January 2011 - Page 3 of 6

Billion-dollar Boeing Fence on U.S.-Mexico Border Canceled

Pratap Chatterjee January 20, 2011 Pratap Chatterjee

One billion dollars and just over four years after Boeing won a contract to build a “virtual fence” on the Arizona-Mexico border, the high-tech project was canceled last week by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) amid widespread recognition that it has been a failure.

The Secure Border Initiative Network (also known as SBInet) was created by the administration of George W. Bush in November 2005 to track down undocumented migrants crossing the 3,200-kilometre land border between the U.S. and Mexico. Estimates of the number of people that make it across range from 400,000 to one million a year, many of whom hike miles of uncharted northbound trails and roads through steep ravines and hills of the desert to evade border patrols. read more

Vermont Yankee Nuclear Plant: Taking Action to Shut it Down Now

Sam Mayfield January 20, 2011 Sam Mayfield

Welcoming the New Year Saturday January 1, 2011 nine women from Vermont and Massachusetts were arrested as they blocked the driveway leading in to the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant owned by Entergy.

The Human Faces of Latin America’s Cold War

Benjamin Dangl January 20, 2011 Benjamin Dangl

The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War by Greg Grandin is based on the belief that the Cold War was more than just a battle of ideologies, nations and political leaders, but a dramatic struggle waged by everyday people whose illuminating stories were buried.

Journalist, Activist and Poet John Ross dies at 72

Tim Redmond January 19, 2011 Tim Redmond

Source: San Francisco Bay Guardian

When John Ross left Terminal Island, the federal prison in Los Angeles, after serving a couple of years for refusing the Vietnam draft, the warden shook his head and said: “Ross, you never learned how to be a prisoner.”

I’m not writing the epitaph for whatever gravestone he has or doesn’t have, wherever it might be in the world, but that’s what I’d put on it: “John Ross, 1938-2011. Never learned how to be a prisoner.” read more

US: Wrong on Honduras

Dana Frank January 19, 2011 Dana Frank

Source: The Nation

As we awake to the nightmare of the new Republican-controlled House of Representatives, Congressional liberals face an immediate test on the Latin American front. Two fanatically right-wing Congress members from South Florida, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Connie Mack, now control the Foreign Affairs Committee and the subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, respectively, and Honduras is at the top of their agenda. They are already aggressively challenging the Obama administration on what they regard as its softness toward Honduras’s deposed president, Manuel Zelaya, the democratically elected leader who was ousted in a June 28, 2009, military coup. They are also attacking the administration’s initial reluctance to give the coup regime its unqualified support. read more

Tunisia: The Last Days of Ben Ali

Rene Wadlow January 18, 2011 Rene Wadlow

The wave of a peoples’ revolution has swept over Tunisia and pushed President Ben Ali to exile in Saudi Arabia.