Michael Moore on Democracy Now!. Good interview!

Spoiling Manuel Zelaya's homecoming

Now that Manuel Zelaya has returned to Honduras, the coup government – after first denying that he was there – has unleashed a wave of repression to prevent people from gathering support for their elected president.

This is how US secretary of state Hillary Clinton described the first phase of this new repression Monday night in a press conference: "I think that the government imposed a curfew, we just learned, to try to get people off the streets so that there couldn't be unforeseen developments."

Spoiling Manuel Zelaya's homecoming | Mark Weisbrot | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

G-20: Globalization Goes Bankrupt

Chris Hedges writes about the upcoming G20 meeting in Pittsburgh.


“The leaders of the G-20 are meeting to try and salvage their power and money after everything that has gone wrong,” said Benedicto Martinez Orozco, co-president of the Mexican Frente Autentico del Trabajo (FAT), who is in Pittsburgh for the protests. “This is what this meeting is about.”

G-20: Globalization Goes Bankrupt

Happy birthday, Brigitte Bardot

After the internation uproar and scandal provoked by the 1956 film And God Created Woman, Brigitte Bardot said she wished she had never been born. Now, as Bardot – "the French export as important as Renault cars" according to Charles de Gaulle – turns 75 on Monday, exhibitions at national museums and private galleries, alongside tributes at fashion weeks in Paris, London and New York, are throwing the spotlight back on to one of the last living icons of the 20th century.

Happy birthday, Brigitte Bardot | Film | The Guardian

'shock therapy' for world leaders on environment

The United Nations is planning a form of diplomatic shock therapy for world leaders this week in the hope of injecting badly needed urgency into negotiations for a climate change treaty that, it is now widely acknowledged, are dangerously adrift.

As the digital counter ticking off the hours to the Copenhagen summit – which had been supposed to seal the deal on climate change – hit 77 days today, progress at the UN summit in New York is seen as vital. Nearly 100 heads of state and government are to attend the summit, for which a pared-down format has been devised.

Climate change: UN plans 'shock therapy' for world leaders on environment | Environment | The Observer

Why I Threw the Shoe | CommonDreams.org

by Muntazer al-Zaidi

I am free. But my country is still a prisoner of war. There has been a lot of talk about the action and about the person who took it, and about the hero and the heroic act, and the symbol and the symbolic act. But, simply, I answer: what compelled me to act is the injustice that befell my people, and how the occupation wanted to humiliate my homeland by putting it under its boot.

Why I Threw the Shoe | CommonDreams.org

Everyone Seems to Be Agreeing with Bin Laden These Days

Robert Fisk in the Guardian today.

No wonder Osama bin Laden decided to address "the American people" this week. "You are waging a hopeless and losing war," he said in his 9/11 eighth anniversary audiotape. "The time has come to liberate yourselves from fear and the ideological terrorism of neoconservatives and the Israeli lobby."


Everyone Seems to Be Agreeing with Bin Laden These Days | CommonDreams.org

A Virtuous Tax

by Robert Kuttner

One prime cause of the financial collapse is that financial trading markets have become speculative worlds unto themselves. Instead of adding efficiency to the real economy, they mainly add risk that the rest of us now have to pay for.

There are many ways to damp down financial speculation, but a very effective strategy is to tax it. Given the huge costs of the clean-up (now being borne mainly by taxpayers) it would make a lot more sense to require financial markets to pay for their own bailout.

One very neat way of doing this is through a very small tax on all financial transactions. Ordinary retail sales are taxed, as are wages. But oddly enough, financial transactions are exempt from tax.

A Virtuous Tax | CommonDreams.org

Charles Darwin film 'too controversial for religious America' - Telegraph

Image by Colin Purrington via Flickr

so it seems that time IS plastic. the US is seemingly living circa: 1850. evolution is to controversial there for a film on that subject to be shown.

The film was chosen to open the Toronto Film Festival and has its British premiere on Sunday. It has been sold in almost every territory around the world, from Australia to Scandinavia.

However, US distributors have resolutely passed on a film which will prove hugely divisive in a country where, according to a Gallup poll conducted in February, only 39 per cent of Americans believe in the theory of evolution.

Charles Darwin film 'too controversial for religious America' - Telegraph