Role of State Terror in Death of Anti-SOPA Activist Aaron Swartz by Imani Henry

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By Imani Henry
Workers World
January 21, 2013

The largest online protest in history, known as the anti-SOPA Internet strike, took place on Jan. 18 a year ago to oppose the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act. If passed, SOPA and PIPA would have had the potential to drastically censor and limit users’ access to online information, as well as give the U.S. government more power to police the Internet.  The bills were backed by corporations in the entertainment industry.

Indian Farmers Trapped and Desperate by Graham Peebles

by Graham Peebles
Guest Writer
Dandelion Salad
London
January 24, 2013

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India has the largest number of smallholder farmers in the World, 600 million by some estimates. From this army of workers one impoverished desperate man, or indeed woman, with a noose of debt around their neck takes his or her own life on average every thirty minutes, A statistic barely comprehensible, representing the tidal wave of suicides that has swept through the farming community in the last 15 years.

Reddit Co-founder, Aaron Swartz, 26, Found Dead

Image by Elizabeth Brossa via Flickr

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Such sad and heartbreaking news today. My condolences to his family and friends. He will be missed greatly by many people across the country/world. ~ DS

NewsyTech·Jan 12, 2013

Swartz dedicated his life to sharing data and information online, developing standards for the free and open sharing of information. He was 26.

Bitter Seeds (no longer available)

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Sorry the video is no longer available.

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www.itvs.org

Biotechnology is changing the way farming is done all over the world. Advocates believe the “New Green Revolution” is the only way to provide sufficient food for the world’s growing population while opponents raise environmental concerns and fear that GMOs drive small-scale farmers off the land. Bitter Seeds explores the controversy — from a village in India that uses genetically modified seeds to U.S. government agencies that promote them.

Monsanto and the mortal danger to traditional agriculture By Siv O’Neall

By Siv O’Neall
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Axisoflogic.com
August 21, 2011

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The greatest threat to the future of food production in the world is the introduction of genetically engineered foods from the bio-tech industry. Contrary to their mendacious propagandized promises of solving the problem of world hunger through the so-called second green revolution, the bio-tech companies are instead in the process of destroying the world’s ecosystems, and thus the natural food chains and life cycles. Their goal is certainly not to solve any problem at all, but instead to fill the corporate coffers with the profits from selling their dangerous products to countries with already high mortality rates from malnutrition and starvation.

Vandana Shiva: Understanding the Corporate Takeover

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http://blip.tv/grittv/
April 29, 2011

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“The American people should see that corporations have abandoned them long ago,” says scientist, environmentalist, and food justice activist Dr. Vandana Shiva, named one of the seven most influential women in the world by Forbes magazine. “The people will have to rebuild democracy as a living democracy.”

P. Sainath: Mass Media v. Mass Reality (must-see)

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zgraphix1 on Sep 11, 2011

Award-winning journalist P. Sainath will speak on the failure of mass media to report and analyze the widening economic inequality in India and around the world. For the past decade, Sainath has been reporting on the epidemic of farmers committing suicide in India as a result of the collapse of the rural economy.

The Man In The Bathtub, December 1, 1940 by Philip A. Farruggio

by Philip A. Farruggio
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
December 1, 2010

He was born and raised in a little town just outside of Licata, Sicily. By the time he was 18, the young man was accepted into university in Tunisia, a far more scholastically advanced place than the Sicily of the early 1900s. Upon graduating, he decided to do what many young Italians chose to do, and he emigrated to the United States. He married a pretty young Neapolitan girl that he met in New York City, and they settled down to raise a family. She could only bear one child, a son, in 1915. Her husband could not get his Tunisian university degree to count for anything here, so he found whatever work he could.

“Not For Nothing…!” Understanding PTSD by Eileen Coles

by Eileen Coles
Guest Writer
Dandelion Salad
November 5, 2010

A newly published World War I diary is considered to be one of the most accurate depictions of the horrors of war. Ernst Jünger, the German diarist, served for 3 years in the trenches on the Western Front. He was wounded 7 times. That he survived the combat theaters he was in at all was a 1 in 20,000 chance.

It is interesting to note that he did not suffer from PTSD. Der Spiegel has the details.

I believe there were two factors which contributed to the diarist’s lack of PTSD. One was the firm belief that what he was doing was right, noble and good. (While the Nazis revered him and tried to exploit his deeds, he himself refused to associate with them.) The other was that he kept a diary, which allowed him to mentally work through any issues as they happened or shortly thereafter.

The Wages of Hate: The Development of Political Homophobia by Steven Jonas, MD, MPH

by Steven Jonas, MD, MPH
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
crossposted on Buzzflash.com
October 9, 2010

Homophobia has been around for a long time.  It turns up in the Old Testament of the Bible as well as in the New.  The Republican Religious Right relies on that view in support of its homophobia, and cites chapters and verses in support of it.  (Not every religious scholar agrees with that interpretation of the Bible.  Indeed, Minister Peter Gomes, the well-known gay [and African-American] Baptist long-time director of the Harvard Divinity School, strongly disagrees with it [see Gomes, P.J., "Homophobic? Re-read Your Bible,"  New York Times, August 17, 1992, and Westminster, J., The 15% Solution: A Political History of American Fascism, 2001-2022, East Setauket, NY, Thomas Jefferson Press, 1996, pp.155-56]).  In modern times it was used by the Nazis to promote their ideology once Hitler’s dictatorship had been established.  Indeed, despite the fact  that the head of the Sturmabteilung, the SA, the most prominent pre-1933 Nazi armed force, Ernst Roehm, was himself homosexual and Hermann Goering was a cross-dresser, the Nazis went after the gays as their identity group of choice for demonization before they went after the Jews full force.

Small plane hits Austin building, sets off blaze + Man flies aircraft into Texas tax office after setting home on fire + Online suicide note

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PressTV
Thu, 18 Feb 2010 18:47:31 GMT

A small single-engine plane has crashed into a seven-story office building in Austin, Texas with at least one person unaccounted for.

According to Harry Evans of the Austin Fire Department, firefighters found “heavy fire destruction in and around the second floor… lots of heat, lots of smoke, lots of fire,” CNN reported on Thursday.

Witness Cynthia Reed described people in the building as “hanging out the windows, screaming for help.”

[...]

via Small plane hits Austin building, sets off blaze

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Man flies aircraft into Texas tax office after setting home on fire

Andy Worthington Discusses Murders at Guantánamo and Bagram’s “Ghost Prisoners” on Antiwar Radio

by Andy Worthington
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
www.andyworthington.co.uk
21 January 2010

Over the last few years, Scott Horton of Antiwar Radio and I have had some hard-hitting interviews, covering many of the most unpalatable aspects of the Bush administration’s “War on Terror,” and, in the last year, the inadequacy of Barack Obama’s response to this toxic and corrosive legacy.

On Tuesday evening, however, we hit a new pitch of outrage (the show is available here, when we discussed two aspects of this legacy that have just surfaced: the revelation, in a compelling article for Harper’s Magazine by Scott Horton (the law professor), that the three men who died at Guantánamo in June 2006 were killed, and that the suicide story was manufactured as a cover-up (which I also wrote about here); and my preliminary analysis of the first ever publicly available list of prisoners held in the US prison at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, in which I investigated the stories of the “ghost prisoners” — previously held in a number of secret prisons run by the CIA — who have been held in Bagram for up to six years, and asked what happened to others who are not included in the list.

Scott Horton Reveals 3 Gitmo Prisoners Died After Torture at Secret Site

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Democracy Now!
Jan 20, 2010

Casting Doubt on U.S. Claims of Suicide, Attorney Scott Horton Reveals 3 Gitmo Prisoners Died After Torture at Secret Site

New evidence has emerged suggesting three Guantanamo prisoners whom the U.S. claims took their own lives in June 2006 died not from suicide, but torture. A six-month investigation by Harper’s Magazine indicates the three prisoners were suffocated and tortured during questioning at a secret black site facility at Guantanamo known as “Camp No”.The article is based in part on testimony from a former staff sergeant who says the Obama administration has refused to investigate his claims.

Olbermann: Camp No, a black site within Gitmo

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MoxNewsDotCom
January 18, 2010

Murders at Guantánamo: Scott Horton of Harper’s Exposes the Truth about the 2006 “Suicides”

by Andy Worthington
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
www.andyworthington.co.uk
18 January 2010

It’s hard to know where to begin with this profoundly important story by Scott Horton, for next month’s Harper’s Magazine (available on the web here), but let’s try this: The three “suicides” at Guantánamo in June 2006 were not suicides at all. The men in question were killed during interrogations in a secretive block in Guantánamo, conducted by an unknown agency, and the murders were then disguised to look like suicides. Everyone at Guantánamo knew about it. Everyone covered it up. Everyone is still covering it up.

Establishing a case for murder — and the disclosure of a secret prison at Guantánamo

The key to the discovery of the murder of the three men — 37-year old Salah Ahmed al-Salami, a Yemeni, 30-year old Mani Shaman al-Utaybi, a Saudi, and 22-year old Yasser Talal al-Zahrani (photo, left), a Saudi who was just 17 when he was captured — is Army Staff Sgt. Joe Hickman, a former Marine who reenlisted in the Army National Guard after the 9/11 attacks, and was deployed to Guantánamo in March 2006, with his friend, Specialist Tony Davila. On arrival, Davila was briefed about the existence of “an unnamed and officially unacknowledged compound,” outside the perimeter fence of the main prison, and explained that one theory about it was that “it was being used by some of the non-uniformed government personnel who frequently showed up in the camps and were widely thought to be CIA agents.”