The message doesn't get more direct

With the Afghanistan war grinding on - with losses of personnel continuing unabated - some 50,000 US troops stationed in Iraq and the situation in Pakistan going from bad to worse, this message to Obama, today, couldn't be more blunt.

CommonDreams reports:

"Earlier this afternoon U.S. military veterans hung an enormous banner on the front of the Newseum in Washington, DC, wrapping their message around the First Amendment.

Several Veterans for Peace dropped the banner down the front of the Newseum, while others distributed special edition copies of the War Crimes Times, explaining the action and what they considered obscene.

National President of VFP Mike Ferner, 59, who served as a navy corpsman during Vietnam said:

"The American public should be shocked that we are still killing and crippling thousands of innocent people in these countries as well as our own soldiers -- that's what's truly obscene. Blowing people's arms and legs off, burning, paralyzing them, causing sewage to run through their streets, polluting the water that kills and sickens children, terrorizing and bombing people and their livestock with flying robots-- that defines obscenity. If this banner shocks and offends a single person who hasn't been shocked and offended by what's being done in our name, we've accomplished our mission."

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Robert Fisk's predictions for the Middle East in 2013

There is no gain-saying that Robert Fisk, fiercely independent and feisty to boot, is the veteran journalist and author covering the Middle East. Who doesn't he know or hasn't he met over the years in reporting from Beirut - where he lives? In his latest op-ed piece for The Independent he lays out his predictions for the Middle East for 2013. Read the piece in full, here - well worthwhile - but an extract... "Never make predictions in the Middle East. My crystal ball broke long ago. But predicting the region has an honourable pedigree. “An Arab movement, newly-risen, is looming in the distance,” a French traveller to the Gulf and Baghdad wrote in 1883, “and a race hitherto downtrodden will presently claim its due place in the destinies of Islam.” A year earlier, a British diplomat in Jeddah confided that “it is within my knowledge... that the idea of freedom does at present agitate some minds even in Mecca...” So let’s say this for 2013: the “Arab Awakening” (the t

The NPT (Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) goes on hold.....because of one non-Treaty member (Israel)

Isn't there something radically wrong here? Israel, a non-signatory to the NPT has, evidently, been the cause for those countries that are Treaty members, notably Canada, the US and the UK, after 4 weeks of negotiation, effectively blocking off any meaningful progress in ensuring the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons. IPS reports ..... "After nearly four weeks of negotiations, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference ended in a predictable outcome: a text overwhelmingly reflecting the views and interests of the nuclear-armed states and some of their nuclear-dependent allies. “The process to develop the draft Review Conference outcome document was anti-democratic and nontransparent,” Ray Acheson, director, Reaching Critical Will, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), told IPS. “This Review Conference has demonstrated beyond any doubt that continuing to rely on the nuclear-armed states or their nuclear-dependent allies for l

#1 Prize for a bizarre story.....and lying!

No comment called for in this piece from CommonDreams: Another young black man: The strange sad case of 21-year-old Chavis Carter. Police in Jonesboro, Arkansas stopped him and two friends, found some marijuana, searched put Carter, then put him handcuffed behind his back into their patrol car, where they say he shot himself in the head with a gun they failed to find. The FBI is investigating. Police Chief Michael Yates, who stands behind his officers' story, says in an interview that the death is "definitely bizarre and defies logic at first glance." You think?

Mahler's Prodigal Son

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