polly7
polly7's Journal
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Gender: Do not display
Hometown: Saskatchewan
Home country: Canada
Member since: Sat Jul 9, 2005, 11:46 PM
Number of posts: 20,582
Hometown: Saskatchewan
Home country: Canada
Member since: Sat Jul 9, 2005, 11:46 PM
Number of posts: 20,582
Journal Archives
Online Media and Technology to the Service of Refugees
Refugees: Online Media and Technology to the Service of Refugees
Video Posted 29 April 2012 5:29 GMT http://globalvoicesonline.org/2012/04/29/refugees-online-media-and-technology-to-the-service-of-refugees/
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Posted by polly7 | Mon Apr 30, 2012, 10:14 AM (0 replies)
Alone: India's Farmer Widows
Alone: India's Farmer Widows
India's ongoing water crisis has driven 200,000 farmers to suicide. As water dwindles, that number grows, and farmer widows are left to pick up the pieces. —Photos by Michael Francis McElroy/Text by Noella May Hebert http://www.motherjones.com/slideshows/2011/08/india-water-crisis-suicide-women/manuala-betwa ![]() Over the past decade, India has been gripped by a devastating water crisis. Farmers make up an estimated 70 percent of the country's population, and for them the consequences of the drought have been dire: Overwhelmed by chronic lack of water, failed crops, and growing debts, more than 200,000 farmers have committed suicide since 1997. |
Posted by polly7 | Sat Apr 28, 2012, 03:00 PM (1 replies)
Why Drones Have Become The Weapon Of Choice
Why Drones Have Become The Weapon Of Choice
By Danny Schechter Source: Paltalk.comSaturday, April 28, 2012 http://www.zcommunications.org/why-drones-have-become-the-weapon-of-choice-by-danny-schechter It’s easy to understand why presidents, politicians and the military love robots. They don’t talk back. They follow orders. You press a button and they kill, kill, kill. They are considered so efficient, so surgical and so deadly.. |
Posted by polly7 | Sat Apr 28, 2012, 02:54 PM (6 replies)
Self-delete, dupe.
The Self-Made Myth: Debunking Conservatives' Favorite -- And Most Dangerous -- Fiction
http://www.democraticunderground.com/101626128 |
Posted by polly7 | Sat Apr 28, 2012, 02:41 PM (3 replies)
Armchair Warriors: Why Are Conservatives the Biggest Warmongers?
Oxford University Press / By Corey Robin
Armchair Warriors: Why Are Conservatives the Biggest Warmongers? Conservatives in government have fetishized violence. Why? April 23, 2012 | http://www.alternet.org/teaparty/155112/armchair_warriors%3A_why_are_conservatives_the_biggest_warmongers_/ The following is Part 2 of an excerpt from Corey Robin's book "The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin." You can find Part 1 here. http://coreyrobin.com/2012/04/22/protocols-of-machismo-on-the-fetish-of-national-security-part-i/ This is a long but very interesting article. IMHO. |
Posted by polly7 | Sat Apr 28, 2012, 02:36 PM (3 replies)
European, US Austerity Drive is Suicidal: Nobel Economist Stiglitz
Published on Friday, April 27, 2012 by Common Dreams
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/04/27-1 European, US Austerity Drive is Suicidal: Nobel Economist Stiglitz 'The Occupy movement has been very successful in bringing those ideas to the forefront of political discussion.' - Common Dreams staff Europe is headed down the same path that most Republicans -- and many Democrats -- are suggesting for the US: reductions in the public sector, cuts in benefits, slashing investments in infrastructure and education.
more....
Austerity is suicidal public policy warns US economist Joseph Stiglitz. Nobel Prize-winning U.S. economist Joseph Stiglitz speaking in Vienna, Austria Thursday night said that it's a suicidal path for Europe -- and that such a policy has never worked in any large country. Youth unemployment in Spain has been at 50 percent since the crisis in 2008 with “no hope of things getting better anytime soon,” said Stiglitz, who is a professor for economics at Columbia University. “What you are doing is destroying the human capital, you are creating alienated young people.” Published on Friday, April 27, 2012 by The Progressive Austerity is Killing Europe by Amitabh Pal http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/04/27-5 The austerity fetish of those making economic decisions is killing Europe’s economy.
The last few days have provided further proof. “Spain officially slipped back into recession for the second time in three years Monday, after following the German remedy of deep retrenchment in public outlays, joining Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic,” the New York Times reported this week. And more bad news has followed. “Britain slid back into recession in the first quarter of the year, according to official figures released Wednesday, undercutting the government's argument that its austerity program was working,” says today’s Times. But those in charge seem to be eternally clueless. |
Posted by polly7 | Fri Apr 27, 2012, 07:23 PM (0 replies)
Democracy Now! airs an exclusive excerpt of "Fallujah: The Hidden Massacre,"
http://www.democracynow.org/2005/11/8/u_s_broadcast_exclusive_fallujah_the
Democracy Now! airs an exclusive excerpt of "Fallujah: The Hidden Massacre," featuring interviews with U.S. soldiers, Iraqi doctors and international journalists on the U.S. attack on Fallujah. Produced by Italian state broadcaster RAI TV, the documentary charges U.S. warplanes illegally dropped white phosphorus incendiary bombs on civilian populations, burning the skin off Iraqi victims. One U.S. soldier charges this amounts to the U.S. using chemical weapons against the Iraqi people. [includes rush transcript] Excerpt: JEFF ENGLEHART: The gases from the warhead of the white phosphorus will disperse in a cloud. And when it makes contact with skin, then it’s absolutely irreversible damage, burning of flesh to the bone. It doesn’t necessarily burn clothes, but it will burn the skin underneath clothes. And this is why protective masks do not help, because it will burn right through the mask, the rubber of the mask. It will manage to get inside your face. If you breathe it, it will blister your throat and your lungs until you suffocate, and then it will burn you from the inside. It basically reacts to skin, oxygen and water. The only way to stop the burning is with wet mud. But at that point, it’s just impossible to stop.
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REPORTER: Have you seen the effects of these weapons? JEFF ENGLEHART: Yes. Burned. Burned bodies. I mean, it burned children, and it burned women. White phosphorus kills indiscriminately. It’s a cloud that will within, in most cases, 150 meters of impact will disperse, and it will burn every human being or animal. Fallujah: The Hidden Massacre http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/fallujah-the-hidden-massacre/ Military and War75 Comments This war can not have witnesses. It can not have witnesses because it is based on lies. The Americans have permitted only embedded journalists to go to Fallujah. Despite that, for example the image of the marine that shoots the wounded and unarmed warrior inside the Fallujah Mosque has gone out. And exactly because this image has gone out, we do not know how, and because it has circulated all over the world, the NBC journalist that has recorded it has been immediately expelled from the embedded body. Fallujah, The Hidden Massacre is a documentary film by Sigfrido Ranucci and Maurizio Torrealta which first aired on Italy’s RAI state television network on November 8, 2005. The film documents the use of weapons that the documentary asserts are chemical weapons, particularly the use of incendiary bombs, and alleges indiscriminate use of violence against civilians and children by military forces of the United States of America in the city of Fallujah in Iraq during the Fallujah Offensive of November 2004. Watch the full documentary now Robert Fisk: The Children of Fallujah - families fight back Special Report day three: Abandoned and afraid, the parents of Iraq's suffering children wait in vain for help ROBERT FISK FALLUJAH FRIDAY 27 APRIL 2012 http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-the-children-of-fallujah--families-fight-back-7682416.html Back story: The evidence was clear, but no one cared – except you It's the same old story. Know nothing. See nothing. Say nothing. When children died in a plague of cancers in southern Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War, the Americans and the Brits didn't want to know about it. Nor, of course, did Saddam Hussein. If children had been poisoned by our depleted uranium munitions, then Saddam would lose face, wouldn't he? Independent readers contributed $250,000 for medicines for the children we met in Iraq who were suffering from cancers and leukaemia after that war.
Margaret Hassan of Care – later murdered by unknown killers months after her kidnapping, following the "liberation" of Iraq – helped us distribute the medicines from our readers across the country. No thanks from Saddam, of course. And all the children died. And not a word from our masters, armaments manufacturers and jolly generals. It's the same again in Fallujah today. The doctors talk of a massive increase in child birth deformities. The Americans used phosphorous munitions – possibly also depleted uranium (DU) – in the 2004 battles of Fallujah. Everyone in Fallujah knows about these deformities. Reporters have seen these children and reported on them. But it's know nothing, see nothing, say nothing. Neither the Iraqi government nor the US government nor the British will utter a squeak about Fallujah. Even when I found in the Balkans a 12-year-old Serb girl with internal bleeding, constant vomiting and nails that repeatedly fell out of her hands and feet – she had handled the shrapnel of depleted uranium munitions after a Nato air strike near Sarajevo in 1995 – Nato refused to respond to my offer to take a military doctor to see her. Already, I had discovered that up to 300 Serb men, women and children who had lived close to the Nato target in the Sarajevo suburb of Hadjici, had died of cancers and leukaemias over the five years that followed the bombing. As for southern Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War, the less said, the better. |
Posted by polly7 | Fri Apr 27, 2012, 11:32 AM (0 replies)
Measuring Wars by a Loss of Principles
Article by WN.com Correspondent Dallas Darling
http://article.wn.com/view/WNATC098D62D5DFC32E3BD36CEECDCA1CBD3/ more..... |
Posted by polly7 | Fri Apr 27, 2012, 10:11 AM (3 replies)
Fisk: The Children of Fallujah - The Hospital Of Horrors
By Robert Fisk
Source: The IndependentFriday, April 27, 2012 http://www.zcommunications.org/the-children-of-fallujah-the-hospital-of-horrors-by-robert-fisk more .... ETA: No pictures at link. |
Posted by polly7 | Fri Apr 27, 2012, 09:47 AM (12 replies)
Afghan Screams Aren’t Heard
Afghan Screams Aren’t Heard
By Kathy Kelly and Hakim Saturday, April 21, 2012 http://www.zcommunications.org/afghan-screams-aren-t-heard-by-kathy-kelly Last weekend, in Kabul, Afghan Peace Volunteer friends huddled in the back room of their simple home. With a digital camera, glimpses and sounds of their experiences were captured, as warfare erupted three blocks away.
The fighting has subdued, but the video gives us a glimpse into chronic anxieties among civilians throughout Afghanistan. Later, we learned more: Ghulam awakens suddenly, well after midnight, and begins to pace through a room of sleeping people, screaming. Ali suddenly tears up, after an evening meal, and leaves the room to sit outside. Staring at the sky and the moon, he finds solace. Yet another puzzles over what brings people to the point of loaning themselves to possibly kill or be killed, over issues so easily manipulated by politicians. I asked our friend, Hakim, who mentors the Afghan Peace Volunteers, if ordinary Afghans are aware that the U.S. has an estimated 400 or more Forward Operating Bases across Afghanistan and that it is planning to construct what will become the world’s largest U.S. Embassy, in Kabul. Hakim thinks young people across Kabul are well aware of this. “Do they know,” I asked, “that the U.S. Air Force has hired 60,000 – 70,000 analysts to study information collected through drone surveillance? The film footage amounts to the equivalent of 58,000 full length feature films. The Rand Corporation says that 100,000 analysts are needed to understand ‘patterns of life’ in Afghanistan.” Hakim’s response was quick and cutting: “Ghulam would ask the analysts a question they can’t answer with their drone surveillance, a question that has much to do with their business, ‘terror’: “You mean, you don’t understand why I screamed?” ..... |
Posted by polly7 | Sat Apr 21, 2012, 01:08 PM (0 replies)