Feature Archives

After weeks of pressure from President Bush, both the House and Senate approved the Protect America Act of 2007, which rewrites the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The new law sharply alters legal limits on the government's ability to monitor millions of phone calls and e-mail messages going in and out of the United States, and moves the power to approve the international surveillance from a special intelligence court to the attorney general.

Following Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's refusal to consider the impeachment of George Bush, Cindy Sheehan has announced she plans to challenge Pelosi for her seat in Congress. Sheehan writes, "At the end of this day, Speaker Pelosi has not supported impeachment and has not upheld her oath of office to 'protect and defend' the Constitution... The Middle East is rapidly falling apart under this regime and our country is sliding rapidly into a state of one-branch tyranny while our 'heroes,' the Democrats, fiddle."

The Board of Regents of the University of Colorado in Boulder voted 8 to 1 Tuesday, July 24th to fire tenured professor of Ethnic Studies Ward Churchill on charges of research misconduct. Churchill maintains that the allegations were a pretext to remove him for his controversial political views.

On Wednesday July 18th, the US Senate abandoned an effort to impose restrictions on the Bush administration’s conduct of the war in Iraq after losing a procedural vote Wednesday to halt a Republican filibuster. The night before the vote, Bay Area activists with MoveOn.org protested the Republican filibuster.

In a small, still mostly segregated section of rural Louisiana, an all-white jury heard a series of white witnesses called by a white prosecutor testify in a courtroom overseen by a white judge in a trial of a fight at the local high school where a white student who had been making racial taunts was hit by black students. The fight was the culmination of a series of racial incidents starting when whites responded to black students sitting under the "white" tree at their school by hanging three nooses from the tree.

Corbin Harney, Spiritual Leader of the Western Shoshone Nation, crossed over at 11:00 a.m. in the morning of July 10th, in a house on a sacred mountain near Santa Rosa, California (Turtle Island). He dedicated his life to ending nuclear testing and dumping. That battle claimed his life through cancer.

On June 30th, Bakers without Borders and Co-optation Watch pied Medea Benjamin at the US Social Forum. Bakers without Borders and Co-optation Watch state that they took action "to demand accountability from a self-appointed "spokesperson" whose actions further the commodification of resistance and sabotage our movement's sustainability and credibility. This person's actions benefit the NGO Industrial Complex at the expense of real democracy and solidarity."