Barack Obama

A truck delivering waste from a fracking operation in Greene County, Pennsylvania, on April 19 was quarantined after being rejected by a hazardous waste landfill as too dangerous.

The truck was carrying highly radioactive radium-226 in concentrations 86 times higher than allowed per Environmental Protection Agency limits.

After being quarantined at the landfill, the truck was sent back to the fracking site, which is operated by Rice Energy.

Radium, it should be noted, is a routine by-product of fracking — the fossil fuel extraction method behind the ongoing “natural gas boom”.

Before a May 7 visit to US Congress by South Korean President Park Geun-hye, the Workers Solidarity Student Group — the student section of socialist group Workers Solidarity All Together — issued this statement about the threat to war on the Korean peninsula. It was translated by Chris Kim and is abridged from US Socialist Worker.

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Amid the continuing rise of military tensions on the Korean peninsula, South Korea's new president, Park Geun-hye, will make her first visit to the US since her inauguration in late February for a US-South Korean summit.

US Senator says drones killed 4700

“A high-ranking US senator has estimated America's use of drone strikes has killed about 4,700 people, including civilians.

“Republican Lindsey Graham is the first US government official to offer an estimate on the total number of fatalities in America's secretive drone war.

“'Sometimes you hit innocent people, and I hate that, but we're at war ...' Mr Graham told the Easley Rotary Club ...”

“The strikes have been condemned by rights groups as extrajudicial assassinations.”

For a moment he lost himself in the old, familiar dream. He imagined that he was master of the sky, that the world lay spread out beneath him, inviting him to travel where he willed. It was not the world of his own time that he saw, but the lost world of the dawn -- a rich and living panorama of hills and lakes and forests. He felt bitter envy of his unknown ancestors, who had flown with such freedom over all the earth, and who had let its beauty die.

-- Arthur C. Clarke, The City and the Stars

Capitalism stands as a death sentinel over planetary life.

The Julia Gillard government has committed Australia to closer war ties with the US, more US bases and billions for US defence contracts at the annual AUSMIN talks in Perth on November 16.

The Gillard government is well aware of the huge public opposition to the US-led wars in Iraq and now Afghanistan. It knows that a majority is critical of Canberra’s unquestioning policy of “all-the-way-with-Obama’s next wars”.

If the mainstream Western media is to be believed, the world witnessed a shining example of true democracy in action in the United States on November 6.

In the Washington Post, Dan Balz described the US presidential race as a “contest of competing visions”.

Apparently, democracy is epitomised by a race between two representatives of the 1% fighting to impose “competing” agendas that ― with differences of nuance ― bear more similarities to each other than to public opinion.

I have been reminded lately of that line from that famous song: “How many polls must an anti-capitalist win, before we call him a democrat?”

It is that time of year again, when a bunch of Norwegian politicians decide who deserves a Nobel Peace Prize with an apparent disregard for any involvement in actual wars.

This year, the European Union was declared the winner. Coming just three years after the Norwegians gave the gong to US President Barack Obama, the decision is actually beginning to make me wonder if they have ever even heard of a place called Afghanistan. Perhaps we should all chip in for an atlas.

After an armed attack killed 16 Egyptian guards on the border with Israel in the Sinai Peninsula, President Mohammed Morsi sacked defence minister and head of the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF) Mohammed Tantawi, and his second in command, Sami Anan.

The move is part of an ongoing battle that has taken place between the Muslim Brotherhood — main political force that emerged after the overthrow of former dictator Hosni Mubarak — and SCAF, which took governmental power after Mubarak stepped down.

Arriving in a village in southern Vietnam, I caught sight of two children who bore witness to the longest war of the 20th century.

Their terrible deformities were familiar. All along the Mekong river, where the forests were petrified and silent, small human mutations lived as best they could.

Today, at the Tu Du paediatrics hospital in Saigon, a former operating theatre is known as the "collection room" and, unofficially, as the "room of horrors". It has shelves of large bottles containing grotesque foetuses.