News Items

  • Media Advisory: Whistleblowers to Speak About Surveillance and Cyber Issues

    “President Barack Obama is set to sign an executive order on Friday aimed at encouraging companies to share more information about cybersecurity threats with the government and each other, a response to attacks like that on Sony Entertainment. … Obama will sign the order at a day-long conference on cybersecurity at Stanford University in the heart of Silicon Valley.”

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  • Delegation of U.S. and UK Whistleblowers in London: News Conference on “Special Surveillance Relationship” — News Advisory

    Whistleblowers from four American and British “national security” agencies will hold a news conference in London on November 21 in a direct challenge to surveillance policies of the U.S. and UK governments. The whistleblowers — from the NSA, FBI, State Department and GCHQ — will speak about the effects of their governments’ policies on freedom of the press and democracy. They are traveling as a delegation co-sponsored by the U.S.-based organizations RootsAction.org and ExposeFacts, a project of the Institute for Public Accuracy. The news conference is being hosted by the Foreign Press Association.

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  • In Response to the Government’s Lynching of James Risen

    It has been a sharp learning curve for Jim Risen, but by having numerous grand juries and two administrations relentlessly hounding him, he has learned how deeply the government’s malevolence descends. But there was always one steadfast assertion he wound not compromise, Jim Risen assured his sources, from the very start of their first encounter, that he would never divulge their identities nor what information they provided him with.

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  • Militarization of U.S. Police: Ferguson, Mo.

    Community policing reforms came about as a corrective to the 1950-60s professional police model which created a large gulf between police and citizens. Few noticed that underlying all the CP rhetoric was a little noticed yet foretelling trend of para-militarism as found in SWAT teams. What we’re witnessing today, though, with the influence of the Dept. of Homeland Security since 9/11 — along with growing emphasis on military hardware and tactics — is the expansion of police militarization throughout entire police departments — and indeed, the entire police institution.

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  • Unconstitutional acts of war in Iraq

    President Obama ignored the wise direction of President George Washington when he casually told the nation — and Congress — that U.S. military forces will engage in acts of war in Iraq for an extended period of weeks and maybe months. Bombing, he said in a brief statement last week, is needed here and there, but he promised there will be no U.S. boots on the ground. … The announcement seemed almost an afterthought as the president headed for vacation in Martha’s Vineyard. He neglected to seek approval of Congress before authorizing bombardment of the military forces of ISIS, the…

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  • News Conference: Edward Snowden’s Passport, Political Asylum and Related Issues

    Ray McGovern, Coleen Rowley and Norman Solomon spoke at this news conference, sponsored by RootsAction.org and hosted by the Institute for Public Accuracy.

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  • NSA Veterans and Whistleblowers Respond to Obama Speech

    Minutes after President Obama’s major address on NSA surveillance on Friday, Jan. 17, the Institute for Public Accuracy held a news conference with noted NSA veterans and whistleblowers.

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  • The War on Poverty at Fifty

    Fifty years after Lyndon B. Johnson made it the centerpiece of his first State of the Union address on January 8, 1964, the War on Poverty remains one of the most embattled—and least understood—of Great Society initiatives.

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  • Edward Snowden: Profile in Courage

    Edward Snowden may go down in history as one of this nation’s most important whistleblowers. He is certainly one of the bravest.

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  • Obama’s Economic Race Legacy

    From the start, President Barack Obama has shown little interest or loyalty in the issues that affect the poor, working class and people of color in the United States. For almost his entire first term he didn’t utter the words poor or poverty. Early on he reminded African Americans: ‘I’m not the president of black America. I’m the president of the United States of America…’

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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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