eileen fleming

"There comes a time comes when silence is betrayal...History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people...We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims...We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people...The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy...Cowardice asks the question: is it safe? Expediency asks the question: is it politic? Vanity asks the question: is it popular? But conscience asks the question: is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular- but one must take it simply because it is right."-Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.

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Protestors took to the streets of New York demanding that one of America's biggest banks start to repay its billion dollar bailout and provide help for some of the city's homeless.

The border between Mexico and the United States is chaotically reverting to historical type, the place of horror it was for most of the 19th and 20th centuries. Nearly 19,000 people in Mexico have been slaughtered in drug violence since 2006, the year the conservative Felipe Calderon was elected president and began deploying some 50,000 troops and federal police in support of the US-convened struggle against street drugs.

Shortly before midnight, the Eyjafjallajokull glacier, the island's fifth largest, started to spew smoke and lava from several craters along a rift which is popular with hikers.

Frustrated with the pace of action to overhaul the country's immigration system, thousands of demonstrators descended on the nation's capital Sunday, waving American flags and holding homemade signs in English and Spanish.

Arriving for work at St Vincent's hospital in downtown Manhattan, nurse aide Emily Isaacs left no doubt about her views on the Democrats' healthcare reforms. Wearing blue scrubs, she had a large Barack Obama shopping bag slung over her shoulder with the president's beaming portrait beneath the word "Hope".

Bills and resolutions have been introduced in at least 36 state legislatures seeking to limit or oppose various aspects of the reform plan through laws or state constitutional amendments, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures

France is expected to deal a bloody nose to Nicolas Sarkozy's ruling rightwing party today in regional elections viewed as a key indication of the president's unpopularity more than halfway through his time in office.

Israeli forces have killed a Palestinian teenager during violent clashes in the occupied West Bank, medics have said.

As Iranians across the world prepare to celebrate the Iranian new year, many Iranian-Americans have criticised the West's approach to confronting the government in Tehran.

Thousands of anti-war protesters have marched through the US capital to call for the immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq, on the seventh anniversary of the US-led invasion.

Barack Obama, the US president, has made his final push among members of the US House of Representatives to rally support for his healthcare bill ahead of a key vote on the measure.

In Barack Obama’s agonising, year-long effort to pass universal health insurance, the latest bump in the road may seem trivial, and the president must surely hope the Indonesians don’t take it personally.

The U.S. needs major changes to its financial system so consumers are better protected, banks fortified and the economy safeguarded from sliding into another Depression, President Barack Obama said Saturday.

Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, has bowed to American demands to suspend the construction of settlement homes in east Jerusalem ahead of his departure today for a visit to Washington DC, it was reported last night.

A national "Day of Anger" in Russia has brought out thousands of demonstrators and a tough government response. Demonstrations against the government of Vladimir Putin attracted more than 1,000 people in several cities, but in many places rallies were banned.

Peter Kent recently returned from a three day trip (February 17-20) to Honduras, proudly declaring the mission a success. As Canada's Minister of State for the Americas, Kent is the Tory government's point person for Canada's growing political and economic interests in the region. Honduras has become an important focus of those interests, since the military coup last June against the moderately left-leaning president, Manuel Zelaya, swung the country sharply back to the right.

When people struggle to provide for themselves, their animals often suffer first. That is why a few dedicated people in the US State of Florida are helping to save horses abandoned by their owners.

As the availability of electric cars expands, one of the largest U.S. home builders has begun offering to pre-wire homes for charging stations. Los Angeles-based KB Home has announced that it will offer the feature on custom-built homes so consumers won't have to add a high-voltage box later.

MONTERREY, Mexico (AP) — A shootout erupted in the streets of a northeastern Mexican city Friday, killing two suspected drug cartel gunmen and wounding a soldier

A pro-democracy activist jailed for months in Myanmar after trying to visit his sick mother in prison arrived home in the United States on Friday, capping weeks of discussions between the ruling military junta and the U.S. State Department.

Washington says it is ready to be engaged in the Six Party talks as soon as North Korea decides to resume the stalled negotiations, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of State said.

Pope Benedict XVI addresses Ireland on Saturday in a letter apologizing for the sex abuse scandal here — a message being watched closely by Catholics from Boston to Berlin to see if it also acknowledges decades of Vatican-approved cover-ups.

The Large Hadron Collider has achieved a record for the highest energy yet achieved in a particle accelerator after successfully circulating two 3.5 TeV proton beams at just after 5.20am this morning.

The Motion Picture Country House was set up six decades ago with donations from stars of the big screen to look after elderly actors and unsung industry heroes including soundmen, lighting technicians and grips.

The trouble started when Raj Patel appeared on American TV to plug his latest book, an analysis of the financial crisis called The Value of Nothing.

This document was clearly intended as a rebuttal to the annual US State Department Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2009, released two days earlier.

Hundreds of Cuban government supporters have heckled members of the "Ladies in White" rights group marching in protest through the streets of Havana. The women - wives and mothers of jailed dissidents - are staging a week of protests on the anniversary of Fidel Castro's 2003 Black Spring crackdown.

A leprechaun bank robber and his getaway driver were killed in a shootout with police after a St Patrick’s Day raid in Tennessee.

The biggest swindler in the history of Wall Street has reportedly been beaten up in prison by a drug dealer with a black belt in judo in a dispute over money.

One way or another, the fate of health care reform is going to be decided in the next few days. If House Democratic leaders find 216 votes, reform will almost immediately become the law of the land. If they don’t, reform may well be put off for many years — possibly a decade or more.

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama on Wednesday took to the Fox News Channel, derided by his White House as a wing of the Republican Party, to sell his embattled health care overhaul in an interview punctuated with interruptions from the host and chiding from the guest.

US President Barack Obama signs the HIRE Act, a 17.6 billion dollar jobs bill that encourages businesses to hire workers, alongside lawmakers during a ceremony in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington, DC on Thursday. The legislation includes tax breaks for businesses that hire new workers and infrastructure investments.

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama, facing criticism from advocates of immigration reform, pledged Thursday "to do everything in my power" to get immigration legislation moving in Congress this year.

The Chinese government is fiercely resisting U.S. and international pressure to allow its currency to appreciate to a market-based level, launching an offensive on multiple fronts to try and discredit the allegations, garner international sympathy and lobby behind the scenes to prevent any action from being taken.

“Joint venture agreements that allow American jobs to be outsourced in the midst of attempting to recover from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression cannot be allowed. Now is not the time to make it easier to ship jobs overseas,” Rep. Tim Bishop said.

Federal safety regulators investigating the crash of a Toyota Prius in suburban New York said Thursday that the car’s computer showed no evidence of braking by the driver at the time of the crash.

The Pennsylvania woman accused of recruiting men on the Internet to wage jihad in southern Asia and Europe pleaded not guilty Thursday to all counts in federal court in Philadelphia.

As the budget crisis in Illinois deepens, the state government is more openly seeking to use its deficits to push through long-planned attacks on the working class. Many of the measures being planned will severely impact students and youth, as well as teachers and educational workers, both active and retired.

Barack Obama, the US president, has postponed his trip to Indonesia and Australia in an attempt to push his historic healthcare reform bill through Congress.

Russia and the United States have made "substantial progress" in negotiating a new nuclear arms disarmament deal, the US secretary of state has said.

Eight states and the District of Columbia don't have laws that specifically bar insurance companies from using domestic violence as a pre-existing condition to deny health coverage, according to a study from the National Women's Law Center. The states are Idaho, Mississippi, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota and Wyoming. The study by the nonpartisan, nonprofit center focused on individual coverage, not group coverage. Some of the states, particularly North Carolina, argue that other statutes on their books address the issue. At least one of the health care bills circulating in Congress includes a specific federal prohibition on the use of domestic violence as a pre-existing condition. Other bills include blanket bans on pre-existing conditions.

According to the ACLU of Maryland, a 13-year-old female student at Roberto Clemente Middle School in Germantown refused to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance on Jan. 27. The teacher reportedly ordered the girl out into the hallway, where he threatened the girl with detention and then sent her to the school counselor's office. The next day, when the student again refused to stand for the pledge, the teacher called school officers to remove her from the classroom and take her to the counselor's office once again. "When the student’s mother reached out to an assistant principal for help in dealing with the teacher’s abusive and improper actions, the official said her daughter should instead apologize for her 'defiance.' The student did apologize, twice," the ACLU states. The right to sit silently during the Pledge of Allegiance has been held up by the US Supreme Court, and is enshrined in Maryland state law and Mongtomery County Public Schools' own policies, reports the Washington Post.

Not long after the Twin Towers fell, Dick Cheney declared the death of more than two centuries of American tradition. "It will be necessary for us to be a nation of men, and not laws," he said. The then vice-president did his best to follow through by riding roughshod over the constitution and international laws by promoting torture, indefinite detention without trial and support for secretive military tribunals in which defendants were stripped of many of their rights.

Kathryn Winkfein, a 72-year-old great-grandmother, was tasered (twice) by an officer for getting shouty after she was pulled over for a traffic offense. Youtube commenters — ever the empathetic bunch — said Winkfein was “asking to be tasered.” Another said Winkfein clearly has to take some “responsibility” for being tasered. Worse than the police state itself are the people who can’t rush to defend the oppressors quickly enough. That student was asking for it. Grandma shoulda kept her mouth shut. Digby calls this the “normalizing of torture.” Not only are people unsurprised by tasering these days, but they watch it for entertainment on Youtube. This normalizing goes beyond tasering, however. It’s now normal for the state to monitor citizens, and for any kind of mass protest to be immediately restricted by the government.

The concept of permanent war economy originated in 1944 with an article by Ed Sard (alias Frank Demby, Walter S. Oakes and T.N. Vance, a Trotskyist) who predicted a post-war arms race. He argued at the time that the USA would retain the character of a war economy; even in peacetime, US military expenditure would remain large, reducing the percentage of unemployed compared to the 1930s. He extended this analysis in 1950 and 1951.[1] The term was also used by the CEO of General Electric and vice-chairman of the War Production Board, Charles E. Wilson ("Electric Charlie," not to be confused with "Engine Charlie," Charles Erwin Wilson of General Motors) to refer to an institutionalized war economy —ie. a semi-command economy to be directed by corporation executives, based on military industry, and funded by government. The term refers to the economic component within the military-industrial complex (MIC) (aka. "the Iron Triangle") whereby the collusion between militarism and war profiteering are manifest as a permanently subsidised industry. Wilson warned at the close of World War II that the US must not return to a civilian economy, but must keep to a "permanent war economy."[2]

Why is the national security community treating the "Enemy Belligerent, Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010," introduced by Sens. John McCain and Joseph Lieberman on Thursday as a standard proposal, as a simple response to the administration's choices in the aftermath of the Christmas Day bombing attempt? A close reading of the bill suggests it would allow the U.S. military to detain U.S. citizens without trial indefinitely in the U.S. based on suspected activity. Read the bill here, and then read the summarized points after the jump. According to the summary, the bill sets out a comprehensive policy for the detention, interrogation and trial of suspected enemy belligerents who are believed to have engaged in hostilities against the United States by requiring these individuals to be held in military custody, interrogated for their intelligence value and not provided with a Miranda warning.

by Martha Rose Crow, M.S. Auto comes from the Greek reflexive pronoun while genocide comes from the Latin words gens meaning "race, tribe" and -cidere meaning "kill." (source: http://wikipedia.org) American Autogenocide is the deliberate, systematic and legal murder of American citizens by socially-engineering the die-off of populations that are “problematic” for the interests of wealth and power. Most victims prematurely die from social forces targeted at them to cause them to wear out by stress. This process is called "Weathering Away" or "Attrition By Stress." Although it has to be “legal,” autogenocide is always committed under the radar so the media won’t be compelled to report it and so the people won’t see it or understand it. More, the genocide is blamed on the victims and their deaths are hidden-attributed-to other causes rather than the primary one of autogenocide. What is different between this genocide and other genocides is that this unique genocide doesn't produce mass graves. Instead, the victims are spread over a large geographic area and buried singly, thereby hiding the body count. This keeps the deaths sanitized and homogenized. It also keeps the autogenocide surreal; thus enabling the village to deny It's existence when clues to It's existence are ambundant and abundantly transparent.

from Gilad Atzmon

A new brilliant work by Anthony Lawson

Extract: There can be absolutely no doubt that Israel has created an inhuman, illegal and utterly disgraceful Apartheid state, and the international community will never be able to excuse itself if it takes no action against this blatant, ongoing and in-plain-sight crime against humanity.

Please join the millions of decent people around the world who are crying out against Israel's ongoing persecution of the Palestinians. Send the link to this video to your elected representative and make sure he or she does something about it. You have to ask yourself: If I keep quiet, will it ever end?

http://www.gilad.co.uk/writings/israeli-apartheid-and-the-nakba-a-new-brilliant-work-by-anth.html