Paul Street, ZSpace, 12 August 2009

The United States’ “representative democracy,” crippled by “too much [corporate and military] representation and too little [actual popular] democracy” (Arundhati Roy) abounds with Kafka-esque, Orwellian, and Vonneguttian absurdity. Take, for one example among many, the determination of the United States Congress’s fifty-two “Blue Dog Democrats” [1] to de-rail any sort of mildly robust public health insurance plan that might be able to remotely counter the nation’s for-profit health insurance firms.

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Related:
Dave Lindorff: Progressives Should be Shutting Down These So-Called ‘Health Care Town Meetings’ Too

By Iqbal Tamimi, Palestinian Mothers, 12 August 2009

I have been reading an article by Robin-Yassin Kassab, entitled ‘A visit to Hebron’. Yassin Kassab is the author of ‘The Road from Damascus’. This time he was not writing about Damascus, he was writing about my home town Al-Khaleel, known to the Western world by the name of Hebron. In his article he describes his visit to Al-Khaleel accompanied by a number of wonderful writers and publishers, amongst them Michael Palin, Henning Mankel, Deborah Moggach, Claire Messud and MG Vassanji, and he describes the misery of the people in my hometown under the illegal Israeli occupation. Those writers have been able to witness the very painful reality when they travelled to Palestine to participate in the Palestine Festival of Literature.

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Millennium Challenge Corp. poured millions into Honduras in months leading up to putsch
Bill Conroy, the narcosphere, 9 August 2009

The coup d’état that rocked Honduras in late June and removed democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya from office, sending him into exile in Costa Rica, was preceded by a multi-million dollar build-up of foreign aid from a U.S. agency that includes on its board of directors the president of the International Republican Institute as well as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

[Read the report]

Related:
Al Giordano: Too Cute by Half on Honduras, Mr. President

The Obama administration – like its predecessors for the past three decades – has turned a blind eye to what makes illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Jerusalem possible: donations from American charities.

Emily Dische-Becker, Menassat, 5 August 2009

BEIRUT, August 5, 2009 (MENASSAT) – In a pre-dawn raid on Sunday (August 2) Israeli police clad in black riot gear evicted two Palestinian families—53 people in total—from two buildings in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem. The evictions followed a ruling by the Israeli Supreme Court that claimed Jewish families had owned the land before 1948. Two Jewish families moved in immediately after the evictions, on the same site that Israel plans to build a 200-unit settlement.

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Pajhwok Afghan News
5 August 2009

KANDAHAR CITY: Four civilians three of them children – were killed during an attack of foreign troops Tuesday night in Arghandab district of southern Kandahar province, civilians said.

Dozens of protesting villagers brought the bodies this morning from their village to the governor’s house in Kandahar City, about 12 kilometers away.

ISAF said it is investigating the incident.

A tribal elder, Haji Bacha, told Pajhwok Afghan News that foreign fighter jets had bombarded a house in their village, killing four people and injuring two others.

The village residents came to the city with the bodies and laid them in front of the governor’s house, chanting slogans against US forces. They demanded that the government investigate the attack.

[Read the report]