All of the parties represented in the new German coalition government are agreed that the burden of the economic crisis and the ballooning state debt is to be placed upon the backs of the general population: here.
America’s roads, bridges, and sewerage are in advanced state of decay, according to a 2009 report by an association of civil engineers: here.
More than 200 people came to the budget hearing of the Seattle City Council to oppose Mayor Greg Nickels’ proposal to cut $72 million from spending: here.
This video says about itself:
The Bush administration, which favored the rich and the financial crisis are to blame for the large number of homeless kids in the U.S., says Jeremy Rosen from the National Policy and Advocacy Council on Homelessness.
The US economy continues to shed jobs, wreaking havoc on countless lives, even as government officials prepare to announce the official end of the recession that began in December 2007: here.
Towana S. Gooch, a single mother, was on the verge of losing her townhouse in Upper Marlboro, MD, after her mortgage lender kicked her out of a government loan modification program because of a seven-cent error. The most important proposal for unmarried women is the creation of a federal Consumer Financial Protection Agency, which would aim to prevent predatory lending and the targeting of vulnerable borrowers: here.
ScienceDaily (Oct. 28, 2009) — Homeless and marginally housed people have much higher mortality and shorter life expectancy than could be expected on the basis of low income alone, concludes a study from Canada published on bmj.com: here.
A US diplomat has resigned from his post in protest over the US-led war in Afghanistan, becoming the first US official to step down over the conflict since it began eight years ago.
“I have doubts and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy, but my resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end,” the letter, which was dated September 10, said.
The Washington Post, a US newspaper, reported that Hoh’s decision “sent ripples all the way to the White House”. …
Government officials had tried to convince Hoh to stay, amid concerns that he could become a prominent voice against the US’s involvement in Afghanistan, the Post reported.
Hoh, a former Marine Corps captain who fought in Iraq, also turned down a senior staff-level job at the US embassy in Kabul after he gave in his resignation. …
The former diplomat said that his resignation, which became final on Wednesday, was tended because staying in his post “was not the right thing to do,” he told the Post.
“… you have to draw the line somewhere, and say this is their problem to solve”
“I’m not some peacenik, pot-smoking hippie who wants everyone to be in love,” he said.
“I want people in Iowa, people in Arkansas, people in Arizona, to call their congressman and say, ‘Listen, I don’t think this is right’.”
Rosiland Jordan, Al Jazeera’s correspondent in Washington, said that the content of the letter had won some endorsement.
“There is already support coming from liberal quarters [in the US] for what Matthew Hoh wrote in his resignation letter, which indicated that, in his view, the US has the wrong perception of who the enemy is inside Afghanistan.
“He said that all his efforts inside Afghanistan were being over-run by [what he called] the fact that people in Afghanistan do not like outsiders, regardless of what flag they work under.”
‘Corrupt’ government
Many Afghans fight US forces because of their presence in the country, Hoh said in his letter.
Afghanistan: The boy is but one youth among many throughout the country forced into an age-old underground tradition known as “bacha bazi,” or “boy play,” in which young boys are taken from their families, made to dance and used as sex slaves by powerful men. The number of boys involved is unknown — the practice has been going on for centuries, in a country where such practices are overshadowed by conflict and war: here.
Since the beginning of the mortgage crisis one and a half million Americans have lost their homes. With banks repossessing their houses, many have been left no other option than to move into their cars.
The streets of California are now filled with people who call their car their home. Jennifer Clement, explains, “The estimated value of our house went to 120,000 U.S. dollars within a month. After losing all the money, we literally landed on the street and were forced to live in our caravan”. It is a vicious circle: Without a job - no home. Without an home - no job.
USA: Emergency shelter providers in Atlanta, Georgia, are confronted by a huge increase in need. Anita Beaty, director of the Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless, spoke to the World Socialist Web Site about the worsening situation: here.
The new German government plans to use cuts to social expenditure as its most important means of redistributing social wealth in favour of the wealthy: here.
Germany: On Thursday of last week 96.7 percent of union members active in the building cleaning branch voted in favor of the first national strike in the history of the industry. The response of the union, however, has been to call out just a fraction of its membership: here.
South Korea: Following the suppression of the 77-day occupation of the Ssangyong Motor plant at Pyeongtaek in August, the government has broadened its offensive against the rights and conditions of the working class: here.
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 27 (IPS) - Gender equality contributes to economic growth, but economic growth does not always contribute to gender equality, says the United Nations World Survey on the Role of Women in Development launched Tuesday, a message well timed in the context of the current financial crisis: here.
US forces open fire at civilians after bomb attack
However, an official, who declined to be identified, told this news agency that one civilian was killed and three others sustained injuries in the gunshots fired by the US forces
Abdul Moeed Hashimi
US forces on Sunday opened fire at civilians in eastern Laghman province after coming under a bomb attack this noon, killing a civilian and wounding three others, an official and a tribal elder said.
The bomb attack happened on the US forces in Safi Qala area of Mehtarlam city, provincial capital at 1pm.
A tribal elder named Zabardast Khan told Pajhwok Afghan News soon after the blast, two helicopters arrived at the scene and airlifted the dead and wounded soldiers.
He added after the blast, the forces cordoned off four villages.
…
Head of the Laghan Civil Hospital, Abdul Latif Qayumi said a seriously injured girl was brought to the hospital who was referred to Nangarhar civil hospital.
However, an official, who declined to be identified, told this news agency that one civilian was killed and three others sustained injuries in the gunshots fired by the US forces.
US forces have so far issued no statement about the blast and fire incident.
According to NGOs, 90 Percent of Afghan Women Are Abused
A 9-year-old tells her story of being raped at age five.
This sobering CNN video takes us into one of only a dozen women’s shelters in Kabul, Afghanistan. According to nongovernmental agencies, 90 percent of Afghan women are victims of domestic abuse.
One woman is at the shelter trying to escape 15 years of abuse from her husband for not being able to conceive a child. As she speaks, a slash on her throat is visible and highlighted by stitches. She would like to see her family again, but she fears she will be killed if she goes home. Another woman has tried to kill herself three times to escape the abuse of a man who often chained her to a wall, setting her free only when it was time for her to cook. In a country where women are viewed as property, even children aren’t spared. A 9-year-old tells her story of being raped at age five.
Within hours of the arrival of U.S. troops in the village, they wrote, bands of villagers began complaining the local police force was “a bigger problem than the Taliban”.
Afghan girls burn themselves to escape marriage: here.
North Afghanistan ‘a bridgehead for drug-trafficking to Russia’: here.
The British Establishment was accused of gross hypocrisy after immigration judges backed Home Office claims that it was safe to deport asylum-seekers to war-torn Afghanistan.
The wife of a soldier facing charges of desertion for refusing to redeploy to an unjust war speaks to peace activists about the challenges she has faced: here.
The top UN official in Afghanistan has said that the extensive fraud that marked the first round of presidential elections would be reduced but not eliminated in time for the run-off in two weeks: here.
This video from the United States Congress says about itself:
The Oversight Committee holds a hearing, “Allegations of Waste, Fraud, and Abuse at the New U.S. Embassy in Iraq.” The hearing examines the performance of the State Department and its contractors in the construction of the new $600 million U.S. embassy in Baghdad.
The Committee reviews questions regarding the embassy compound construction as well as allegations of labor abuse through improper contracting practices. Rory Mayberry, a former subcontractor employee for First Kuwaiti Trading & Contracting Company, gives opening testimony.
The extent of the massive waste and abuse surrounding the construction of the monstrous US embassy in Baghdad continues to expand. The State Department has just released another audit of the embassy’s construction and suggests that the Kuwaiti contractor hired by the Bush administration to do most of the construction work may have to repay more than $130 million to US taxpayers as a result of construction deficiencies, incomplete and undocumented design work, inadequate quality control and interest on unauthorized payments.
First a bit of background:
The Baghdad embassy—the largest of any nation on planet earth and ten times bigger than any other US embassy—is striking evidence indicating a continued US presence in the country for many years to come. The structure cost more than $700 million and is the size of 80 football fields. It is bigger than the Vatican, six times larger than the United Nations compound in New York and is about two thirds the size of the National Mall in Washington. It has space for 1,000 employees who are guarded by scores of paramilitary mercenary forces. In other words it is the perfect structure for a nation that claims to be leaving Iraq very soon.
The embassy is more like a fortress and hardly sends a message of warm diplomacy. “What kind of embassy is it when everybody lives inside and it’s blast-proof, and people are running around with helmets and crouching behind sandbags?” said Edward Peck, the former US ambassador to Iraq when the embassy was first being constructed.
The company that was contracted to build the embassy was First Kuwaiti General Trading & Contracting (FKTC). It’s run by Mohammad I. H. Marafie, “a member of one of the most powerful mercantile families in Kuwait,” according to CorpWatch. “FKTC’s general manager and co-owner, Wadih al-Absi jets back and forth to the United States, dreaming of magazine covers celebrating his rise to a global player in large-scale engineering and construction… FKTC is one of the many Middle East companies that collectively ship tens of thousands of cheap day laborers to Iraq’s war zones where they are paid just dollars a day.”
In 2006, David Phinney reported: “Several other contractors that competed for the embassy contracts… believe that a high-level decision at the State Department was made to favor a Kuwait-based firm in appreciation for Kuwait’s support of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. ‘It was political,’ said one contractor.”
FKIT has been plagued by allegations from whistleblowers who worked on the embassy that say the company “brought workers, mostly South Asians and Filipinos, to Baghdad under false pretenses, then abused and threatened them while there.”
The mother of a British soldier killed in Iraq broke down in tears today as she called for former prime minister Tony Blair to be held to account for the “unlawful” conflict in Iraq: here.
While Iraq and its people continue to suffer, with most of the western media ignoring their plight, President Obama is still pursuing President Bush’s goal in Iraq – to have a government in Baghdad that is closely allied to the US. This is incompatible with bringing about a stable, peaceful and democratic Iraq: here.
Oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens told Congress on Wednesday that U.S. energy companies are “entitled” to some of Iraq’s crude because of the large number of American troops that lost their lives fighting in the country and the U.S. taxpayer money spent in Iraq: here.
Pressure for an “oil-gusher” tax on BP grew on Tuesday after the petroleum giant announced increased quarterly profits of £3 billion fuelled by job cuts and its new Iraq contract: here.
The massive explosions in central Baghdad on Sunday are a particularly bloody reminder of the sectarian, ethnic and political conflicts that have been generated in Iraq by six-and-a-half years of US occupation: here.
One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: Women’s Rights in Kuwait: here.
Nancy Spero (August 24, 1926 – October 18, 2009) was an American artist. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, she had long been based in New York City. She was married to and collaborated with artist Leon Golub (1922–2004).
As both artist and activist, Nancy Spero’s career has spanned fifty years. Her continuous engagement with contemporary political, social, and cultural concerns is renowned. She has chronicled wars and apocalyptic violence as well as articulating visions of ecstatic rebirth and the celebratory cycles of life. Her complex network of collective and individual voices was a catalyst for the creation of her figurative lexicon representing women from prehistory to the present in such epic-scale paintings and collage on paper as Torture of Women (1976), Notes in Time on Women (1979) and The First Language (1981). …
Spero and Golub returned to New York in 1964, where the couple remained to live and work. The Vietnam War was raging and the Civil Rights Movement was exploding. Affected by images of the war broadcast nightly on television and the unrest and violence evident in the streets, Spero began her War Series (1966-70). These small gouache and inks on paper, executed rapidly, represented the obscenity and destruction of war. The War Series is among the most sustained and powerful group of works in the genre of history painting that condemns war and its real and lasting consequences.
An activist and early feminist, Spero was a member of the Art Workers Coalition (1968-69), Women Artists in Revolution (1969), and in 1972 she was a founding member of the first women’s cooperative gallery, A.I.R. (Artists in Residence) in SoHo. It was during this period that Spero completed her “Artaud Paintings” (1969-70), finding her artistic “voice” and developing her signature scroll paintings: Codex Artaud (1971-1972). Uniting text and image, printed on long scrolls of paper, glued end-to-end and tacked on the walls of A.I.R., Spero violated the formal presentation, choice of valued medium and scale of framed paintings. Although her collaged and painted scrolls were Homeric in both scope and depth, the artist shunned the grandiose in content as well as style, relying instead on intimacy and immediacy, while also revealing the continuum of shocking political realities underlying enduring myths.
In 1974, Spero chose to focus on themes involving women and their representation in various cultures; her Torture in Chile (1974) and the long scroll, Torture of Women (1976, 20 inches x 125 feet), interweave oral testimonies with images of women throughout history, linking the contemporary governmental brutality of Latin American dictatorships (from Amnesty International reports) with the historical repression of women. Spero re-presented previously obscured women’s histories, cultural mythology, and literary references with her expressive figuration.
HERE WE go again. Another study is out to show how the women’s movement ruined women’s lives: here.
Most scholars have assumed that all prehistoric artists were male, but new evidence suggests women and even young girls produced at least some cave drawings, according to a study in the latest Oxford Journal of Archaeology.
The study focused on finger flutings made on the walls and ceiling of Rouffignac Cave in the Dordogne, France.
The flutings — lines drawn with the fingers on soft surfaces — as well as other art in the cave are thought to be 13,000 to 14,000 years old, based on stylistic considerations.
The figures pictured here were likely created by a 5-year old girl. The researchers came to this conclusion based not only on her hand dimensions but also on the height of the places where she had been able to reach.
Tens of thousands of US soldiers are returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan, suffering from post traumatic stress disorder. They say they’ve been abandoned by the Bush Administration and the Department of Veterans Affairs, claiming that government officials are actively trying to cover up the extent of America’s traumatised soldiers.
For many vets, this means not enough help is being offered and their lives are plagued by anxiety and mental health issues. But for some, the results are even more tragic. Dateline video journalist Nick Lazaredes meets the widow of an Afghanistan veteran who was severely depressed by his recall to fight in Iraq. He was killed in a police shootout on Christmas Day, his death dubbed ‘police-assisted suicide’. As Dateline reveals, his story is not an isolated one.
US soldier commits suicide in Indiana movie theater
20 October 2009
A National Guard soldier home on a 15-day leave from the war in Afghanistan committed suicide in a Muncie, Indiana, movie theater October 12. Jacob W. Sexton, a 21-year-old from rural Farmland, Indiana, shot himself in the head, approximately 20 minutes into the violent comedy Zombieland, with friends and siblings sitting around him. The suicide underscores once again the psychological damage done to soldiers charged with carrying out the brutal colonial occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Sexton’s death came as a shock to his family and military cohorts, who told the Muncie Star Press they had not seen any symptoms of suicidal behavior or post-traumatic stress disorder. Yet the young man’s behavior before the film showing revealed that the war’s violence was on his mind. When asked by the theater manager for identification proving the group was of age to see the movie, Sexton reportedly snapped at him, “I shot 18 people and you want to see my identification?”
Sexton’s father, Jeffrey Sexton, told the Associated Press, “We just need to watch these boys and the girls coming back home. Something’s just not right. Too much is happening.”
Like many active-duty military members, Sexton had served multiple tours in both Middle East occupations.
U.S. Army had no mandatory policies for handling suicidal soldiers in Iraq: here.
U.S. Army Reserve Spc. Chancellor Keesling died in Iraq on June 19, 2009, from “a non-combat related incident,” according to the Pentagon. Keesling had killed himself. He was just one in what is turning out to be a record year for suicides in the U.S. military: here.
As with suicides, the rate of sexual assaults within the US military now exceeds that of the general population. A Pentagon report earlier this year found one in three female service members are sexually assaulted at least once during their enlistment. Sixty-three percent of nearly 3,000 cases reported last year were rapes or aggravated assaults. Rape in the Ranks: The Enemy Within is a documentary that focuses on the cases of three female service members victimized by rape and other forms of sexual assault. We air excerpts of the film and speak to filmmaker Pascale Bourgaux: here.
British soldiers’ families against the Afghanistan war: here.
