Jan. 21, 2006

Across the front pages of several of this nation’s newspapers came the recent announcement that the Bush administration had embarked on another adventure in its “war against terrorism.” Referred to as the “Trans-Sahara Counter-Terrorism Initiative,” this effort involves an annual budget of $100 million as well as the deployment of troops and advisers to help prosecute the fight against terrorism in Africa.

On Election Day 2005, Seattle’s voters resoundingly approved an advisory measure for an American right to health care, Ballot Measure 1. The vote was 69 percent yes to 31 percent no. It capped a two-year effort by volunteer activists from two small community organizations in Seattle: the Puget Sound Alliance for Retired Americans (PSARA) and Health Care For All-Washington (HCFA-WA).

Despite efforts to dilute and trivialize Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, the only national holiday celebrating a people’s freedom movement, the people once again rescued and defended “The Dream” in actions spanning the United States.

When they arrived at work on Jan. 17, fresh from a holiday break, union workers at U.S. Repeating Arms were greeted with the announcement that the plant has been scheduled to close on March 31. The 186 workers, who produce Winchester sporting rifles, also discovered important machinery had already been removed by parent company Browning, part of the Belgium-owned Herstal Group.

“Be assured that we will pursue every avenue as we seek to understand what happened at Sago, because the truth is that when it comes to safety, we represent every miner in America and Canada whether he or she chooses to pay dues to this union or not,” said United Mine Workers President Cecil Roberts as a team of union safety experts arrived at the scene of the Jan. 2 explosion that killed 12 miners.

While Canadian involvement in Afghanistan makes headlines, less well known is its role in Haiti. Last year, the Liberal government of Prime Minister Paul Martin announced that it will be playing a major role in rebuilding Haiti. In “Canada in Haiti: Waging War on the Poor Majority,” Yves Engler and Anthony Fenton expose Canadian government involvement in the overthrow of an elected government and supporting a repressive dictatorship in Haiti.

A handful of American intellectuals actually understand the ins and outs of the great ripoffs of American economics and cultural values in the past 26 years.

If you aren’t a scientist but seek to understand the latest theories of physics, then this book is for you. In “A Briefer History of Time” Hawking clarifies, in a popular way, the theories of the Big Bang origin of the Universe, the special and general theories of relativity, quantum theory, black holes, and what physics has to say about time travel and string theory.

El gobernador de California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, está tratando duro de convencer a los votantes que ha tomado un nuevo camino centrista desde que sus propuestas antitrabajadoras y de inspiración empresiarial fueron derrotadas el pasado noviembre.

Desde el 2001, el Foro Social Mundial ha proveido un “espacio de debate democrático de ideas, profundización de la reflexión, formulación de propuestas, cambio de experiencias y articulación de movimientos sociales, redes, ONGs y otras organizaciones de la sociedad civil que se oponen al neoliberalismo y al dominio del mundo por el capital y por cualquier forma de imperialismo” con miles de participantes de todas partes del mundo.