The G8-Summit is to be held in Heiligendamm, Germany from June 6th to June 8th 2007. The high costs for security measurements are bringing the hosting state of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania to the brink of bankruptcy. Massive protests are expected to accompany the summit.

For about thirty years now, the heads of the eight leading industrial nations, France, Great Britain, Italy, Germany, Japan, Canada, Russia and the United States are meeting annually at the so called G8-Summit to discuss economic, as well as global issues, such as terrorism and climate change.

The meetings are informal, thus meaning, no contracts are signed. Instead, declarations of intend are adopted. Yet, the economic and political resolutions passed effect not only summit members, but the rest of the world. Especially the recent discussions on development issues had an impact with disastrous consequences for third world countries.

For a documentary on the 100-year history - and horror - of aerial bombardment, Barry Stevens' "The Bomber's Dream" has a remarkably deft touch. The emotion driving the film isn't outrage so much as jumpiness, of the sort that bedeviled Stevens' mother, a survivor of the Nazis' rocket blitz on London during World War II, who was thereafter spooked by loud noises.

She was permanently unsettled, Stevens says, by "a memory just below the skin, of things going very wrong very quickly." Multiply that by all of us and you have modern society, which lives on this edge and calls it peace . . . or the closest we can get to it.

"The Bomber's Dream" tears back the assumptions and paradoxes and, yes, the good intentions of high-tech war and leaves us mourning not so much its millions of victims - or even the 40,000 dead of the Hamburg firestorm of 1943, survivors of which Stevens interviews ("outside, the wind sucked babies out of their mothers' arms") - as a single 15-year-old girl. Her sad and pointless death is a stand-in for all the others.

What would be the consequences of a US or Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear energy sites?

At the 2006 Perdana Global Peace Forum, Australian medical scientist Dr. Helen Caldicott provided an authoritative analysis of the devastating impact on human life that would result from the radiation release from such an attack.

Dr. Caldicott described the catastrophic deaths that would result from a conventional attack on nuclear facilities and the long-term increase in cancer deaths from the radiation release.

Should the attack be made with nuclear weapons--as some of Bush's criminally insane neoconservative advisers advocate--the populations of many countries would suffer for generations from radioactive particles in air, water, and food chains. Deaths would number in the many millions.

Such an attack justified in the name of "American security" and "American hegemony" would constitute the rawest form of evil the world has ever seen, far surpassing in evil the atrocities of the Nazi and Communist regimes.

Dr. Caldicott detailed the horrible long-term consequences for the

The following news brief ran on the Associated Press yesterday:

Strickland Doesn't Want Overflow Iraqi Refugees

"Ohio Governor Ted Strickland has a message for President Bush: any plan to relocate to the US thousands of refugees uprooted by the Iraq war shouldn't include Ohio.

The administration plans to allow about 7,000 Iraqi refugees to settle in the United States over the next year, a huge expansion at a time of mounting international pressure to help millions who have fled their homes in the nearly four-year-old war.

Strickland -- a Democrat who opposed the war as a US House member -- says Ohioans can't be expected to have open arms for Iraqis displaced by the war.  More than 100 Ohioans have been killed since the war began.  The governor  says he has sympathy for the refugees' plight, but he won't ask Ohioans to accept a greater burden."

It is really all quite mad, isn't it?

From: Carol Steiner, Chris and Frank Targoss, J. Uprise and Zirca (Guerilla Radio), Lee Thompson, Marjorie Clark, Mary Jo Muser, Rebekka Willow, Cheryl Lessin

We are friends of Carol Fisher, the woman from Cleveland, Ohio , who spent the better part of 2006 battling felony charges stemming from putting up anti-Bush posters.  We urge you to take a minute to read an update on her situation and pledge your support.

Millions of people are deeply concerned about the direction and fate of the world. The Bush Regime has made torture legal, is conducting a “surge” of US troops into Iraq , and continues to radically remake society very quickly, in a fascist way, and for generations to come.  Many more need to step up to stop this, and join with people who are showing tremendous courage in refusing to be silent and complicit in these crimes being done in our name.

As most of you are aware, in an outrageous trial Carol was convicted of two felony counts of “assault on police officers”.  She served 5 weeks in jail, completed a court ordered “anger management” class, and is on probation until June of 2008.