Alan Maas

An estimated 76 people died in Norway at the hands of a far-right fanatic whose connections to the organized racists and Islamophobes extend to the anti-Muslim bigots in the US.

Anders Behring Breivik is accused of setting a car bomb in downtown Oslo. At least seven people died in the blast in front of the oil ministry, but which also apparently targeted a 17-story office tower that contained the offices of Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, leader of the governing Labor Party.

The US-led military operation in Libya has morphed from the initial imposition of a “no-fly zone” — ostensibly to prevent Muammar Gaddafi’s regime from carrying out a massacre — into an ongoing bombing campaign with no end in sight.

And now there’s increasing talk of the use of ground forces until Gaddafi is overthrown and a new government, no doubt Western-approved, takes his place.

Libya discussion
Left wrong to oppose military intervention
Two wars in Libya

Howard Zinn, an activist and author for half a century and probably the best-known voice of the US left, died on January 27 at the age of 87.

The US government has nuclear weapons pointed at North Korea, a fleet of Navy vessels permanently positioned off its coast, and close to 100,000 soldiers stationed in South Korea and Japan.

“A lady who’s a leader”, gushed the Weekly Standard’s William Kristol. “I would pull that lever”, declared James Dobson of the anti-choice and homophobic group Focus on the Family.

10,000 B.C.

Directed by Roland Emmerich

With Omar Sharif, Camilla Belle & Steven Strait

There Will Be Blood

Written & directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, based on the novel Oil! by Upton Sinclair

With Daniel Day-Lewis & Paul Dano.

Oil!

By Upton Sinclair

Penguin, 1927

560 pages, $24.95 (pb).

Voters’ desire to see political change has become the undisputed theme of the 2008 US presidential election scheduled for November following a strong surge of support for contender for Democrat presidential candidate Barack Obama that has caused other candidates, even Republicans, to adopt similar rhetoric.

A Louisiana appeals court threw out the only remaining conviction against Mychal Bell, the first of the Jena 6 to be put on trial in an example of modern-day Jim Crow injustice that has stunned people around the globe.