Burma seals Irrawaddy delta to hide victims’ plight
BURMA’S military regime is reported to have sealed off the devastated Irrawaddy delta in a bid to stop the outside world seeing the plight of its cyclone victims.
Tear down Burma’s bamboo curtain
Thousands more will die if aid does not start flowing
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Myanmar Junta Still Blocking Much Cyclone Aid
YANGON, Myanmar — A trickle of aid shipments arrived in Myanmar on Sunday, more than a week after a powerful cyclone smashed the country, but the ruling military junta continued to bar major shipments to more than a million of the storm’s hard-hit survivors.
The junta is also continuing to deny entry to foreign aid workers, who relief officials say are needed to prevent more deaths.
Starting today:
Pay To Attention To Obama’s Voter Registration Drive, here:
Is It Time to Invade Burma?
The disaster in Burma presents the world with perhaps its most serious humanitarian crisis since the 2004 Asian tsunami. By most reliable estimates, close to 100,000 people are dead. Delays in delivering relief to the victims, the inaccessibility of the stricken areas and the poor state of Burma’s infrastructure and health systems mean that number is sure to rise. With as many as 1 million people still at risk, it is conceivable that the death toll will, within days, approach that of the entire number of civilians killed in the genocide in Darfur.
Government officials, all but absent since cyclone Nargis killed tens of thousands across Burma, pressed ahead with a referendum Saturday in villages still reeling from the disaster
So what is the world doing about it? Not much. The military regime that runs Burma initially signaled it would accept outside relief, but has imposed so many conditions on those who would actually deliver it that barely a trickle has made it through. Aid workers have been held at airports. U.N. food shipments have been seized. U.S. naval ships packed with food and medicine idle in the Gulf of Thailand, waiting for an all-clear that may never come.
Burma: Dispatches From a Nightmare
In the wake of the devastation left by Cyclone Nargis in Burma, “huge sections of the Irrawaddy Delta lie cut off from the outside world,” writes Paul Danahar for the BBC in Southern Burma. “Monks are leading the cleaning-up process in the residential areas,” says one blogger in Rangoon. “No electricity means no water; a real crisis, and people don’t know whether to pray for rain (no roofs) or not for water.”
Hucklebird makes the point: A self imposed swift boating!.
Here’s an interesting piece from TPMcafe fighting back against a Pipes smear campaign:Hatemonger Daniel Pipes: Forget Rev. Wright, Obama is a Muslim!. Actually Not! But we are so immersed in the chauvinist religious right’s retrograde domination that we can’t appreciate the subtle charm in Obama’s full name, a name ready to ship for a global age. Dig the wistful breeze of sufistic meanings in the ‘Barack’.
Fascinating.
In this culture of klutzes what should be an asset ends in the ‘dog ate the paper’ mode of hopeless idiots.
Battle of the Beijing Boycotts
To boycott or not to boycott, that is the question. Rather, that’s just one of the questions activists are facing right now when it comes to China. At least four different Olympics boycott-related debates are currently taking place in print, online and broadcast media.
300,000 may have died in Darfur: UN official
UNITED NATIONS (AFP) — A top UN official said Tuesday as many as 300,000 people may have died in the Darfur conflict, amid warnings a joint UN-African Union peace force might not be fully operational before 2009.
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CounterPunch Diary
“Hero” John McCain as Phony and Collaborator: What Really Happened When He Was a POW?
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
John McCain’s been getting kid-glove treatment from the press for years, ever since he wriggled free of the Keating scandal and his profitable association – another collaboration, you might say — with the nation’s top bank swindler in the 1980s. But nothing equals the astounding tact with which his claque on the press bus avoids the topic of McCain’s collaborating with his Vietnamese captors after he’d been shot down.
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Film ‘Expelled’ Opens in Theaters
By Gailon Totheroh
CBN News Science & Medical Reporter
April 18, 2008
CBNNews.com - The war between Darwin and design goes back 150 years, and the latest battle front in the debate is the basis of the new movie ‘Expelled’ which released today.
Expelled and ID may have problems, but, remarkably, the Darwinists and scientific community seem unable to correctly tell us what they are.
Torturers in the White House: Why Is This Story Being Ignored?
By Ruth Conniff, The Progressive. Posted April 17, 2008.
We now have confirmation that the President of the United States gave the OK to torture. Where is the media? Where are the Democrats?
Carter’s visit with Hamas’ Meshal
April 17, 2008 By Hasan Abu Nimah
Source: Electronic Intifada
The Politics of Distraction in an Age of Gotcha Capitalism
By RALPH NADER
In this year’s presidential campaign, the major media want you to focus on the candidates’ gaffes, their tactics toward one another’s gaffes, the flows of political gossip and four second sound bytes.
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Clinton tied to Chinese crackdown on dissent
Hillary Clinton has loudly demanded that George Bush boycott the Beijing Olympics opening ceremonies as a protest against China’s crackdown on Tibet and dissenters. However, Bill Clinton has found financial reward from collaborators with the Beijing government in that crackdown for his charitable foundation. Alibaba, which took over Yahoo’s operations in China, has paid for promotional work done by the former president in an amount he refuses to disclose:
From Znet
The Three Trillion Dollar War – The True Costs of the Iraq Conflict
Review of: The Three Trillion Dollar War – The True Costs of the Iraq Conflict (, )
By Jim Miles
Source: Palestine Chronicle
April, 13 2008
The Three Trillion Dollar War – The True Costs of the Iraq Conflict. Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes. W.W. Norton & Company, N.Y. 2008. Read the rest of this entry »
via Common Dreams
War Without End
by Helen Thomas
WASHINGTON - Surprise, surprise. Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, wants to put a halt to any more troop withdrawals for the foreseeable future.
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France uses Olympics to pressure China on Tibet
3 hours ago
BEIJING (AFP) — France stepped up the pressure on China Saturday over its handling of the Tibet crisis with an apparent warning that President Nicolas Sarkozy may boycott the Olympic opening following fresh violence.
The warning, delivered by one of Sarkozy’s ministers in the Le Monde newspaper, came as International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge said he saw “no momentum” for a boycott of the summer Games.
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By TINI TRAN – 2 hours ago
BEIJING (AP) — Police fired on hundreds of protesters in a Tibetan area of western China, killing eight people, overseas activist groups said. State media reported one government official was seriously injured in what it called a riot.
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Should the U.S. End Aid to Israel?
Funding Our Decline
By ALISON WEIR
April 1st I participated in a debate in San Francisco that raised the question of US aid to Israel.
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Intimidation and Violence in Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq
The U.S. Disdain for Mideast Democracy
By RANNIE AMIRI
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Atheists Infiltrate Events for Intelligent Design Film
By Kevin Mooney and Josiah Ryan
CNSNews.com Staff Writers
April 02, 2008
(CNSNews.com) - Outspoken opponents of the Intelligent Design (ID) movement, including scientists Richard Dawkins and Paul Zachary “PZ” Myers, have managed to infiltrate private screenings for a soon-to-be released movie on the subject, according to a film producer who helped to organize the events.
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