We urgently need your help to stop a live animal lab from taking place at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Ohio this month. The school plans on using pigs in its elective laparoscopy surgery lab. Pigs are highly intelligent, social, and sensitive animals. According to this recent article in The Cleveland Plain Dealer, Case Western has stopped using live dogs, cats, and ferrets to teach surgery and other medical courses, and it also plans to stop using pigs—but not until the next academic year. Live animal laparoscopy labs are easily replaced by inexpensive, high-quality simulators. Please urge Case Western to discontinue its live animal lab program today. Being polite is the most effective way to help these animals.

Here’s what you can do to help:

Call Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine Dean Pamela B. Davis, M.D., Ph.D., at 216-368-2825 and politely ask her to end the school’s live animal lab once and for all.
Send an automatic e-mail to Dr. Davis and politely ask her to end the school’s live animal lab program now.

By all standards, the situation unfolding in Somalia is horrifically grim, and according to the UN, it is the worst crisis in Africa; worse than the crisis in Darfur that outraged the world’s conscience in an unprecedented way.

However, unlike Darfur, Washington has a role in the creation of this massive humanitarian crisis and therefore must have a role in rectifying it.

As Washington was claiming to care about winning the “hearts and minds of the Muslim world” in order to curb the ubiquitous Anti-Americanism around the world, it was stubbornly pursuing that same ill-tempered foreign policy that considers all

“Islamists”-- euphemistically understood as all Muslims who believe that their religion is a comprehensive way of life-- potential enemies; that same policy that has proven miserable failure everywhere it was implemented.

As a result, creepily emerging in the past few months was the nightmare scenario that many analysts warned against as John Bolton, the US Ambassador to the UN, in his last days, aggressively pushed for resolutions that would ultimately pave the

Many U.S. media outlets were quick to give us a primer on Islamic terrorism in the wake of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination last week, even though actual evidence points the finger far more at our ally in the war on terror, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, than it does at the Taliban or al-Qaida.

Indeed, McClatchy Newspapers recently reported that Bhutto, at the time of her murder, was in possession of evidence that Pakistan’s military intelligence agency was planning to rig the upcoming election (then scheduled for Jan. 8) in Musharraf’s favor, supplying, as if it were needed, an obvious motive for getting rid of her.

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There have been good reasons not to support John Edwards for president. For years, his foreign-policy outlook has been a hodgepodge of insights and dangerous conventional wisdom; his health-care prescriptions have not taken the leap to single payer; and all told, from a progressive standpoint, his positions have been inferior to those of Dennis Kucinich.

But Edwards was the most improved presidential candidate of 2007. He sharpened his attacks on corporate power and honed his calls for economic justice. He laid down a clear position against nuclear power. He explicitly challenged the power of the insurance industry and the pharmaceutical giants.

And he improved his position on Iraq to the point that, in an interview with the New York Times at the start of January, he said: "The continued occupation of Iraq undermines everything America has to do to reestablish ourselves as a country that should be followed, that should be a leader." Later in the interview, Edwards added: "I would plan to have all combat troops out of Iraq at the end of nine to ten months, certainly within the first year."

"Capitalism is the legitimate racket of the ruling class."
—Al Capone

It has taken Nuremberg-class war crimes, craven ineptitude by Congressional Democrats, foreclosures on every other home in the neighborhood, and a metaphorical gun to our heads when we fill our gas tanks, but growing numbers of us US Americans are shedding our smug insularity.

“Ron Paul in 2008” has become the mantra for untold millions who are realizing that the establishment in the United States is an abomination that needs to be torn down and replaced. Ostensibly, Dr. Paul is the populist maverick we need to shake up the system and set our nation on a path to sanity and viability. His political coffers are overflowing with cash, almost none of which came from corporate or “special” interests. He is principled and consistent. And his position on a number of important issues aligns with the interests of the masses.