New York Times (NYT)New York, United States of America — www.nytimes.com
"Under the Bush administration, the federal government has aggressively used a well-established tool of public relations: the prepackaged, ready-to-serve news report that major corporations have long distributed to TV stations to pitch everything from headache remedies to auto insurance. Many were subsequently broadcast on local stations across the country without any acknowledgement of the government's role in their production. [more]
"The public anger has dented Mr. Putin's ratings and rattled his government ministers, who responded slowly and confusedly to the first wave of protests over pensions before retreating in part on changes that the Kremlin had pushed through a pliant Parliament last summer. Mr. Putin's appointees have attributed the demonstrations to a disgruntled few, incited by agitators, but the protests show little sign of dissipating. A coalition of political, social, environmental and labor organizations has called new rallies across the country for Saturday, including two in Moscow." [more]
"The Bush administration has turned Guantánamo into a place that is devoid of due process and the rule of law. It's a place where human beings can be imprisoned for life without being charged or tried, without ever seeing a lawyer, and without having their cases reviewed by a court. Congress and the courts should be uprooting this evil practice, but freedom and justice in the United States are on a post-9/11 downhill slide." [more]
"Last Thursday morning, Natalia Dimitruk, an interpreter for the deaf on the Ukraine's official state UT-1 television, disregarded the anchor's report on Prime Minister Viktor F. Yanukovich's 'victory' and, in her small inset on the screen, began to sign something else altogether." [more]
"A senior Western diplomat in Kiev, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the political situation, portrayed the Ukrainian leadership as being at an impasse, stung by public and diplomatic reaction, and unsure of how to react to the growing protests." [more]
"Like so many conflicts in West Africa, the one in Ivory Coast is in large part a contest for the country's most valuable asset: the land on which cocoa is grown. Making it particularly entrenched are issues that were never fully resolved at independence: Who is a citizen of Ivory Coast, who can rule, who can own land?" [more]
"While Pakistanis swiftly condemned the terrorists' tactics, they said they saw Iraq as an American problem, not a Pakistani one. They also gave credence to the idea that unfair American acts in Iraq, beginning with the invasion, have led people there to adopt terrorism, a view sharply rejected by Washington." [more]
"In a report to be released Monday, Amnesty International said the sexual attacks in Darfur amounted to war crimes and crimes against humanity. But it said it did not have sufficient evidence to show that the Janjaweed, as the government-backed militias are known, have carried out genocide in Darfur, as some critics of Sudan's government maintain." [more]
"A resolution granting a year's exemption had passed the council the past two years, but this year the attempt to renew it ran into difficulties because of the prisoner abuse scandal in Iraq and a strong statement of opposition from Secretary General Kofi Annan." [more]
"If Washington scrapped the subsidies, Brazil estimated, American cotton exports would fall 41 percent and production would drop 29 percent. That, in turn, would lead to a 12.6 percent increase in world cotton prices, helping struggling cotton farmers from Brazil to West Africa." [more]
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(IHT, Apr 30)
"In just five years, Bush has challenged more than 750 new laws, by far a record for any president, while becoming the first president since Thomas Jefferson to stay so long in office without issuing a veto." [more]
(Interactivist Info Exchange, Jul 26)
"Horizontalism is not an ideology, however, it is a relationship — a way of relating to one another in a directly democratic way while at the same time creating through the process of discovery. What has resulted is the creation of an amazing complex of movements, all linked." [more]
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