Link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2010/jun/08/freedom-of-speech-usa

Whatever one thinks of the views propounded by the (former) doyenne of the White House press corps, Helen Thomas, one of the series of punishments administered to her seems disproportionate. Soon after the 89-year-old journalist was filmed saying that Jews should "get the hell out of Palestine" and go "home" to Germany and Poland, she lost her job. (See the video here).

Link: http://www.paltelegraph.com/columnists/peter-eyre/6338-palestine-an-israeli-dumping-ground-for-radioactivetoxic-waste

We have seen the decades of suffering by the Palestinian people at the hands of the apartheid government of Israel and yet little has been said about another unseen problem that lies buried beneath the ground.

Link: http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=51753

Mel Frykberg interviews HUWAIDA ARRAF, leader of the Free Gaza flotilla. RAMALLAH - In an exclusive interview with IPS Huwaida Arraf, the chairwoman of the Free Gaza (FG) movement, which tried to break Israel’s crippling blockade on Gaza, explains what happened on the night of May 31 when Israeli commandos raided the FG humanitarian flotilla, shooting nine people dead and injuring dozens more.

Link: http://www.aclu.org/blog/racial-justice/human-rights-nightmare-occurring-our-watch

(Originally posted on the ACLU of Washington's blog.) With 5 percent of the world's population, the United States today boasts 25 percent of its prison population. Despite declining crime rates in the last three decades (even in the midst of our current recession), rates of incarceration in the U.S. have been stunning. The Economist recently called this trend "a disgrace." Even more staggering has been the racial dispararity in the people our nation incarcerates.

Link: http://www.infowars.com/erdogan-putin-israel-wont-get-our-gas/

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin said Tuesday that they don’t plan to export natural gas to Israel via a new pipeline to Turkey. “There is no such thing on our agenda,” Erdogan said at a news conference with Putin in Istanbul when asked about the gas.

Link: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/ten-allied-soldiers-killed-in-one-day-1994227.html

Ten servicemen with the Nato-led International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) for Afghanistan were killed in separate incidents yesterday, the alliance said.

Link: http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=12844

On June 7, the day Afghanistan became America’s longest-ever war, the New York Times reported on an ongoing investigation poised to prove that private security companies "are using American money to bribe the Taliban" to fuel combat and thus enhance demand for their services. The news follows a "series of events last month that suggested all-out collusion with the insurgents," the Times said.

Link: http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/366.php

Workers in Greece today stand in the forefront of the converging European class struggles against big capital's attempt to make working people pay the costs of its crisis.

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2010/06/08/08greenwire-scientist-awed-by-size-density-of-undersea-oil-98517.html

Vast underwater concentrations of oil sprawling for miles in the Gulf of Mexico from the damaged, crude-belching BP PLC well are unprecedented in "human history" and threaten to wreak havoc on marine life, a team of scientists said today, a finding confirmed for the first time by federal officials.

Link: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article7146177.ece

BP is being accused of trying to manipulate the search results on sites like Google and Yahoo, as it attempts to salvage its battered image following the oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico. The company is purchasing terms such as “oil spill”, “Deepwater Horizon” and “Gulf of Mexico”, so that when a user types these words into the search engines, the results prominently feature a “sponsored link” to BP’s official page on its response to the spill. Critics have described BP’s move as unethical. Maureen Mackey, a writer on the Fiscal Times, an online news site, said: “What it effectively does is that it bumps down other legitimate news and opinion pieces that are addressing the spill... and \[BP are\] paying big money for that.”