The blogger Xymphora makes several good points about the supposed mugging-murder of the New York Times’ recently retired journalist, David Rosenbaum, most notably the fact the crime did not resemble a normal mugging. Thus we must consider the possibility that Rosenbaum was assassinated for reasons that are not clear and probably never will be. Xymphora speculates that Rosenbaum “might reveal some of the secrets behind the odd relationship of the Times to the Bush Administration (holding stories of extreme national importance back for a year, and engaging in discussion of what news is ‘fit to print’), or behind the campaign of lies told by the Times to help the Bush Administration trick the American people into the attack on Iraq.”
kurtnimmo.com

… There is one aspect of all this, however, that is especially interesting to foreign policy aficionados, and that is Abramoff’s connections to the far right wing of Israel’s Likud Party, the “settler” movement, and, here in America, Israel’s amen corner in the conservative movement.

According to a report by Michael Isikoff in Newsweek, Abramoff was soliciting funds on behalf of a shady organization known as the Capital Athletic Foundation (CAF), which was supposed to be funding sports programs and imparting “leadership skills” to inner-city youth. Instead, CAF funneled millions scarfed up from Indian tribes not only into Abramoff’s own pockets and the pockets of his cronies, but also to ultra-right-wing Israeli “settlers.” Isikoff reports:
antiwar.com

Jack Abramoff, ‘Super Zionist’

The 2003 U.S. aggression against Iraq has taken Western “progressive” élites, particularly those on the Left by surprise, not because of the violent and criminal nature of U.S.-orchestrated terror against the Iraqi people, but because of the instant rise of the Iraqi Resistance against the unprovoked military and economic against Iraq. While meddling in the affairs of other distant peoples has been a conspicuous feature of the “progressive” élites, their interference in the affairs of the Iraqi people is disturbing and contributing to the suffering of the Iraqi people.

As most people know, the invasion of Iraq was an illegal act of aggression, in violation of international laws and the UN Charter. The ‘Supreme International Crime’ the Nuremberg judges found, was that of unprovoked aggression, because it contains ‘the accumulated evil’ of all war crimes. However, despite all this, Western élites, supported by the mainstream media continue to describe the Iraqi Resistance against the Occupation as “insurgency” in order to justify U.S. “counter-insurgency”.

The Iraqi Resistance is not an “insurgency”. Insurgency is an organized rebellion aimed at overthrowing a legitimate and constituted government by force, such as the Contras, a U.S. proxy terrorist gang used against the legitimate government of Nicaragua in the late 1980s. There is nothing legitimate about the U.S. Occupation and its puppet government in Iraq. The Iraqi Resistance has the support of most Iraqi. One only needs to watch the jubilation of Iraqis at a destroyed U.S. tank or a Humvee to have a sense of Iraqi feelings. This distortion of the truth is part of U.S. psychological warfare not only against the Iraqi people but also against the rest of the world. It denies indigenous Iraqis their right for legitimate national resistance, and it deliberately demonises the armed struggle against the invaders. The presence of “insurgency” implies that the U.S. Occupation is (nonexistent) peaceful and legal, and that the puppet government is legitimate government; it is not imported to Iraq on the back of U.S. tanks and imposed and legitimised by undemocratic and fraudulent elections at gunpoint.
globalresearch.ca

Thin is still in, but apparently fat is nowhere near as out as it used to be.

A survey finds America’s attitudes toward overweight people are shifting from rejection toward acceptance. Over a 20-year period, the percentage of Americans who said they find overweight people less attractive steadily dropped from 55 percent to 24 percent, the market research firm NPD Group found.
news.yahoo.com

…A century ago people talked of “What we could do to Africa”. Last century, it was “What can we do for Africa?”. Now, in 2006, we must ask what the developing world, empowered, can do for itself.

British psychiatrists are beginning to debate the highly sensitive issue of using LSD for therapeutic purposes to unlock secrets buried in the unconscious which may underlie the anxious or obsessional behaviour of some of their patients.

The UK pioneered this use of LSD in the 1950s. But psychiatrists found their research proposals rejected and their work dismissed once “acid” hit the streets in the mid-60s and uncontrolled use of the hallucinogenic drug became a social phenomenon.

Today, on the 100th birthday of Albert Hofmann, the scientist who discovered the mind-expanding properties of lysergic acid diethylamide in Switzerland, one consultant psychiatrist is openly risking controversy to urge that the debate on the therapeutic potential of LSD be reopened. Ben Sessa has been invited to give a presentation on psychedelic drugs to the Royal College of Psychiatrists in March – the first time the subject will have been discussed by the institution in 30 years.

“I really want to present a dispassionate medical, scientific evidence-based argument,” says Dr Sessa. “I do not condone recreational drug use. None of this is tinged by any personal experience.

“Scientists, psychiatrists and psychologists were forced to give up their studies for socio-political reasons. That’s what really drives me.”
guardian.co,uk

July 10, 2001
Nearly 20 years ago the man who is now Israel’s Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, sent Lebanese militiamen into the Palestine refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla. When they left 36 hours later at least 800 people lay dead after a rampage of murder, torture and rape.

The massacre provoked international outrage. In Israel itself 400,000 people took to the streets in the largest demonstration the country had ever seen. Ariel Sharon was forced to resign as Israel’s defence minister.

But he has maintained that he could not have foreseen the danger of a massacre in the camps. Fergal Keane investigates this claim, and talks to key witnesses and survivors of the massacre.
bbc.co.uk

“Evo, what do you and the MAS understand by ‘socialism,'” I asked him, when I was invited by the Executive Committee of the Bolivian Labor Central (COB). “To live in community and equality,” he answered. “Fundamentally, in the peasant communities they have socialism. For example, if we speak of land. I come from the ayllu of the Department of Oruro. Clearly, where I live at this moment, in the East in Chapare, there are no ayllus. It is individual parceling, and there arise very serious problems, because it leads to small holdings, which you don’t see in a peasant community where the land is communal.”

“Does the socio-economic model of the MAS resemble more that of Lula, Cuba, or Hugo Chávez?” I insisted. “I believe it is something much deeper,” he answered. “It is an economic model based on solidarity, reciprocity, community, and consensus. Because, for us, democracy is a consensus. In the community there is consensus, in the trade union there are majorities and minorities.

“Inside this official democracy of Bolivia they do not respect the thought, sentiments, and the sufferings of the national majorities. And within this framework we are seeking a communitarian socialism based on the community. A socialism, let’s say, based on reciprocity and solidarity. And beyond that, respecting Mother Earth, the Pacha Mama. It is not possible within that model to convert Mother Earth to merchandise. In Bolivia with the agrarian reform it is better to be a vaccinated cow than a human being. For a vaccinated cow there are 25 hectares and for a human being there is nothing.”
zmag.org

If there had been justice and reparation for the victims of hundreds of massacres committed in the last twenty years in the Colombian countryside, as well as those committed between 1946 and 1958 and in previous waves of violence, the prin cipal measure would be to return their land to the campesinos, indigenous people and afro-colombians who have time and again been thrown off Mother Earth by blood and fire.

As dawn came on 2 September 2005, two hundred comuneros – commu nity activists – from the Indigenous Reserve of Nasa de Huellas dared to implement the decision of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the Court established that the Colombian state should hand back their land as part of an integral reparation to victims of a massacre committed by paramili taries on 19 September 1991 in the Nilo hacienda – large farmstead – that the indigenous people had occupied. Twenty of them, children included, were assassinated.
zmag.org

After spending 36 days in the fall of 2000 in thrall to politicians, pundits and the press, Americans probably thought they knew all about the hanging, dangling and pregnant chads that helped decide the presidential election.

Turns out, those chads only distracted attention from much more grievous breakdowns during the 2000 election.

At least that’s what longtime Florida political observer Lance deHaven-Smith believes. His most recent book, The Battle for Florida (University Press of Florida, 2005), looks at the twilight of democracy in Ancient Greece and draws disturbing parallels with the institutions in Florida and the nation during the 2000 election and up until today.
research.fsu.edu