This 50-page issue of the Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade's magazine, Press for Conversion!, exposes ten important ways in which Canada's Liberal government was deeply complicit in:

(1) aiding and abetting the 2004 coup d'etat in Haiti that ousted President Aristide's democratically - elected government and
(2) supporting the illegal, coup-installed regime that was responsible for the two-year, human-rights catastrophe that followed.

The Associated Press (AP) is reporting the recent outbreak of foot-and-mouth in rural Britain is now believed to have emanated from a vaccine lab near the  epicenter of the infectious disease's spread.

The Institute for Animal Health Pirbright Laboratory is a government/corporate partnership between England's Institute for Animal Health and Merial Animal Health, a Georgia-based private pharmaceutical company.

Canadian freelance journalist and author, Yves Engler on Canada's booming mercenary business;

 

and Randy Holmquist, president and founder of Canadian Electric Vehicles on the prematurely announced demise of the electric car.

Ice and debris falling from the external fuel tanks of the Space Shuttle Endeavour has NASA scientists poring over images of the craft's ceramic heat shield. It's a recurring problem for the shuttle program, one that caused the fatal 2003 reentry explosion of the Space Shuttle Columbia.

The mission bears resemblance to another ill-fated shuttle mission; astronaut Barbara Morgan was back-up for Christa McAuliffe, the first member of the "Teacher in Space" program, killed when the Challenger shuttle exploded shortly after take-off in 1986.

Happy Labour Day to you, workers of the world, and to those that though they toil, their labour remains unrecognized. Happy day of rest to all you who shoulder the wheel week in and week out, without whose work Society would certainly shiver and shudder, convulse and collapse.

Happy day of delayed continuance of the rote routines you endure for love, or love of money, for shelter, comfort, prestige, or merely for another day's survival. Know today that, without your efforts the machinery would stop; without you, the pulse of the shared economic organism would cease to beat; without you, the designs of kings and captains of industry would all come to nought.

This week: freelance photojournalist, Jon Elmer on Bush's plan for peace in Palestine; author and journalist William Marsden and Canada's Tar Sands eco-cide in the far north; Janine Bandcroft bringing us up to speed on good local goings-on in and around Victoria in the coming week.

Chris Cook hosts Gorilla Radio, airing live every Monday, 5-6pm Pacific Time. In Victoria at 101.9FM, 104.3 cable, and on the internet at: http://cfuv.uvic.ca .  He also serves as a contributing editor to the web news site, www.pacificfreepress.com . And, you can check out the GR blog here.    

Year's end is nigh. And what a relief it would be to send off bloody 2007, as we did its bloody predecessors, happily, if only 2008 looked to be an improvement.

But the war will grind wearily on in darkness, as electoral politics command the corporate media lime-light in the United States.

This week on GR: Author and activist Naomi Wolf on 'The End of America;' journalist Tim Shorrock and America's Surveillance, Inc.; and Janine Bandcroft brings us up to speed with good goings on in and around Victoria in the coming week.

This week; Jon Elmer on the dramatic escape from Gaza, and the subsequent re-imposition of the wall breached; Justin Podur on Canada's theatrical border security; Janine Bandcroft brings us up to speed with all that's good to do in and around Victoria in the coming week.

Chris Cook hosts Gorilla Radio, airing live every Monday, 5-6pm Pacific Time. In Victoria at 101.9FM, 104.3 cable, and on the internet at: http://cfuv.uvic.ca .  He also serves as a contributing editor to the web news site, www.pacificfreepress.com . And, you can check out the GR blog at:  http://GorillaRadioBlog.blogspot.com  

Early October can be dismal in Moscow. The short, harsh summer is over, the brief and beautiful refreshment of September has passed, yet the snow – in which the city has its deepest life – has not yet come. Instead there is often miasma: gray days pocked with rain or fog, vague and ragged days, neither autumn nor winter but suspended in a limbo state.

 They say last Saturday was just such a day in Moscow: tepid, damp, fog through the morning, clouds all afternoon, a limp breeze pushing at the torpor. The muffled sunlight would have just begun draining toward night when a young man – dressed in black, carrying a 9mm Makarov pistol – approached the non-descript apartment building at 18/13 Lesnaya Street. His target was in sight: a woman, early middle age, laden with groceries, walking toward the door. A few stray lines of the setting sun might have split the clouds as he moved toward her – or perhaps it stayed dim, miasmic. He wouldn't have noticed in any case: the door was open, they were inside, the pistol was out, he fired – a few shots to the body, one to the head; the woman fell. Her life was gone; the job was done. He dropped the pistol, as he'd been taught to do, and left the scene. It was, they say, about 4:30 in the afternoon.

That's how Russia's leading journalist, Anna Politkovskaya, came to die last week. Many details of the death are still unclear – and as the Russian authorities launch their usual "thorough investigation" of yet another reporter's murder, no doubt the details will grow more and more muddled, more vague and ragged, until the chain of accountability leading back to the real culprits, the instigators of the hit, is lost in the murk. All we will be left with is this stark, basic fact: one of the world's most fearless voices for truth and human decency has been silenced forever.

by Chris Floyd

This is my latest piece for Truthout.org.

I.
Why is the United States government spending millions of dollars to track down critics of George W. Bush in the press? And why have major American universities agreed to put this technology of tyranny into the state's hands?

At the most basic level, of course, both questions are easily answered: 1) Power. 2) Money. The Bush administration wants to be able to root out - and counteract - any dissenting noises that might put a crimp in its ongoing crusade for "full spectrum dominance" of global affairs, while the august institutions of higher learning involved - the universities of Cornell, Pittsburgh and Utah - crave the federal green that keeps them in clover.

But beyond these grubby realities, there are many other disturbing aspects of this new program - which is itself only part of a much broader penetration of American academia by the Department of Homeland Security.

As with so many of the Bush measures that have quietly stripped away America's liberties, this one too is beginning with a whimper, not a bang: a modest $2.4 Department of Homeland Security million grant to develop "sentiment analysis" software that will allow the government's "security organs" to sift millions of articles for "negative opinions of the United States or its leaders in newspapers and other publications overseas," as the New York Times reported earlier this month. Such negative opinions must be caught and catalogued because they could pose "potential threats to the nation," security apparatchiks told the Times.

This hydra-headed snooping program is based on "information extraction," which, as a chipper PR piece from Cornell tells us, is a process by which "computers scan text to find meaning in natural language," rather than the rigid literalism ordinarily demanded by silicon cogitators. Under the gentle tutelage of Homeland Security, the universities "will use machine-learning algorithms to give computers examples of text expressing both fact and opinion and teach them to tell the difference," says the Cornell blurb.

At this point, the ancient and ever-pertinent question of Pontius Pilate comes to mind: "What is truth?" Of course, Pilate, being a devotee of what George W. Bush likes to call "the path of action," gave the answer to his philosophical inquiry in brute physical form: truth is whatever the empire says it is - so take this Galilean rabble-rouser out and crucify him already. In like manner, it will certainly be the government "security organs" who ultimately determine the criteria for what is fact and what is opinion - and whether the latter is positive or negative, perhaps even a candidate for the Bush-Pilate "path."

The academics will be trying out the Sentiment Analysis program (let's call it SAP, for short) on four main clusters of articles from 2001-2002, the Times reports. These include: Bush's famous declaration of an "axis of evil" threatening the world; the treatment of his Terror War captives in Guantanamo Bay; global warming; and the failed Bush-backed bid to topple Venezuela's Hugo Chavez in a coup - all of them issues on which the Bush administration was at odds with much of the world, and large swathes of American opinion as well. Obviously, such issues are fertile fields for terrorist thought-crimes to be snagged and tagged by SAP.

For those with concerns about civil liberties, Cornell assures us that SAP will be limited strictly to foreign publications. Oh, really? Hands up out there, everyone who believes that this technology will not be used to ferret out "potential threats to the nation" arising in the Homeland press as well. After all, the Unitary Executive Decider-in-Chief has already decided that the nation's iron-clad laws against warrantless surveillance of American citizens can be swept aside by his "inherent powers" if he decides it's necessary. Why should he bother with any petty restrictions on a press-monitoring program? And wouldn't dissension within the ranks of the volk itself actually be more threatening to government policy than the grumbling of malcontents overseas?

By Chris Floyd

The picture below (from the New York Times) speaks most eloquently on the essence of the Bush Regime's brutal, grubby Babylonian Conquest: fat mercenaries guarding the construction of yet another prison.

The picture comes from a story on the "overhead costs" of reconstruction projects, based on a report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, who found astonishing amounts of waste and cost overruns by the crony contractors who came to feast on the carcass that Bush killed for them. Two main points emerge from the report.

First, that the IG's catalogue of gouging, feather-bedding and other profitable forms of war-profiteering is by no means complete, because "the United States has not properly tracked how much such expenses have taken from the $18.4 billion of taxpayer-financed reconstruction approved by Congress two years ago." In fact, the IG's office was only able to examine only $1.3 billion of the contracts. 

In other words, as oft reported here (and here and here), much of that money has simply disappeared -- into corporate coffers, into copious baksheesh for the Bush-backed Iraqi government, into kickbacks for Congressional vultures, and doubtless into slush funds both for covert ops (including perhaps the Bushists' deliberate formenting of terrorism and arming of militias) and domestic politics. We are most likely seeing the fruits of some of this blood money wash up on American screens at this very moment, as the GOP's last-ditch "Smear and Fear" campaign goes into hyperdrive.

"To build a child's character, the home atmosphere should be appropriate, parents should attend to children, the school environment should be proper, and the whole society should function at the best level," he told IPS. "But none of these factors seems to exist in Iraq any more."