The Japanese government breached a series of internationally guaranteed human rights by detaining two Greenpeace activists who had uncovered major corruption in the Japanese whaling programme, according to a working group of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC). (1) Junichi Sato and Toru Suzuki, known as the “Tokyo Two”, are due to stand trial on February 15th, but it has been revealed that the UNHRC’s Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (WGAD) informed the Japanese government in December that the rights of the two men have been breached by the Japanese justice system.

The Bob Barker had been actively blocking the slipway of the Nisshin Maru, the Japanese whaling fleet’s factory ship when the collision occurred. Four harpoon ships, the Yushin Maru 1, 2, and 3 and Shonan Maru 2, were circling and making near passes to the stern and bow of the Sea Shepherd vessel. The Bob Barker did not move from its position. At which point, the Yushin Maru 3 intentionally rammed the Bob Barker, creating a 3-foot long 4-inch deep gash in the mid starboard side of the Sea Shepherd vessel above the waterline. No crew was injured during the collision. The Bob Barker continues to block the slipway of the Nisshin Maru, preventing the transfer of slaughtered whales and effectively shutting down illegal whaling operations. The incident demonstrates a continued escalation of violence by the illegal whalers in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary.

Choose 3 Representatives from any district in the US. Of course, I chose Kucinich for one of the three. "It’s going to be a tough election year in 2010, so helping good incumbents keep their seats is going to be as important as supporting challengers was in 2006 and 2008. It's a rare breed of representative who stands up for progressive values and doesn't back down. That's why we want to choose members of Congress who aren't afraid to fight. We're calling them FDL Fire Dogs. Two thousand people who hailed from their districts nominated 180 members of Congress for support from FDL Action PAC. Now you get to decide — who should we help?"

Each day brings more revelations of efforts of the NY Fed and Goldman Sachs to hide the details of the criminal conspiracy of the AIG bailout. . . . This is a real crisis on the scale of Watergate. Corruption at its finest. --- But unlike the perpetrators of the Watergate scandal, who wound up looking at jail time, Geithner evidently has a golden parachute waiting at Goldman Sachs, not coincidentally the largest recipient of the AIG bailout. At least that is the rumor sparked by an article by Caroline Baum on Bloomberg News, titled “Goldman Parachute Awaits Geithner to Ease Fall.” Hank Paulson, Geithner’s predecessor, was CEO of Goldman Sachs before coming to the Treasury. Geithner, who has come up through the ranks of government, could be walking through the revolving door in the other direction. Geithner has been under the House microscope for the decision of the New York Fed, made while he headed it, to buy out about $30 billion in credit default swaps (over-the-counter derivative insurance contracts) that AIG sold on toxic debt securities. The chief recipients of this payout were Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Societe Generale and Deutsche Bank. Goldman got $13 billion, roughly equivalent to its bonus pool for the first 9 months of 2009. --- Critics are calling the New York Fed’s decision a back-door bailout for the banks, which received 100 cents on the dollar for contracts that would have been worth far less had AIG been put through bankruptcy proceedings in the ordinary way. --- --- In a Bloomberg article provocatively titled “Secret Banking Cabal Emerges from AIG Shadows,” David Reilly writes: The New York Fed is a quasi-governmental institution that isn’t subject to citizen intrusions such as freedom of information requests, unlike the Federal Reserve. This impenetrability comes in handy since the bank is the preferred vehicle for many of the Fed’s bailout programs. It’s as though the New York Fed was a black-ops outfit for the nation’s central bank. --- The beneficiaries of the New York Fed’s largesse got paid in full although they had agreed to take much less.

Operation Breakfast Redux: Could Pakistan 2010 Go the Way of Cambodia 1969? --- --- While the CIA and the U.S. military have been expending enormous effort studying the Afghan and Pakistani situations and consulting experts, and while the White House has conducted an extensive series of seminars-cum-policy-debates on both countries, you can count on one thing: none of them have spent significant time studying or thinking about us. --- --- As a result, the seeming cleanliness and effectiveness of the drone-war solution undoubtedly only reinforces a sense in Washington that the world’s last great military power can still control this war -- that it can organize, order, prod, wheedle, and bribe both the Afghans and Pakistanis into doing what’s best, and if that doesn’t work, simply continue raining down the missiles and bombs. Beware Washington’s deep-seated belief that it controls events; that it is, however precariously, in the saddle; that, as Afghan War commander General Stanley McChrystal recently put it, there is a “corner” to “turn” out there, even if we haven’t quite turned it yet. --- --- In fact, Washington is not in the saddle and that corner, if there, if turned, will have its own unpleasant surprises. Washington is, in this sense, as oblivious as those CIA operatives were as they waited for “their” Jordanian agent to give them supposedly vital information on the al-Qaeda leadership in the Pakistani tribal areas. Like their drones, the Americans in charge of this war are desperately far from the ground, and they don’t even seem to know it. It’s time for Washington to examine not what we know about them, but what we don’t know about ourselves.

The biggest kerfuffle of the tea bag ball last weekend was a verbal brawl outside the hall between Andrew Breitbart and WingNutDaily editor Joseph Farah sparked by Breitbart’s displeasure over Farah’s speech exhorting tea baggers to return to demanding to see the original hard copy of Pres. Obama’s birth certificate.

Is there any other nation in the world where a leading politician can appear in public -- without controversy -- wearing the flag of a foreign country? It was a huge scandal on the Right when immigration reform marchers waved Mexican (along with American) flags in order to display cultural solidarity with Mexican immigrants who were being demonized and living in wretched conditions, as non-persons, in the U.S.; isn't it obviously more significant when someone who recently wanted to be Vice President and is now the leader of this Fox-News-sponsored political movement appears at events in the U.S. wearing an Israeli flag melded to an American flag, as though the two nations are joined as one entity? Why should an American political leader be wearing an Israeli flag?

What do we say to our more conservative friends, who genuinely think that the Single Payer solution to our health care crisis would be a disaster? Try what follows. In the end, you may simply agree to disagree. That's O.K., but what follows may give them pause to think.

Nice interview with Kucinich on Russia Today; 11 1/2 minutes or so. "The war in Afghanistan, jobs and health care. All big issues in America. And one man with strong opinions on all of them is U.S. Congressman Dennis Kucinich."

The price of power has always been a political issue -- but now campaigners argue it could be the key to starting a green energy revolution. --- Roofs in the Vatican City covered with solar panels point the way to off-grid power.On February 1, the British Government announced details of the rates that will be paid for renewable power generated by homeowners and communities. --- --- Called the Clean Energy Cashback, or feed-in tariff (FIT), the aim is to provide an above-market bonus that will encourage individuals and groups to invest in solar panels, wind turbines and other forms of green power. - It's the first national scheme of its kind in the UK, although FIT plans have been operating in other EU countries and at regional levels in the U.S. - Paul King, chief executive of the UK Green Building Council told CNN that the announcement will help make small scale renewables a more attractive and viable option, for householders, communities and businesses. King also believes that it will also support an emerging green industry and generate high quality jobs. --- But others are less enthusiastic about the UK's plan, and believe the Department of Energy and Climate Change's ambition that two percent of electricity generated from small scale renewables by 2020 doesn't go far enough.

In the United States, we grow and eat corn whose genes have been tweaked to make the plants more resistant to pests and pesticides. Most European countries don't, largely because the citizenry fears it isn't safe. But try as scientists might, they haven't been able to find any good reason why we shouldn't eat genetically modified (GM) food.

Globalization is killing Europe, just as it's already wiped out much of the American middle class. --- Spain and Greece are facing immediate crises that many other European nations see on the near horizon: aging boomer workers are retiring with healthy benefit packages, but the younger workers who are paying for those benefits aren't making anything close to the income (or, therefore, paying the taxes) that their parents did. --- --- Globalists/corporatists/conservative "free market" and "flat earth" advocates say this is a great opportunity to cut benefits for the old folks (and for the young folks in the future), thus bringing the countries budgets back into balance, and this story is the main corporate media storyline. --- --- But it overlooks the real issue (and the real solution): how globalization is killing these nations' economies and what can be done about it. --- --- From the days of Adam Smith, classical economics pointed out that manufacturing and extraction are the only two ways to "create wealth." --- "Wealth" is different from "income." Wealth is value, which endures at least for some time. Income is simply compensation for work. If you wash my car for $10 and I mow your lawn for $10, we have a GDP of $20 and it looks like we both have income and economic activity. But no wealth has been created, just income. On the other hand, if I build your car, I'm creating something of value. And if you turn my lawn into a small farm that produces food we can all eat, you're creating something of value. Not only do we have an "economy" with a "GDP," we also have created wealth. --- --- --- The transnational corporations benefiting from globalization are also, in most cases, the transnational corporations that own our media, so even the word globalization is rarely heard in reports on economic crises around the world. --- But globalization is the villain here, and one that needs to be taken in hand and brought under control quickly if we don't want to see virtually the nations of the world end up subservient to corporate control, a new form of an ancient economic system known as feudalism.

In the years following Godfrey Chaucer the phrase "stupid assholes" became one of the most definitive and ubiquitous in the English lexicon. Using the Pimbo Bender we trekked back to the 13th century to find where exactly the term originated.

Here is a close up of Sarah Palin's crib notes which she wrote on the palm of her hand to help her along WHILE she accused the President of using a teleprompter. The words on her hand were "energy," "tax," "lift American spirits" and "budget" which was crossed out. Well maybe she didn't write them, after all the words were spelled correctly. But hey, she leads the Republican pack for President in 2012! Ahead of runner ups Dick Cheney and Newt Gingrich! Oh and Mitt Romney, who like Glenn Beck, believes Jesus is from Michigan!

In a Taliban dominated area of Pakistan a Marxist lawyer has defeated the candidate of the Islamic fundamentalists. In spite of a Fatwa being issued against him, comrade Ahad stood firmly on the ideas of revolutionary socialism and won the position of President of the Malakand District Bar Association.

[Note: Look at the answer Chomsky gives during an interview for why the situation with the Tea Partiers must be addressed. But not by name-calling.]: DK: On that note, I’m also looking to think ahead with what’s in the future for the labor movement and the IWW. More generally, if you had one piece of advice to offer future generations of Wobblies—especially in light of the tough financial times that we are facing and will probably continue to face for a long time in the Western world—what would it be? NC: Well, I get a lot of letters from people. When I go home tonight I’ll have 15 letters today from mostly young kids who don’t like what’s going on and want to do something about it, and [they ask me] if I can give them some advice as to what they should do, or can I tell them what to read or something. It doesn’t work like that. I mean, everything depends very much on who you are, what your values are, what your commitments are, what circumstances you live in and what options you’re willing to undertake, and that determines what you ought to be doing. There are some very general ideas that people can keep in mind; they’re kind of truisms. It’s only worth mentioning them because they’re always denied. First of all, don’t believe anything you hear from power systems. So if Obama or the boss or the newspapers or anyone else tells you they’re doing this, that, or the other thing, dismiss it or assume the opposite is true, which it often is. You have to rely on yourself and your associates—gifts don’t come from above; you’re going to win them, or you won’t have them, and you win by struggle, and that requires understanding and serious analysis of the options and the circumstances, and then you can do a lot. So take right now, for example, there is a right-wing populist uprising. It’s very common, even on the left, to just ridicule them, but that’s not the right reaction. If you look at those people and listen to them on talk radio, these are people with real grievances. I listen to talk radio a lot and it’s kind of interesting. If you can sort of suspend your knowledge of the world and just enter into the world of the people who are calling in, you can understand them. I’ve never seen a study, but my sense is that these are people who feel really aggrieved. These people think, “I’ve done everything right all my life, I’m a god-fearing Christian, I’m white, I’m male, I’ve worked hard, and I carry a gun. I do everything I’m supposed to do. And I’m getting shafted.” And in fact they are getting shafted. For 30 years their wages have stagnated or declined, the social conditions have worsened, the children are going crazy, there are no schools, there’s nothing, so somebody must be doing something to them, and they want to know who it is. Well Rush Limbaugh has answered – it’s the rich liberals who own the banks and run the government, and of course run the media, and they don’t care about you—they just want to give everything away to illegal immigrants and gays and communists and so on. Well, you know, the reaction we should be having to them is not ridicule, but rather self-criticism. Why aren’t we organizing them? I mean, we are the ones that ought to be organizing them, not Rush Limbaugh. There are historical analogs, which are not exact, of course, but are close enough to be worrisome. This is a whiff of early Nazi Germany. Hitler was appealing to groups with similar grievances, and giving them crazy answers, but at least they were answers; these groups weren’t getting them anywhere else. It was the Jews and the Bolsheviks [that were the problem]. I mean, the liberal democrats aren’t going to tell the average American, “Yeah, you’re being shafted because of the policies that we’ve established over the years that we’re maintaining now.” That’s not going to be an answer. And they’re not getting answers from the left. So, there’s an internal coherence and logic to what they get from Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and the rest of these guys. And they sound very convincing, they’re very self-confident, and they have an answer to everything—a crazy answer, but it’s an answer. And it’s our fault if that goes on. So one thing to be done is don’t ridicule these people, join them, and talk about their real grievances and give them a sensible answer, like, ”Take over your factories.”

At issue is a regulation that would force employers to identify when a workplace-related injury or illness is considered a musculoskeletal disorder (MSD), a term broadly used to describe ailments caused by repetitive stress, like carpal tunnel syndrome or strains from frequent heavy lifting.

Those politicians cannot argue that they took the pro-war decision because they had the wrong information. We, the public, saw the truth, as did many backbenchersand others of little clout. But of all the statesmen and their shadows in our Mother of Parliaments, only one got it right: Robin Cook.

Their call for urgent government action comes amid a wider debate on the issue and follows allegations by insiders at the International Energy Agency that the organisation had deliberately underplayed the threat of so-called "peak oil" to avoid panic on the stock markets. Ministers have until now refused to take predictions of oil droughts seriously, preferring to side with oil companies such as BP and ExxonMobil and crude producers such as the Saudis, who insist there is nothing to worry about.

A Washington media watchdog organization is correcting record after it identified "numerous false and misleading claims" former Alaska governor Sarah Palin made about Obama administration's national security and foreign policy during her speech at the National Tea Party Convention in Nashville, Tenn.