By WILLIAM BLUM - March 29 / 30, 2008

It's nice to see the West's conscience stirred up. They're real good about such things, when the target is not one of their own, particularly against a communist country. In 1980, 62 nations -- including the United States, Canada, West Germany, Japan, and Israel -- boycotted the Olympics in Moscow because the previous year the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan. Four years later, the Olympics were held in Los Angeles. Not a single member of "The Free World" boycotted it, even though the previous year the United States had invaded Grenada...

by Seumas Milne - The Guardian

If a government wants to abuse human rights and rig elections, it needs to have the support of - or be - the western powers...[T]he best chance both of settling the Zimbabwean crisis and of meeting Tibetan aspirations is without the interference of western powers, which would do better improving the human rights records of their allies and themselves.

Craig Kielburger, Marc Kielburger, Chris Mallinos. The Ottawa Citizen.
Ottawa, Ont.: Apr 6, 2008. pg. A.8

Lured to Kuwait with the promise of work, truck drivers from developing countries say they have been trapped by companies that seized their passports and forced them to join deadly convoys into Iraq to supply U.S. troops.

By Mike Marqusee - March, 08 2008

The end of January 2008 marked the 40th anniversary of an event that astonished the world [and] changed the course of history...In the early hours of 31 January 1968, soldiers of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam and the Army of North Vietnam launched what came to be known as the Tet Offensive...against the US occupiers and their puppet government...The insurgents struck simultaneously across the country, targeting more than one hundred cities and towns...Most spectacularly, a group of 19 commandos fought their way into the US Embassy compound in Saigon, where they held out for six and half hours--long enough for the images of defiance to be broadcast around the world.

So yea want to do something for the suffering of Burma. Like I said, the most powerful tool we have is the all mighty dollar. This is only a small list but as you soon will see, it has many strange bedfellows. List provided by Burma: On line News and Analysis. Comentaries by moi.

Sunday Times (London) | Sarah Baxter

Washington - The Pentagon has drawn up plans for massive airstrikes against 1,200 targets in Iran, designed to annihilate the Iranians' military capability in three days, according to a national security expert.

If you think the U.S. has only 160,000 troops in Iraq, think again.

With almost no congressional oversight and even less public awareness, the
Bush administration has more than doubled the size of the U.S. occupation
through the use of private war companies.

Malaysia has caned dozens of refugees as illegal immigrants, a refugee group said, sparking criticisms by rights organizations that the government is torturing people it should protect...Malaysia arrested up to 300 of Myanmar's Rohingya refugees at the weekend for alleged immigration offences, raising fears they too could face caning...

I Come and Stand at Every Door
by Nâzim Hikmet Ran

I come and stand at every door
But no one hears my silent tread
I knock and yet remain unseen
For I am dead, for I am dead.

[...]

...[C]ritics contend that Washington's enthusiasm for its Indonesian military "partners" has been at the expense of any accountability for military atrocities. On April 26, the U.S.-based East Timor and Indonesia Human Rights Network (ETAN) condemned the participation of Indonesian Major General Noer Muis in a joint U.S.-Indonesia military exercise. ETAN pointed out that General Muis has been indicted for crimes against humanity in East Timor.

The Bush administration this week signalled a tough new stance on Pakistan, demanding that military strongman General Pervez Musharraf takes action against Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters in areas bordering Afghanistan, and threatening US strikes if he failed to do so.

Two kinds of imperial whining have come to pervade foreign policy discussion.
One relates to Bush's overextending the military so they cannot deploy to other
places desperately needing their lethal capacity.

Others fixate on "American credibility". If we withdraw, an October 22 2006
Washington Post editorial declared, we forego our "moral obligation". After all
the US military and Iraqi sacrifices, the US must not allow a collapse, which
would occur "without the prop of 140,000 [now 170,000] US troops".

The world hasn’t been paying attention to Nepal lately. Why would they? As the plan of action seems to go for the Goliath International Institution, the UN comfortably settled into the poor South Asian country last year ready to play its usual role of peace broker, supplier and judge and the global gaze moved on to newer, more exciting stories. The few stories that we can read are often published from New Delhi, and follow the UN line.

Some who have supported the CPN(M) are expressing grave concern that the party is abandoning its commitment to socialist revolution by its deal with the seven mainstream parties and its abandonment of the People's War.

The Nepali Maoists deny that that's the case, and I'd just as soon withhold judgment on that issue. But if the sentiments of Comrades Gurung and Biswokarma are at all representative of party sentiment, and if measures against gays are part of the party's agenda, the outlook for a new revolutionary model in Nepal is looking worrisome.

Everyone’s favourite and forgotten national liberation struggle of the 90’s-East Timor-is about to introduce mandatory military conscription on the decimated island.