Six months after two states became the first in the nation to fully legalize recreational marijuana use the federal government has yet to articulate an official response to the historic voter-approved measures while simultaneously authoring a vast pot crackdown and refusing to accept even far less sweeping state-based marijuana laws as legitimate. The juxtaposition between [...]
WILL “KEYSTONE COPS,” IN THE NAME OF “SECURITY,” BE SUPPRESSING PROTEST AGAINST KEYSTONE XL PIPELINE IN NEBRASKA? Local officials of the pipeline company behind the oil company, TransCanada, are in negotiations with local police enforcement agents about using “off duty” police officers to insure against “violence” among the protesters. The local protest group, Bold [...]
WANT TO GET MORE BIKES ON THE ROAD IN BRITAIN? How about making it safer and more convenient for people to ride them? Only 2% of people in UK ride bicycles to work, compared with about a quarter of them in continental countries. A group of MPs are urging their colleagues, in the name of [...]
THE HEADLINES
WATCH YOUR MOUTH, JOHN KERRY. The new U.S. Secretary of State commits the unpardonable sin of comparing the suffering visited on innocent people at the Boston Marathon with the 2010 Israeli raid and killing of numerous passengers on a “flotilla” of vessels bound with humanitarian aid to breach the Israeli blockage of Gaza. Israeli [...]
“INSUFFICIENTLY PRO-ISRAELI?” New U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel had his appointment held up on such “insufficiency” charge but now, on a trip to Israel, he seems to be establishing his sufficiency bones. In presenting a large deal for U.S. arms shipments to Israel, he says that the deal is a “clear signal” to Iran [...]
BOMB AT BOSTON MARATHON KILLS 3 PEOPLE, INCLUDING 1 CHILD AND THERE IS AN OUTPOURING OF U.S. SYMPATHY FOR THE VICTIMS. A secret C.I.A. counter-terrorist raid in Afghanistan kills 17 people, including 12 children. Sympathy out-pouring?—not so much, at least in the U.S. Not so, however, in Afghanistan itself, where the PM Hamid Karzai [...]
INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL TRIBUNAL ON FORMER YUGOSLAVIA DELIVERS NO JUSTICE AND NO RECONCILIATION BUT A LOT OF CONTINUED SERB-BASHING. Diana Johnstone reviews the recent activities at the Tribunal and concludes that it has and continues to demonize the Serbian state and its leaders in pursuit of defining NATO’s 1999 bombing of Kosovo as a “humanitarian [...]
TOO BIG TO PUNISH: U.S. SHIP DAMAGES WORLD HERITAGE CORAL REEF IN THE PHILIPPINES AND BARELY SAYS “EXCUSE ME.” The commander and 3 other sailors are “relieved of their duties” after they ignored warnings and slammed their minesweeper ship into the Tubataha Reef. The $1.5 million fine against U.S. government is castigated as a loose-change “slap [...]

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