By Chris Hedges, May 16, 2011, via American Everyman.
The moral philosopher Cornel West, if Barack Obama’s ascent to power was a morality play, would be the voice of conscience. Rahm Emanuel, a cynical product of the Chicago political machine, would be Satan. Emanuel in the first scene of the play would dangle power, privilege, fame and money before Obama. West would warn Obama that the quality of a life is defined by its moral commitment, that his legacy will be determined by his willingness to defy the cruel assault by …

By David North and David Walsh.
The arrest of French financier and politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn in New York City on sexual assault charges and his continued imprisonment is a disturbing event with far-reaching implications.
Strauss-Kahn is the managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), perhaps the most powerful global capitalist financial institution, and a prominent figure in the French Socialist Party, one of that country’s leading big business parties. He was expected to announce soon his candidacy for the presidency in 2012, and polls in France had him leading his rivals, …

By Paul Craig Roberts, May 18, 2011.
The International Monetary Fund’s director, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, was arrested last Sunday in New York City on the allegation of an immigrant hotel maid that he attempted to rape her in his hotel room. A New York judge has denied Strauss-Kahn bail on the grounds that he might flee to France.
President Bill Clinton survived his sexual escapades, because he was a servant to the system, not a threat. But Strauss-Kahn, like former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, was a threat to the system, and, like …

By Mike Whitney, May 16, 2011.
I have no way of knowing whether the 32-year-old maid who claims she was attacked and forced to perform oral sex on IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn, is telling the truth or not. I’ll leave that to the braying hounds in the media who have already assumed the role of judge, jury and Lord High Executioner. But I will say, the whole matter smells rather fishy, just like the Eliot Spitzer story smelled fishy. Spitzer, you may recall, was Wall Street’s biggest adversary and a likely …

Monday 16 May 2011, by Felicity Arbuthnot.
It was May 12 1996 when I got the call. Kathy Kelly, a peace activist who constantly risked the wrath of the US government for her compassion, was phoning from Chicago, stunned.
Washington’s UN ambassador Madeleine Albright had just appeared on Sixty Minutes, Kelly told me.
Presenter Lesley Stahl had confronted her guest on the US-driven embargo on Iraq.
“We have heard that a half million children have died,” said Stahl. “I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is …

What Americans Must Utter to Reclaim the Human
By Kathleen Wallace Peine / May 12th, 2011.
The quote is from a book I’m sure you were forced to read if you are older than 30. This was of course before the outrage over language that knocked it off the shelves in recent years. I’m speaking, of course, of the first truly American classic, Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain’s deceptively simple, meandering voyage through race and social custom in pre-Civil War America.
An old love was rekindled for me recently when I sadly picked up …

By Patrick O’Connor.
Israeli soldiers yesterday killed at least fifteen Palestinians and wounded many more as they suppressed protests held at border posts facing Syria, Lebanon, and Gaza to mark the 63rd anniversary of the founding of the Zionist state.
This latest massacre of Palestinian civilians inflicted by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) again demonstrates the Israeli government’s brazenly unlawful operations. The situation also exposes the Obama administration’s “humanitarian” pretext for the bombardment of Libya.
NATO’s war is supposedly necessary to protect unarmed civilians from the possibility of being killed by government forces—but …

Press TV.
American troops have killed several women and children in the troubled eastern Afghanistan amid growing civilian casualties in the war-torn country.
Villagers in Kunar Province say the US troops fired rockets at local residents from their military outposts.
The children were all girls aged 8 to 15.
Also, a 12-year-old child was reportedly killed and four others were injured in a NATO attack in Kunar on Sunday.
In a separate incident on Thursday, a 12-year-old girl was killed in Nangarhar Province after foreign troops hurled a hand grenade towards her.
Afghan authorities say they …

Amidst drone attacks & bombings, Pakistan threatens to strand US forces in Afghanistan
By Tony Cartalucci.
Bangkok, Thailand May 14, 2011 – After a double bombing in Pakistan’s north that resulted in over 80 deaths, the Western media was quick to report an unverified phone-call made from an “undisclosed location” to Reuters and AFP claiming the Taliban was responsible.
Reuters stated, “Now Pakistani rulers, President Zardari and the army will be our first targets. America will be our second target,” Ehsanullah Ehsan, a spokesman for Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan …

By Emrah Kaynak, 13 May, 2011, via Irradiee.
Much of the discussion on the announcement of the death of bin Laden is devoted to disqualifying critical thinking by assimilating it with paranoid delusions.  Whoever has expressed suspicion of various official narratives has immediately been saddled with the unflattering ‘conspiracy theorist’ epithet. The corporate media uncritically sides with power and is trying hard to make coherent the incoherent.
The concept of “conspiracy theory” is used improperly and systematically to discredit any rational inquiry.  The undefined contours of this framework/concept can encompass …