Wow, the weapons heavies had to cut and run. A sense of enlightened self-interest - the same stuff that legendary community organizer Saul Alinsky was preaching in Chicago's Back-of-the-Yards neighborhood six decades ago - enabled a bunch of little guys out West to stare down the future of nuclear warfare, and win.

This unprecedented development must be savored. Divine Strake, the simulated nuclear blast the Defense Threat Reduction Agency was initially planning to set off nine months ago at the Nevada Test Site near Las Vegas - which would have raised a 10,000-foot mushroom cloud of god-knows-what - has been scrapped for good. After several postponements and a round of power-point presentations at various locations downwind of the test site that did nothing but fuel people's outrage, it ain't gonna happen.

On March 17, a huge mass of people will gather at the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C., and march from there to the Pentagon for the cause of impeachment and peace.  http://www.impeach07.org

A handful of pro-war people, some volunteer and some probably paid to be there, will stage a counter-demonstration.  This relatively tiny pro-death contingent will garner 50 percent of the media coverage if those on the side of peace do everything right.  If a single demonstrator for peace turns violent in any way, that story will take up far more than 50 percent of the news, and that news will hurt the cause of peace and justice.

Citizens United for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (CUADP) Celebrating 160 Years Without Death Penalty
With judicial, legislative or executive moratoriums on executions in place in at least eight states, March 1st, 2007, International Death Penalty Abolition Day, brings with it not only a celebration of the past but an indicator of the future. The death penalty in the United States is on its way out.

Executions have been suspended, literally, from coast to coast, as Florida and California grapple with the question of how to prevent botched lethal injection executions. Other states have joined them in suspending executions: Arkansas, Delaware, Maryland, Missouri, North Carolina and Tennessee. Indeed, more than one third of the nation's approximately 3,350 people on death rows across the U.S. are in states where a moratorium exists on carrying out the death penalty.

Abolition Day 2007 is the 160th anniversary of the date in 1847 when the State of Michigan officially became the first English-speaking territory in the world to abolish the death penalty.

FOR A LISTING OF SOME OF THE EVENTS SCHEDULED ACROSS THE UNITED

 Charles Mercieca, Ph.D. President, International Association of Educators for World Peace Dedicated to United Nations Goals of Peace Education, Environmental Protection, Human Rights & Disarmament Professor Emeritus, Alabama A&M University

During the seventy year period of communist control in Russia (1917-87), religious persecution always stemmed from the government. Some of the clergy of the Russian Orthodox Church even cooperated with the government by submitting names to the police of people who went to church to pray and to participate in religious services. By the process of time, many Russians who suspected this kind of spying, ceased going to church any longer to the extent that all Russian churches became virtually empty.

Communist Collapse and Spiritual Revival

While finance and technology are rapidly reshaping our media, undermining printed words and exalting digital screens, the nation's major newspapers continue to exercise enormous political influence. Their news reports and editorial opinions still shape the ideas and themes behind every night's television coverage.

            But the great power of the dailies isn't always used wisely, especially because "liberal" newspapers have so often proved easy prey for right-wing manipulation, as they were during the Clinton era and most of the Bush era.

            Unfortunately, we can expect such manipulations to be repeated -- as The New York Times illustrated on page 1 of its Feb. 19 edition, with an article headlined "As Clinton Runs, Some Old Foes Stay on Sideline."

            According to that report, the snarling perpetrators of what Hillary Clinton so famously called "this vast right-wing conspiracy" have been housebroken.