphia Inquirer
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
Who knew? It pays to watch TV.
Starting Jan. 1, the federal government will offer up to two $40 rebate coupons to each household of television viewers in a $1.5 billion plan announced yesterday by the Commerce Department.
Peop... (more)
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Airport aims to streamline security COLONIE -- A program to speed registered travelers through security lines at Albany International Airport could be operating by summer.
The Albany County Airport Authority said it will negotiate a contract with New York City-based Verified Identity Pass Inc. to install its Clear Registered Traveler program at the airport.
Albany was one of 20 airports in a pilot program of the Transportation Security Administration that is intended to speed fr... (more)
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U.S. allies in Africa may have engaged in secret prisoner renditions NAIROBI, Kenya - A network of U.S. allies in East Africa secretly have transferred to prisons in Somalia and Ethiopia as many as 150 people who were captured in Kenya while fleeing the recent war in Somalia, according to human rights advocates here.
Kenyan authorities made the arrests as part of a U.S.-backed, four-nation military campaign in December and January against Somalia's Islamist militias, which Bush administration officials have linked to al-Qaida.
The p... (more)
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Trio must pay for prison 'board'Three men who spent years in jail after being wrongly convicted of murder will have to pay for their prison board and lodgings, Law Lords have ruled.
Brothers Vincent and Michael Hickey of Birmingham, spent 18 years in jail for paperboy Carl Bridgewater's murder.
Michael O'Brien from Cardiff spent 11 years in jail for a separate murder.
The three were deducted money from their compensation for what lawyers called "living expenses" but what the court a... (more)
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Giuliani will miss firefighters eventJohn McCain will be there, as will Hillary Rodham Clinton, John Edwards and half a dozen other presidential candidates. But when firefighters hold a candidates' forum today in Washington, Rudolph W. Giuliani, the contender most closely identified with their profession, will not attend.
In the past several days, a private tussle over Giuliani's participation — he was out, then in, then out again — has turned into a public spat with the International Association of Fire ... (more)
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Archive.org makes HUGE 9/11 television archive available to publicThis collection contains television news programs recorded live from around September 11, 2001 by the non-profit Television Archive to help patrons research this important part of United States history. These materials were available on the televisionarchive.org site from October 11, 2001 through 2003.
http://www.archive.org/details/sept_11_tv_archive
These are lower quality, streaming versions of the 9/11 Archive MPEG's that were discovered by user 'gangsta' on... (more)
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Idaho House Passes NAU Resolution The Idaho House successfully passed House Joint Memorial 5 by a voice vote on Monday. The legislation is a resolution that opposes U.S. participation in the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP) and the development of the North American Union (NAU). The legislation has been transmitted to the Senate for further consideration and will hopefully come to floor vote soon.
Idaho represents the 14th state to introduce anti-NAU and SPP resolutions. The other states ... (more)
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Cop: Wife googled 'How to commit murder'At exactly 5:45:34 on April 18, 2004 a computer taken from the office of the attorney of Melanie McGuire, did a search on the words "How To Commit Murder."
That same day searches on Google and MSN search engines, were conducted on such topics as `instant poisons,` `undetectable poisons,' 'fatal digoxin doses,' and gun laws in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
Ten days later, according to allegations by the state of New Jersey, McGuire murdered her husband, William T. McG... (more)
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1984 and Beyond – Science Fiction Moving Into Reality The Guardian reports that neuroscientists have determined how to look inside a person’s brain and read their intentions before they act. The new brain scans allow them to identify patterns of brain activity showing what a person plans to do in the near future. It is the first time scientists have succeeded in reading intentions in this way.
"It’s like shining a torch around, looking for writing on a wall... (more)
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Group claims disabled students improperly disciplined, school district to react COLORADO SPRINGS - A school watch group is accusing an elementary school of restraining and secluding students with disabilities, forcing one to sit in her own urine.
The Legal Center for People with Disabilities and Older People says five students with disabilities who attended Will Rogers Elementary were restrained or secluded on 45 different occasions since 2005.
The students, Kayla Rhuby, Michael Gates, Christopher Spiliotis, Alex Gilliland and A.T., were... (more)
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The AIPAC CaucusThe Nation -- The night before Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi addressed the American Israel Public Affairs Committee's (AIPAC) annual conference, House Democrats removed language from an Iraq supplemental bill that would have prevented President Bush from attacking Iran without Congressional approval.
"Conservative Democrats as well as lawmakers concerned about the possible impact on Israel had argued for the change in strategy," the Associated Press reported. "Opposition to th... (more)
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Return to the Battlefield: The Number One Guantanamo MythWhy bother to do fact checking when it is so much easier to just write down whatever you are told? Every time I read or hear about the ever-changing number of Guantánamo prisoners that have "returned to the battlefield" I try to research this issue yet again. The Pentagon, Cheney, Rumsfeld and various others have, at different times, claimed that 12, 4, 15, 10, 7 and even twenty-some Guantánamo prisoners have "returned to the battlefield." The administration and the military freque... (more)
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The rise of the Rove ReichPolitics is the art of destroying one’s enemies and rewarding one’s friends. By this standard, the Bush regime is the most capable administration in American history. Bush and his fellows have shown time and again that they have sharp elbows and can be cold-blooded political street fighters.
The “Swift-boating” of John Kerry, Dan Rather and Joseph Wilson are just a few of the more familiar examples. Each was singled out as a potential rival by high-ranking ... (more)
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9/11, Iraq: Cheney again claims tie Vice President Dick Cheney, lashing out at Democrats for the first time since the felony conviction of Lewis "Scooter" Libby, his former top deputy, resumed his controversial claims Monday that the war in Iraq is the central front in the worldwide U.S. response to the Sept. 11 attacks.
Cheney linked Iraq and al Qaeda even though post-invasion reports by the Senate Intelligence Committee and the presidential Commission on Intelligence Capabilities found no... (more)
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Olmert's testimony reveals the real goal of the war in Lebanon Israel's supposedly "defensive" assault on Hizbullah last summer, in which more than 1,000 Lebanese civilians were killed in a massive aerial bombardment that ended with Israel littering the country's south with cluster bombs, was cast in a definitively different light last week by Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert.
His leaked testimony to the Winograd Committee -- investigating the government's failures during the month-long attack -- suggests that he had been preparing for such... (more)
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