By Michael Collins Rupert Murdoch's reign over the $33 billion News Corporation hinges on events surrounding the company's ownership share of Britain's dominant pay TV network, BSkyB (Sky). As Business Insider said, "it's the only asset that really matters" in the News Corp collection of media properties. As a result of Murdoch scandals, News Corp lost the chance to buy 100% of Sky's shares. More troubling ...

By Saul Landau The Syrian conflict continued to boil -- or boil over -- when Syrian troops fired across the Turkish border on April 9, apparently killing either fleeing refugees or armed combatants. Then the UN team entered and began monitoring a shaky ceasefire – shaky because the Syrian National Council in exile and their backers in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Washington and western capitals don’t want the fight ...

Danny Glover and Saul Landau   Highway 15 connects California’s Inland Empire with Las Vegas – accounting for the relative thickness of Saturday morning traffic. So we don’t stare too long at signs advertising Gentleman’s Clubs – showing no gentlemen, but rather attractive young women. Did you get it? If not you will. A few miles ahead the road ascends into the high desert. A billboard descends to Supe ...

  10.  militarization of domestic police force   9.  internment of Bradley Manning   8.  mass incarceration of undocumented residents   7.  Guantanamo Bay detention camp   6.  military tribunals   5.  secret overseas prisons   4.  HR347   3.  NDAA   2.  targeted killings of Americans   1.  Drone strikes against civilians ...

By - John Reimann   The Fukushima-Dai-Ichi… (reactors) have generated some of the largest concentrations of radioactivity on the planet…85 times more Cesium-137 than Chernobyl. [Its release] would destroy the world environment and our civilization. This is not rocket science, nor does it connect to the pugilistic debate over nuclear power plants. This is an issue of human survival. So commented Japan’s ...

"My colleagues were entitled to ignore my views," he [Zelikow] continued. "They did more than that: The [2006] White House attempted to collect and destroy all copies of my memo. I expect that one or two are still at least in the State Department's archives." Phillip D. Zelikow, State Department Counselor, 2005-2007, to Congress, May 13, 2009 Former legal counsel to the Department of State, Phillip Zelikow, ...

There is a playbook with a collection of tools and strategies conservatives use to erode democracy and strip mine the treasures, assets and strengths of the USA. They are almost always masked as changes aimed at serving democracy, the constitution, rights or capitalism. They are not separate. They are not coincidental. Naomi Klein described a systemic approach to strip mine nations and weaken freedoms in he ...

The following was written in 1995 and is posted here for readers.  How profundly to the right this country has moved since that time; all to the detriment of our citizenry and children.  For this reason, critical thinking and critical pedagogy must be emphasized once again.  As long as the testing regime is in place, no critical thinking can be taught.  This is one reason testing is promoted by those in pow ...

By Michael Collins Foreign Policy just published a roundup of weapons contributed to the Libyan rebels in the regime change effort.  The e-Journal is a publication of the Washington Post.  Colum Lynch's April 4 article relies on the March 20 UN report to the UN Security Council by a panel of experts appointed to track the UN resolutions and responses from the start of the conflict. These two paragraphs, non ...

America is a bully nation. America is the embodiment of might-makes-right. When another country (USSR) invades Afghanistan, America is filled with righteous indignation, but when America invades Afghanistan, well, all is right with the world. America has bred the bully tactic of vigilantism in the sanctified Petri dish of law (Stand Your Ground), and the result is the person with the gun is the law while th ...