No Picture

Detained reporter pressured to spy

NEW YORK – U.S. military interrogators have allegedly told a journalist for Al Jazeera who has been detained since December 2001 as an "enemy combatant" that he would be released if he agreed to provide U.S. intelligence authorities with inside information about the satellite news network’s activities, according to London’s Guardian newspaper.

Sami Muhyideen al-Haj, an assistant cameraman for Al Jazeera, was arrested by Pakistani authorities along the Afghan-Pakistani border while on assignment, then transferred to U.S. custody and brought to the detention center at Guantanamo Bay. read more

No Picture

Study says THC reduces cancer risk

In an interview with Reuters, Melamede explained that while nicotine has several effects that promote lung and other types of cancer, THC acts in ways that counters the cancer-causing chemicals in marijuana smoke. "THC turns down the carcinogenic potential," he said. Melamede reviewed the scientific evidence in a recent issue of Harm Reduction Journal.

Lab research indicates that nicotine activates an enzyme in the body that converts certain chemicals in both tobacco and marijuana smoke into cancer-promoting form. But studies in mice suggest that THC blocks this enzyme activity. read more

Diane Wilson

An Unreasonable Woman

Our mainstream press is fond of celebrating the world's great heroes. You know, people (mostly men) who make the time to cross the globe solo in a hot air balloon (Go Steve Forbes), or hit more home runs in a single year than anyone else (Where have you gone, Joe Dimaggio?), or make more money in a single year than any other family on the planet (Thanks, Wal-Mart Waltons!).

But what about ordinary folks who do something extra-ordinary? Those who get out of bed in the morning and go to work, while simultaneously managing to raise children, those who discover that the world doesn't look quite right from the front porch or the wooden comfort of the Adirondack chair?

No Picture

Forestry in Chile and the Myth of the Trickledown Theory

Two years ago, in early November 2003, after a ferocious markets-based campaign in the US, an agreement was signed by US and Chilean environmental groups with the two largest wood products companies in Chile. The agreement, facilitated by Home Depot, was received as an important step forward in promoting collaborative resolution to international environmental conflicts. The agreements language binds the companies to a conservation focused solutions process with the environmental groups, and an end to the practice of the substitution of the native forest with exotic tree species plantations.

No Picture

Freedom of Speech Under Fire in Nepal: Take Action!

Nepal is a country which has been living under a so-called ‘state of emergency’ and its extended anti-constitutional aftermath decreed in Nov. 2001 by the corrupt and despotic monarchy, an absolutist regime which is now exercising control directly through the military and police while fighting (with great and indiscriminate, if ineffective, brutality) a Maoist insurgency which has de facto control of almost two-thirds of the country and the support of vast sectors of the rural poor.

Parliament was disbanded in the name of the ‘war on terrorism’ (which is how the fight against the insurgency is described) and now people who simply exercise Constitutional rights are arrested as ‘terrorist sympathizers’. Many who are merely critical –or thought to be critical — of the regime are jailed, tortured, killed in jail or summarily executed on the spot. read more

Dahr Jamail

Unembedded Reporting From Iraq: An Interview with Dahr Jamail

In 2003, tired of the US media's inaccurate portrayal of the realities of the Iraq War, independent journalist Dahr Jamail headed to the conflict himself. Instead of following in the footsteps of mainstream media's embedded, "Hotel Journalists," Jamail hit the Iraqi streets to uncover the stories most reporters were missing. His countless interviews with Iraqi citizens and from-the-ground reporting have offered a horrific look into the bowels of the US occupation. From covering the bloody siege of Falluja to breaking a story on Bechtel's failure to reconstruct water treatment plants, his writing and photographs depict an Iraq that is much worse off now than it was before the US invasion. As one Abu Ghraib detainee explained to Jamail, "the Americans brought electricity to my ass before they brought it to my house."