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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  • Pope Francis in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to Condemn Possession of Nuclear Weapons

    Pope Francis will travel to Hiroshima and Nagasaki this weekend. On Sunday, he will give a public address at the ground-zero site of the nuclear attack on Nagasaki. … “Twice in 2017, in diplomatic contexts, Francis made remarks that moved the Church away from its support of nuclear deterrence and toward advocating for the abolition…

  • Biden’s Falsehoods on Medicare for All

    “The Medicare for All Act of 2019 has 119 cosponsors — majority support of Democrats in the House. … Bernie said it best: ‘We have a system where we spend twice as much on health care as any other country, but we have 80 million uninsured and underinsured. … 500,000 people go bankrupt because of…

  • Sweden Drops Assange Case, Wikileaks Publisher Faces 175 Years in U.S. on “Espionage”

    “Mr. Assange arrived in Sweden two weeks after WikiLeaks published the Afghan War Diaries, the first of a series of four groundbreaking WikiLeaks publications attributed to whistleblower Chelsea Manning. …It is the first time the U.S. has applied the Espionage Act to a publisher. …The Trump administration is seeking a 175-year prison sentence for the…

  • Trump’s Violations of Law and Pelosi/Schiff Impeachment Agenda

    “Obviously war crimes are impeachable offenses. Trump is Commander-in-Chief and has become an accomplice to the war crimes he is pardoning. These are just the latest illegal actions by Trump that the Congress is refusing to address. Also, just yesterday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claimed that Israeli settlements are legal, which is obviously false.…

  • Biden vs. Middle Class?

    “In 2008, a month before Biden was elected vice president, [John] Hynansky [of Winner Auto Group] made his biggest political donation: $28,500 to the Democratic National Committee. The next summer, Biden told a roomful of Ukrainian leaders in Kyiv, ‘My very good friend John Hynansky, a very prominent businessman from Delaware, is here.’ That fall,…

  • Buttigieg Attacks Medicare for All, Gets Cash from Industry

    “Pharmaceutical, health insurance, and hospital industry donors have flocked to [Pete Buttigieg] all year. As of mid-2019, he was second only to Donald Trump in overall campaign cash from donors in the health sector. Among Democratic candidates, he was second to former Vice President Joe Biden in terms of pharmaceutical and health insurance donations. …A…

  • Bolivian Coup Targeting Indigenous People

    “Bolivia’s far right has exploited the power vacuum and stoked anti-indigenous sentiment. Since Morales’s resignation, many officials down the line of succession for the country’s presidency have resigned as well, to protect themselves and their families, leaving Jeanine Añez Chavez, a conservative opposition leader and second vice president of the Senate, poised to take over…

  • Top Bolivian Coup Plotters Were School of the Americas Grads

    “Kaliman sat at the top of a military and police command structure that has been substantially cultivated by the U.S. through WHINSEC [Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation], the military training school in Fort Benning, Georgia known in the past as the School of the Americas. Kaliman himself attended a course called ‘Comando y Estado…

  • Israel Bombs Palestinians as Twitter Censors Them

    “This alarming act of censorship is another indication of the complicity of major social media firms in Israel’s efforts to suppress news and information about its abuses of Palestinian rights.”

  • Bolivia: Understanding Coups

    Kathryn Ledebur, Joe Emersberger, Alan MacLeod, and more expert primary source information on the Bolivian coup. Ledebur is director of the Andean Information Network in Cochabamba and researcher, activist, and analyst with over two decades of experience in Bolivia.

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