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by Bill Van Auken

On the eve of President Barack Obama’s July deadline for beginning the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan, the US military has opposed any significant drawdown.

Gen. David Petraeus, the top US military commander in Afghanistan—and Obama’s nominee for director of the Central Intelligence Agency—met with White House national security advisers on Wednesday. According to White House spokesman Jay Carney, Petraeus presented a “range of options.” Carney said that the US president would announce “relatively soon” how many troops would be withdrawn and at what pace.

by F. William Engdahl

This skillfully researched book focuses on how a small socio-political American elite seeks to establish control over the very basis of human survival: the provision of our daily bread. “Control the food and you control the people.”

This is no ordinary book about the perils of GMO. Engdahl takes the reader inside the corridors of power, into the backrooms of the science labs, behind closed doors in the corporate boardrooms. The author cogently reveals a diabolical world of profit-driven political intrigue, government corruption and coercion, where genetic manipulation and the patenting of life forms are used to gain worldwide control over food production. If the book often reads as a crime story, that should come as no surprise. For that is what it is.

by Peter Salisbury

This article was first published in The Ecologist

In the first of a major new series following on from the ground breaking Behind the Label, Peter Salisbury takes a look at one of the biggest brands in the world – McDonald’s – and asks: has the burger giant done enough to clean-up its act?

by Pablo Ouziel

While “Europe’s slow-motion financial collapse” – as Mother Jones magazine described it in a June 6th article – continues to unravel, Spain, like other European states continues to implement anti-social-neo-liberal policies with strong opposition from the citizenry.

by Kourosh Ziabari

You might have frequently heard of the Western mainstream media’s claims that Iran is pursuing a military nuclear program which is aimed at developing atomic weapons. Actually, spreading falsehood and untruth about the nature of Iran’s peaceful nuclear program has been a constant, unchanging and recurring theme of the Western corporate media’s coverage of Iran’s events.

Over the past years, the world mainstream media, funded and fueled by certain Western governments to derail Iran’s sublime position in the international community through their unyielding black propaganda have laboriously and persistently attempted to pretend that Iran’s nuclear program poses a serious threat to the global peace and security and that Tehran is taking steps to create atomic bombs to drop on Israel and European countries.

by Joel S. Hirschhorn

What is the main lesson from the recent fiascos of former Senator John Edwards and Representative Anthony Weiner? If you follow the news shows you saw a number of video clips where each of them had lied many times about what eventually they confessed to, their stupid, sleazy sexual misconduct. As I watched the videos I was amazed how good their lying behavior was, without any hint of their blatant dishonesty in how they looked or sounded. Of course, I was also reminded how terrific a liar Bill Clinton was when he went on television to lie about his sexual misconduct.

by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya

The geo-political chessboard is being lined up for a showdown with Iran and its allies in the Resistance Bloc. This is just one theatre within the broader struggle to control Eurasia. In the process there is an effort by Washington and its allies to manipulate Islam and subordinate it to capitalist interests by ushering in a new generation of Islamists amongst the Arabs.

A New Pressure Point in Tehran for Washington, Israel, and the E.U. to Capitalize?

BELGRADE, WASHINGTON — The American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors on June 6 blasted Pope Benedict XVI over his statement about WW2 Croatian Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac.

The spiritual leader of the Roman Catholics claimed during his visit to Zagreb that Stepinac – tried and found guilty of collaboration with the fascist Ustasha regime of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) – was a defender of Jews, Orthodox Christians and anyone under persecution.

That regime ran death camps, including the largest – Jasenovac, where Serbs, but also Jews and Roma, were slaughtered.

by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya

Washington and its allies, Israel and the Al-Sauds, are taking advantage of the upheavals in the Arab World. They are now working to dismantle the Resistance Bloc and weaken any drive for democracy in the Arab World. The geo-political chessboard is now being prepared for a broader confrontation that will target Tehran and include Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and the Palestinians.

Tying Hezbollah’s Hands through External and Internal Pressure

In Lebanon, there is a deadlock in regards to the formation of a Lebanese government. Michel Sleiman, who holds the presidency and the new Lebanese prime minister have been delaying the formation of the cabinet in a political row with Michel Aoun, the leader of the Free Patriotic Movement.

by Dr. Robert P. Abele

Even to the casual observer, the last thirty years has witnessed a revolution in American media,

1 No longer fulfilling the valued democratic function of “the fourth estate,” the media complex has co-opted itself simultaneously into both mega-corporations and government megaphone.

2 The result is a government-corporate-media complex, whose function is to profit those who run them and use them. It is the point of the following analysis to elucidate the existence, structure, and values of this mega-complex. The ensuing eight-part argument is intended to produce in the reader the commitment to become the media, since there is currently no fourth estate in the U.S.