News Releases

  • Interviews Available: * Mideast * Venezuela

    SARAH ANNE MINKIN JOSHUA RUEBNER A member of Jews for Peace in Palestine and Israel, Minkin will attend the National Rally in Solidarity with Israel today in Washington at the Capitol. She said today: “There is a growing Jewish movement in this country and around the world working for justice and peace for Israelis and Palestinians.” Ruebner, co-founder of the group, said today: “As Jews who love justice and peace, it’s offensive to us that, in our name, Israel is pursuing policies completely out of line with the truths of Judaism.” More Information KATHY KELLY, JEFF GUNTZEL Members of Voices…


  • Taxation Without Representation — and Representation Without Taxation

    BILL ALLISON Co-author of The Cheating of America: How Tax Avoidance and Evasion by the Super Rich Are Costing the Country Billions — and What You Can Do About It, Allison is managing editor at the Center for Public Integrity. More Information SCOTT KLINGER (via Betsy Leondar-Wright) Co-director of Responsible Wealth and a chartered financial analyst, Klinger is the author of United for a Fair Economy’s new report “Titans of the Enron Economy: The 10 Habits of Highly Defective Corporations.” He said today: “Enron’s profits in the five years ending in 2000 were $1.8 billion, which would mean $625 million…


  • Interviews Available: Mideast Crisis

    DIAA HADID Hadid, an Australian citizen, is assisting Ittijah, a Haifa-based network of Arab associations. With many phone lines in the West Bank cut, Ittijah is connecting media to Palestinian civilians in the West Bank. More Information NAJEH JARRAR Professor of sociology at An-Najah National University, which is in Nablus, Jarrar is currently in Jenin. He said today: “For 10 days, we’ve been under curfew, no electricity, no water, a shortage of food. The Israelis conquered the city four days ago and searched the houses one by one. Today they forced out the residents of the refugee camp. Some of…


  • Israeli Palestinian Conflict: Voices

    ALI ABUNIMAH Abunimah is vice president of the Arab-American Action Network More Information MARC ELLIS Ellis is director of the Center for American and Jewish Studies at Baylor University. He is author of Practicing Exile: The Religious Odyssey of a American Jew and a recent essay about this year’s Holocaust Remembrance Day (which is Tuesday) entitled “A Revolutionary Coincidence.” EMAD FRAITEKH Internet director for the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Fraitekh is from Nablus. Two of his cousins were killed in Nablus when a missile from an Apache helicopter hit their home late last week. He is in contact…


  • Crisis in Middle East: Interviews Available

    JOEL CAMPAGNA Program coordinator on the Middle East and North Africa for the Committee to Protect Journalists, Campagna said today: “We are outraged by the Israeli army’s continuing attacks against journalists. Today’s incident in Ramallah, in which the army fired stun grenades and rubber bullets at reporters, is reprehensible. On several occasions in recent days, the Israel Defense Forces have opened fire on, or in the direction of, working journalists, in a clear effort to intimidate journalists reporting in the West Bank. These actions must cease and we call on the IDF to lift the restrictions now in place on…


  • U.S. and Israeli Policies: The Road Ahead

    SIMONA SHARONI Sharoni is professor of peace and conflict studies and Middle East politics at Evergreen State College and executive director of the Consortium on Peace Research, Education and Development. An Israeli Jew who served in the Israeli army, she said today: “Sharon will probably do as much damage as he can before Powell gets to Israel next week, the same way he did before Zinni’s trip. Israel’s leaders have proven that they can go into the West Bank towns anytime they want. There should be an inquiry commission to investigate allegations of war crimes committed by Israel in the…


  • Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Interviews Available

    CHRIS TOENSING Editor of Middle East Report, Toensing talked this morning with Boston Globe reporter Anthony Shadid, who was shot yesterday. Shadid has written for Middle East Report. Toensing said today: “The bullet missed Anthony’s spinal cord by a centimeter. The talk of him being ‘caught in the crossfire’ is misleading. The circumstantial evidence is that an Israeli sharpshooter hit him. His jacket clearly said ‘TV’ on both the front and back. The Israelis slowed his treatment by trying to prevent his Palestinian translator from leaving Ramallah with him. Israel has demanded that all journalists get out of Ramallah. This…


  • Interviews Available on McCain-Feingold Law

    JOHN MOYERS Editor and publisher of TomPaine.com, Moyers wrote the recent article “Measuring the First Step: Campaign Finance Reform and the ‘Fannie Lou Hamer Standard.’” He said today: “At best, McCain-Feingold is a first step. It does nothing to get at the heart of the problem, which is that we have privately financed public servants. That’s oxymoronic. He who pays the piper calls the tune — we need to give candidates a clean money option.” More Information SPENCER OVERTON An acting professor of law at the University of California at Davis specializing in voting rights, campaign finance and property law,…


  • Interviews Available: Perspectives on Arab Summit

    AS’AD ABUKHALIL Associate professor of political science at California State University, Stanislaus, and research fellow at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, AbuKhalil is author of the just-released book Bin Laden, Islam, and America’s New “War on Terrorism” and The Historical Dictionary of Lebanon. He said today: “The Arab people are not holding their breath over the results of this summit. Twenty-five Arab summits have been held in the name of ‘liberating Palestine’ while the plight of Palestinians continued to worsen and while Israeli occupation expanded. The U.S. government may be holding its…


  • Bush’s Latin America Trip: Interviews Available

    LARRY BIRNS and ALEX VOLBERDING Birns is director of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs and Volberding is a research fellow there. Birns said today: “Bush’s trip is more about ginning up enthusiasm for the ‘war on terrorism’ and the ‘drug war’ than aimed at promoting meaningful progress at democratization and human rights. Bush’s heralded $5 billion in aid carries stiff conditions mandating that recipient countries accept the Treasury Department’s economic game plan and is almost insignificant given the magnitude of world poverty — over 40 percent of the population of Latin America lives below the poverty line…. Bush’s call to…


  • Biden’s Executive Order on Asylum Seekers

    “The current numbers [of border crossings] are much lower than in 2023, but still higher than 2,500 daily. These new quotas exclude various groups, including people who arrive with previously-scheduled appointments made with CBPOne App, the app used by Customs and Border Patrol. People from Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, and Venezuela also have a special [Temporary…

  • Nuclear Peril: One Year After Death of Daniel Ellsberg

    The one-year anniversary of Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg’s death on June 16 is being marked by Daniel Ellsberg Week and the release of a new documentary directed by Oscar-nominated filmmaker Judith Ehrlich, with never-before-seen footage of Ellsberg warning about heightened dangers of nuclear war. Now premiering online without charge, the 37-minute film “A Common…

  • Biden Allowing More Israeli Atrocities

    A London Times investigation recently found: “The Israeli government insists that Hamas formally sanctioned sexual assault on October 7, 2023. But investigators say the evidence does not stand up to scrutiny.” The piece quotes Orit Sulitzeanu, the executive director of Israel’s Association of Rape Crisis Centers: “The politicization of rape by the Israeli government was…

  • U.S. Jury Holds Chiquita Liable for Colombian Death Squad’s Murder of Banana Workers

    Common Dreams reports: “U.S. Jury Holds Chiquita Liable for Colombian Death Squad’s Murder of Banana Workers” that: “In what case litigants are calling the first time an American jury has held a U.S. corporation legally liable for atrocities abroad, federal jurors in Florida on Monday found that Chiquita Brands International financed a Colombian paramilitary death…

  • U.S. “Ceasefire” a “Ploy to Sabotage the Rule of Law”

    Reports indicate that the U.S. government is pushing for a vote in the UN Security Council today on a resolution it drafted. UN whistleblower Craig Mokhiber commented: “A distorted U.S. draft that would (1) divert diplomacy from the UN to a U.S. controlled process (2) compel Hamas to accept but not Israel (3) dictate to…

  • New U.S. ICBM Tests Spark Criticism

    The coordinator of the coalition, Emma Claire Foley, is the author of the landmark report “The Real Cost of ICBMs.” After this week’s tests, in an article titled “America’s Nuclear Missiles Make Its Citizens Less Safe,” she wrote that ICBMs “are not only strategically impractical but a threat to the lives of millions.”

  • The Corporate Power Brokers Behind AIPAC’s War on the Squad

    “AIPAC wading into elections was nothing new. … But the sheer scale of AIPAC’s spending – enabled by Supreme Court decisions that have unleashed the distorting influence of big money in elections – and the tactics being used are more recent developments. These pro-Israel groups now directly intervene in Democratic primary races, flooding the airwaves with negative ads defaming…

  • Assessing Race-Neutral Tests for Lung Function

    A new study shows the implications of adopting race-neutral equations when physicians are testing for lung function.

  • 1967 War Myths Key to Gaza Today

    “Most people, even those knowledgeable about the Middle East, if asked how Israel portrayed its invasion of Gaza and Sinai in 1967, will say that it claimed self-defense on a rationale that Egypt was about to invade. In fact, that is inaccurate. In the Security Council, Israel claimed that Egypt had initiated hostilities by shelling…

  • Palestinian Groups Call to Declare Gaza a Famine-Stricken Area

    The groups “call on the United Nations and the Palestinian Authority to immediately declare Gaza a famine-stricken area due to famine, environmental pollution, and the spread of diseases.”

Mastodon