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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  • Democratic National Committee Blocks Its Own Autopsy

    Responding to the news that the Democratic National Committee is blocking the release of its own autopsy on the 2024 Democratic defeat, RootsAction issued a statement today pointing to the exhaustive autopsy that the group recently released: “The DNC is failing to acknowledge, much less learn from, the Democratic Party’s avoidable failures in 2024. This is a recipe…

  • Babies Freezing to Death, “Gazafication” of the West Bank

    Drop Site News reports Thursday morning: “A fourth child has frozen to death in Gaza in just 10 days — two of them babies — as Israel continues blocking tents and winter shelter aid, despite UN supplies pre-positioned at the border that could immediately shelter more than 1.3 million displaced Palestinians.”

  • * Threatening Venezuela * Gaza Genocide Never Stopped

    A mobile billboard in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the group RootsAction, demands an end to warmaking. 

  • What Men Think About Falling Birth Rates

    For Vox, Rachel Cohen Booth looked into data about men’s perspectives on falling birth rates, caregiving and domestic labor. The data shows that American men are more likely than women to see falling birth rates as a problem and more likely to desire a return to “traditional gender roles.” Booth contends that “understanding men’s attitudes…

  • Why is the National Guard in Syria?

    DeCamp is news editor of Antiwar.com and host of “Antiwar News with Dave DeCamp.” He just wrote the piece “Gunman Who Killed Three Americans in Syria Was Member of Syrian Government’s Security Forces,” which notes that President Trump and other U.S. officials “have called the incident an  ‘ISIS attack’ and have left out” the fact “that the…

  • Autopsy: “How Democrats Lost the White House”

    A new report by RootsAction, titled “How Democrats Lost the White House,” conducts an autopsy on the 2024 presidential election, concluding that Vice President Kamala Harris lost while courting “moderate” Republicans rather than speaking to her core bloc: Democratic working-class, young, and progressive voters. The pivotal factor in her loss, the autopsy suggests, was the…

  • Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices

    The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices met last week to vote on changes to CDC recommendations for the hepatitis B vaccine series for infants. Public Citizen notes that the committee “voted 8 to 3 to recommend replacing the long-standing practice of administering the first dose of the hepatitis B…

  • Google/YouTube Accelerating Attack on Free Speech on Palestine

    “The scale of content deleted specifically due to U.S. sanctions is also difficult to quantify since such decisions happen without transparency. A recent investigation by The Intercept revealed that YouTube quietly deleted the accounts of three prominent Palestinian human rights organizations due to the Trump administration’s sanctions against the groups for assisting the International Criminal…

  • Anti-Genocide Activists Target Huge Military Hub for Israel in New Jersey

    “Early morning Friday, dozens of protestors convened at 1A Colony Road in Jersey City to picket G&B Packing, whose warehouse is operated by Interglobal Forwarding Services — a company that works closely with the Israeli Ministry of Defense and U.S. federal contractors to ship military cargo to Israel and supply its genocidal assault on Gaza.“

  • YouTube Deletes Musician’s Entire Catalogue

    “It seems abundantly obvious to me that everyone who believes in free expression, whatever side of various political equations they may be on, should be concerned about what YouTube just did to me. If it could happen to me because of my allegedly controversial political viewpoints, it could happen to you because of yours.”

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