In his report on Gaza issued late last year, prominent South African jurist Richard Goldstone accused Israel and Hamas of committing war crimes. His language also showed awareness of the fact that the former is an occupying power with most sophisticated weapon arsenal (as reflecting in the number of Palestinian victims), and the latter is a besieged, occupied faction in a state of self-defense. Although Goldstone must have been aware of the kind of hysteria such a report would generate, he still did not allow ideological or ethnic affiliation to stand between him and his moral convictions.

Despite some initial apprehension – owing to the fact that Goldstone is a self-declared Zionist with links to Israel - many justice and peace advocates were comforted by the man’s past record. He was a former judge of the Constitutional Court of South Africa and former Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunals of the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.

(Stony Ridge, OH) For decades a quiet neighborhood in the suburbs of Toledo, Ohio has been home to working class Americans and the place where their children were raised. There is even a local park and playground right around the corner complete with Little League field. Its idyllic serenity has not been spared from the pains of the current economic and housing crisis. On the morning of May 3rd, one working-class anarchist and laid-off auto-worker facing eviction resulting from just one more of the nearly 1.5 million foreclosures in the U.S., decided that now was the time to stand his ground.

Back when "tin soldiers and Nixon" were "cutting us down" in 1970, a group of Ohio State University students and campus activists started an underground newspaper in Columbus. Driven mostly by the murder of four students at Kent State - Allison Krause, Jeff Miller, Sandy Scheuer, and Bill Schroeder - shot during a demonstration that was opposing President Nixon's illegal attack on Cambodia and the Vietnam War, the Columbus Free Press was born.

Not surprisingly, the Free Press was the first western newspaper to expose Cambodia's killing fields thanks to international law professor John Quigley's reporting from Southeast Asia.

In the first issue of the Free Press, the October 11, 1970 issue, a Free Press opinion attacked a special grand jury's decision not to indict Ohio National Guardsmen for the Kent State killings. The Free Press wrote at the time: "The jury conveniently disregarded the FBI report which stated that the guardsmen were not 'surrounded,' that they had tear gas, contrary to claims of guardsmen following the shooting."

BANGKOK, Thailand -- Two Thai faces appear behind the sharpened bamboo poles and hundreds of car tires which form lengthy menacing barricades, now stinking of urine, rotten food and other debris, along Bangkok's busy downtown streets.

The face of British-born and Oxford-educated Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva, hated by the thousands of Red Shirts behind the barricades, is plastered all over their occupied zone.

His eyes are cut out, or reddened along with his mouth to make him appear ghoulish, on handbill-sized posters which place him above photographs of three corpses.

A bullet hole punctures the center of one man's forehead. Another dead man is wrapped in Thailand's red-white-and-blue national flag on a gurney. A third man lays in the street with a chunk of his bloodied head missing.

They were among the 25 people killed, and 900 injured, when Abhisit and the military failed to crush the Red Shirts on April 10.

The other face behind the nine-foot (three-meter) tall barricades is of the authoritarian Thaksin Shinawatra, who won three elections before being toppled in a 2006 military coup.