May 16, 2012
AP is reporting: “Government troops and warplanes pounded al-Qaida positions in southern Yemen on Wednesday, killing at least 29 militants as part of a ramped up campaign against the group, military officials said.”
El Asbahi is founder and director of the Human Rights Information and Training Center in Yemen. He said today: “The U.S. military and the Yemeni government frequently launch these attacks and claim they are killing al-Qaida fighters. But the fact is quite often they are killing regular people, or political opponents of the regime who are not al-Qaida. This ends up having the effect of causing more resentment and gives al-Qaida more recruits. After the start of the uprising a year ago, the U.S. declared they would get rid of al-Qaida in a matter of three weeks. Today al-Qaida controls a region ten times the size of Bahrain with sea port access.”
This week El Asbahi is in Washington, D.C. with a delegation of the Arab NGO Network for Development, which also includes representatives from Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Tunisia and other Arab countries.
He added: “Military intervention and use of violence has left a negative impact and does not achieve the stated goal of eliminating terrorism. The elimination of terrorism starts with the support of local development. Airplane and drone bombings nurture terrorism as they enroll more people struggling with poverty, anger and fear with al-Qaida which gives them a salary and a Kalashnikov to empty their anger. While in city of Taiz, a stronghold of the left and revolution in Yemen, they still talk fondly of U.S. aid and the ‘Kennedy project’ of drinking water distribution.”
[more]May 15, 2012
Reuters is reporting: “Standing up to Israel through non-violent resistance can produce encouraging results, Palestinians said on Tuesday, after a prisoner hunger strike produced some Israeli concessions.
“The deal under which some 1,600 Palestinian prisoners agreed on Monday to end a month-long fast against Israel’s prison policy was struck on the eve of Nakba (catastrophe) Day…”
[more]May 15, 2012

Stephany Griffith Jones is Financial Markets Program Director at the Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia University. With José Antonio Ocampo, and Joseph E. Stiglitz she co-edited “Time for a Visible Hand: Lessons from the 2008 World Financial Crisis.” She said today: “Two billion dollar losses in JPMorgan give us further confirmation of the need to regulate the financial system much more, particularly increasing transparency of derivatives, forcing all derivatives on exchanges, and tightening the Volcker rule. Dilution of regulation by financial interests must be resisted strongly. More radical questions need to be asked: whether such complex financial activity, where risks are impossible to measure, and with no positive effect on the real economy, should be allowed at all?”
May 15, 2012 by journalist ·
In 2011, some 12,000 people were murdered in situations presumably related to the drug trafficking industry in Mexico. In 2010, the number was more than 15,000 killed. Between December 2006, when Felipe Calderón of the conservative National Action Party (PAN) took office and declared a “war on drug traffickers” and January 2012, depending on the source, some 47,000 to 60,000 people have been slain, and some 5,000 disappeared. This grim fact has become the centerpiece of Mexican politics and an inescapable force in daily life throughout much of the country.
But neither the number of people killed nor the cruelty of the killings can be understood without simultaneously taking account of another pair of figures. First, Calderón has repeatedly said that more than 90 percent of those killed were involved in “the struggle of some cartels against others.” Calderón does not cite a source for this estimate. The underlying logic, however, is clear: if you’re dead, you’re guilty. The perennial official refrain is “en algo andaba,” or, they were up to something; they were in the game.
[more]September 9, 2011 by Gwendolyn Mink ·
Is President Obama trying to kill Social Security without explicitly saying so? He put Social Security “on the table” for consideration by his Deficit Commission — even though Social Security has not contributed to creating or sustaining the deficit/debt in the first place. He kept Social Security on the table when he made a deal [...]
[more]July 20, 2011 by Gwendolyn Mink ·
Medicaid cuts will injure communities of color disproportionately. 11 percent of Asian Americans, 14 percent of Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, 27 percent of Latinos, and 27 percent of African Americans gain access to health care through Medicaid. Medicaid cuts will injure women disproportionately. Women account for 70 percent of Medicaid participants. Social Security is [...]
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