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Dan Siegel is now both interim Executive Director and General Counsel for Pacifica. He intervened in last fall's KPFA board election to help insure a victory by the Sherry Gendelman slate. Meanwhile, the board election at WBAI, the Pacifica sister station in New York, was even more blatantly corrupt than the one at KPFA, and it became the subject of a court case. In this letter, counsel for the plaintiffs tells the Pacifica National Board (PNB) that Dan Siegel is "an unreliable source of l...

Friday, January 25, 2008 : Union organizers don't sit around when injustice occurs. So when Facebook banned Canadian union organizer Derek Blackadder from the site earlier this week, the global union movement took action and Blackadder is back on Facebook. Although candidates running for president, including Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, each boast tens of thousands of friends on the social networking site, Facebook threw Blackadder off for making too many friends on the site...

Saturday, January 26, 2008 :The Democratic-controlled Senate moved Thursday to shield telecommunications companies that aided the Bush administration’s illegal domestic spying program from lawsuits. By a vote 60 to 36, the Senate rejected any provision in its upcoming amendment to the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that would open the companies to prosecution in civil courts....

Daniel Ellsberg, who has become an ardent antiwar activist since releasing the Pentagon Papers back in 1971, writes about the media and Sibel Edmonds, the FBI whistleblower who cannot get her story about nefarious government corruption heard in the United States. [Sibel Edmonds' website is http://www.justacitizen.com/]...

Robert McChesney's new book on the media....

Apparently the RIAA is so busy suing consumers that they forgot to hire a decent programmer. With a simple SQL injection, all their propaganda has been successfully wiped from the site....

On the eve of the first anniversary of the killing of the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, Amnesty International calls on the Turkish authorities to condemn all forms of intolerance and to bring all those involved in the killing to justice in accordance with international fair trial standards....

Wednesday, January 16, 2008 :Film and television writers have been on strike since November 5. Their struggle with the giant studios and networks over the issue of decent compensation for material shown on the Internet and other new media is a bitter one. The writers are entitled to what they are asking—in fact, they’re entitled to far more....

Tommy Tomorrow, the cartoonist, said that William Kristol’s career as a warmonger had “failed upward!” On Aug. 11, 2008, activist Russell Mokhiber picketed the NYT’s office and demanded that Kristol, who was recently named to its Op Ed Page, meet with severely wounded Iraq War veteran, Tomas Young. Young is featured in Phil Donahue’s film, “Body of War.” Being a repulsive Neocon, like Kristol, means you never have to say you’re sorry....

Monday, January 14, 2008 :More than 300 striking film and television writers gathered January 9 at the Writers Guild of America Theater in Beverly Hills to prepare for a February launching of “Strike TV,” a web site featuring original shows produced by WGA members to be streamed across the Internet. According to the Strike TV “MySpace” page, funds raised by ad revenue will go toward the Writers Guild Foundation Industry Support Fund, assisting non-WGA members, including IATSE and Teamsters af...