World News & Views

“His homeland, Gaza, is surrounded, starved, attacked, forgotten. He is a profoundly humane witness to one of the great injustices of our time. He is the voice of the voiceless.”

I was sitting in San Francisco, something like halfway between England and its former convict colony, Australia, when I stumbled on news that the Queen of England had placed former Australian Prime Minister John Howard, one of President George Bush's closest allies, very near the top of her list of 458 Australian birthday honors on June 9, just eight days after Australia's new Prime Minister Kevin Rudd finally pulled the last of the Australian troops that John Howard had, in 2003, committed to our Iraq War.

Vieques is an exquisite white-sand-trimmed island, a jewel in the blue Caribbean, where the 10,000 Viequenses fight valiantly for cleanup of massive contamination left by the U.S. Navy.

Sami Al-Hajj was released after spending more than seven years in U.S. custody. He was released without ever being prosecuted.

35 percent of the National Assembly members are Black, up from 33 percent in 2003 and 28 percent in 1998. Forty-three percent of the National Assembly members are women, making Cuba one of the worlds’ leaders in the percentage of women in representative government.

What’s different is you’re going to hear the voices of the people. You don’t usually hear the voice of the people.

While Washington assures that its sole interest in the region is combating “new threats” – terrorism, drug trafficking and the Maras gangs of Central America – Latin American people often see it as the pursuit of “imperialist” interests dictated by energy needs.

In San Francisco, more than a thousand people marched from Local 10’s union hall, led by the Local 10 Drill Team, along the Embarcadero where the 1934 Big Strike took place.

Supposedly, the UN occupation and the 2006 election had allowed Haitians to forget that its democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, had been overthrown in a violent coup. The massive protest over food prices has shattered this facade.

“We’re under domestic insurgency. If we don’t get it, it will get us.” – California Attorney General Jerry Brown, Anti-Gang Conference, Riverside, Calif., December 2007 “We’re mounting a coordinated, aggressive suppression strategy that targets the worst offenders and the most violent gangs. We’re converging local, state, federal and even international efforts … coming at them with everything we have.” – Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Feb. 8, 2007, press conference

Since 1963 West Papua, a land whose rich natural resources are being exploited by multi-national corporations, has been occupied by the Indonesian armed forces. The people of West Papua have been subjected to gross human rights violations including rape, torture, cultural genocide, murder and massacre.

A group of journalists is determined to seek a fair retrial of death row prisoner, noted journalist and former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal, and they point to evidence they say provides further proof of his innocence: photos from the crime scene that the jury never had the chance to see.

For small non-commercial radio stations across the country, the ability to stream programs on the Internet is indispensable. Instead of being limited to the wattage granted to them by the FCC, streaming on-line allows stations to reach listeners all over the world.

"There is nothing divine about something built to destroy life," said lifelong war resister and Western Shoshone elder Carrie Dann, as she was arrested, yet again, protesting "Divine Strake."

Multi-award winning photojournalist, Malaika Kambon, in 2004 detailed the crushing evidence of capitalist imperialist monster maneuvers the U.S. used then, bringing current seven years hence the rooted reality of Haiti’s and Iraq’s ongoing struggles today.

I say stop the privatization of the Hunters Point Shipyard before we have more corruption to clean up than toxics.