January 11th marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of Pierre Mendes France (1907-1982), a man held in high esteem by the founding editor of Toward Freedom , Bill Lloyd, and Homer Jack who was an early writer for TF and whose TF study on the Bandong Conference was an important contribution to raising awareness of the growing Asian-African movement of decolonization.(1)
"They [the heavily armed Mexican federal police] began to hit us indiscriminately as they moved in. I was carrying my friend who'd fainted from the tear gas they shot at us. Seven police were hitting me with their billy clubs. They took my wallet and my cell phone, then threw me on top of a mountain of people. They took off everybody's shoes and tied our hands behind our backs. For an hour and a half they spit on us, kicked us, tortured us, then they grabbed me and threw me in the back of a pickup. I was covered with blood. They questioned us, kicked us, jumped on us. We drove for two hours. I lost all feeling in my body. When they finally stopped they pulled me out of the pickup by my hair. 'Drag yourselves like the dogs you are!' they reviled us."
The '100% Pure New Zealand' is a government-sponsored tourism promotion campaign targeting tourists from wealthy countries as 'cash cows.'
About 2.5 million foreign tourists including visitors from Europe, North America, China, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore and S. Korea, who visit New Zealand each year, risk exposure to serious health hazards without any warning.
1. Excessive UV Radiation
2. Lethal Chemicals
3. Toxic Algae Poisoning
The turmoil in the Darfur region of west Sudan has received too little international attention. Yet the plight of the southerners has been neglected even more in recent months. In early July 2006, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was celebrating a 'modest landmark': the repatriation of 10,000 Sudanese refugees from neighbouring countries over a seven-month period.
Given that there are 340,000 more Sudanese refugees to be taken home, this may not sound like such a significant achievement. But to the UNHCR and anybody else who knows the headaches the exercise has encountered since its launch at the end of 2005, the progress is satisfactory.
In the January 16 New Yorker magazine, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh reported that the Pentagon has begun updating its plans for an invasion of Iran. Hersh reported that, "Strategists at the headquarters of the US Central Command, in Tampa, Florida, have been asked to revise the military’s war plan, providing for a maximum ground and air invasion of Iran."
Ostensibly, the Pentagon is preparing an Iraq-style “pre-emptive” attack on Iran in order to stop Tehran from building a nuclear bomb. But in the November 27 New Yorker, Hersh reported that a highly classified assessment by the CIA had “found no conclusive evidence, as yet, of a secret Iranian nuclear-weapons program running parallel to the civilian operations that Iran has declared to the International Atomic Energy Agency”.As with Iraq’s alleged, but non-existent, weapons of mass destruction, Washington’s claims about a secret Iranian nuclear bomb program are simply a cover for the US rulers real goal of restoring a pro-US regime in oil- and gas-rich Iran.
Since coming into office in 2001, George W. Bush, his administration, and his supporters (mainly ideological religious groups and corporate powers) have waged an unprecedented attack on science. Broadly speaking, these attacks have focused on debunking scientific conclusions relating to evolution, health care (i.e., stem cell research), and perhaps most strikingly, the environment. It is in the realm of the environment that the administration's policies will have the most lasting damage. A plethora of articles have documented the Bush administration's systemic weakening of important environmental policies and even their agencies, the stacking of commissions with people directly from the business world hell bent on the bottom line, and the silencing of our nation's top scientists.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019