Muntazer al-Zaidi, guardian.co.uk Thursday 17 September 2009.

Photo: Zoriah (c) Iraq’s national flag painted in Baghdad.

I am free. But my country is still a prisoner of war. There has been a lot of talk about the action and about the person who took it, and about the hero and the heroic act, and the symbol and the symbolic act. But, simply, I answer: what compelled me to act is the injustice that befell my people, and how the occupation wanted to humiliate my homeland by putting it under its boot.

Over recent years, more than a million martyrs have fallen by the bullets of the occupation and Iraq is now filled with more than five million orphans, a million widows and hundreds of thousands of maimed. Many millions are homeless inside and outside the country.

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Daily Star by Rami G. Khouri, Saturday, September 19, 2009.

Photo: Tanya Traboulsi. Sky over sea, Beirut, Lebanon.

The amount and quality of available scientific data on the global impact of climate change, I rediscovered at a seminar organized by the Danish Foreign Ministry in Copenhagen this week, is staggering. The debate that swirled around the issues of climate change and global warming just two or three years ago has vanished. There is much more certainty now on the nature and extent of the changes to the Earth’s climate that can be attributed to the impact of human activity, mainly the burning of fossil fuels that emit greenhouse gases.

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Al Kitab (Arabic for ‘Book’), is a new book club organized by Tadamon!

Photo: James Longley. Al-Mutanabi Street in Iraq.

Al Kitab club members (six to 10 people) will meet in a comfortable place (someone’s home, a quiet café, or a room in a public library) once a month to discuss and reflect on a book.

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rabble.ca by Sunera Thobani | May 8, 2009.

Photo: Iraq war graphic by Jeremy Traum.

Where does the question of race figure in President Obama’s political calculations, for surely he cannot be ignorant of the historical relationship between race and torture in the American experience?

The tortured body has long been the site for the most spectacular display of the politics of race: the utter violation and dehumanization of black and other bodies of colour has been central to the colonial and imperialist expansion of American and European powers.

Amidst the media fanfare that marked the Obama Administration’s first 100 days in office, the five-year anniversary of the release of the Abu-Ghraib photographs by the CBS went largely unmarked.

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Derrick O’Keefe, rabble.ca January 20, 2009.

Photo: Martin Luther King protesting Vietnam War.

Today is a day to watch history unfold before our eyes. But today is also a day to think about the ongoing struggle to make history, to achieve social and global justice, and to put an end to empire.

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new single from hip-hop artist the Narcicyst

Gaza remix featuring Shadia Mansour is available: free download

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photos capturing Montreal solidarity action with Muntader al-Zaidi.

Inspired by Iraqi journalist Muntader al-Zaidi, who launched a pair of shoes at U.S. President George W. Bush this past week in Baghdad, local activists in Montreal held a mass shoe-throwing directed at the U.S. Consulate and the Canadian Armed Forces recruiting centre in downtown Montreal this past Saturday.

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SATURDAY DECEMBER 20, 1pm
In solidarity with Muntadar al-Zeidi
outside the US Consulate in Montreal
(1155 St-Alexandre, métro McGill)

bring extra shoes and footwear to throw! bring noisemakers!

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BAGHDAD: While the number of US troops killed in Iraq since the 2003 invasion stands at 4,000, up to three times as many Iraqi soldiers have died – and the number of civilians killed runs into tens and probably hundreds of thousands. The icasualties.org Web site, based only on published reports, shows that around 8,000 members of the Iraqi security forces have died since the March 2003 invasion. Last year, however, the Iraqi government put the figure at 12,000.

There is no agreement when it comes to civilian casualties, particularly as many deaths are never reported in the media.

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(Beirut, December 4, 2007) – Lebanese authorities arrest Iraqi refugees without valid visas and detain them indefinitely to coerce them to return to Iraq, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today.

“Iraqi refugees in Lebanon live in constant fear of arrest,” said Bill Frelick, refugee policy director for Human Rights Watch. “Refugees who are arrested face the prospect of rotting in jail indefinitely unless they agree to return to Iraq and face the dangers there.”

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