San Francisco Bay Area’s BART Pulls a Mubarak

By Amy Goodman

What does the police killing of a homeless man in San Francisco have to do with the Arab Spring uprisings from Tunisia to Syria? The attempt to suppress the protests that followed. In our digitally networked world, the ability to communicate is increasingly viewed as a basic right. Open communication fuels revolutions—it can take down dictators. When governments fear the power of their people, they repress, intimidate and try to silence them, whether in Tahrir Square or downtown San Francisco.

From Kilotons to Millisieverts: Japan’s Nuclear Legacy

By Amy Goodman

In recent weeks, radiation levels have spiked at the Fukushima nuclear power reactors in Japan, with recorded levels of 10,000 millisieverts per hour (mSv/hr) at one spot. This is the number reported by the reactor’s discredited owner, Tokyo Electric Power Co., although that number is simply as high as the Geiger counters go. In other words, the radiation levels are literally off the charts. Exposure to 10,000 millisieverts for even a brief time would be fatal, with death occurring within weeks. (For comparison, the total radiation from a dental X-ray is 0.005 mSv, and from a brain CT scan is less than 5 mSv.) The New York Times has reported that government officials in Japan suppressed official projections of where the nuclear fallout would most likely move with wind and weather after the disaster in order to avoid costly relocation of potentially hundreds of thousands of residents.

From Kilotons to Millisieverts: Japan’s Nuclear Legacy

By Amy Goodman

In recent weeks, radiation levels have spiked at the Fukushima nuclear power reactors in Japan, with recorded levels of 10,000 millisieverts per hour (mSv/hr) at one spot. This is the number reported by the reactor’s discredited owner, Tokyo Electric Power Co., although that number is simply as high as the Geiger counters go. In other words, the radiation levels are literally off the charts. Exposure to 10,000 millisieverts for even a brief time would be fatal, with death occurring within weeks. (For comparison, the total radiation from a dental X-ray is 0.005 mSv, and from a brain CT scan is less than 5 mSv.) The New York Times has reported that government officials in Japan suppressed official projections of where the nuclear fallout would most likely move with wind and weather after the disaster in order to avoid costly relocation of potentially hundreds of thousands of residents.

War, Debt and the President

By Amy Goodman

President Barack Obama touted his debt ceiling deal Tuesday, saying, “We can’t balance the budget on the backs of the very people who have borne the biggest brunt of this recession.” Yet that is what he and his coterie of Wall Street advisers have done.

War Is a Racket

By Amy Goodman

“War is a racket,” wrote retired U.S. Marine Maj. Gen. Smedley D. Butler, in 1935. That statement, which is also the title of his short book on war profiteering, rings true today. One courageous civil servant just won a battle to hold war profiteers accountable. Her name is Bunnatine “Bunny” Greenhouse.

Rupert Murdoch Doesn’t Eat Humble Pie

By Amy Goodman

Surian Soosay

“People say that Australia has given two people to the world,” Julian Assange told me in London recently, “Rupert Murdoch and me.” Assange, the founder of the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks, was humbly dismissing my introduction of him, to a crowd of 1,800 at East London’s Troxy theater, in which I suggested he had published perhaps more than anyone in the world. He said Murdoch took that publishing prize.

Two days later, the Milly Dowler phone hacking story exploded, and Murdoch would close one of the largest newspapers in the world, his News of the World, within a week.

Suicidios de soldados y la política de condolencias del Presidente

Por Amy Goodman

El presidente Barack Obama acaba de anunciar una inversión de una política de larga data que negó las cartas presidenciales de condolencia a los familiares de los soldados que se suicidan. Familiares de soldados muertos en acción recibir cartas del presidente. Silencio oficial, sin embargo, siempre ha estigmatizado a los que mueren de heridas auto-infligidas. El cambio marca un cambio a largo retraso en el reconocimiento de la epidemia de suicidios de veteranos y soldados en este país y el número de las heridas ocultas de la guerra.

Wikileaks, Wimbledon y la guerra

Por Amy Goodman

El sábado pasado estaba soleado en Londres, y las multitudes acudían a Wimbledon y la Regata Henley anual.Julian Assange, el fundador de la página web Wikileaks.org denunciante, se dirigía en tren desde el arresto domiciliario en Norfolk, a tres horas, para unirse a mí y filósofo esloveno Slavoj Zizek en una conversación pública sobre Wikileaks, el poder de la información y la importancia de la transparencia en las democracias.

Next Door “El terrorismo de Alimentos para el Reino Mágico

By Amy Goodman

Think of “food terrorism” and what do you see? Diabolical plots to taint items on grocery-store shelves? If you are Buddy Dyer, the mayor of Orlando, Fla., you might be thinking of a group feeding the homeless and hungry in one of your city parks. That is what Dyer is widely quoted as calling the activists with the Orlando chapter of Food Not Bombs—“food terrorists.” In the past few weeks, no less than 21 people have been arrested in Orlando, the home of Disney World, for handing out free food in a park.

Japan’s Meltdowns Demand New No-Nukes Thinking

By Amy Goodman

New details are emerging that indicate the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan is far worse than previously known, with three of the four affected reactors experiencing full meltdowns. Meanwhile, in the U.S., massive flooding along the Missouri River has put Nebraska’s two nuclear plants, both near Omaha, on alert. The Cooper Nuclear Station declared a low-level emergency and will have to close down if the river rises another 3 inches. The Fort Calhoun nuclear power plant has been shut down since April 9, in part due to flooding. At Prairie Island, Minn., extreme heat caused the nuclear plant’s two emergency diesel generators to fail. Emergency-generator failure was one of the key problems that led to the meltdowns at Fukushima.

War on Drugs: Fast, Furious and Fueled by the U.S.

By Amy Goodman

The violent deaths of Brian Terry and Juan Francisco Sicilia, separated by the span of just a few months and by the increasingly bloody U.S.-Mexico border, have sparked separate but overdue examinations of the so-called War on Drugs, and how the U.S. government is ultimately exacerbating the problem.

Weiner’s No Longfellow

By Amy Goodman

“The troubled sky reveals 
The grief it feels.”

Those two lines were written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his poem “Snow-Flakes,” published in a volume in 1863 alongside his epic and better-known “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.” Much of the news chatter this week has been about Sarah Palin’s flubbing of the history of Revere’s famous ride in April 1775. Revere was on a late-night, clandestine mission to alert American revolutionaries of an impending British attack. Palin’s incorrect version had Revere loudly ringing a bell and shooting a gun on horseback as a warning to the British to back off.

Hope and Resistance in Honduras

By Amy Goodman

While most in the United States were recognizing Memorial Day with a three-day weekend, the people of Honduras were engaged in a historic event: the return of President Manuel Zelaya, 23 months after he was forced into exile at gunpoint in the first coup in Central America in a quarter-century.

Andrew Breitbart’s ‘electronic brownshirts’

By Amy Goodman/(Guardian)

Andrew Breitbart holds a news conference on Acorn Revealed: The Philadelphia Story at the National Press Club. Photograph: Win McNamee/Getty Images

Judy Ancel, a Kansas City, Missouri, professor, and her St Louis colleague were teaching a labour history class together this spring semester. Little did they know, video recordings of the class were making their way into the thriving sub rosa world of rightwing attack video editing, twisting their words in a way that resulted in the loss of one of the professors’ jobs amid a wave of intimidation and death threats. Fortunately, reason and solid facts prevailed, and the videos ultimately were exposed for what they are: fraudulent, deceptive, sloppily edited hit pieces.

The battle for public broadcasting

>Republicans aim to defund NPR and public broadcasting, but at a modest cost this journalism is vital to American democracy

Amy Goodman/guardian.co.uk,

The aspen grove on Kebler Pass in Colorado is one of the largest organisms in the world. Thousands of aspen share the same, interconnected root system. Last weekend, I snowmobiled over the pass, 10,000ft above sea level, between the towns of Paonia and Crested

Afghanistan and the arithmetic of austerity

>Getting out of just one foreign war could fix all the US states’ budget deficits. If the math is that simple, the politics should be

Amy Goodman

guardian.cu.uk

US soldiers in Afghanistan: 711 US and allied soldiers were killed in 2010 while maintaining an occupation that costs US taxpayers $2bn a week. Photograph: Patrick Baz/AFP/Getty Images

Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio, Idaho … these are the latest fronts in the battle of budgets, with the larger fight over a potential shutdown of the US government looming. These fights, radiating out from the occupation of the Wisconsin Capitol building, are occurring against the backdrop of the two wars waged by the US in Iraq and Afghanistan. No discussion or debate over budgets, over wages and pensions, over deficits, should happen without a clear presentation of the costs of these wars – and the incalculable benefits that ending them would bring.

Uprisings: From the Middle East to the Midwest

By Amy Goodman

As many as 80,000 people marched to the Wisconsin state Capitol in Madison on Saturday as part of an ongoing protest against newly elected Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s attempt to not just badger the state’s public employee unions, but to break them.

When Corporations Choose Despots Over Democracy

By Amy Goodman

“People holding a sign ‘To: America. From: the Egyptian People. Stop supporting Mubarak. It’s over!” so tweeted my brave colleague, “Democracy Now!” senior producer Sharif Abdel Kouddous, from the streets of Cairo.