I have yet to spend too much time digging into the corporate press reaction to the latest news from Ecuador, but I’m sure it’s not pretty. The South American country recently announced that it is…
Category: Asia
Sayyeda Zeinab Shrine Damascus. It is well known in this region that powerful foreign and domestic forces in nearly every country, but particularly Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, are increasingly acting, for purely political purposes, to ignite a…
If, as Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote, “the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons” then we are a nation of barbarians. Our vast network of federal and state prisons, with some 2.3 million inmates, rivals the gulags of totalitarian states. Once you disappear behind prison walls you become prey. Rape. Torture. Beatings. Prolonged isolation. Sensory deprivation. Racial profiling. Chain gangs. Forced labor. Rancid food. Children imprisoned as adults. Prisoners forced to take medications to induce lethargy. Inadequate heating and ventilation. Poor health care. Draconian sentences for nonviolent crimes. Endemic violence. Bonnie Kerness and Ojore Lutalo, both of whom I met in Newark, N.J., a few days ago at the office of American Friends Service Committee Prison Watch, have fought longer and harder than perhaps any others in the country against the expanding abuse of prisoners, especially the use of solitary confinement. Lutalo, once a member of the Black Liberation Army, an offshoot of the Black Panthers, first wrote Kerness in 1986 while he was a prisoner at Trenton State Prison, now called New Jersey State Prison. He described to her the bleak and degrading world of solitary confinement, the world of the prisoners like him held in the so-called management control unit, which he called “a prison within a prison.”
While joint military exercises between the Pentagon and South Korea gained tremendous attention over the last week, there have been two major maritime and ground operations carried out under United States leadership with the involvement of…
On March 14, multi-millionaire Gov. Rick Snyder appointed Kevyn Orr as an “emergency manager’ over the city of Detroit. Detroit becomes the latest city in a string of other majority African American municipalities in Michigan to fall…
Those scientists, technicians and workers of the DPRK who contributed to the success of the third underground nuclear test were accorded the most cordial hospitality in Pyongyang. From the moment they arrived in Pyongyang on…
Fed President: Too Big Banks Are Just Crony Capitalists Reuters notes that the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas – Richard Fisher – said yesterday: The largest U.S. banks are “practitioners of crony…
Introduction President Hugo Chavez was unique in multiple areas of political, social and economic life. He made significant contributions to the advancement of humanity. The depth, scope and popularity of his accomplishments mark President Chavez…
Chavez spent his last days in the army hospital of Caracas. The fourth cancer surgery in Cuba failed to improve his health. He took a decision to return. There were rumors going round that it…
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has just completed its annual gala in Washington. A reported thirteen thousand AIPAC supporters reportedly cheered the latest efforts to make Israel America’s most favored nation….