SchNews | If you knew that someone was putting poison into your water supply, what would you do? Call the authorities? Well don’t bother cos it’s the government wot’s doing it! If you live in the West Midlands or the North East, the chances are that you already have a fluoridated water supply - and comments earlier this year from Health Secretary Alan Johnson made it clear that he ...

By Scott Ritter | I am a former U.N. weapons inspector. I started my work with the United Nations in September 1991, and between that date and my resignation in August 1998, I participated in over 30 inspections, 14 as chief inspector. The United Nations Special Commission, or UNSCOM, was the organization mandated by the Security Council with the implementation of its resolutions requiring Iraq to ...

By Paul Rockwell | There are two kinds of courage in war - physical courage and moral courage. Physical courage is very common on the battlefield. Men and women on both sides risk their lives, place their own bodies in harm’s way. Moral courage, however, is quite rare. According to Chris Hedges, the brilliant New York Times war correspondent who survived wars in Latin America, Africa, the Middle ...

Independent Working Class Association | ...and we all know who broke it When submerged under a veritable deluge of ideologically-driven ‘reforms’, it takes something especially imbecilic to provoke a double-take. Louise Casey, the mouthy former head of the Government’s ‘Respect task force’, is set to spearhead the latest New Labour gimmick on law ’n order. Among the 20 proposals that fade from the merely banal to the truly asinine here ...

Socialist Worker | Gordon Brown says we must all take a wage cut – but up to 800,000 local government workers are set to walk out over pay. Gordon Brown, chancellor Alistair Darling, and Bank of England governor Mervyn King lined up last week to deliver pious lectures on why workers must accept wage cuts to help stop inflation. But it is not wages that are pushing up ...

By Ron F | According to UN figures, in the 2000 growing season opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan covered 82,000 hectares. (1) Following a ban ruthlessly enforced by the Taliban opium cultivation declined to 8,000 hectares in the following year, according to the same reporting agency. Much of this remaining opium cultivation was carried out in areas not under Taliban control, but by our friends in the ...

Democracy Now! |  Listen to the Interview Audio stream  Download mp3  Criticism of Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe and the actions of his ruling Zanu PF party is growing. The most recent condemnation comes from former South African President Nelson Mandela, who mourned the “tragic failure of leadership” in Zimbabwe on Wednesday. They were the former leader’s first comments on the situation. President Bush also criticized Mugabe Wednesday for defying international ...

Think Progress | Nearly two weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that detainees held at Guantánamo Bay have the right to habeas corpus and can thus challenge their detention in civilian courts, a U.S. Court of Appeals dealt another blow to the Bush administration’s detention policy. The appeals court ruled that the Pentagon improperly designated Huzaifa Parhat, an ethnic Uighur Chinese national, an “enemy combatant” after ...

By Spencer Ackerman | In August 2004, a Defense Dept. panel convened to investigate detainee abuse after the Abu Ghraib scandal issued its much-anticipated report. Interrogation techniques designed for use at Guantánamo Bay, which President George W. Bush had decreed outside the scope of the Geneva Conventions, had "migrated" to Iraq, which Bush recognized was under Geneva, concluded panel chairman James Schlesinger, a former defense secretary. Schlesinger's panel, however, did ...

How conflict exacerbates Somalia's starvation Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) says thousands of Somalis are malnourished and in need of urgent medical treatment. This comes as local human rights groups claim conflict in the country has left more than 2,000 civilians dead so far this year. Ama Boateng reports on the fighting that is exacerbating hunger and illness. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtDjMhH0Iww

By Muhammad Idrees Ahmad | “The public has to be more alert”, warned one “international terrorism expert” in the Daily Mail late last year, because Scotland “is set to become another Israel within five years”. “[A]nti-terror measures will soon become a common feature of life”, he assured the audience, and called for “routine arming of police officers” and increasing children’s “awareness of the dangers of terrorism” and for them to ...

By Sandy English | According to a report issued last week by the human rights organization Amnesty International, the plight of nearly 5 million Iraqis displaced from their homes since the American invasion of 2003 is worsening in nearly every respect. The report observes the “crisis has steadily increased in size and complexity.” One in eight Iraqis is now internally displaced or a refugee. Amnesty International notes that the trend ...

By Steve Wampler | LIVERMORE, Calif. — Airplane passengers and baggage might be screened one day by a machine under development at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) that can detect explosive, chemical and biological agents all at the same time. A team of LLNL researchers has conceptually proven that a three-in-one machine, or “universal point detection system,” can be achieved, said George Farquar, a postdoctoral fellow and physical chemist at the ...

ADS | "Blood and Oil" is a very, very well made film that will show you something new even if you already know that - as Dubya admits - the United States is addicted to oil, even if you know the deal that FDR cut with the king of Saudi Arabia on February 14, 1945 (and have already seen the film footage of them meeting on a US ...

Rick Shenkman, is the author of the just-published Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth About the American Voter (Basic Books, 2008). He blogs at Howstupidblog and is editor of George Mason University's History News Network Shenkman writes: I do not wish to engage in a debate about the Iraq War. But the thought of planting a largely Christian army in the middle of the Muslim Middle East ...