"Maude Barlow" - Why Governments Are on the Hook to Ensure Clean, Safe Water for Everyone

One year ago today, the United Nations General Assembly adopted an historic resolution recognizing the human right to safe and clean drinking water and sanitation. Two months later, the Human Rights Council adopted a second resolution affirming that drinking water and sanitation are human rights, and setting out the new obligations and responsibilities all governments now carry to develop appropriate tools and mechanisms to progressively achieve the full realization of these rights. Together the two resolutions represent an extraordinary breakthrough in the international struggle for the right to safe clean drinking water and sanitation and a crucial milestone in the fight for water justice.  

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"Henry Giroux" From Benetton to Murdoch -- The Culture of Money, Shock and Schlock

"Benetton appropriated for one of its advertising campaigns actual news photos of social events that portray various calamities of the time. These include pictures of a bloodied Mafia murder victim, depictions of child labor, a terrorist car bombing and the bloodstained clothes worn by a Croatian student the day he was killed."

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"Naomi Klein" -Climate Change and Disaster in Montana

"We're a disaster area," Alexis Bonogofsky told me, "and it's going to take a long time to get over it."

Bonogofsky and her partner, Mike Scott, were all over the news earlier this month, telling the world about how Montana's Exxon Mobil pipeline spill has fouled their goat ranch and is threatening the health of their animals.

But my conversation with Bonogofsky was four full days before the pipeline began pouring oil into the Yellowstone River. And no, it's not that she's psychic; she was talking about this year's historic flooding.

"It's unbelievable," she said. "It's like nothing I've experienced in my lifetime. It destroyed houses; people died; crops didn't get in the fields…. We barely were able to get our hay crop in."

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"Tim DeChristopher" - I Do Not Want Mercy, I Want You To Join Me

Tim DeChristopher, who was sentenced Tuesday to two years in federal prison and a $10,000 fine for 'disrupting' a Bureau of Land Management auction in 2008, had an opportunity to address the court and the judge immediately before his sentence was announced. This is his statement:"… those who write the rules are those who profit from the status quo. If we want to change that status quo, we might have to work outside of those rules because the legal pathways available to us have been structured precisely to make sure we don’t make any substantial change." (Portrait by Robert Shetterly - Used with Permission) http://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org

Thank you for the opportunity to speak before the court.  When I first met Mr. Manross, the sentencing officer who prepared the presentence report, he explained that it was essentially his job to “get to know me.”  He said he had to get to know who I really was and why I did what I did in order to decide what kind of sentence was appropriate.  I was struck by the fact that he was the first person in this courthouse to call me by my first name, or even really look me in the eye.  I appreciate this opportunity to speak openly to you for the first time.  I’m not here asking for your mercy, but I am here asking that you know me.

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"Jill Richardson" -ALEC Exposed: Warming Up to Climate Change

As the U.S. suffers through catastrophic tornadoes, heat waves, and other climate extremes - no doubt just a small taste of what the climate crisis will bring in the future - polluting industries and the politicians that serve them want to convince you that excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is actually a good thing.

Last December, almost like clockwork, Republican legislators in state houses across the nation sounded the alarm about an "out of control" Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). What had the EPA suddenly done to earn such criticism? The EPA had dared to take the first baby steps towards regulating greenhouse gas emissions.

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"Ronnie Cummins" - Monsanto Nation -- Taking Down Goliath

"If you put a label on genetically engineered food you might as well put a skull and crossbones on it." - Norman Braksick, president of Asgrow Seed Co., a subsidiary of Monsanto, quoted in the Kansas City Star, March 7, 1994

After two decades of biotech bullying and force-feeding unlabeled and hazardous genetically engineered (GE) foods to animals and humans‹aided and abetted by the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations‹it¹s time to move beyond defensive measures and go on the offensive. With organic farming, climate stability, and public health under the gun of the gene engineers and their partners in crime, it¹s time to do more than complain. With over 1/3 of U.S. cropland already contaminated with Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs), with mounting scientific evidence that GMOs cause cancer, birth defects, and serious food allergies  and with new biotech mutants like alfalfa, lawn grass, ethanol-ready corn, 2,4 D-resistant crops, and genetically engineered trees and animals in the pipeline time is running out.

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"Ronnie Cummins" - Monsanto Nation -- Taking Down Goliath

"If you put a label on genetically engineered food you might as well put a skull and crossbones on it." - Norman Braksick, president of Asgrow Seed Co., a subsidiary of Monsanto, quoted in the Kansas City Star, March 7, 1994

After two decades of biotech bullying and force-feeding unlabeled and hazardous genetically engineered (GE) foods to animals and humans‹aided and abetted by the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations‹it¹s time to move beyond defensive measures and go on the offensive. With organic farming, climate stability, and public health under the gun of the gene engineers and their partners in crime, it¹s time to do more than complain. With over 1/3 of U.S. cropland already contaminated with Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs), with mounting scientific evidence that GMOs cause cancer, birth defects, and serious food allergies  and with new biotech mutants like alfalfa, lawn grass, ethanol-ready corn, 2,4 D-resistant crops, and genetically engineered trees and animals in the pipeline time is running out.

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"David Benjamin" - The Tax-Free American Aristocracy

PARIS — The Republican vision for America’s future keeps popping up in old movies.Karlheinz Boehm and Romy Schneider in "Sissi".

My latest flash of GOP déjà vu came unexpectedly, while I feasted with friends in a tiny Italian village. As we ate, the television unspooled a 1955 German movie dubbed in Italian. The only face I recognized was Romy Schneider as the title character, “Sissi,” who was — as best I could guess — princess of Austro-Hungary. I tried to ignore the TV. But the sheer spectacle, in vibrant, tear-inducing Agfacolor, kept pulling me back into the charming, although completely incomprehensible life story of the woman I later learned was Elizabeth, Empress of Austro-Hungary from 1854-1898.

The film, “Sissi,” lacks two elements whose absence works together to attain a sort of transcendent tedium rarely seen in non-German cinema. The film, as far as I could tell, has no dramatic tension. Its shimmering characters float through velvet-draped rooms in a silken castle atop an inaccessible mountain. They are beautifully, elegantly, opulently oblivious to any events that might be going on in the outside world— which is the movie’s other absent element. The universe is a sound stage steeped in luxury.

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"Christina Luisa" -Theft is on the rise in a worsening economy

(NaturalNews) It is not strange to hear about cars, jewelry or money being stolen. These days, desperate thieves are choosing bizarre targets: copper wires, air conditioning units, storm drain covers, grapes, ambulances, pain killers and even bees. This petty thievery of agricultural goods and odd supplies is the new norm in a rapidly worsening economy where unemployment is rampant.

The downturn in the economy and record unemployment numbers have created a heightened sense of desperation, which subsequently is leading to a rapid increase in crime levels all over the country.

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"J.D Heyes" -FDA admits heart drug doubles risk of death

NaturalNews) Regulators with the Food and Drug Administration have warned that Multaq, a cardiac drug Sanofi, has been linked with fatal heart problems in a clinical trial the company recently ended.

In the study involving 3,000 patients, 32 who were taking Multaq died from cardiac-related problems compared with 14 who were taking a placebo. In all, nearly twice as many people suffered heart attacks, strokes and death than those in the placebo control group.

Multaq is prescribed to control atrial fibrillation, the most common type of irregular heartbeat which is found in about 2.2 million Americans. It is a condition in which the primary electrical impulse that causes the atria - the two upper chambers of the heart - to contract instead fires erratically, causing several other nodes, or electrical impulse points, to fire instead.

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