“Security forces in Bahrain clashed on Thursday with anti-government protesters in street battles that left at least one boy dead amid high tensions on the second anniversary of the uprising in the Gulf nation, activists said. The demonstrators also included groups chanting against talks aimed at easing the Arab Spring-inspired unrest in the country, showing…

KATHY KELLY, [email] Just back from Afghanistan, Kelly is co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence. She said today: “Obama is a ‘hawkish’ president who likes to sound ‘dovish.’ He spoke of ending the U.S. war in Afghanistan, and yet the Pentagon has already told the Afghan government that U.S. troops will remain in Afghanistan till…

“The content of the president’s state of the union regarding climate was un-presidential. Trying to resuscitate broken carbon markets that have not worked in a decade since they began in Europe is a recipe for climate catastrophe. The failure to assemble the growing litany of oil and energy executives that are already doing more than…

“The North Korean government is angry about “massive war games that the United States and South Korea [engage in] almost every year — one took place last week. And they see the United States and these war games as very hostile and as a threat to their sovereignty, as they put it.”

“Under each of the past two presidents, executive fiat, enabling legislative statutes and judicial formalism have combined to shred our Constitution and transform America from a ‘land of the free’ into a land that loudly proclaims freedom while denying it to our own people.”

“The USPS’s financial crisis has primarily been caused by a congressional mandate, coming from the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006, that the USPS prefund the next 75 years of retiree health benefits in just a decade, by 2016. This is something that is not required of any other federal government agency or private…

‎”The USPS is custodian of post offices and art of extraordinary quality, but at the current pace of downsizing, all of its properties will soon be thrown onto the market and the U.S. will be without the public postal service mandated by the Constitution. The USPS announced last week that it will sell the central…

“Last night, NBC News’ Michael Isikoff released a 16-page ‘white paper’ prepared by the Obama DOJ that purports to justify Obama’s power to target even Americans for assassination without due process. This is not the primary OLC memo justifying Obama’s kill list — that is still concealed — but it appears to track the reasoning…

“When Secretary of State Colin Powell spoke to the U.N. Security Council on February 5, 2003, countless journalists in the United States extolled him for a masterful performance — making the case that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. The fact that the speech later became notorious should not obscure how easily truth…

“Last night’s power outage at the Super Bowl gave the world a glimpse of the daily challenges many New Orleans residents still face in the wake of rebuilding post-Katrina. Thanks to misplaced priorities that place war and partisan politics over our nation’s infrastructure needs, cities like New Orleans suffer. From New Jersey to New Orleans…