Koch Industries involved with Canadian oil for fifty years.
By David Sassoon, InsideClimate News
Over the last decade, Charles and David Koch have emerged into public view as billionaire philanthropists pushing a libertarian brand of political activism that presses a large footprint on energy and climate issues. They have created and supported non-profit organizations, think tanks and political groups that work to undermine climate science, environmental regulation and clean energy. They are also top donors to politicians, most of them Republicans, who support the oil industry and deny any human role in global warming.
Bin Laden had plans for tenth anniversary of 9/11.
by Gwynne Dyer
I wanted you to be the first to know. It has just been revealed by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point Military Academy in the United States that I am on a very short list of journalists (eight in western countries, and seven others in India, Pakistan and Arab countries) to whom Osama bin Laden wanted to send "special media material" on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the United States. To what do I owe this honour?
I can't vouch for the authenticity of the letters that the American forces seized when they raided bin Laden's house in northern Pakistan a year ago, but according to the CTC's translation the plan was to send these carefully selected and named journalists a site address and password "at the right time" so that we could download his "special material."
That never happened, because bin Laden was killed before the anniversary rolled round, but it does raise an interesting question. None of the people he named (me, Bob Fisk of theIndependentin Britain, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh in the United States, and independent journalist Eric Margolis in Canada, for example) has actually written in favour of al-Qaida and its goals — so what did he think he would gain by sending us the stuff?
The answer, I suspect, is that he had been reduced to grasping at straws…
Infections and errors due to understaffing: authors.
by Beatrice Fantoni for the Windsor Star
The problem of hospital-acquired infections and medical error is much worse than governments would have us believe, the authors of a new book say, and the cuts to Ontario's health care spending will exacerbate the problem.
When US gun culture meets segregation, Trayvon Martin seems to be the enemy within.
by Rowland Atkinson and Oliver Smith
George Zimmerman, who shot Trayvon Martin at a gated community in Sanford, Florida, in February, is to be charged with second-degree murder. The case, in which Martin, an unarmed black teenager, died, reminds us how young African-American males face prejudice and heightened risks of death or harm.
Progressive values now stretch from coast to coast.
by Michael Den Tandt
An extraordinary transformation has occurred, or more precisely appeared above the waterline. It is a change so epochal, so profound, you’d think Canadians would be in the streets, cheering. But then, this is Canada: Celebratory back patting is not our cup of tea.
The big news, which will never make a bold headline, is just this: Across this country, from coast to coast to coast, there is now a nearly unanimous view that the old, divisive, angry debates about matters of individual faith and morals are over. And we’re not going back there. Not any time soon, probably not ever.
Discrimination based on race and gender and sexual orientation are history, too, for the most part. There are still racists, homophobes and gender-haters in Canada, of course. And there are aberrations (Afro-centric schools in Toronto, for example). But the shared expectation of equality under the law for all, is now so firmly embedded as to be foundational. This is something interesting, unique — and new…
Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem.
by by Thomas E Mann and Norman J Ornstein for the Washington Post
Rep Allen West, a Florida Republican, was recently captured on video asserting that there are “78 to 81” Democrats in Congress who are members of the Communist Party. Of course, it’s not unusual for some renegade lawmaker from either side of the aisle to say something outrageous. What made West’s comment — right out of the McCarthyite playbook of the 1950s — so striking was the almost complete lack of condemnation from Republican congressional leaders or other major party figures, including the remaining presidential candidates.
It’s not that the GOP leadership agrees with West; it is that such extreme remarks and views are now taken for granted.
We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.
Investigators report a complex disaster, a disastrous response.
Yoichi Funabashi and Kay Kitazawa
On March 11, 2011, an earthquake and tsunami crippled the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station. The emerging crisis at the plant was complex, and, to make matters worse, it was exacerbated by communication gaps between the government and the nuclear industry. An independent investigation panel, established by the Rebuild Japan Initiative Foundation, reviewed how the government, the Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco), and other relevant actors responded.
In this article, the panel’s program director writes about their findings and how these players were thoroughly unprepared on almost every level for the cascading nuclear disaster. This lack of preparation was caused, in part, by a public myth of “absolute safety” that nuclear power proponents had nurtured over decades and was aggravated by dysfunction within and between government agencies and Tepco, particularly in regard to political leadership and crisis management. The investigation also found that the tsunami that began the nuclear disaster could and should have been anticipated and that ambiguity about the roles of public and private institutions in such a crisis was a factor in the poor response at Fukushima…
The US war and occupation of Afghanistan was supposed to bring stability and democracy. Instead, Afghanistan remains a country on the brink of disaster — one that has clearly been exacerbated by the US presence. More than 10 years after the US war began, in spite of the presence of about 2,000 international aid groups, at least $3.5-billion in humanitarian funds and $58-billion in development assistance, humanitarian conditions in Afghanistan remain abysmal.
This past winter, one of the harshest in recent years, compounded the suffering of those living in refugee camps — an estimated 35,000 people just in the capital of Kabul, and many more around the country.
"We, the undersigned armed terrorist groups, hereby promise to stop all violence in Syria and surrender all our weapons to the Syrian regime. We will no longer carry out the orders of Israel, the United States, Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, who have been financing our campaign of armed terrorism against the Syrian people. Love, the terrorists of the Free Syrian Army."
Romney Republicans suddenly insist that raising children is "work".
by Laura Flanders
For all the shameful sucking up to multimillionaire mom Ann Romney after Democratic pundit Hilary Rosen accused her of never having worked "a day in her life," the reality is neither Republicans nor Democrats treat most parenting as work, and thousands of poor women are living in poverty today as living proof of that fact.
Do we need to state the obvious? Women of different classes are beaten with different rhetorical bats. For the college-educated and upwardly aspiring, there's the "danger" of career ambitions. Ever since women started aspiring to have men's jobs, backlashers have told those women that they're enjoying their careers at the expense of their kids' well being. They really can't have it all.
They'll raise monsters, or worse, they'll grow old on the shelf. Remember the Harvard/Yale mob that made headlines with a "study" showing that unmarried women over thirty had a slimmer chance of matrimony than they had of being taken out by a terrorist? Susan Faludi took them apart in Backlash! But the evil spawn of that story still circulate. The media still love stories about stay-at-home moms and professional women are still punished for wanting to succeed. For the poor, though, it's very different.
Following Rosen's remark, Ann Romney tweeted her first tweet: "I made a choice to stay home and raise five boys. Believe me, it was hard work." Her husband's campaign hoisted that cudgel high and they have been beating Rosen and the Democrats with it for almost a week.
It was a relief, then, to see this gotcha clip from Mitt Romney at a campaign event in January, in which he said mothers on welfare should be forced to get a job outside the home or lose their government benefits…
Video: Mitt Romney explains to a crowd why he wants welfare single mothers "to have the dignity of work".
