“Extraordinary rendition” is White House-speak for kidnapping. Just ask Maher Arar. He’s a Canadian citizen who was “rendered” by the U.S. to Syria, where he was tortured for almost a year.
Filed under Weekly Column
U.S. Army Reserve Spc. Chancellor Keesling died in Iraq on June 19, 2009, from “a non-combat related incident,” according to the Pentagon. Keesling had killed himself.
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Climate-change activists, from pranksters to presidents, are stepping up the pressure by staging elaborate stunts.
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Lt. Dan Choi doesn’t want to lie. Choi, an Iraq war veteran and a graduate of West Point, declared last March 19 on “The Rachel Maddow Show,” “I am gay.” Under the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” regulations, those three words are enough to get Choi kicked out of the military.
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A social worker from New York City was arrested last week while in Pittsburgh for the G-20 protests, then subjected to an FBI raid this week at home—all for using Twitter.
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Journalist Christian Parenti responds to our interview with Kevin Bales, founder of Free The Slaves
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Environmentalists charge that the Bush administration is making concessions to industry at the expense of theenvironment. The latest move came this week when the Environmental Protection Agency announced it would withdraw anew drinking water regulation approved by the Clinton administration. The rule, which would have reduced by 80percent the permissible standard for arsenic in drinking water, had been a priority of environmental groups for morethan a decade. But the mining industry and by some municipalities complained that lowering allowable levels of thecarcinogen would be too expensive.
After years of dismissing suggestions that Mad Cow disease might threaten US livestock, the US Department ofAgriculture is using possibly flawed tests to justify killing two flocks of Vermont sheep. The government claims thesheep may harbor the disease that has killed more than 80 Britons, devastated that country’s beef industry, andspread to other European countries.
AIDS, an emerging disease, was the first human pandemic of the age of globalization. Scientists now fear that footand mouth disease, an ancient scourge, may be the first animal epidemic to sweep the world, spread by the flow ofpeople and goods that crisscross the globe every day.