"Erik Olson and Barbara LaBoe" - No Arrests as ILWU Members, Supporters Attempt to Turn Themselves In

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/09/17-0

Published on Saturday, September 17, 2011 by The Daily News (Longview, Washington)

by Erik Olson and Barbara LaBoe

More than 200 union longshore workers and supporters massed peacefully outside the Cowlitz County Hall of Justice in Kelso early Friday afternoon, saying they were planning to surrender themselves to police to answer charges for demonstrations last week.

ILWU Local 21 president Dan Coffman addresses the media Friday at the Cowlitz County Hall of Justice. (photo: Bill Wagner / The Daily News)

However, when no law enforcement official emerged to meet with them and officers present did not move to make any arrests, the group dispersed at 1:30 p.m after waiting a half hour.

Later Friday, though, the union's local vice president was arrested on two misdemeanor charges. He bailed out after roughly an hour in custody.

"I'm hoping we don't have to worry about being arrested in the middle of the night now. ... We shouldn't have to fear the intimidation that's been put forth or the abuse that's been put forth. ... We're going home as free citizens," Dan Coffman, president of the longshore union's Longview-based Local 21, said during the rally.

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"Al Jazeera Correspondent" - Haiti: After the Quake

http://www.commondreams.org/video/2011/09/17

Published on Saturday, September 17, 2011 by Al Jazeera Correspondent

Al Jazeera's Sebastian Walker asks why a system that was designed to help Haitians ended up exacerbating their misery.

Al Jazeera's Sebastian Walker was sent to Haiti to cover the aftermath of the devastating earthquake that rocked the tiny island nation in January 2010. His assignment was to last two weeks, but he was there for more than a year.

He saw firsthand how Haitians dug up their dead from the rubble with their bare hands. He witnessed people struggling to recover from an earthquake, violent weather and disease. Millions throughout the country were made homeless.

More than a year later, millions of Haitians are still living in makeshift camps, cholera has become an epidemic and the aid money has run out. Many Haitians feel abandoned after one of the most tragic chapters in the country's history.

Sebastian Walker revisits many of the people he met at a time when Haiti was deep in crisis to examine how the country has coped since the earthquake struck. Where have things gone wrong since the international community promised to 'build Haiti back, better'?

This film examines why a system that was designed to help actually ended up exacerbating the misery and how aid efforts created a state of over-dependence.

© 2011 Aljazeera.net

"Nick Hopkins" - Companies Ejected From London Arms Fair for 'Promoting Cluster Bombs'

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/09/16-8

Published on Friday, September 16, 2011 by The Guardian/UK

by Nick Hopkins

The world's largest arms fair has thrown out two exhibitors after they were found to be promoting cluster munitions that have been banned by the UK and condemned by more than 100 other countries.

Protesters against the Defence and Security Equipment International fair. Photograph: Pete Riches / Demotix/ Pete Riches / Demotix/Demotix/Corbis

The organisers of the London exhibition said they had been unaware that the material was available and an investigation had been launched. But campaigners rounded on the Defense and Security Equipment International fair, saying it was "unbelievable" that more thorough checks had not been undertaken.

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"Jim Hightower" - DuPont's Herbicide Goes Rogue

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/09/17-2

Published on Saturday, September 17, 2011 by OtherWords

The company's landscaping weed-killer turned out to be a tree-killer.

by Jim Hightower

In the corporate world's tortured language, workers are no longer fired. They just experience an "employment adjustment." But the most twisted euphemism I've heard in a long time comes from DuPont: "We are investigating the reports of these unfavorable tree symptoms," the pesticide maker recently stated.

How unfavorable? Finito, flat-lined, the tree is dead. Not just one tree, but hundreds of thousands all across the country are suffering the final "symptom."

The culprit turns out to be Imprelis, a DuPont weed-killer widely applied to lawns, golf courses, and — ironically — cemeteries.

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"Maria Golovnina and Alexander Dziados" - Gaddafi Loyalists Resist and Say NATO Kills 354 Libyans

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/09/17

Published on Saturday, September 17, 2011 by Reuters

by Maria Golovnina and Alexander Dziados

BANI WALID/SIRTE, Libya - Libyan interim government forces licked their wounds on Saturday after a failed assault on the town of Bani Walid, and a spokesman for Muammar Gaddafi accused NATO of killing 354 people in overnight air strikes on the city of Sirte.

An anti-Gaddafi fighter fires a multiple-rocket launcher near Sirte, the hometown of deposed leader Muammar Gaddafi, September 17, 2011. (REUTERS/Goran Tomasevic)

Moussa Ibrahim, the deposed leader's spokesman, contacted Reuters by satellite telephone to say Gaddafi was still in Libya, leading the "resistance" against his foes.

He said NATO air strikes on Sirte, Gaddafi's birthplace, had hit a residential building and a hotel, killing 354 people.

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"Michael Saba" - Wall Street Protesters Inspired by Arab Spring Movement

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/09/17-1

Published on Saturday, September 17, 2011 by CNN

by Michael Saba

 

It worked in Cairo's Tahrir Square. Now, taking their cue from social-media fueled uprisings in places like Egypt and Iran, a band of online activists hopes it will work on Wall Street.

Kalle Lasn, co-founder of the counterculture magazine AdBusters, has taken to Twitter and other websites to help organize a campaign encouraging tens of thousands of Americans to hold a nonviolent sit-in Saturday in Lower Manhattan, the heart of the U.S. financial district.

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"Progressive Network Radio Host Glen Ford, Mondays @ 4pm(EDT)" - High Stakes Testing in Schools: Who’s Cheating Whom?

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/09/16-6

Published on Friday, September 16, 2011 by Black Agenda Report

Corporate school privatizers feign disgust with teachers that cheat the standardized tests. But big business theft of public education is by far the greater sin.

by Glen Ford

The school privatizers now headquartered in the Obama administration are all pitching a morality fit over teachers that cheat by altering answers on standardized tests. Corporate privatizers, of course, have no real sense of morality beyond profit and loss: their own profit, and to hell with those that lose. But, when attacking institutions so historically revered as public education and the teaching profession, one must play dirty. You’ve got to get them on a morals charge.

The assault on public schools began with the blanket assertion that teachers – or, more precisely, teachers unions – are out for themselves; that they are sinfully selfish. Strange words, from the lips of corporate executives and free marketeers who preach that the highest virtues are revealed in the cutthroat corridors of commerce. Then again, pots and kettles are always calling everybody else black.

So, they slimed the teachers as the root of all that ails public education, teachers whose moral deficits could be corrected by rigorous competition regulated by standardized testing of students. If the students failed the tests, then the teachers would fail and be discharged, and the schools they worked in would also fail, and be replaced by privatized charters. High stakes testing was designed as a Trojan Horse for a corporate educational takeover, but packaged as a public good. Bad teachers and bad schools would come to a well-deserved bad end.

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"Dean Nelson" - Pakistan Floods: World Ignoring Humanitarian Crisis

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/09/16-9

Published on Friday, September 16, 2011 by The Telegraph/UK

The world is ignoring a growing humanitarian crisis in Pakistan's Sindh province where a second year of catastrophic floods has forced up to two million to flee their homes, washed away vital crops and left millions at risk of disease, according to aid agencies and local political leaders.

by Dean Nelson in New Delhi

An estimated 300 people have died in three months of torrential monsoon rains which have destroyed 400,000 homes, breached sewerage and freshwater canals and left two million people suffering from malaria, hepatitis and other sanitation-related diseases.

A Pakistani woman makes bread in a flooded region of Jhudo. The United Nations said on Friday that it was stepping up aid to Pakistan, where monsoon floods have killed 270 people, affected over 5.5 million others and destroyed 1.1 million homes (photo: AFP)

Three-quarters of a million people are living in temporary shelters and seven thousand people have been bitten by snakes in the water.

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"Business Insider" -The U.S. Is Unable To Account For 36k Pounds Of Its Own Weapons Grade Uranium And Plutonium

Under special nuclear cooperation agreements, the United States sent 38,580 pounds of enriched uranium and plutonium to more than two-dozen foreign agencies and is unable to account for 36,000 pounds of the material.

The Government Accountability Office report says these 27 cooperation agreements, set up to facilitate cross border research, have no accountability and the U.S. has no way to enforce control.

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"Nancy Murray & Kade Crockford" - Targeting Dissent, Inside the Surveillance State

How little - yet how much - has changed in the last 40 years. The COINTELPRO papers sound distinctly 21st century as they detail the monitoring of perceived threats to "national security" by the FBI, CIA, National Security Agency (NSA), Secret Service, and the military, as well as the intelligence bureaucracy's war on First Amendment protest activity.  

The Church Committee investigation concluded in 1976 that the "unexpressed major premise of the programs was that a law enforcement agency has the duty to do whatever is necessary to combat perceived threats to the existing social and political order."

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