Common Dreams

By Julia Spurzem

A United Nations human rights investigator on Friday accused U.S. and British forces in Iraq of breaching international law by depriving civilians of food and water in besieged cities as they try to flush out militants.

Forget about the hurricanes. Put them out of your mind. We'll never know for sure that any particular hurricane is caused by global warming, so just don't think about them. By Bill McKibben

At a Greenpeace press conference today in Bucharest, Monsanto's former general manager in Romania warned that Romanian authorities have totally lost control over genetically modified organisms in the country.

The 132-member Group of 77, the largest single coalition of developing nations, has sent a letter of protest to Secretary-General Kofi Annan implicitly decrying the U.N. Secretariat's efforts to appease U.N.-bashing right-wing conservatives, both inside and outside the U.S. Congress. By Thalif Deen

President Chávez addresses the teeming Gigantinho stadium in Porto Alegre, Brazil on the last day of the World Social Forum. The massive crowd cheers wildly; thunderous applause explodes each time he appeals for Latin American unity and denounces the Bush agenda. By Deborah James

Alas, it was only a reverie. The reality is otherwise. Rather than leading the world in finding solutions to the global environmental crises, the United States is a recalcitrant naysayer and backslider. by Bill Moyers

Mary and the Tillman family are relentlessly pushing for answers to the questions surrounding Pat's death in Afghanistan. They want to know why it took the Pentagon five weeks to tell them he died in a tragic case of friendly fire. By Dave Zirin

Imagine we're back in October 1962, at the height of the Cold War, in the thick of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The world's survival is at stake, threatened by the real possibility of nuclear war between the two superpowers, neither one prepared to concede an inch.

WASHINGTON - Army Secretary Noel Harvey and vice chief of staff Gen.

Energy drawn from the wind, tide, sun, Earth's heat, and farm waste is poised to begin replacing oil and other fossil fuels, a prominent research group said Wednesday in a wake-up call to industry executives and government officials worldwide. By Abid Aslam

Last spring, in an attempt to make President Bush appear to be more of a regular guy, the White House released a list of the tunes the commander in chief was listening to on his iPod. By John Nichols

When the hurricane struck the Gulf and the floodwaters rose and tore through New Orleans, plunging its remaining population into a carnival of misery, it did not turn the region into a Third World country - as it has been disparagingly implied in the media - it revealed one.

As public conversation about global warming has centered for several weeks on its possible role in a dreadful hurricane season, climate scientists have been tracking a much clearer and more alarming impact.

Hundreds of tons of British food aid shipped to America for starving Hurricane Katrina survivors is to be burned. By Ryan Parry

Americans who are familiar only with the almost always empty words - and often empty heads - of this country's political leaders can be a little shocked by George Galloway's pronouncements. By John Nichols

"This is the worst environmental president we've had in American history." By Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

An increase in the ferocity of hurricanes around the globe over the last 35 years may be attributable to global warming, a new report states. By Amanda Gardner

Federal officials appear to be seeking proof to blame the flood of New Orleans on environmental groups, documents show. By Jerry Mitchell

Offering to Sell Cheap Oil to America's Poor. By Juan Gonzalez

Chapter 3, Verses 1-8 of the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible begins, "To everything there is a season and a time for every purpose under heaven." It is time for a national debate, and its purpose is our country's future. By US Senator Robert Byrd

A nutritional survey in the Zinder region reveals a worsening situation, with little to indicate that the alarming conditions will improve in the near future.

My spiritual forbears did not take kindly to living under theocrats who embraced religious liberty for themselves but denied it to others.

The Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights (FTCR) today exposed internal oil company memos that show how the industry intentionally reduced domestic refining capacity to drive up profits

September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows was launched on February 14, 2002, with the hope that all of our nations powers -- our political power, legal power, economic power and spiritual power -- rather than simply our military power, would be brought to bear in ending terrorism.

In a May 25, 2001 interview, Grover Norquist told National Public Radio's Mara Liasson, "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub." By Thom Hartmann

... And Catastrophic Failure of Government. Bby Charlie Demerjian

First Mom Barbara Bush yesterday walked past rows of poor and ailing refugees at the Houston Astrodome, then said, "So many of the people here . . . were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them. Bby Kate Sheehy

With a horrible decisiveness, Hurricane Katrina has sheared off the front of the American doll house, leaving our decimated national infrastructure for all the world to see. By Cynthia Bogard

The slow response to Katrina and poor federal leadership is a replay of 1992's mishandling of Hurricane Andrew. By Seth Borenstein