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A major pro-nuke "surge" against the renewable solution to global warming is about to erupt in California.

State assemblyman Chuck DeVore (R-Irvine) has moved for a statewide vote to allow new nuclear power plants to be built in the Golden State. He wants to repeal the 1976 law requiring a solution to the nuke waste problem before new reactors are built. A business cartel says it wants to build a new reactor near downtown near downtown Fresno. (For more information on the California situation, visit http://www.a4nr.org/)

So the nation's biggest state may soon be at war over new nukes. In essence, it's King CONG (Coal, Oil, Nukes and Gas) versus Solartopia. The core issue is who will control our energy: corporations, or the public.

The irony is that we stand at the brink of the greatest technological revolution in human history. But we're being dragged away from it by Big Money's push for a technology with fifty years of proven ecological disaster and financial failure.

Green energy is poised to remake our world.

On the outskirts of Guatemala City the body of an 18-year-old woman of indigenous ethnicity was recently discovered by her frantic parents who had been searching long and hard. Forensic evidence showed that she had been repeatedly raped and tortured and that her head had been severed from her body with a blunt knife while she was still alive.

This killing was more than just a passing aberration. Nightmarish crimes against women have been occurring with horrifying frequency in Guatemala. In the last seven years, over 3,200 Guatemalan women have been abducted and murdered, with many of them raped, tortured, and mutilated in the doing. The number of victims has shown a striking increase in the last few years with some six hundred murdered in 2006 alone.

The victims often are from low-income families deracinated from their rural homesteads during the civil war and forced to crowd into Guatemala City and other urban areas in search of work.

Drop a dime on the eco-criminals at Franklin Park. Call the City of Columbus Hotline at "311" on your phone to complain about the slow death of the ponds at Franklin Park (Broad Street and Nelson Road) due to a faulty pump. For the past several months the elaborate ponds and waterways perfected at the park for Ameriflora in 1992, home to a thriving ecosystem of ducks, geese, fish, frogs, and other wildlife - has almost completely dried up killing in an unknown number of aquatic and other life forms.

If it was Les Wexner's pond and in New Albany, the city would have fixed it a long time ago. But an inner-city pond is allowed to go dry from neglect or indifference.

You you care about the natural ecosystem at Franklin Park and the lives of our fellow creatures, call the Mayor and tell him to get that pump fixed!

311 is the 911 on this emergency!!
On Friday, 13 July, Governor Deval Patrick showed his skills at working with the Massachusetts Legislature by passing all but $40 million of a $28.4 billion legislative budget for fiscal year 2008, which starts on 1 July 2007.

On the beautiful Summer's eve of 12 July, in a lower field at the Patrick's secluded country retreat in Richmond, Massachusetts, a fund raiser was being held. For a mere minimum of $250, over three hundred supporters and elected officials gathered under a series of catered white tents with three bars flowing beverages to go with the hors d'oeuvre.

I bit the bullet, paid the entry fee, and armed with the March 2007, National Priorities Project's "War Costs to Massachusetts", I headed right for the governor. I dutifully waited for him to conclude his hello's to others ahead of me. In time he turned to me, "Hello, Bob", Deval offered his hand and warm smile, "Thanks so much for coming out tonight to see me."

FRANCE -- In a home near the Seine, four American women are engaged in what the Bush administration may consider an act of treason.

            They are watching the Forbidden Channel.

            They are watching Al Jazeera. If you watch it, They say the terrorists win.

            Of the four women, one is a card-carrying member of the Religious Right who twice voted for Bush. Another woman voted for him in 2000 but not the second time.

            The remaining women, one a registered Democrat, the other a Socialist -- which aren't the same thing -- are still angry about Hurricane Katrina and over 3,000 dead troops in Iraq.

            So this caucus across the Atlantic isn't about shared interests. Coco, Nikita, Sabine and Irma -- not their real names -- are drawn to the TV out of common curiosity.

            They want to see for themselves if Al Jazeera, at least the English-language version, is as bad as They said.

            So they quietly engage in the revolutionary act of supporting freedom of expression.

            They watch the Forbidden Channel.
On behalf of the Ohio Environmental Council, I respectfully submit these comments on the U.S. Department of Energy’s Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement for the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP-PEIS). The OEC is a statewide environmental advocacy group representing over 100 environmental and conservation organizations and thousands of individual members throughout the state of Ohio. OEC’s mission is to advocate for healthy air, land, and water to make Ohio a better place in which to live, work, and play. In light of our mission and our role as a statewide environmental advocate, OEC has some grave concerns with DOE’s decision to consider the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Piketon, Ohio as a site for GNEP’s nuclear fuel recycling center and/or its advanced recycling reactor.

In response to the DOE’s request for comments on the proposed scope, alternatives and environmental issues to be analyzed by GNEP PEIS, OEC respectfully submits the comments below. OEC requests the DOE take these issues into consideration, and address these questions before moving forward on the GNEP program.

Even as we throw a wall of barbed wire and tin across our southern border, we’re allowing the only national wall that actually serves a legitimate purpose to fall into serious disrepair, with signs of active government collusion in its collapse.

The wall, of course, is the one that separates church and state — and establishes what may be, arguably, the single most important agreement we have as a nation and free society: the agreement that secularity is sacred.

This agreement has to be more than a genteel abstraction if it’s going to survive Alberto Gonzales’ Justice Department and the Evangelical takeover of the Air Force Academy and the simmering witches’ brew of money and Old Testament intolerance that is George Bush’s political base. For that reason, gloves off, my friends — about faith, values, spirituality and even that loaded term, God.

BANGKOK, Thailand -- Defending Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge leaders at an international tribunal may include arguing about genocide and the lack of a "smoking gun," despite the deaths of up to three million Cambodians, according to U.N. Principal Defender Rupert Skilbeck.

"One of the big questions will be whether, what happened in Cambodia, was genocide or not," Mr. Skilbeck said in an interview.

"There is a very strong legal argument to say that genocide is when you kill people because of their ethnicity, whereas the vast majority of the [Khmer Rouge] purges were not for ethnic reasons, but were for political reasons. So genocide may not be possible" as a successful prosecution charge.

Mr. Skilbeck heads the Defense Support Section of the tribunal, which is officially called the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC).

A London-based criminal lawyer, Mr. Skilbeck was previously Defense Advisor for the Special Court for Sierra Leone, and head of the Criminal Defense Section for the War Crimes Chamber in Sarajevo.

Among the most durable myths of American public life is that conservatives are more authentic in their religious faith than liberals and progressives. Certainly this arrogant presumption prevails on the religious right, where commentators and politicians routinely denigrate the sincerity of Christians such as Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, whose irredeemable sin is that they also happen to be Democrats and candidates for president.

            With characteristic condescension, an editor of the right-wing Weekly Standard dismissed public expressions of faith from the left as both pointless and worthless. He declared that the Democrats can only attract Christians who are "religious in the way that Hillary Clinton is religious, which is to say a very liberal Protestant sort of view, in which they believe in everything but God." That quip is quite mild compared with typical fiery denunciations from the religious right, branding the Clintons as instruments of Satan and Obama as an Islamist in disguise.

The House of Representatives is poised to vote on NJ Rep. Holt's "election reform" bill (HR 811), TODAY ,Thursday. Organizations ordinarily aligned with the common good have pulled out all the stops to ram this legislation through. Unless - and maybe even though - we make a LOT of noise, this bill will become law and our elections will take more irrevocable steps away from democracy. If you doubt this, read Mark Crispin Miller's expose below -complete with quotes from Holt and his legislative aide, Michelle Mulder- as well as an action alert put out by VoteRescue.

Here's everything you need, in a nutshell: information about HR 811 and contact info for your member of Congress:

Here's how you call (no time to write) your Congressional Rep.: Contacting the Congress

Exposé: Holt bill was revised by Microsoft, Diebold and ES&S by Mark Crispin Miller

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