The biggest civil liberty of all is not to be killed
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Joan Didion in the NYRB:The leading candidates duly presented their "health care solutions," not one of which addressed the core problem, which is the $350 billion a year it costs, according to a Harvard Medical School study, to cut in the commercial insurance industry.-
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We did not need to talk about how the question of race has been and continues to be used to exacerbate the real issue in American life, which is class, or absence of equal opportunity.
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We could argue over whether "intelligent design" should be taught in our schools as an alternative to evolution, and overlook the fact that the rankings of American schools have already dropped to twenty-first in the world in the teaching of science and twenty-fifth in the world in the teaching of math.
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We could forget the 70 percent of American eighth graders who do not now and never will read at eighth-grade levels, meaning they will never qualify to hold one of those jobs we no longer have.
Colin Powell: The Iraq war is the Iraq war. We now see that things are a lot better in Iraq.
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In the last three years, Yemen has become a centre for trafficking Iraqi women.
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Ted Nugent: ... instruct the U.S. military warriors to do their job — win the global war on terror right now and eliminate all threats from all sources by any means necessary
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they must beat him by a margin that exceeds the level of GOP vote tampering
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...a passive camera-based radiometric detection system, the T4000, which acts on naturally occurring low-energy terahertz emissions from humans and objects - known to physicists as Boltzmann radiation. This may be particularly useful...
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"Banks are now willing to lend to one another. That's a huge plus for the economy because the big problem has been that banks have been unwilling to trust one another," he said
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The treasury secretary seems out of breath.
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He gazed down at me with gentle eyes and a serene smile.
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Sadly, his case is just the latest in a series of abductions, disappearances and murders
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She wanted to end what she felt was a hopeless and degrading life.
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In April, a foliage sculpture of Starr outside a railway station in Liverpool was beheaded by vandals.
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The author lives in virtual seclusion, only travels to his former homeland incognito and never speaks to the media.
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Gunmen in central Sudan have kidnapped nine Chinese oil workers. It is the third such kidnapping in the oil-rich region over the past year. The government blames a Darfur rebel group. Diplomats say the kidnappers are local tribesmen who are demanding a larger share in the region's oil revenues.
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The release of the nine was announced soon after police arrived on the island of West Caicos, where they were being held.
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Some 80 trucks carrying food and medical aid for the Gaza Strip had to wait for several hours.
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Israeli leaders are seriously considering a dormant Saudi plan offering a comprehensive peace between Israel and the Arab world in exchange for lands captured during the 1967 war, Defense Minister Ehud Barak said Sunday.
[This may mean an incident in the next few days, some shocking act of anti-Israeli violence that will bounce off and contrast with the "serious considerations for comprehensive peace" and justify an already planned retaliation]
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[CIA Director Michael] Hayden's trip, however, does not fall under the security and intelligence category
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"More troops are not the answer," a senior United Nations official in Kabul tells me. "You will not make more babies by having many guys screw the same woman."
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But nothing has proved to be as lucrative as the drug trade, which accounts for 53 percent of Afghanistan's gross domestic product. In the province of Helmand alone, the drug trade is a business worth several billion dollars per year.
So far not a single corrupt minister or leading drug baron has so much as been charged with a crime much less sentenced.
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Just recently, the New York Times published a story about the alleged involvement of Karzai's brother, Ahmed Wali, in the drug trade. President Karzai himself denied the allegations in an interview with SPIEGEL, saying, "I have thoroughly investigated these accusations; none of them are true."
Koelbl/Spiegel 17.Oct.08
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"But legitimacy, including crucially in the eyes of the Afghan people. Why on earth would or should the US, a power that’s very distant both geographically and culturally, and NATO (ditto) have control of a pacification operation in Afghanistan?"
Helena Cobban in comments at registan
"You do remember 9/11, don’t you?"
TCHe ibid.
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She [A. Huffington] segued into a fluent disquisition on the Bush Administration’s flawed decision to focus on Iraq at the expense of Afghanistan, and concluded, “Yes, we want peace, but we also agree on enemies. And so that is a very important distinction that Obama has made, and Kucinich failed to make.”
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George W. Bush has grown old, erratic and rosy in the eight years of his presidency. Little remains of his combativeness or his enthusiasm for physical fitness. On this sunny Tuesday morning in New York, even his hair seemed messy and unkempt, his blue suit a little baggy around the shoulders, as Bush stepped onto the stage, for the eighth time, at the United Nations General Assembly.
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The decision has been backed up by a recent survey which showed a decline in the number of shortwave listeners in North America.
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it's hard not to crack a smile over news that Sumner Redstone is in trouble
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As the U.S. private banking system self-destructs, we need to ensure that a public credit system is in place and ready to serve the people’s needs in its stead.
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Why hasn't HRW[Human Rights Watch] called for a full disclosure of US funding of the opposition in Bolivia given the murders recently perpetrated in Pando by anti-government groups?
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The first step to a new hemispheric partnership is the recognition that the Monroe doctrine is, in the 21st century, quite dead
-Cuba has no stock exchange. Undoubtedly, we will find more rational and more socialist ways of financing our development.Fidel Castro Ruz
The current crisis and the brutal measures of the U.S. administration to save itself will bring more inflation, more devaluation of national currencies, more painful losses in the markets, lower prices for exports and more unequal exchange. But they will also bring to the peoples a better understanding of the truth, more awareness, more rebelliousness and more revolutions.
October 11, 2008
via uruknet / granma
the world, as it looked from here 19.Oct.2008
