Ronda Hauben: The United Nations and the Houla Massacre!

At a press conference held on June 4, marking the beginning of China's presidency of the UN Security Council for the month of June, Li Baodong, Chinas Ambassador to the UN, observed that there are different versions of the facts of the Houla Massacre. Now we have different stories from different angles, he noted. Now we have the story from the Syrian government, and from the opposition parties, and from different sources. Since the Security Council has a team on the ground, we want to see first-hand information from our own people. He hoped this would make it possible to put the different pieces of information together and to come to our own conclusion with our own judgment. The expectation was that Joint UN-Arab League Envoy Kofi Annan would be able to provide further information from the UNSMIS Observer mission when he came to speak with the Security Council on Thursday, June 7. It was anticipated that Annans presentation would help to clarify the facts of the massacre. On June 7, however, instead of providing new information from such an investigation, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and several of the other speakers at the Informal General Assembly (GA) meeting put the responsibility for the Houla Massacre on the Assad government. This was also the dominant response of the nations that spoke at the Informal GA meeting, even though there had not yet been any adequate investigation into facts of the situation. Also, there were claims of a new massacre. Some of the member nations that spoke at the Informal GA meeting, however, objected to coming to such a conclusion,especially, in the absence of an adequate investigation.  

Anthony Hall: From Nuclear Power Plant to Nuclear Weapon!

Albert Einstein, May 1946: "Our world is faced with a crisis that has never before been envisaged in its whole existence. The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift towards unparallelled catastrophe." As the bad news gradually spreads that the debacle at Fukushima nuclear power plant #1 is becoming more perilous rather than less so, the words of Albert Einstein come to mind. Recall that the legendary physicist, Einstein, helped to set in motion the Manhattan Project, whose personnel designed and built the first atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. In his letter to US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1939, Einstein warned that if the United States did not enter and win the race to harness the destructive potential of atomic weaponry, Germany would almost certainly do so! The Manhattan Project became a primary prototype for the Research and Development, R and D partnerships linking the US government and for-profit corporations in what Dwight D Eisenhower would later describe as the military-industrial complex. Einstein himself did not directly participate in this huge initiative aimed at defeating the Axis powers, linking Japan with Germany and Italy. One of the twentieth century's most iconographic thinkers watched from the sidelines as other physicists and technologists applied many of Einstein's theories to the building of atomic weaponry. After Japan lay in ruins, not only from the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also from the massive carpet bombing of Tokyo and several other urban centers, Einstein went public with his fears and anxieties. In famous passages that have been subject to various translations and paraphrasing, Einstein observed, Our world is faced with a crisis that has never before been envisaged in its whole existence. The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking!  

Gordon Sturrock: 30 Seconds to Stop "Social Cleansing".

If anyone could spare just a minute (30 seconds?) to vote in a poll, it would be VERY much appreciated. Local activists here in Oregon are trying to stop a "Social Cleansing" of our homeless population, which our local police have been quite ruthless towards. Please vote "YES" to the poll question: Should the Eugene City Council grant the request to provide land for a homeless camp? For further information about how bad the problem is, here is an EXCELLENT letter on the subject written by a local activist: "Countless times, I've looked-on in horror as downtown cops have roughly shoved old vets around, man-handled elderly gents for the crime of holding an 'anything helps' cardboard sign. I've seen squad cars parked wildly on sidewalks Starsky & Hutch style, and had steroid-aggressive uniforms gesture wildly to 'keep moving' so there are fewer witnesses as their class-cops rough up the poor downtown. Bank robbery in progress? More often, some jug-band buskers, Jaywalkers, Loiterers in tie-dye. Well meaning people keep bringing this very real and ongoing concern to City Hall, but it was City Hall who found 7 mil for downtown policing, on behalf of a vocal elite-primarily three high-end restauranteurs, a bourgeois social club, and some misguided able viewers who only race downtown in over-sized white vehicles, endangering pedestrians en route to big-box franchises and malls in the suburbs, anyway. The first three years I lived downtown, it felt like a happy haven for bohemians and academics. I spent countless hours at Saturday Market, sitting around the Park Blocks, admiring all the beautiful artwork in downtown windows, watching shows at WOW Hall, seeing Frank Black in the window of Cosmic. Loved the "Unfine" Art Museum, Cosmic, the Kiva, etc.

Obama's Bold Immigration Executive Order and the Election!

The Obama administration's blockbuster immigration announcement is a huge victory to "progressives" and immigration rights activists, and puts Republicans in a very awkward situation. It's only a few hours old, but we are already seeing how Republicans will likely respond to this move, which fundamentally changes the parameters of the presidential campaign on the key issue of immigration. But first the policy: The administration will stop deporting young undocumented immigrants, who meet certain criteria. They have to have graduated from a US high school or earned a GED or served in the military, have no criminal record, be younger than 30 and have been brought to the US under the age of 16, by no fault of their own, as Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said on a conference call with reporters this morning. These approximately 800,000 immigrants will have an opportunity to obtain work permits, which will give them legal status in the country. Essentially, the administration is using its executive authority to implement the dream act, the much discussed policy that many Republicans used to support, but no longer. Now for the politics. The move puts Republicans, who are torn internally over immigration, and especially Mitt Romney, in a very uncomfortable spot: Romney has repeatedly said that he would veto a "Dream Act" if elected president, and Kris Kobach, his hard-right immigration adviser and the author of Arizona's notorious immigration law, has said the candidate will not support anything that gives undocumented immigrants a path to legal status!

Madison Ruppert: Pentagon Lists 110 Drone Bases in the US!

In the fact that military drones are already being used in tandem with law enforcement in order to conduct warrant-less surveillance on the American people wasn't troubling enough, we now have 110 potential drone bases on US soil. Let's not forget that drones have also been used to help carry out arrests and with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) accelerating the integration of these unmanned crafts into our airspace and the drone industry boasting about their influence over "our" government, we can only expect more. The newly released document, which was originally reported on by Inside Defense, is a report to Congress,which lists every one of the 110 potential sites, as well as the models of unmanned aerial systems (UAS), better known as drones, which will fly out of said site: These bases span 39 out of 50 states, as well as bases in Guam and Puerto Rico. The drones which will operate out of these sites range from the relatively tiny AeroVironment RQ-11B Raven to the considerably larger General Atomics MQ-1 Predator and beyond. Indeed, many of the drones listed are far from the usual drones I would expect to see, such as the RQ-4 Block 10 Global Hawk, produced by Northrop Grumman, which is to be operated out of NAS (Naval Air Station) Jacksonville in Jacksonville, Florida, as well as the RQ-4 Block 10 Global Hawk, produced by Northrop Grumman, which is to be operated out of NAS (Naval Air Station) Jacksonville in Jacksonville, Florida, as well as the RQ-4 Block 40 Global Hawk to be operated out of Grand Forks Air Base in North Dakota.       

Rick Rozoff: Battle-Hardened Troops Headed To Africa

After the US begins to wind down more than ten consecutive years of combat, mainly counter -insurgency, operations in what has variously been labeled the Broader, Greater and New Middle East, war-tested troops are being prepared for redeployment to Africa and Latin, largely South America. Last September President Barack Obama hailed the five million US soldiers that have served in the so-called global war on terror, what he called the 9/11 generation, in the preceding decade. American commanders issue regular statements that war-time experience in Afghanistan and Iraq has trained the armed forces for new operations in other parts of the world. Africa, Latin America, those parts of the Middle East so far not undermined and attacked, the Balkans-Black Sea-Caucasus arc and the Asia-Pacific region. On June 8, the Gannett newspaper chain's Army Times cited the commander of US Army Africa, Major General David Hogg, disclosing that a brigade-size force of US troops, 3,000 "and likely more" will begin regular deployments to the African continent beginning next year. As a component of US Army Africa's regionally aligned force concept, the American military personnel will concentrate on training the armed forces of US Africa Command's new military allies, which have grown to include all 54 African nations, except for Eritrea, Sudan and Zimbabwe after the overthrow of the governments of Ivory Coast and Libya last year, and, in Pentagonese, to advise, assist, partner, enable and mentor in counterinsurgency campaigns like those underway in Mali, Somalia and Central Africa. As Africa is alone in not being the site of extensive and sustained US military deployments, according to Hogg As far as our mission goes, its uncharted territory. In the words of the Army Times, Africa is "the Army's last frontier."

Stella Dawson: Central Banks Promise to Save the World On Monday.

Yes, sport fans, it's finally happened: Our Central Banks Promise To Save our World On Monday, if Greece Elects a Crazy Person This Weekend. A senior US official cautioned that the Greek election will not provide "the definitive signal on what happens next" in the euro zone debt crisis, but if severe market strains emerge after an unusual confluence of three elections this weekend, there are important polls in Egypt and France as well: "The central banks are preparing for coordinated action to provide liquidity," said a senior G20 aide familiar with discussions among international financial diplomats. His statement was confirmed by several other G20 officials. Wall Street stocks jumped sharply on the news, with the S&P 500 and the Dow Industrials both up more than 1 percent. The Euro added to gains and US government debt prices fell, boosting yields. A move to boost liquidity could mark a dramatic backdrop to the G20 summit of world leaders, who will gather in Los Cabos, Mexico, on Monday and Tuesday, where Europe's escalating crisis tops the agenda. Leaders will be accompanied by finance ministers playing an advisory role. The ministers, who usually keep a low profile at these summits, have scheduled a working dinner on Monday and lunch on Tuesday. Depending on the severity of the market response, an emergency meeting of ministers from the Group of Seven developed nations could be held on Monday or Tuesday in Los Cabos, with central bankers joining by phone, a second G20 official said. Their first line of defense probably would be a statement that policymakers are ready to take whatever steps are needed to assure market stability.