Neoconservative forces in and around the Bush administration and beneficiaries of war dividends — wishing to deflect attention away from war as the main culprit for the skyrocketing energy prices — tend to blame secondary or marginally relevant factors: OPEC, China and India for their increased demand for energy, or supply-demand imbalances in global markets. Whatever the contributory role of these factors, the fact remains that the current oil price hikes started with the beginning of the Bush administration’s wars against Iraq and Afghanistan. Furthermore, a closer examination of these factors reveals that their roles in the current price inflation of oil have been negligible.

A commentary from Lindsay Maas, one of the CUNY-Brooklyn Journalism class students who attended and covered the Race and New Media conference, reports on Omar Wasow's keynote speech. Wasow is a co-founder and ongoing strategic advisor of BlackPlanet.com. Under Wasow's leadership, BlackPlanet.com became the leading website for African Americans, reaching over three million people a month. Maas reports that Wasow " focused on the question: 'What is the struggle for black Americans today?” evaluating the notion of the “digital divide.'”

Every year, members of Congress are required to report their financial assets. The last reports from 2006 have just been made public, and here's a record of their assets, estimated net worth, liabilities, outside income, most popular investments and other info. (See the toolbar on the left side of the page.)

"Somalia — and much of the volatile Horn of Africa, for that matter — was about the last place on earth that needed a food crisis. Even before commodity prices started shooting up around the globe, civil war, displacement and imperiled aid operations had pushed many people here to the brink of famine.But now with food costs spiraling out of reach and the livestock people live off of dropping dead in the sand, villagers across this sun-blasted landscape say hundreds of people are dying of hunger and thirst. This is what happens, economists say, when the global food crisis meets local chaos."

Gone are the days when vegetarians were served up a plate of iceberg lettuce and a dull-as-dishwater baked potato. With the growing variety of vegetarian faux meats like bacon and sausages — along with an ever-expanding variety of vegetarian cookbooks and restaurants — vegetarianism has taken the world by storm. With World Vegetarian Week beginning on Monday, here without further ado are PETA’s picks for the top 10 reasons to give vegetarian eating a try.

The barrister answers questions such as: Why do states almost universally condemn and practise torture at the same time? Is torture really acceptable during any campaign of conflict? Is torture a real alternative where soft techniques to extract information have failed? To what extent do you think the US Government is involved in the treatment of terror suspects? What consequences would the use of controlled “legislative” violence in the interrogation of suspects have for our present understanding of Human Rights? If it is widely accepted that people will say pretty much anything under torture then why is it still carried out by democratic governments that profess to adhere to the rule of law? Why doesn’t the international committee put more pressure on the US to resolve this situation?

From the superdelegate process to the farm bill to the recent raid on immigrants in Postville, Iowa, elitism is rearing its nipped-and-tucked head all across America. How else can you explain anointing a handful of Democratic party officials to have more power in the nominating process than millions of average American voters? According to CNN, each Democratic superdelegate has more power than 13,000 primary voters. So just like George Bush was able to ignore millions of people marching in the streets against the Iraq War, the superdelegates are free to replace the will of the voters with their own whims. The idea that, like father, superdelegates know best, is anti-democratic and elitist.

The Colombian government has argued that the files found in computers show that the Venezuelan provided the FARC with material aid, in the form of money, weapons, and munitions. Various computer experts around the world have examined the Interpol report more closely and many are saying that the Colombian government’s claims of authenticity contradicted some of the findings within the report itself. The Interpol report itself concedes, that the results of the analysis are not particularly reliable. Other reactions came from Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa, who said that with the report Colombia’s President Uribe is trying to slander Ecuador’s government.

Prince Saud said the Kingdom agreed with what the US president said regarding the right of nations to have justice, freedom and hope, adding that the Palestinian people are in dire need of these legitimate rights, which they have been denied for 60 years. “We believe that the right to the existence of one nation does not eliminate the legitimate right to the existence of another nation,” he stressed, adding that the Annapolis meeting in the United States had visualized the creation of a Palestinian and Israeli state living side by side.

The murder of women who are deemed to have disobeyed traditional codes of morality is even more common in the rest of Iraq where government authority has broken down since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003. A surprising reason explaining the massive increase in the number of honor killings is the availability of cheap mobile phones able to take pictures. Men photograph themselves making love to their girlfriends and pass the pictures to their friends. This often turns out to be a lethal act of bravado in a society where premarital or extra-marital sex justifies killing.

Antiwar veterans of the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan took their case to Capitol Hill Thursday, baring their souls with stories of killings of innocent civilians, torture, and wrongful detentions The veterans spoke about extremely lax rules of engagement handed down by commanding officers, which they said virtually guaranteed atrocities would be committed, and which in turn created a violent backlash among Iraqi people and a continued cycle of violence. Former U.S. Army Capt. Luis Carlos Montalvan served directly under Gen. David Petraeus in 2005 and 2006. “We have beaten our drum to try to raise the issue of the dereliction of duty committed by a number of generals who have been promoted and promoted again and continue to perpetuate the lies [that] paint a rosy picture of the situation in Iraq,” he said. Montalvan said he personally witnessed U.S. military personnel carrying out waterboarding, the mock-drowning interrogation technique that has long been considered torture by U.S. courts.

companies to market directly to consumers. It’s a bad idea, it drives bad medicine, and it should be banned. But although it has the highest profile, direct-to-consumer advertising is a small part of Pharma’s marketing machine. Researchers Marc-André Gagnon and Joel Lexchin conclude in a recent issue of the journal PLOS Medicine that direct-to-consumer ads make up less than a tenth of industry marketing expenditures ($4 billion of $57.5 billion in 2004). And Gagnon and Lexchin’s estimate of $57.5 billion on marketing excludes many industry expenditures that are really driven by marketing, including clinical trials conducted for marketing purposes. The bulk of the industry marketing effort — more than 70 percent by Gagnon and Lexchin’s calculation — is directed at doctors. Why? Because it works. The companies spend huge amounts paying firms that carefully track what doctors prescribe, and then they use the information to tailor messages to doctors, distribute samples and develop continuing medical education programs.

The human race was divided into two separate groups within Africa for as much as half of its existence, says a Tel Aviv University mathematician. Climate change, reduction in populations and harsh conditions may have caused and maintained the separation. "This new study illustrates the extraordinary power of genetics to reveal insights into some of the key events in our species' history. Tiny bands of early humans, forced apart by harsh environmental conditions, coming back from the brink to reunite and populate the world. Truly an epic drama, written in our DNA."

Give Brad Williams a date, and he can usually tell you not only what he was doing but what world events happened that day. Williams is one of only three people in the world identified with this off-the-charts autobiographical memory, according to researchers at the University of California-Irvine who gave the condition its name: hyperthymestic syndrome, from the Greek words for excessive (hyper) and remembering (thymesis). Unlike most people whose memories fade with time, much of Williams' life is etched indelibly in his mind.

Parental concerns in maintaining germ-free homes for their children have led to an ever-increasing demand and the rapid adoption of anti-bacterial soaps and cleaning agents. But the active ingredients of those antiseptic soaps now have come under scrutiny by the EPA and FDA, due to both environmental and human health concerns. Two closely related antimicrobials, triclosan and triclocarban, are at the center of the debacle. Whereas triclosan (TCS) has long captured the attention of toxicologists due to its structural resemblance to dioxin (the Times Beach and Love Canal poison), triclocarban (TCC) has ski-rocketed in 2004 from an unknown and presumably harmless consumer product additive to one of today’s top ten pharmaceuticals and personal care products most frequently found in the environment and in U.S. drinking water resources.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts has been hospitalized in Boston after suffering stroke-like symptoms, The Associated Press has learned. Kennedy, 76, was taken to the hospital overnight, said an official who requested anonymity. There was no word on his condition. The long-serving senator is a leading liberal voice in the United States and has actively campaigned for Barack Obama in his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.

In the larger scheme of all things political, my feeling has been that religious dog-whistling by presidential candidates isn’t really all that impactful beyond a core constituency of true believers. But listening yesterday to a replay of a 2006 interview with radical dominionist mullah John Hagee changed my mind. John McCain should immediately renounce any association with Hagee, Rod Parsley, and the rest of the Armageddonist movement.

ePluribus Media's Cho uses her own experiences as a filter to help relate why she "could sense a kernel of hope for our troops while reading Sue Halpern's Virtual Iraq in this week's The New Yorker. Her article details a fledgling program that immerses the patient into the environment where the trauma occurred. The slow and controlled immersions attempts to de-couple the deep emotional responses from what, to the non-afflicted, are neutral components of our everyday civilian environment." Check it out, and perhaps you can help build on that kernel of hope for the sake of others by sharing the news and -- as always -- hope for an end to the biggest trauma-inducing debacles of today's world.

Where does the madness end? Where do words lose their meaning? Al-Qa'ida is not being defeated. Hizbollah has just won a domestic war in Lebanon, as total as Hamas's war in Gaza. Afghanistan and Iraq and Lebanon and Gaza are hell disasters – I need no apology to quote Churchill's description of 1948 Palestine yet again – and this foolish, stupid, vicious man is lying to the world yet again.

Ah, the Religious Reich. So holy, so pure, so far above worldly temptations. Except maybe this guy, who was arrested when he traveled 200 miles with the intention of of raping a 13-year old girl and videotaping the event....Is it just me, or does anyone else see a trend here?

Sen. Edward Kennedy was rushed to Cape Cod Hospital in Massachusetts Saturday morning, a well-informed, prominent Democratic source in that state told CNN. The source said the 76-year-old senator had "symptoms of a stroke."

The failure of the Bush/Bandar/Olmert axis to ignite a prolonged shooting war between the Lebanese resistance forces and their hired guns Hariri and Jumblatt is a clear declaration to the world that the glorious neocon policies of Bush have been proven complete failures on the battlefield. Yet, he and Cheney keep pushing for new openings to ignite a new conflagration.

Arizona Senator and apparent Republican presidential nominee John McCain has been riding his so-called ‘Straight Talk Express’ for some time now, carting his frail, aging carcass about the countryside as he smilingly promises Americans four more years of misery. Yet his happy train was derailed this week, when he lapsed into fairy tales that no toddler would accept. Surely, after this speech, any child would long for the realism of Cinderella or Harry Potter. The following are some of the more noteworthy excerpts from Mr. McCain’s ‘happily ever after’ view of the conclusion of his first potential administration.

On May 13, amidst the 2008 US election news and the coverage of the Sichuan earthquake and the Burma aid quagmire, The Globe and Mail reported that Dallaire, at a parliamentary subcommittee meeting, stated that the United States and Canada are terrorist organization and must begin to abide by international and Human Right treaties or else be considered rouge states.

Anyone who has kept half an eye on the proceedings at the Military Commissions in Guantánamo -- the unique system of trials for “terror suspects” that was conceived in the wake of the 9/11 attacks by Vice President Dick Cheney and his close advisers -- will be aware that their progress has been faltering at best. After six and a half years, in which they have been ruled illegal by the Supreme Court, derailed by their own military judges, relentlessly savaged by their own military defense lawyers, and condemned as politically motivated by their own former chief prosecutor, they have only secured one contentious result: a plea bargain negotiated by the Australian David Hicks, who admitted to providing “material support for terrorism,” and dropped his well-chronicled claims of torture and abuse by US forces, in order to secure his return to Australia to serve out the remainder of a meager nine-month sentence last March.

Don't worry what's a little more poulltion

Just moments after former presidential candidate John Edwards endorsed Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill) for president, Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) vowed to “continue the fight” for Edwards’ endorsement. “My friends, I will fight for the endorsement of John Edwards, even if it takes all summer,” she told supporters in Louisville, Kentucky. “I have not begun to fight for this endorsement!”

The other day, a somewhat obscure right-wing radio host got his posterior handed to him by MSNBC's Chris Matthews. The radio talker, Kevin James, obviously has been reading "Right-Wing Cable News Punditry for Dummies." He seems to have followed all the steps. But his execution turned out to be amateurish. Here, for your reference, are the Top 10 Most Effective Tips for Being a Successful Right-Wing Pundit. You can also check out the video everyone's talking about.

The 2008 Election Calculator projects that Obama will win the True Vote in a landslide: 71-59m (54-45%). But the official recorded vote will be Obama by only 64-61m (50-48%). The True Vote is based on the same model which indicates that Kerry won the 2004 True Vote by 67-57m. This is a detailed statistical analysis of the 2004 stolen election: http://www.geocities.com/electionmodel/TruthIsAllFAQResponse.htm

The Saudis have said no to Bush's request for an increase in oil production. So the Question is why? Of course it would be easy to say that this is just another example of how little influence George W. Bush has anywhere and that would be correct. But there is more - the Saudis said there is not enough demand to increase production. This too is correct, the current price increases are not so much a rise in the price of oil as the decrease in value of the dollar. And yes the war that was supposed to reduce the price of oil is responsible. Borrowing three billion dollars a week to finance the occupation of Iraq is rapidly eroding the dollar. But there may be another reason why the Saudis won't increase production - they can't. The Saudis have reached Peak Oil.