The new version of the exam has tougher questions and a higher registration fee--plus it requires computer proficiency
by Kavitha Cardoza / October 11th, 2013
Kiana Rucker dropped out of school when she was 15 years old to look after her younger brothers and sisters. Five years later she had a baby herself. For years, she relied mostly on food stamps, medical assistance, and subsidized housing to get by. But it always bothered her. “I don’t want to rely on anyone,” Rucker, now 35, says. “I don’t want government help.”
So in 2010 Rucker decided to get her General Educational Development certificate. She took classes at Southeast Ministries, a nonprofit in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Washington, D.C. This past June–three years and five attempts …
This is the first of a series of exposés focusing on the Institute of International Finance (IIF), the very “visible hand” of financial markets. It is a continuation of the Global Power Project produced by Occupy.com. Part 1 examines the origins of the IIF.
Founded in 1983, the Institute of International Finance (IIF) describes itself as “the world’s only global association of financial institutions” with a membership that includes “most of the world’s largest commercial banks and investment banks,” along with sovereign wealth funds, asset managers, hedge funds, insurance companies, law firms, multinational corporations, development banks, multilateral agencies, credit ratings agencies …
Obama’s rhetorical exercise in ‘peace talk’ at the United Nations General Assembly impressed few delegations and even fewer Americans: Far more eloquent are his five years of wars, military interventions, cyber-spying, drone murders, military coups and the merciless prosecution of patriotic truth tellers.
If his ‘peace message’ fell flat, the explicit affirmations of imperial prerogatives, threats of military interventions and over two dozen (25) references to Israel as a ‘strategic ally’, confirmed the suspicions and fears that Obama was preparing for even more deadly wars.
Is the NDP the solution or part of the problem for those us who promote a Canadian foreign policy that favours ordinary people around the world?
While pushing arms control measures and oversight of Canadian mining companies, this ‘Left’ party generally backs the military and a Western pro-capitalist outlook to global affairs.
In 2011 the party supported two House of Commons votes endorsing the bombing of Libya. The party’s most recent election platform called for maintaining the highest level of military spending since World War II. In a more recent display of militarism NDP veterans affairs critic Peter Stoffer joined some veterans …
by The Real News Network (TRNN) / October 10th, 2013
Jesse Hagopian, a leader of Garfield High’s historic test boycott, given rare opportunity to challenge corpate education reform policies at the Gate’s funded Education Nation, a testament to the growing national opposition to high stakes testing.
by International Tribunal into Crimes of Church and State / October 10th, 2013
DUBLIN — Four years ago, this city on the Liffey River hosted the formation of the ITCCS: a grassroots movement that has successfully prosecuted and deposed one pope and rallied survivors of church crimes in twenty one countries.
Today, Dublin is once again witnessing the birth of an historic movement, an offshoot of the ITCCS: a network of Roman Catholic priests who are aiming to break away from Rome, and establish an independent Irish Church that is free of any complicity with the crimes of the Vatican.
The new group is called Not in Our Name (NON), and it formed at a …
“Nothing is more precious than freedom,” is a quotation attributed to Vo Nguyen Giap, a Vietnamese General who led his country through two liberation wars. The first was against French colonialists, the second against the Americans. And despite heavy and painful losses, Vietnam prevailed, defeating the first colonial quest at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu (1954) and the second at Ho Chí Minh Campaign (1975).
General Giap, the son of a peasant scholar, stood tall in both wars, only bowing down to the resolve of his people. “Any forces that would impose their will on other nations will most certainly …
So, here’s the deal. We live in a time where the technocrats, the military-prison-economic-chemical scientists rule the roost. We have an allegiance to the engineers in communities looking for more ways to pave over more land and to put up more stuff to keep the capitalist engine fueled. We bow to the nerds, we stiff arm salute the geo-pharma-biotech engineers, and we lick the boots of the techno-creeps who design the junk of planned and perceived obsolescence. Who work with the PT Barnums of media-marketing might. These people have infected our world, and they are part of the 20 percent, …
RT — On the 6 October 2013, in Cairo, on the 40th anniversary of the Arab-Israeli War, everything that could have gone wrong, did. It was bit like that great short novel by the Columbian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Chronicle of a Death Foretold.
Everyone knew that there would be murder, brutal and cold-blooded, and there was candid talk about its inevitability for days and weeks. But nothing was done to prevent it and nobody really intervened.
On that ill-fated Sunday, since the early morning, a constant flow of vehicles took millions of city-dwellers away from the capital to the countryside. There were …
The “Line 9? and “Energy East” pipelines threaten to bring tar sands “crude” from Alberta for export through ports in the Atlantic. These pipelines will traverse through many Indigenous communities and natural areas, threatening not only the health of the land but the sovereignty of these territories and their peoples. We have teamed up with Indigenous organizer Amanda Lickers to produce Kahsatstenhsera: Indigenous Resistance to Tar Sands Pipelines. This video will focuses on Indigenous resistance and seeks to build capacity in Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities by providing an educational and accessible resource to build awareness across communities. Featuring stories …
Two Pennsylvania legislators who have taken money from—and enthusiastically supported—the natural gas industry have teamed up to now praise coal.
State Sen. Gene Yaw (R-Williamsport), chair of the Environmental Resource and Energy Committee, and Rep. Tim Solobay (D-Canonsburg, Pa.) are co-chairs of the newly-established Coal Caucus.
It’s a strange move on their part, since both have praised natural gas as the economic future of Pennsylvania.
Yaw, in his first run for the Senate in 2008 accepted only $3,700 in campaign contributions from energy companies; the largest were $1,000 donations from Anadarko Petroleum and Chesapeake Energy. In his first re-election campaign in 2012, he …
NEW YORK, 17 September — Six students were arrested this evening in a brutal, unprovoked police attack against a peaceful protest by City University of New York students and faculty against CUNY’s appointment of former CIA chief ex-General David Petraeus. Students were punched, slammed against vehicles and against the pavement by police captains and officers, after the NYPD forced them off the pavement and into the street. The demonstration was called by the Ad Hoc Committee Against the Militarization of CUNY.
The arrested students are presently being held and are to be …
A high school teacher tells college educators what they can expect in the wake of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top
by Kenneth Bernstein / October 8th, 2013
You are a college professor.
I have just retired as a high school teacher.
I have some bad news for you. In case you do not already see what is happening, I want to warn you of what to expect from the students who will be arriving in your classroom, even if you teach in a highly selective institution.
No Child Left Behind went into effect for the 2002–03 academic year, which means that America’s public schools have been operating under the pressures and constrictions imposed by that law for a decade. Since the testing requirements were imposed beginning in third grade, the students …
Doves Darken the Sky as They Take Flight from Dem Party
by John V. Walsh / October 8th, 2013
A funny thing happened on the way to a war on Syria – in fact, several funny things. First the road to Damascus was blocked by the sentiment of the American people who are fed up with war. Second, international opposition from every corner of the earth, save two or three, joined the barricade, even unto the British House of Commons and its Tory majority, which derailed the clueless Cameron’s bid to join the planned strike on Syria. Third, Putin and Lavrov backed by Iran and China drew a line in the sand in Syria – and they won, a …
Conservative parties are lobbying to remove Palestinian history from school curriculum
by Jonathan Cook / October 8th, 2013
Israel’s right-wing government and its supporters stand accused of stoking an atmosphere of increasing intimidation and intolerance in schools and among groups working for a peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The latest efforts by the right to stifle dissent have included censoring schoolbooks and seeking to silence organisations that raise troubling questions about Israel and its past – in what appears to be an escalating war for the minds of Israelis.
Groups allied to the government tried to prevent the recent staging of an international conference in Tel Aviv that examined events surrounding Israel’s creation in 1948 – known as the …
U.S. hopes of winning more influence over Syria’s divided rebel movement faded Wednesday after 11 of the biggest armed factions repudiated the Western-backed political opposition coalition and announced the formation of an alliance dedicated to creating an Islamist state. The al-Qaeda-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra, designated a terrorist organization by the United States, is the lead signatory of the new group. ((Washington Post, September 26, 2013.))
Pity the poor American who wants to be a good citizen, wants to understand the world and his country’s role in it, wants to believe in the War on Terrorism, wants to believe that his government …
How important is it to Japan’s economy to continue selling Toyotas, Hondas and Nissans? How crucial is it to its job market? How many primary and secondary jobs in the manufacturing sector has the auto industry created? Are the rewards of sustaining and expanding the Japanese auto industry worth the risk of occasionally getting caught cheating?…
Netanyahu’s speech at the UN General Assembly was a political impudence. He showed the world that he has not understood the signs of the times. He seemed out of place with diplomacy and still caught up in aggressive rhetoric. He threatened Iran with an attack. If no other country wants to participate in a raid, Israel will do it alone, he said. President Obama should be forewarned and make clear that the U. S. would not help Israel in a war of aggression. The U. S. should not accept any longer to be jerked around by a politically deranged leader …
Having endured an unreal week of “checks” — more like unhinged minority checkmates, defenders of majority rule must yearn for those legendary “balances” that save us from rightwing extortion. What felt first like a mugging escalated into a national home invasion, like a marathon House filibuster mercifully absent non-stop talking on Cruz control. Thank goodness, the president banned domestic torture.
If nothing breaks, thuggish House rubes trump the Senate, the White House, federal agencies, and a growing majority aghast at leaps off the cliff solely to dramatize one’s purity. Who let the howling dogs in? Behind colorful depictions for this new …
Reports are that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is engaged in a massive, covert military buildup.An article in the Associated Press in February confirmed an open purchase order by DHS for 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition. According to an op-ed in Forbes, that’s enough to sustain an Iraq-sized war for over twenty years. DHS has also acquired heavily armored tanks, which have been seen roaming the streets. Evidently somebody in government is expecting some serious civil unrest. The question is, why?
Recently revealed statements by former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown at the height of the banking …
As They Get Sick, Age, and Die, Will Downwinders Tell The Story of Nuclear Dread
. . . a history of tribes, farmers, workers, downwinders & the powerful push to make Tri-Cities a community rising from the ashes of WW II, the Cold War and an atomic mess now called, “The Hanford Clean-up”
There are over 40 miles of unlined trenches with radioactive and chemical wastes – picture I-90 as a trench fifty feet deep filled with radioactive wastes from Spokane to Ritzville, or I-5 from Seattle to Marysville. Then picture your federal government refusing to do anything to clean it …
One of the best things in life is feeling like you are accomplishing something bigger, more enlightening and grander in the scheme of all busted-usury based interchanges with fellow humans and all the other species and geomorphic things that make this planet, a, pretty darn unique, and, b, the water planet. Hmm, wonder why Lovelock developed that single bio-organism theory, Gaia Theory?
Nothing big, hanging out at Terrain, Saturday, Oct. 5, in Spokane …. Except, after leaving Spokane Summer of 2011, I still run into people I know, I have taught, I have agitated against and agitated, for their own damned …
Recently, Richard Stallman published an article in Wired about Free and Open Source Software and its alternative, “Proprietary Software”. As he has for 30 years now, he vigorously called for the use and defense of FOSS and warned about the nefarious nature of Proprietary.
As if the worthy Stallman needed an illustration to dramatize his point, the Adobe Corporation last week announced that hackers had stolen from its servers the password and credit card information, of almost three million of its users as well as a huge amount of code from some of its programs — probably ColdFusion and Adobe Acrobat. That theft …
The Government will neither propose nor implement measures which may infringe the rules on the free movement of capital. Neither the State nor other public bodies will conclude shareholder agreements with the intention or effect of hindering the free movement of capital or influence the management or control of companies. The Government will neither initiate nor introduce any voting or acquisition caps, and it will not establish any disproportionate and non-justifiable veto rights or any other form of special rights in privatized companies. No further special rights will be introduced in the course of future privatization projects.
In the first part of this essay series on ‘Empire Under Obama,’ I will aim to establish some fundamental premises of modern imperialism, or what is often referred to as ‘international relations,’ ‘geopolitics’, or ‘foreign policy.’ Specifically, I will refer to George Orwell’s writing on ‘political language’ in order to provide a context in which the discourse of imperialism may take place out in the open with very little comprehension on the part of the public which consumes the information; and further, to draw upon Noam Chomsky’s suggestion of understanding international relations as the application of ‘Mafia Principles’ to foreign …
Since the general election last May, UMNO has been redefining it’s electoral base as ‘Malay’ and native groups across the country, merging them under the umbrella of ‘bumiputra’. If UMNO can successfully capture this constituency, it would garner enough votes across the nation for the party to continue governing Malaysia into the foreseeable future.
A recent statement by Sabah Mulfti Bungsu @Aziz Jaafar calling for the government to classify all Muslim indigenous people as “Malays” seems to support this view. This has attracted criticism from some local components of the ruling state Barisan Nasional coalition, as it ignores the differing …
RT — Recent outbursts of violence in Kenya and Nigeria shocked the world, but with the influx of guns from destabilized countries, and instability, which is a direct result of Western neo-colonialism, the situation could get much worst.
The African continent is being ravished as it was in the darkest days of direct colonialism.
There are no exact statistics available, but at least 6 million people have died in war-ravaged DR Congo since 1995. But some say that 10 million is a much more precise figure. There, Rwanda and Uganda, two staunch allies of the West, are plundering with absolute impunity, and …
On October 6, 2013, the Israeli Government decided to scrap the Haifa Chemicals Ammonia Tank near Haifa, and instead to build a new tank and probably also an ammonia production plant near the Negev Nuclear Research Center in Dimona.
Haifa Chemicals Ammonia TankThe laconic announcement stated also that this will happen until 2017. Yet, the importance of the step was signaled by its being promoted directly by the Prime Minister Bureau together with the Ministry of Environmental Protection. This is a quite unusual level of involvement …
