Yesterday was the 15th anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and elsewhere and there were many commemorations of that somber occasion. But it is also good to remember that it generated a period of mass fear and hysteria in the US that has resulted in endless, cruel, and needless wars, and accelerated a massive increase in the powers of the national security state and severe erosions on people’s privacy and civil liberties, all in the name of fighting terrorism.
[Read more…]

In a long article that appeared in the Canadian National Post, two Hong Kong lawyers Robert Tibbo and Jonathan Man describe how they hid Snowden from the Hong Kong and US authorities and the media while they devised ways to get him to safety. This story has not been told until now and it is timed to coincide with the release of the Oliver Stone film Snowden that premiered yesterday at the Toronto International Film Festival and goes into general release on Thursday, September 15.
[Read more…]

There can be no doubt that Saudi Arabia has one of the worst governments n the world. It is a ruthless monarchy that ignores the basic human rights of its citizens, persecutes the LGBT community, treats women as second class and its immigrant low-level workers like chattel, and has a punitive and barbaric judicial system that dates back to the Dark Ages. It deserves to be treated as an international pariah.
[Read more…]

This election has posed a serious problem for many voters in that the two major party candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have historically high disapproval ratings. What are those voters, especially on the progressive side, who are not tied rigidly to party loyalties supposed to do?
[Read more…]

The New York Times has an interesting article about the two weeks that Edward Snowden went missing, after he left his luxury hotel in Hong Kong and before he showed up in Moscow, when he was in hiding from the US government and the hordes of media reporters who were seeking him after him bombshell revelations about US spying. It turns out that his lawyers in Hong Kong had placed him in the homes of other clients who were refugees seeking asylum, people who lived in tiny apartments in some of the city’s poorest districts, and some of them were Sri Lankans.
[Read more…]

There seem to be two standard rules of political reporting when it comes to US presidential elections. One is that the media has a vested interest in a close race because that generates more interest in the news and thus more readers and viewers. Hence there is always more breathless reporting generated by positive news and polls favoring the candidate who is behind and negative news about the one who is ahead. So in the current race, where Donald Trump is behind, any poll that shows him close to or tied with Hillary Clinton gets wide coverage. But statistically, when two candidates are within three or four points of each other, there will always be some polls that show them to be tied or the one who is behind on average to be even ahead slightly, and the number of polls that show this in this race are what one might predict purely on statistics.
[Read more…]

There has been considerable hyperventilating in the US media and political circles about Russia supposedly trying to influence the outcome of the US election, though the government is careful to avoid going on the record with the allegations. This news report is full of such speculations based on anonymous sources.
[Read more…]