be just

US attack kills 5 Afghan kids     : Information Clearing House May 08, 2012 "Salon" -- Yesterday, I noted several reports from Afghanistan that as many as 20 civilians were killed by two NATO airstrikes, including a mother and her five children. Today, the U.S. confirmed at least some of those claims, acknowledging and apologizing for its responsibility for the death of that family:

Top Republican Calls for Stepped-Up Interventionism in Latin America -- News from Antiwar.com The top Republican in Congress on Tuesday called for stepping up U.S. “engagement” and interventionism in Latin America in order to obstruct various bogeymen that pose no threat to America. “The best defense against an expansion of Iranian influence in Latin America – and against the destructive aspirations of international criminals in the region – is for the United States to double down on a policy of direct engagement,” U.S. House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner said at the State Department. Boehner said Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visits to Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua and Ecuador in recent months “underscored the designs Iran has for expanding its influence in Latin America, and its eagerness to forge bonds with governments in the Western Hemisphere that have demonstrated a lesser interest in freedom and democracy.” If diplomatic meetings between Iran and Latin Am...

Supposed Would-Be Underwear Bomber Is CIA Informant -- News from Antiwar.com U.S. and Yemeni officials have confirmed that the supposed would-be underwear bomber at the heart of an al-Qaeda airliner plot revealed this week was actually an informant working for the CIA and Saudi intelligence all along. Members of the Obama administration spent virtually all of yesterday parading throughout major media outlets claiming their intrepid counterterrorism efforts successfully foiled a terrorist plot to blow up an American airliner. But now officials have anonymously confirmed that the plot, like so many other “successfully foiled” terror attacks, was hatched by the CIA from the start. Instead of showing that the CIA and the counterterrorism policies of the U.S. are keeping Americans safe from harm, or that al-Qaeda is making “inroads,” as former director of the National Counterterrorism Center Michael Leiter said, all this lauded incident shows is that the CIA can get weapons from shadow...

Former Labor Sec. Robert Reich on Clinton's Errors of Crippling Welfare to Repealing Glass-Steagall Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich critiques President Obama’s handling of the economic crisis and the Clinton administration’s repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, a key deregulatory move that ended the separation of commercial and investment banking and is widely seen as having helped lead to the financial collapse. The Clinton administration also presided over a drastic transformation of U.S. welfare laws, throwing millions off of welfare rolls. "I went outside of the White House, walked back to my office along Constitution Avenue, expecting I would see signs. ... There are a lot of people who were concerned about that issue. But there was nobody on the streets. It was deafening. The silence was deafening," Reich says of the day Clinton signed the change into law. He notes this is when he realized, "if people who are concerned about the increasing concentration of...

U.S. Spends Far More for Health Care Than 12 Industrialized Nations, but Quality Varies      : Information Clearing House U.S. Spends Far More for Health Care Than 12 Industrialized Nations By Mary Mahon May 03, 2012 "Information Clearing House" -- May 3, 2012, New York, NY—The United States spends more on health care than 12 other industrialized countries yet does not provide "notably superior" care, according to a new study from The Commonwealth Fund. The U.S. spent nearly $8,000 per person in 2009 on health care services, while other countries in the study spent between one-third (Japan and New Zealand) and two-thirds (Norway and Switzerland) as much. While the U.S. performs well on breast and colorectal cancer survival rates, it has among the highest rates of potentially preventable deaths from asthma and amputations due to diabetes, and rates that are no better than average for in-hospital deaths from heart attack and stroke.

Finding Bin Laden: The Truth Behind the Official Story       : Information Clearing House Finding Bin Laden: The Truth Behind the Official Story By Gareth Porter May 03, 2012 "Information Clearing House" -- A few days after US Navy Seals killed Osama bin Laden in a raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, a "senior intelligence official" briefing reporters on the materials seized from bin Laden's compound said the materials revealed that bin Laden had, "continued to direct even tactical details of the group's management." Bin Laden was, "not just a strategic thinker for the group," said the official. "He was active in operational planning and in driving tactical decisions." The official called the bin Laden compound, "an active command and control center." The senior intelligence official triumphantly called the discovery of bin Laden's hideout, "the greatest intelligence success perhaps of a generation," an...

United Methodists Call for Boycott of “products made by Israeli companies operating in occupied Palestinian territories” | BDSmovement.net United Methodists Call for Boycott of “products made by Israeli companies operating in occupied Palestinian territories” http://www.bdsmovement.net/2012/united-methodists-call-for-boycott-of-products-made-by-israeli-companies-operating-in-occupied-palestinian-territories-8999 Adopting the “Kairos Palestine” document, Methodists Elevate Palestinian Rights and Israel Divestment to Mainstream Prominence “Every worthwhile accomplishment, big or little, has its stages of drudgery and triumph; a beginning, a struggle and a victory.” –Gandhi Occupied Palestine, 3 May 2012 – The General Conference of the United Methodist Church decided yesterday to call for an explicit boycott of all Israeli companies “operating in the occupied Palestinian territories,” knowing that this constitutes the absolute majority of Israeli corporations. This and the overwh...