What Do You Call Edward Snowden? By Peter Hart

16 August 2013 — FAIR Blog

cbsen-snowdenOn CBS Evening News (8/13/13), anchor Scott Pelley gave viewers a brief–and very misleading–update on Edward Snowden: 

In an interview today, Edward Snowden appears to describe himself as a spy. Snowden is the National Security Agency computer specialist who spilled some of America’s top surveillance secrets. The New York Times asked Snowden about his collaboration with a reporter and Snowden replied, “As one might imagine, normally spies allergically avoid contact with reporters or media.” Snowden, wanted by the United States, is being harbored by Russia.

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The Bullet: Connective Party or Return to a "War of Maneuver"?

16 August 2013 — The Bullet • Socialist Project E-Bulletin No. 865

For some two decades, the anti-globalization movement and its successors have assumed that society contains within itself – and automatically throws up – political oppositions and organizational forms independent of capital and of the state. There is simply the need to encourage the cumulative growth of society’s own potentialities for forming alternatives apart from the state and apart from the terrain of politics. Continue reading

Haiti: Grassroots Groups Afraid “Attractive” Mining Law Could Open Country Up to Systematic Pillage

1 August 2013 — Haiti Grassroots Watch

haiti mining

As the government works on preparing “an attractive law that will entice investors,” Haitian popular organizations are mobilizing and forming networks to resist mining in their country.

Already one-third of the north of Haiti is under research, exploration, or exploitation license to foreign companies. Some 2,400 square kilometers have been parceled out to Haitian firms fronting for U.S. and Canadian concerns. Some estimate that Haiti’s mineral wealth – mostly gold, copper, and silver – could be worth as much as US$ 20 billion.

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Haiti “Reconstruction”: Luxury Hotels, Sweat Shops and Deregulation for the Foreign Corporate Elite By Julie Lévesque

16 August 2013 — williambowles.info

“The international community is so screwed up they’re letting Haitians run Haiti.” – Luigi R. Einaudi, US career diplomat, member of the Council on Foreign Relations and former Assistant Secretary General at the Organization of American States Continue reading

Pharaoh al-Sisi sits tight By M K Bhadrakumar

16 August 2013 — Asia Times

The highly opportunistic stance taken by the “big powers” who are veto-holding permanent members of the United Nations Security Council has prevented that august body from articulating an outright condemnation of the brutality with which the Egyptian military massacred more than 1,000 civilians in Cairo on Wednesday. 

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VTJP Palestine-Israel Newslinks 15 August 2013: The negotiations trap

15 August 2013 — VTJP

News

International Middle East Media Center

Army Admits Alleged “Gaza Mall” Is In Malaysia
IMEMC – After being exposed by the Electronic Intifada, the Israeli army issued an apology for an image it published of a lavish mall, allegedly in the besieged Gaza Strip, admitting that the Mall is actually in Malaysia, and claiming that what happened was “an honest mistake”. …

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Egypt’s Junta Has Nothing to Lose By Melkulangara BHADRAKUMAR

16 August 2013 — Strategic Culture Foundation

The appointment of Robert Ford as the new American ambassador to Egypt was indeed an ominous sign that the Obama administration expected civil war conditions to arise in Egypt. Ford’s forte during his hugely successful «diplomatic» assignment in Baghdad in the middle of the last decade was to organize the notorious death squads, which tore Mesopotamia apart and destroyed Iraq almost irreparably.

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