“Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had barely left Israel on Monday after her latest peacekeeping mission when Israeli officials announced plans to build 1,400 new homes on land Palestinians claim for a future state.”

“There is a growing crisis of political representation in the West. Democracy is becoming hollow.”

This comes 15 months after an unprovoked invasion by U.S. backed Ethiopian forces who wrecked any semblance of a stable central government.

Also, it is worth checking out the version of events being reported by the Washington Post. It is not everyday that the mainstream media offer diverging points of view on the same story.

The U.S. military justice system has dropped all charges against 3 of the 4 self-confessed war criminals.

“The legal stymieing of Abu-Jamal’s efforts to win a new trial comes at a time of growing questions regarding his guilt, or at least the veracity of the witnesses and the evidence used to convict him on a first-degree murder charge.”

“Pakistan has never formally admitted to allowing such missile strikes and Musharraf earlier this year said that unauthorised military actions on Pakistani soil would be treated as an invasion”

Also see: Pakistani secret agents shot dead | BBC

More evidence suggesting that Pakistan is becoming increasingly destabilised.

–A breakdown of the New Brunswick tax system and public services by the NUPGE.

“Residual antibiotics have been detected in Chilean salmon that have been exported to the United States, Canada and Europe [it is] estimated that 70 to 300 times more antibiotics are used by salmon producers in Chile to produce a ton of salmon than in Norway … Researchers say that some antibiotics that are not allowed in American aquaculture, like flumequine and oxolinic acid, are legal in Chile and may increase antibiotic resistance for people.”

Wealth held by rich investors with assets over $1 million is set to grow 50 percent in the next five years to $75 trillion, according to a report published on Thursday.

Global wealth held by rich clients grew by an annual 12 percent over the past five years to 2007 to $50 trillion thanks to a bull run in stock markets.

Since 2001, hundreds of members of left-wing political parties, activists, journalists, and outspoken clergy have been killed or “disappeared.” The UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary Executions, Philippine human rights groups, and Human Rights Watch all found strong evidence of military involvement in many of these cases.

Violations of the right to life and other fundamental human rights have become a routine in St. Petersburg, argues the city’s Human Rights Council, in its first analytical report released this week.

“Recruits get beaten to death by senior conscripts in the army; inmates are tortured by the staff in prisons; antifascists and non-Slavs are stabbed to death in the streets of St. Petersburg,” said council member and human rights advocate Leonid Romankov. “The state is unable to protect its people, and the level of the state’s helplessness is as alarming as the ever-increasing scale of the abuses.”

“The circle of independent media in the city has been shrinking,” reads the council’s report. “It has become extremely difficult for the city’s residents to get access to free, unbiased and unfiltered information. Television channels — the main source of information for most Russians — remain under strict state control.”

“The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Abu-Jamal’s conviction, but said he should get a new sentencing hearing because of flawed jury instructions. If prosecutors don’t want to give him a new death penalty hearing, Abu-Jamal would be sentenced automatically to life in prison.”

–More public support for public health. The only people that are fighting for this are the unions and their supporters. Support the workers, your health may depend on it.

–This report could be applied to most asylum policies around the world. The stigma against the mentally ill continues even in the form of policy. Things must change.

–I cannot understand how the RCMP (part of the public service) has the right to censor its own documents.

–Too bad we do not have some central planning around the prescription of anti-biotics and enough will to engage in an education program around anti-biotic soaps and drugs. Apart from this, it is the underfunding of our public healthcare system and the outsourcing of the cleaning staff that have lead to the current crisis in hospitals. We need to have an infusion of money into the system and it needs to be broad and sustained if we are going to stop this situation from getting worse.

–The governments of Europe asked their people for input on a European constitution in 2005. It seems that they did not like the response from their people, so now they are going ahead with their plans regardless of what the people wanted. Democracy, it seems, is fine unless the people vote the wrong way.

CBC’s The Current obtained a series of notes handwritten by Ontario Provincial Police officers that describe how Commissioner Julian Fantino planned a morning raid of the blockades set up overnight on June 28 on Highway 401, Highway 2 and a CN Rail line in the Kingston area.

–The murder of those fighting for the rights of working people continues in Columbia. This and the US government continues to back the right-wing Columbian government that has more than a few members that are connected to the right-wing paramilitaries that target the trade unionists.

–Another bad budget from the Liberals in Ontario.

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The report by the British-based Jane’s Information Group ranked Afghanistan as the world’s third most-unstable country after the Gaza Strip and West Bank, and Somalia.

Afghan violence has grown steadily over the last two years to the highest level since U.S.-led forces ousted Taliban rule after the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington in 2001, despite the presence of 43,000 NATO-led troops.

–Interesting article. Real democracy was reached in Nepal whereas this is rather a strange way to get to “democracy”. Still, always interesting to see how elite democracy is established by the rulers.

The international aid effort in Afghanistan is in large part “wasteful and ineffective”, with as much as 40 per cent of funds spent going back to donor countries in corporate profits and consultant salaries, Kabul-based charities will say on Tuesday.

This is not an accident - rather it is the new mode of imperial profiteering.

Predictably, the CBC also ran this story, but only mentioned the part about aid retuning to donor countries in the form of corporate profits as a footnote. The main emphasis being the assertion that not enough aid is being sent to Afghanistan in the first place.

CBC

–A new movement against nuclear armament. There is a long history in the UK of protests against the Bomb, hopefully the people will learn from their mistakes last time and merge the movement with others that fight for similar causes.

–For those interested in what Tony Benn has to say there is a new album that features some of his poetry. There is no question that it will be political.

–The National Union of Teachers in the UK has come up with some progressive changes to public education that deals with the current problems of faith in school.

–An examination of the economic crisis in the US from a trade union perspective.

–We continue to admire the work of Rachel Corrie.

This is a draft document for discussion amongst supporters of Fightback in Canada. Perspectives are a guide to action and it is through creating a dialogue with working class militants that we hope to increase the authority of Marxist ideas in the Canadian Labour movement.

–Imperialist war takes on some different forms these days. The attack on Iran has started through the undermining of its main financial system.

–The wildly inefficient markets.

–An analysis of the current crisis is global capital with a focus on the effects here in Canada.

The 600 skeletons are packed into cartons and stacked on shelves in the cupboard of a forensic laboratory. They are identified as “Skeleton No. 4″ or “Skeleton No. 21″.

But 25 years after Argentina’s “Dirty War” dictatorship which left 12,000 government “opponents” officially listed as dead or missing, DNA testing is identifying skeletons mostly collected from unmarked graves across Argentina.

Israel Defense Forces troops killed an unarmed Palestinian and wounded another during a clash with gunmen on the border of the Hamas-run Gaza Strip on Monday, hospital officials and militant sources said.

Hamas suspended its rocket fire after Israeli forces raided northern Gaza this month, killing more than 120 Palestinians, many of them civilians. There have, however, been sporadic launches by a smaller militant group, Islamic Jihad.

The cruelty and illegality of the US government’s program of secret detentions can be illustrated by one man’s story. It is the story of a man who was never charged with any crime, but who was held in secret CIA custody for nearly three years, becoming the victim of enforced disappearance.