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Bradley Manning wins Peace Prize

U.S. whistleblower and international hero Bradley Manning has just been awarded the 2013 Sean MacBride Peace Award by the International Peace Bureau, itself a former recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, for which Manning is a nominee this year.

A petition supporting Manning for the Nobel Peace Prize has gathered 88,000 sinatures, many of them with comments, and is aiming for 100,000 before delivering it to the Norwegian Nobel Committee in Oslo. Anyone can sign and add their comments at ManningNobel.org

The International Peace Bureau (IPB) represents 320 organizations in 70 countries. It was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1910. Over the years, 13 of IPB's officers have been Nobel Peace laureates. See ipb.org

From conversation to action: After Trayvon

President Barack Obama eloquently described the agony experienced among African-Americans from the slaying of Trayvon Martin. He called for a more thoughtful “conversation” on race, convened not by politicians, but among families, in churches and workplaces. He suggested modest steps to provide greater training on racial profiling with police, greater efforts to figure out how to do a “better job helping young African-American men feel that they’re a full part of this society and that they’ve got pathways and avenues to succeed.”

The president’s courageous comments merit praise and consideration. But we’ve had a long conversation about race in America. No small part of American history has been devoted to that “conversation” and that struggle. And as the president said, great progress has been made.

What we need now is action. The president’s personal narrative must translate into policy. His sentiments must be turned into meaningful solutions.

Fifty years later

Fifty years ago was a tumultuous time in America. A spirit of change pulsed throughout the country. Major problems afflicting the country were once again being rediscovered. Poverty and inequality in all their facets – social, political and economic – rose higher and higher on the national agenda.

At the beginning of the 1960s, many Americans – including their leaders – looked at their country and saw what they wanted to see: a Post-World War II America brimming with affluence, a land where poverty – especially the poverty of the Great Depression – had finally been left behind and where everyone who wanted to could participate in the American Dream. Then, in 1962, Michael Harrington’s The Other America put the lie to that vision. What he found in his travels was a nation still struggling with deep poverty, some 40 to 50 million poor out of a total population of about 180 million (or 22% to 28%).

Harrington’s book received widespread attention following Dwight Macdonald’s review in the New Yorker magazine in January 1963, its influence reaching the Oval Office when President John F. Kennedy received a copy from an adviser.

Shoulder-to-shoulder to stop fracking

As the sumer is heating up, so is our movement. In one week we join together to stand up to Big Oil and Gas. Communities across the region will join together in the heart of the region's oil industry to call for a ban on injection wells in Ohio. Nearly sixty percent of the 600,000,000 gallons of waste accepted into Ohio's injection wells in 2012, came from states other than Ohio -- and without a place to dump waste, fracking across the region will become much tougher.

We know that Gov. John Kasich and many in the Ohio Legislature have big plans to drastically increase the number of wells in Ohio. We also know they have been given big money to do so.

Although the fight against big money remains, we also know we have the power of people and will no longer tolerate handouts to the oil and gas industry.

350.org co-founder Bill McKibben, as well as leaders from the grassroots anti-fracking movement will be there -- can you be there too? Everything is happening on July 29th in Courthouse Square, in Warren, Ohio at 1PM. Sign up to RSVP here:

Don't Frack Ohio

Panama releases convicted American war criminal sought by Italy to return to the US without hearing

On Thursday, July 18, a convicted American war criminal, Robert Seldon Lady, was detained in Panama near the Costa Rican border. The next day, Lady was headed back to the United States, according to news reports. Lady, age 59, was convicted by an Italian court in 2005 for kidnapping and his role in the 2003 “extraordinary rendition” of Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr to Egypt. Nasr was tortured every day for seven months. Neither the CIA nor the State Department has offered any statements about the case at this time.

According to court documents, Lady watched from a cafe across the street while Nasr was sprayed with an aerosol drug, beaten, loaded into a van and driven to the Aviano airbase outside Milan, where Lady then-served as CIA station chief. Lady was given the most severe sentence, nine years, out of the 22 American CIA and Air Force personnel found guilty by the Italian court. Three Italian military and intelligence officers were also found guilty of kidnapping during the probe of Italy's role in the illegal American program.

Intelligence leaders and courts unite in renewed offensive against press freedoms

Current and former intelligence community leaders made their case for imprisoning journalists to the public through compliant corporate media outlets today while a federal judge gutted a historic court ruling protecting journalists and their sources. The court ruling could lead to the indefinite jailing of Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times journalist James Risen.

General Michael Hayden's comments leave little doubt that some in the Obama administration are strongly considering espionage charges against Glenn Greenwald who has been leading the journalistic investigations of NSA violations of US and international law through its bulk interception of virtually every phone call and email on planet Earth. Taken together with the mysterious death of investigative journalist Michael Hastings, the government's control of the press seems to tighten daily.

Texas passes landmark abortion restrictions, Texas DPS officers taser and sexually assault protestors immediately afterwords

The Texas Senate passed a landmark bill restricting abortion access last Thursday in a second special session called by the Governor. At the same time, the Capital of Texas building was filled with protestors, despite draconian access restrictions and the presence of armed and sometimes violent pro-life partisans.

The measure, which Governor Rick Perry signed today, would restrict abortions to 20 weeks. The bill requires all abortion clinics to be licensed as “surgical centers,” a provision that would require most of them to widen their hallways. Such cost-prohibitive renovations will force the closure of all but five of the state's 42 clinics by the end of the year. Planned Parenthood's gulf coast affiliate has already announced the closure of clinics in Bryan, Lufkin and Huntsville. These closures affect 130,000 patients, of whom only 3% sought abortions last year.

Trayvon Martin: A Jewish response

The acquittal by jury of Goerge Zimmerman who shot and murdered the unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin was emblematic of the consistent racism and double standard used in the treatment of minority groups or those deemed "Other" in the U.S. and around the world. Where is there justice in a world in which so many people suffer oppression and in which those who choose to use violence as a way to address and deal with their hatred and fear often seem to triumph?

Jewish theology holds that there is a karmic order, so that evil actions will not always run the world. Justice and compassion are both essential to the survival of the planet. Unlike many religions that focus on individual sinners and imagine that they will be punished in some future not currently verifiable--for example in a heaven or hell after life, or in a reincarnation in some form that provides rewards or punishments for how one lives in this world, most of Jewish theology sees karma as playing out on a societal scale, and over the long run.

White privilege: Innocent; Trayvon Martin: Guilty

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I can't say I was surprised at the verdict. Because, to apply the famous words of George Zimmerman, these assholes always get away. There is a lot of blame to go around for the fact that there is no Justice for Trayvon Martin, an unarmed 17- year old African American kid who was profiled, hunted, and killed. High on the list of what killed Trayvon and what allowed his murderer to go free is the white privilege and systems of racism and oppression that this country was built upon and executes (pun intended) with full force, in a slightly more nuanced form, today.

Investigate the racial context behind Martin's death

If Trayvon Martin were not a young black male, he would be alive today. Despite the verdict, it's clear that George Zimmerman would never have confronted a young white man wearing a hoodie. He would, at the very least, have listened to the cops and stayed back. Trayvon Martin is dead because Zimmerman believed that "these guys always get away" and chose not to wait for the police.

Trayvon Martin's death shatters the convenient myths that blind us to reality. That reality, as the Chicago Sun-Times editorial board wrote, is that "black men carry a special burden from the day they are born."

Both the prosecutor and the defense claimed that the trial was not about race. But Trayvon Martin was assumed to be threatening just for walking while being young, black and male.

That is the reality that can no longer be ignored. Through the years, gruesome horrors -- the murder of Emmitt Till, the shooting of Medgar Evers in his front yard -- have galvanized African Americans and public action on civil rights. Trayvon Martin's death should do the same.

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