News Items

  • Affidavit by Daniel Ellsberg for Plowshare Activists Being Allowed a Defense of Necessity

    In 1971 I gave the U.S. Senate, the New York Times and the Washington Post copies of what have come to be known as The Pentagon Papers. I was arrested on twelve felony counts. My trial was dismissed because of government misconduct which figured in the impeachment proceedings against President Nixon…These considerations bear on two other elements of the necessity defense, the “lack of legal alternatives” and the “imminence” of the harms to be averted. Again, I speak from my own experience, but not only mine, in saying that it is the perceived insufficiency of other means, by themselves not…

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  • A Long List of Democratic Candidates Requires a Large Catalog of Their Funders

    By Sam Haut: As the first debates for the Democratic primary begin, and the list of candidates has grown to 24, it can be difficult to contextualize where each candidate has received funding from over the course of their time in office. What follows is a list of the Democratic candidates and the top sources for how much money they’ve made and where those top sources come from.

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  • NATO and US Foreign Policy: Dangers Ahead

    RootsAction.org held a news conference Thursday on “NATO and U.S. Foreign Policy: Dangers Ahead” hosted by the Institute for Public Accuracy. Speakers include former State Department officials Matthew Hoh, Ann Wright, as well as Martin Fleck. The event was moderated by Norman Solomon.

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  • Media Advisory: “NATO and U.S. Foreign Policy: Dangers Ahead”

    At 10 a.m. Tuesday, April 2, 2019 at the National Press Club: On the same day that President Trump is scheduled to meet with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg at the White House, this news conference will focus on the U.S.-NATO relationship. Speakers include former State Department officials Matthew Hoh and Ann Wright.

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  • Statement by Floyd Abrams in response to Attorney General nominee William Barr’s remarks on the First Amendment

    “It’s one thing to say that there could be circumstances in which a journalist’s need to protect her sources could lead to a potential finding of contempt of court if she refused to obey a court order requiring such disclosure. But the notion that a journalist could properly be jailed for publishing material that the government thinks could ‘hurt the country’ is something else entirely and would be deeply threatening to First Amendment norms in general and journalistic freedom in particular.”

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  • Statement on NAFTA’s “Kafkaesque” Turn

    The supposedly concluded renegotiation of NAFTA has reached a Kafkaesque stage. As the United States Trade Representative has stated: “The United States and Mexico have reached a preliminary agreement in principle, subject to finalization and implementation.” Not only the negotiations have not been finalized, and without Canada, but the texts remain hidden from the public.

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  • What’s the Cost of Medicare for All?

    Even a Koch-backed think tank finds Medicare for all would cut health care spending. In a report released by the Mercatus Center, a single-payer health care system would offset costs with even greater savings. The Intercept and other media reporting on this are citing the work of Drs. David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler. They are distinguished professors of health policy at the City University of New York at Hunter College and lecturers in medicine at Harvard Medical School. They have written an analysis of the work of the Koch-backed think tank, the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, which is…

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  • Trump Team Hired Israeli Spy Firm Used by Harvey Weinstein to Attack Obama Officials on Iran Deal

    “Aides to Donald Trump, the U.S. president, hired an Israeli private intelligence agency to orchestrate a ‘dirty ops’ campaign against key individuals from the Obama administration who helped negotiate the Iran nuclear deal, the Observer can reveal. People in the Trump camp contacted private investigators in May last year to ‘get dirt’ on Ben Rhodes, who had been one of Barack Obama’s top national security advisers, and Colin Kahl, deputy assistant to Obama, as part of an elaborate attempt to discredit the deal.”

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  • From the desk of Noam Chomsky

    From the desk of Noam Chomsky

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  • 15 Years Later: The Whistleblower Who Almost Blocked the Iraq War

    Media Advisory: Press Conference to Mark 15th Anniversary Of Leak by GCHQ Translator Katharine Gun Revealing US “Dirty Tricks” at UN for Iraq War When:  Thursday, 1 March 2018 at 11:00 a.m. Where:  Head office, National Union of Journalists Headland House, 72 Acton Street, London, WC1X 9NB Who:  Katharine Gun, Thomas Drake, Matthew Hoh, Jesselyn Radack This press conference will take place the day before the 15th anniversary of the Observer’s publication of the explosive March 2, 2003 story “US dirty tricks to win vote on Iraq war” — based on a leak by GCHQ translator Katharine Gun — revealing the US National Security Agency’s UN surveillance memo that aimed to grease the way for the…

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  • Long Covid: A New Report

    The Center for Economic and Policy Research and the Congressional Progressive Caucus Center released a new report last week on long Covid. 

  • “Pretty Extreme”: CDC Decision to Loosen Universal Masking in Health Care Settings

    This week, the CDC issued an update to its masking recommendations. The agency no longer recommends universal masking in health care settings. Epidemiologist Justin Feldman says the change in guidance is “pretty extreme.”

  • Patents on 7 Out of 10 Top Drugs Set to Expire This Decade: What Next?

    Patents on 7 out of 10 of the 10 highest selling drugs in the U.S. are set to expire this decade, without urgently needed patent reforms, pharmaceutical companies will be able to delay those expirations––making it nearly impossible for biosimilar generic drugs to come on the market, shutting out competition, and keeping drug prices high. 

  • The CIA Just Invested in Woolly Mammoth Resurrection Technology

    “The embrace of this technology, according to In-Q-Tel’s blog post, will help allow U.S. government agencies to read, write, and edit genetic material, and, importantly, to steer global biological phenomena that impact ‘nation-to-nation competition’ while enabling the United States ‘to help set the ethical, as well as the technological, standards’ for its use.”

  • Explosions Cause Major Damage to Both Nord Stream Pipelines

    “The era of Russian domination of gas is coming to an end, an era marked by blackmail, threats and coercion,’ Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said at a ceremony for the pipeline”

  • CIA Spying on Assange Extended to Legal Team, Other Journalists, Activists

    In addition to violating the rights of a political, the story involves breaches of an embassy’s sovereignty and the surveillance of a range of journalists, human rights defenders, and politicians. Whether they were intentional targets or collateral damage in the CIA’s war on WikiLeaks, their surveillance, like that of Assange, remains an outrageous deprivation of…

  • Researchers Find Medical Debt Worsens Health Vulnerability

    A new study found medical debt among 18 percent of householders; a higher risk of acquiring medical debt fell to those without insurance as well as those with high deductible private insurance or Medicare Advantage. Medical debt also worsened social determinants of health––causing more food insecurity, inability to pay for housing and utilities, and eviction…

  • Ukraine War: Is Media Misreporting Facilitating Escalation?

    “The Western media description is completely misleading, exaggerating the significance of Kharkov region advances, while ignoring Ukrainian setbacks in Kherson and Donbas. Also, Western media completely ignore the profound casualties inflicted on Ukrainian forces, when the Russian allies suffered relatively few losses. On all of these fronts, Ukraine may have suffered 35,000 killed and wounded,…

  • Scrutinizing AFRICOM as Neocolonial Instrument

    “Despite its rhetoric, the purpose of AFRICOM is to use U.S. military power to impose U.S. control on African land, resources and labor to service the needs of U.S. multinational corporations and the wealthy in the United States. It also serves as a major boon to ‘defense’ contractors.

  • The Consequences of Biden’s Claim “the Pandemic Is Over”

    Some public health experts expressed outrage this week after President Biden repeatedly asserted on CBS’s 60 Minutes that “the pandemic is over.” 

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