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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  • NYT Minimizing “Forever Chemicals” Threat to Fish and Military Pollution

    “The article only mentions the military twice. Where I live in this small area known as southern Maryland, Joint Base Andrews, Naval Support Facility Indian Head, Naval Support Facility Dahlgren, The Naval Air Station Patuxent River, the Webster Field Annex of the Naval Air Station, Patuxent River, the Naval Research Laboratory’s Chesapeake Bay Detachment, and…

  • Assassinated Ecuadorian Presidential Candidate’s Family Calls Killing a “State Crime”

    “Multiple videos show Fernando Villavicencio being escorted by police personnel to a vehicle that did not comply with the most basic security standards. The car was not an armored or bulletproof vehicle. The police confirmed this fact the following day in a press conference, admitting that Villavicencio’s armored car was in Guayaquil where he had…

  • Public Pharmaceuticals to Mitigate Drug Shortages

    Public pharmaceuticals are the best solution to the ongoing drug shortages in the United States.

  • “Blatant Lie”: Secret Pakistan Cable Documents U.S. Pressure to Remove Imran Khan

    “One month after the meeting with U.S. officials documented in the leaked Pakistani government document, a no-confidence vote was held in Parliament, leading to Khan’s removal from power. The vote is believed to have been organized with the backing of Pakistan’s powerful military. Since that time, Khan and his supporters have been engaged in a…

  • Activists Arrested at Nuclear Base in the Netherlands

    “activists from the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and the USA worked on a tunnel under the fence of Volkel Air Base with the intention of occupying the runway once again to call society to abolish nuclear weapons and CO2 emissions by the armed forces and to learn to solve our conflicts in such a way that…

  • What to Make of the Covid Surge?

    Recent reporting has sounded the alarm on this summer’s Covid surge. But it’s been challenging for the public to know what to make of the numbers. A new one-stop shop aggregates available data.

  • Battles Over Ukraine * Nuland * Rewriting History

    “In the nearly ten years since the Maidan Revolution, a handful of us have been sounding the alarm over the possibility of war breaking out between Russia and the West. For nearly ten years, a small minority of writers and thinkers have relentlessly advocated for a peaceful solution to the Ukraine crisis, and in the…

  • Activists Converge to Protest Nuclear Weapons in Europe Which “Threaten Genocidal Violence”

    Most of the U.S. delegates to the two peace camps “have worked for years in anti-war and disarmament campaigns, and several have been imprisoned in the United States for nonviolent actions taken against the war system.” Ellen Grady, from Ithaca, New York and a member of the delegation said, “We have to take some responsibility…

  • Oppenheimer and the Profiteers of Armageddon

    “Once Oppenheimer and other concerned scientists and policymakers failed to convince the Truman administration to simply close Los Alamos and place nuclear weapons and the materials needed to develop them under international control — the only way, as they saw it, to head off a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union — the drive…

  • Missing Americans

    By the time the Covid-19 pandemic arrived, 600,000 more Americans were dying every year than we would expect if the U.S. had mortality rates equal to comparable countries. 

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