An Israeli judge made an historic ruling last week when he decided that an Arab teenager needed "protection" from the justice system and ordered that he not be convicted despite being found guilty of throwing stones at a police car during a protest against Israel's attack last winter on Gaza. In the verdict, he wrote: "I will say that the state is not authorised to caress with one hand the Jewish ‘ideological' felons, and flog with its other hand the Arab ‘ideological' felons." He referred in particular to the lenient treatment by the police and courts both of Jewish settler youths who have attacked soldiers in the West Bank and who violently resisted the disengagement from the Gaza Strip in 2005, and of religious extremists who have spent many months battling police to prevent the opening of a car park on the Sabbath in Jerusalem.

You know how when we start talking about raising taxes on the rich, who have gotten a free pass the last few decades how some Conservative politician or idiot radio-type is always bantering about how the richest 2% pay more than half in taxes or some garbage like that. Well, as always with the greediest and least patriotic among us that talk is just that, garbage.

Shouldn't the government pledge allegiance to the people rather than the other way around?

Because of the current recession and job losses, more people are going hungry now that at any time since the statistic has been recorded. Unfortunately, most likely these numbers will be even worse next year as the full effects of the recession come to fruition. As always with hunger children were some of the hardest hit.

On the eve of the International Energy Agency’s release of its annual World Energy Outlook (WEO), a whistleblower at the IEA claims the agency “has been deliberately underplaying a looming [oil] shortage for fear of triggering panic buying” in the world markets.

"A Rhode Island woman is suing Citibank, claiming the financial giant is trying to squeeze money out of its credit-card customers in advance of changes in federal law due to take place in February 2010. The lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court earlier this week by Providence lawyer Peter N. Wasylyk on behalf of Portsmouth resident Michol K. Murphy states that Citibank has violated the terms of her credit-card agreement by jacking up the annual percentage rate on her account without cause. Wasylyk is asking the court to certify the case as a class-action lawsuit."

The public are not the problem. It's true some people don't give a damn - but millions do, as I know from the responses to my own films. What people want is to be engaged - a sense that things matter, that nothing is immutable, that unemployment among the young and poverty among the old are both uncivilised and wrong. What terrifies the agents of power is the awakening of people: of public consciousness.

"This piece will attempt to analyze the US Government’s Warrantless Wiretap Program utilizing open source information including A.T.&T. What I will attempt to show in this piece is how those lofty goals remain largely unrealized and how governments, under the guise of “security” are, in fact, using the Internet as a new, overarching and suffocating surveillance state to monitor, compile and track the personal and private lives of virtually everyone who uses modern telecommunications in any form."

The move came Wednesday night in Amherst, Mass., on a voice vote of town meeting members. The town is also now officially on record as urging Congress to lift its ban on moving cleared detainees to the US – and has gone so far as to identify two detainees it would like to welcome to Amherst.Amherst’s resolution to take in cleared detainees – of which there are at least 60 out of the 215 held in the US camp for terrorism suspects – is a first for a US municipality, says Nancy Talanian, director of No More Guantánamos, a citizen organization founded this year to support President Obama’s plan to close the Guantánamo facility in Cuba.

The recommendation, published in the latest issue of the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, follows from the Academy’s Arthur M. Sackler Colloquium on ‘‘Evolution in Health and Medicine’’ held in April 2009 at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC. The paper’s authors say “Better education about evolutionary biology and its applications in medicine will have substantial benefits for physicians, their patients, public health workers, researchers, and other health professionals.”

"It’s been a rough few years for lobbyists. They have been attacked by President Barack Obama. They have been targeted in corruption probes. And they have been hurt by the economy. And many have decided they’re not going to take it anymore. A record number of lobbyists have quit the business this year, according to a study released today. About 1,400 lobbyists, or 8% of the industry, left in the three-month period ending June 30, according to a joint study of lobbying records by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics and OMB Watch. Typically, a few hundred lobbyists leave the business every quarter."

It's shocking enough to hear that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), a small subset of the U.S. Dept. of Labor, dropped a whooping $87.4 million fine on oil giant BP. It comes as even more of a shock, though, when you find out that BP has challenged the fine, as well as the hundreds of cited health and safety violations that came along with it, as more and more of their employees are being injured due to safety accidents, some being fatal. BP Explosion March 2005, photo from OSHAYet that's what happened last Friday when BP formally contested the fines and citations imposed by the OSHA for what officials said was the company's failure to correct safety hazards identified after the 2005 explosion that killed 15 workers and injured 170 more at its Texas City refinery, the third largest refinery in the country.

Welcome to 17th Century Salem. Welcome to neo-Puritan America, where dismemberments and flying body parts and mushroom clouds and elected officials intentionally and strategically lying to their constituents are cool but a picture of a woman wearing four times more clothing than every teenaged girl around every swimming pool in the United States is NSFW. The Scarlet NSFW brands the wrong person. Those whose visions challenge are to be positioned behind the screen of shame, while those who are afraid of ideas have their narrow prejudices reinforced by official policies and unspoken self-righteous bullying. We will know America has finally attained a measure of enlightenment when the reverse of those statements is true.

"When Matthew Hoh joined the Foreign Service early this year, he was exactly the kind of smart civil-military hybrid the administration was looking for to help expand its development efforts in Afghanistan. A former Marine Corps captain with combat experience in Iraq, Hoh had also served in uniform at the Pentagon, and as a civilian in Iraq and at the State Department. By July, he was the senior U.S. civilian in Zabul province, a Taliban hotbed. But last month, in a move that has sent ripples all the way to the White House, Hoh, 36, became the first U.S. official known to resign in protest over the Afghan war, which he had come to believe simply fueled the insurgency."

President Barack Obama on Tuesday will announce $3.4 billion in government grants to help build a “smart” electric grid that will save consumers money on their utility bills, reduce blackouts and carry power supplies generated by solar and wind energy, the White House said.

"For the retired couple from East Bethel, it was the beginning of a financial nightmare that left them with at least $50,000 in unpaid medical bills. They discovered that the new 'health plan,' they signed up for in January, for $499 a month, wouldn't pay for any of his medical care. ... Consumer advocates say companies are taking advantage of the recession and the growing number of uninsured people -- 1 in 5 American adults under age 65 -- to sell 'health coverage' that evaporates when customers try to use it, or provides far less than promised."

A must see. Take a moment and just watch the trailer. You'll love the Haliburton Survival Ball.Impersonating big-time criminals in order to publicly humiliate them. Targets are leaders and big corporations who put profits ahead of everything else. Includes video.

Victims of rape often wind up being denied health insurance, and due to records of treatments and precautionary medications.

"The basic Medicare premium will shoot up next year by 15 percent, to $110.50 a month, federal officials said Monday. The increase means that monthly premiums would top $100 for the first time, a stark indication of the rise in medical costs that is driving the debate in Congress about a broad overhaul of the health care system. About 12 million people, or 27 percent of Medicare beneficiaries, will have to pay higher premiums or have the additional amounts paid on their behalf. The other 73 percent will be shielded from the increase because, under federal law, their Medicare premiums cannot go up more than the increase in their Social Security benefits, and Social Security officials announced last week that there would be no increase in benefits in 2010 because inflation had been extremely low."

"The unprecedented number of death threats against President Obama, a rise in racist hate groups, and a new wave of antigovernment fervor threaten to overwhelm the US Secret Service, according to government officials and reports, raising new questions about the 144-year-old agency’s overall mission."