Get this. The Senate fails to pass the new FAA reauthorization bill—because of “non-aviation provisions” that would have doubled the tax on oil spills, using the revenues to replenish the strapped Highway Trust Fund! And this is deemed so un-newsworthy… Read moreNo increase in oil-spill tax
Never mind the silly Canadian angle. The really sinister thing here is the embryonic hybridization of man and machine—a phenomenon we have already predicted. From the Canadian Press, May 5: Canadian military looking for Iron Man-type suits for overburdened soldiers… Read moreIron Man lives again —in Iraq?
The US administration has finally seen fit to release another group of prisoners from Guantánamo, including the Sudanese AlJazeera cameraman Sami al-Haj. Despite claims from within the administration that it was hoping to scale down operations at Guantánamo, no prisoners… Read moreAlJazeera cameraman freed from Gitmo
Eight thousand pages of documents related to the Pentagon’s illegal propaganda campaign, known as the Pentagon military analyst program, are now online for the world to see, although in a format that makes it impossible to easily search them and… Read morePentagon media scandal down memory hole?
Alfonso Chardy writes for the Miami Herald, May 3 (links added): Militant Cuban exile honored A beaming Luis Posada Carriles hugged and shook hands with hundreds of supporters late Friday as he arrived at a club in west Miami-Dade fo… Read moreMiami fetes terrorist
Our April issue featured the story “The Audacity of Vagueness: Barack Obama and Latin America,” by Nikolas Kozloff of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs. Wrote Kozloff: “Barack Obama, the likely Democratic nominee, has not been very eager to comprehensively address… Read moreOur readers write: Barack Obama or “October Surprise”?
Talk about chutzpah. The right-wing blogosphere is ballistic over Barack Obama‘s rather tenuous ties to a former member of the Weather Underground. It was Hillary Clinton who first made an issue of the fact that Obama once served on the… Read moreMilitia-linked extremoids bait Obama on (tenuous) Weatherman tie
We’ve always maintained that anti-Semitism and anti-Arab racism are genetically linked phenomena. A lovely illustration is provided by Joseph E. DiGenova, the prosecutor in the Jonathan Pollard case, following the latest bust in the endless Israeli spy scandal—of octogenarian former… Read moreJewish “sleeper cells” threaten America: Pollard prosecutor
Stories like this make us think Orwell was an optimist. From Reuters, April 8: Robots seen doing work of 3.5 million in Japan Robots could fill the jobs of 3.5 million people in graying Japan by 2025, a thinktank says,… Read moreRobots to run Japan by 2025: think-tank
We’ve said it before, but here we go again. The Conspiracy Industry plays into the very hands of the police state it ostensibly opposes. The latest blog fodder from Raw Story, April 1, emphasis added, links not included: Mukasey hints… Read moreConspiracy vultures descend on Mukasey quip
The US State Department’s new annual human rights report accuses China of “extrajudicial killings, torture and coerced confessions of prisoners and the use of forced labor.” Russia and Sudan were also especially criticized. Ten countries were named as under “unaccountable… Read moreWhite House bashes China torture, vetoes bill banning torture
A man claiming to be Jaber al-Banna (also rendered Elbaneh), a Yemeni-American who is among the FBI’s most wanted terrorism suspects, showed up in a Yemeni court Feb. 23—and was allowed to walk free, surprising the attendees. Al-Banna’s appearance was… Read moreYemen lets jihadi walk free?
