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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  • Drone Assassination: Inconvenient Facts

    Author Laurie Calhoun says, “We have been assured by President Biden that Ayman al-Zawahiri was killed alone, and no one else was injured by the strike, not even his family. What a curious claim to make, given that family members were considered fair game for attack throughout the ‘war on terror.'”

  • Pelosi “Playing with Fire” Regarding China

    James Bradley, author of many bestsellers concerning U.S. policy in the Pacific and Asia says, “Pelosi is indeed ‘playing with fire’ as Xi says… military conflict regarding Taiwan will happen if the U.S. government starts or provokes it.”

  • 77 Years After Hiroshima, Public “Shockingly Oblivious” to Threat of Nuclear War

    Co-founder of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki Peace Committee of the National Capital Area, John Steibach says, “The public is shockingly oblivious to the threat of global nuclear war. This is the most dangerous period, even exceeding the Cuban missile crisis.”

  • Health Advocates Say “We Can’t Fail” to Accurately Frame Monkeypox

    Days after the World Health Organization declared monkeypox a global emergency, the U.S. has reported more than 3,000 confirmed cases of the virus. The Biden administration is likely to follow the WHO’s lead by the end of the week in a move that would expand the nation’s ability to respond to the virus.

  • Healthcare Companies Fighting Drug Price Reform

    New reporting shows that Republican lawmakers are working behind closed doors to “tank” the Inflation Reduction Act’s drug-pricing provisions. Public Citizen advocate Steve Knievel says that Democrats “should do what they can now––full stop.” 

  • Big Tech’s “Corporate Welfare” and $1 Trillion Spent on Stock Buybacks

  • Amazon Acquires One Medical, Expanding the Company’s “Data-opoly”

    Amazon announced last week it would buy primary health care provider One Medical for nearly $4 billion. Maurice Stucke, a professor of antitrust and privacy law, says that the concern here is not that major companies “are getting the same data but more of it… the concern is that they’re getting another important piece of…

  • AIPAC Targeting Pro-Israeli Jewish Congressman

    Ronald Aronson says that AIPAC’s targeting of Rep. Andy Levin is because of his proposed Two-State Solution Act, something which has been neglected “except as a shibboleth to which lip service must be given to undercut accusations of ‘apartheid.'”

  • Democrats Keeping Greens Off Ballot in North Carolina

    Legal counsel for the Center for Competitive Democracy, Oliver Hall condemns the North Carolina State Board of Elections for failing to attest the North Carolina Green Party as a new political party.

  • Researchers Learning More About the Neurological Effects of Long Covid

    Recent research is shedding light on how SARS-CoV-2 “readily forms aggregated protein clumps that look very similar to amyloid deposits seen in the brains of people with neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.”

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