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Mountaintop Removal Mining Protests in West Virginia
Hundreds of people are marching towards Blair Mountain in West Virginia to protest mountaintop removal mining. The march will culminate Saturday with a rally featuring Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Emmylou Harris, among others. You can follow the march at marchonblairmountain.org The documentary “The Last Mountain,” which examines the threat mountaintop removal mining poses to the environment, has just been released. Watch the trailer.
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* Al-Qaeda Wants U.S. to Stay? * Palestinian U.N. Membership
GARETH PORTER, porter.gareth50 at gmail.com Porter is an investigative journalist and historian specializing in U.S. national security policy and author of Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam. He just wrote the piece “Slain Writer’s Book Says U.S.-NATO War Served Al-Qaeda Strategy,” which states: “Al-Qaeda strategists have been assisting the Taliban fight against U.S.-NATO forces in Afghanistan because they believe that foreign occupation has been the biggest factor in generating Muslim support for uprisings against their governments, according to the just-published book by Syed Saleem Shahzad, the Pakistani journalist whose body was found in…
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Obama Meeting with Bahraini Despot
The Wall Street Journal reports: “President Barack Obama will meet with the crown prince of Bahrain at the White House on Tuesday, an administration official said. But in a show of how delicate relations with the U.S. ally have become, the sit-down is not officially on the president’s schedule.” HUSAIN ABDULLA, mohajer12 at comcast.net Abdulla is director of Americans for Democracy and Human Rights in Bahrain. He said today: “There will be no news conference so there will likely be no pictures together, but the reality is that Obama is meeting Salman al-Khalifa. While he’s been depicted as the more enlightened element…
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Jobs: Goolsbee Resignation and Ten Years After Bush Tax Cuts
On Sunday chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers Austan Goolsbee appeared on ABC’s “This Week” defending the administration’s record on helping to produce jobs. “It’s not a jobless recovery” he said. Later in the program, economist Paul Krugman said: “The fact is, for about 18 months, we’ve had an economy that’s recovering in a technical sense, but it’s not generating jobs faster than population growth.”
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Japan Doubles Admission of Radiation, Admits Three Meltdowns
AP is reporting today: “Japan’s government has doubled the estimate of how much radiation leaked from a tsunami-hit nuclear plant and says the damage to the reactors was greater than previously thought.” CNN International reports: “All three operating reactors at Fukushima Daiichi melted down after the plant was swamped by the tsunami that followed northern Japan’s magnitude 9 earthquake in March, Japanese authorities confirmed Monday.” Obama is meeting today with Angela Merkel, the chancellor of Germany, which just announced it will shutdown all its nuclear reactors within 11 years. ROBERT ALVAREZ, kitbob at erols.com Alvarez is a former senior policy…
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Colbert or Goolsbee: Who’s the Clown?
Nearly two years ago, Chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers Austan Goolsbee, told Comedy Central host Stephen Colbert, “A year from now we’re going to be in a very happy place.” (June 15, 2009, 1:40 mark of the video.) TIMOTHY CANOVA, canova at chapman.edu Canova is a professor of international economic law at the Chapman University School of Law in Orange, California. He is the author of numerous articles and book chapters forewarning of financial crisis and examining government intervention in the economy, including “The Federal Reserve We Need” and “Legacy of the Clinton Bubble.”
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Yemen: “Crafted Chaos”
The Christian Science Monitor is reporting: “Yemen slipped closer to a full-blown civil war today as opposition tribesmen attacked the compound of President Ali Abdullah Saleh for the first time. While the president appears to have narrowly escaped serious injury, the escalating fighting represents an unprecedented challenge to his 32-year rule.” ABDUL GHANI AL-ERYANI, agiryani at gmail.com LARA ARYANI, lara.aryani at gmail.com Al-Eryani is a founding member of the Democratic Awakening Movement. Aryani (they are father and daughter) is a lawyer based in New York City. She just wrote a piece titled “Crafting Chaos: Presidential Games and Yemen’s Escalating Violence”…
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Left-Right Alliance Against Libya War
The Wall Street Journal reports: “House Republican leaders on Wednesday abruptly canceled a vote on a resolution forcing U.S. withdrawal from Libya amid signs an … alliance of liberals and conservatives could approve the measure, indicating Congress’s growing dissatisfaction with the extent of U.S. military operations overseas. “The House had been scheduled to vote on a resolution by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D., Ohio) requiring President Barack Obama to withdraw from Libya within 15 days. The measure cites the 1973 War Powers Resolution, which says the president must get approval from Congress if a military operation lasts 60 days or more.”
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OAS Voting on Honduras, But There’s “Neither Reconciliation nor Democracy”
ALEXANDER MAIN, main at cepr.net Senior associate for international policy at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, Main said today: “Following the June 2009 coup d’etat that forcibly removed President Zelaya from power, Honduras’ participation in the OAS was suspended by unanimous decision of the 33 member states. Today, nearly two years later, there appears to be nearly unanimous support for Honduras’ readmission, with only Ecuador indicating that it is still opposed.
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Germans Abandoning Nuclear Energy
AP reports: “Europe’s economic powerhouse, Germany, announced plans Monday to abandon nuclear energy over the next 11 years, outlining an ambitious strategy in the wake of Japan’s Fukushima disaster to replace atomic power with renewable energy sources.”
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Howard Zinn