B.C. Provincial Court heard Thursday that cannabis is safer than aspirin and can restore the balance in people's bodies to help fight illness...That was the testimony of Dr. Robert Melamede, an associate professor at the University of Colorado, who was brought in by the defense team for the four men accused in the Holy Smoke Culture Shop drug trafficking case taking place in Nelson this week.

By John Pilger - May, 10 2008

When I first came to live in Britain, much of ordinary life was premised on a sense of community...A good place to look is a local post office...Some 2,500 post offices are expected to be shut in Britain by the end of 2009. This includes rural and remote areas, where the post office is quite literally the heart of a community...The whole wilful destruction is a new Labour classic and shows why, in a nutshell, even the ever faithful have turned on them.

By Dan Freeman-Maloy - May, 07 2008

When Ben Dunkelman...returned from the European battlefields of WWII...he had already been [asked]...to participate in the looming fight in Palestine. Soon, Dunkelman was juggling management responsibilities at Tip Top Tailors with his tasks as head of the Canadian branch of the Hagana. These included fundraising for weaponry, direct arms procurement, and recruitment for Hagana forces. By the summer of 1948, he was in command of a Brigade actively depopulating Palestinian villages by force - a unit so heavily comprised of recruits from Canada, the United States and South Africa that it came to be known as the "Anglo-Saxon Brigade."

[Translated from April 2, 2008 broadcast by Gegenstandpunkt Marburg]

Hunger riots in Haiti, protests in Egypt, flour and bread rationing in Pakistan, a corn shortage making tortillas exorbitant in Mexico, rice shortages in Thailand and the USA, etc....

By JoANN WYPIJEWSKI; April 28, 2008

Sean Bell was dead at 23, too bad. He and a friend had had heated words with another man outside Club Kalua, an exotic dance club, after his bachelor party there. Did anyone really say he had a gun or say he was going for a gun? The testimony was inconsistent, but the judge wasn't bothered by that inconsistency. Police "perceived" that Bell and his crew might have had a gun in their car, he stated. They no more had a gun than Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

By CYNTHIA McKINNEY - May 1, 2008

...[T]he criminal justice system in [the United States] "always finds a rationale for letting off cops who kill black and brown people." Indeed, police officers seem to know that they can kill certain people with impunity...the prospects are that black and brown men and women will continue to be murdered by police officers who, fundamentally, seem scared of black people. That fear apparently extends to the larger community because juries construct ways to let murderous police officers escape just punishment.

Israel's ambassador says he is concerned that the growing number of Muslim Canadians might cause a shift in this country's Middle East policy...Alan Baker, Israel's ambassador in Ottawa, said Muslim communities have had an impact on the foreign policies of such countries as France, and he is concerned Canada might follow..."Do you expect...these greater numbers [of Arab immigrants]...will absorb themselves into Canadian society as Canadians or that they'll try to push Canadians to adopt their own values and principles? And this is the gist of the problem"...

On the night of May 7, 2008 we set fire to a Kiewitt & Sons work truck. Peter Kiewitt & Sons is currently working on expanding the Sea to Sky highway between Vancouver and Whistler, the main artery for the Olympics, also paving the way for investment [in] land exploitation, tourism and development.

by Kevin Doyle

[...I]ncompetence alone cannot account for the sheer scale and seriousness of [mismanagement]. Rather, to fully understand why it happens, we have to look at how organisations are set up and run. This is where the anarchist analysis of hierarchy comes into its own.

By ALEXANDER G. HIGGINS

GENEVA (AP) — An Iranian envoy said Monday his government will not submit to extensive nuclear inspections while Israel stays outside the global treaty to curb the spread of atomic weapons.

Palestinian resistance against Israeli repression.

By Dan Freeman-Maloy - May, 06 2008

...Canada is operating in particularly crude alignment with Israel against the Palestinians. Within the framework of the "war on terror," the Canadian government has criminalized nearly all major Palestinian political parties by designating them as "terrorist groups"...even as it cultivates ever more intimate trade, security and diplomatic relations with the Israeli state. On the United Nations Human Rights Council, Canada has emerged as the staunchest opponent of meaningful criticism of Israeli human rights violations and war crimes.

By TARIQ ALI - Counterpunch

Awestruck by Margaret Thatcher, [Tony] Blair and [Gordon] Brown aped her achievements within their own party, squeezing old social-democratic ideas out of themselves, drop by drop. They were all market fundamentalists now. Deregulation and privatisation became a mantra and over the last ten years the social divide in the country between rich and poor increased more than even under Thatcher. Redistribution of wealth was no longer on Labour’s agenda.

By ANDREW COCKBURN - May 2, 2008

Six weeks ago, President Bush signed a secret finding authorizing a covert offensive against the Iranian regime that...[is] "unprecedented in its scope."...Bush’s secret directive covers actions across a huge geographic area – from Lebanon to Afghanistan – but is also far more sweeping in the type of actions permitted under its guidelines – up to and including the assassination of targeted officials.