“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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Nearly 1,000 diplomats from around the world are meeting in Bonn, Germany this week to draft a new global treaty to control greenhouse gases to replace the Kyoto Protocol which expires in 2012. We speak with former Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland—one of three prominent international figures named special UN envoy on climate change. She is former Director-General of the World Health Organization. [includes rush transcript]
The battle over political science professor Norman Finkelstein to receive tenure at DePaul University is heating up. Finkelstein has taught at DePaul for the past six years. Finkelstein’s two main topics of focus over his career have been the Holocaust and Israeli policy. We speak to two world-renowned scholars in these fields: Raul Hilberg, considered the founder of Holocaust studies, and Avi Shlaim, a professor of international relations at Oxford University and an expert on the Arab-Israeli conflict. Shlaim calls Finkelstein a “very impressive, learned and careful scholar”, while Hilberg praises Finkelstein’s “acuity of vision and analytical power.” Hilberg says: “It takes an enormous amount of courage to speak the truth when no one else is out there to support him.” [includes rush transcript]
Specialty Ethiopian coffee beans can retail for as much as $25 dollars a pound in the U.S, but back in Ethiopia, impoverished farmers may earn less than $1 dollar a pound for the same beans. Hoping to take more control over marketing and boost prices, the government of Ethiopia tried to trademark regional coffee names. Starbucks–the world’s largest specialty coffee retailer–opposed Ethiopia’s trademarking efforts. In response, Starbucks came under heavy public pressure to sign a licensing deal with Ethiopia. The campaign appears to have worked. Last week, Starbucks and the Ethiopian government released a joint statement announcing they signed an agreement in principle. [includes rush transcript]