Alternative News Network

Media Release DRIVING A MARKET FOR PLUG-IN HYBRIDS- How to make this happen now
17 April 07 - For immediate Release - Melbourne, Australia

"Soon we'll have have no Jobs, and live in a very uncomfortable environment if our politicians don't pull their fingers out and take emergency measures like get the Australian Car Industry Converted to build cars based on "near zero emissions" Hybrid Electric technologies said Matthew Wright, Lead Campaigner Beyond Zero Emissions.

The potential for Australia to resurrect its languishing manufacturing sector and secure homegrown jobs is being undermined by the Federal Government's failure to promote the Plug-in Hybrid Electric vehicle (PHEV). -The Plug-in Option is an enhancement that Toyota has announced they may release in their 2009 series Prius.

On Friday morning, Paul Wolfowitz -- President Bush's key architect of the Iraq war, now president of the World Bank and self-styled fighter of corruption -- was caught red-handed in a corruption scandal of his own. He pushed a huge pay raise for his girlfriend, and hid the facts from his organization and the world.

He's got to go. The World Bank's board, made up of our governments from around the world, is now deciding whether Wolfowitz should keep his job. An immediate, massive, and global outcry could make the difference. Our petition is three words long: "Sack Paul Wolfowitz." Sign it here:

On March 23, just two days before the 50th birthday of the Euratom Treaty (the EU Treaty for promotion of nuclear power in Europe) more than 630.000 signatures were handed over to EU Energy Commissioner Andris Piebalgs in Brussels. It was a great event with activists from several European countries dressed in radiation protection suits. See photos on the website

1. 9/11 Truth Reaches The Tipping Point
2. The Coming Shakedown of the US and Iran
3. Emissions Already Affecting Climate, Report Says
4. April 3 Message from Matthew
5. Project Censored: Real News April 2007
6. George Bush's Land Mine: If the Iraqi People Get Revenue Sharing, They Lose Their Oil to Exxon
7. Mobile phones: an inconvenient truth & FREIBURGER APPEAL
8. The War On Consciousness
9. A Chemtrail Aerosol Breakthrough?
10. Transform Your Life and Our World: Three Simple Yet Powerful Principles
11. A sacred right
12. Project Censored Announces On-Line Voting for Junk Food and News Abuse Stories of the Year

- by Stephen Lendman

This article addresses two of the writer's favorite corporate media targets - the Wall Street Journal's far-right editorial page and New York Times on every page. Both broadsheets were recently in attack mode taking on two Latin American leaders deserving praise but never getting any other than occasional backhanded kinds from papers devoted to one dual core mission - supporting the power elite and their own bottoms lines. First, the Journal.

Readers need a strong stomach and nerves of steel venturing onto the Wall Street Journal's editorial page any time, but especially on days when self-styled "Latin American expert" Mary Anastasia O'Grady's columns appear. This writer has tangled with her a time or two before. In a response last fall, it was suggested she one day risks a serious back problem, the result of her permanent position of genuflection to the far-right extremists she pledges allegiance to. Based on her latest offering, nothing has changed, but readers be warned. Those accepting how she views Latin America won't ever know the way it really is.

Civil and Human Rights Advocate and Political Prisoner
- by Stephen Lendman

Sami Al-Arian is one of many dozens, likely hundreds, of political prisoners in the US today but is noteworthy because of his high-profile status and as an especially egregious example of persecution and injustice in post-9/11 America with its climate of state-induced fear and resulting repression with special targeting of Latino immigrants and all Muslims characterized as "Islamofascists" because of their faith and ethnicity. One of them is Dr. Sami Al-Arian - Palestinian refugee, scholar, academic, community leader, civic activist and advocate for freedom and justice for his people imprisoned since February, 2003 on trumped up charges explained below even after a jury exonerated him on eight of the false 17 charges against him, all the ones relating to violence and terrorism, and remained deadlocked 10 - 2 in favor of acquittal on the other nine. More on this below.

-by Avaaz

Adel Hamad grew up in a small village in Sudan. Through hard work, he became a schoolteacher and hospital assistant. To support his family he took a better job at a community hospital in Afghanistan. Then late one night he was torn from his bed and sent to hell, as Guantanamo Bay Detainee #940.

Adel Hamad has had no trial. He has seen no family members for four years. Even US military officers reviewing his situation have called his detention "unconscionable." But he and nearly 400 other prisoners are still trapped at Guantanamo. Last week US Defense Secretary Robert Gates finally said Guantanamo should be closed. President Bush's advisors are split down the middle on this issue -- a massive global outcry could tip the balance, and push Bush to close Guantanamo forever. Click below to sign the Close Guantanamo petition, and we'll run ads next week in major US papers announcing the number of signatures:

- by Stephen Lendman

Emma Lazarus' memorable words on Lady Liberty's pedestal once had meaning as a new nation grew. No longer in a country hostile to the tired, the poor, the huddled masses, the wretched refuse, the homeless and many others not making the grade in a white supremacist Judeo-Christian state worshiping wealth and privilege. No welcome sign is out for the unwanted poor and desperate. At best, they're ignored to subsist on their own. At worst, they're scorned and abused, exploited and discarded like trash or labeled "terrorists" in a post-9/11 world of mass witch-hunt roundups aimed at Muslims because of their faith or country of origin and Latinos coming north to survive the fallout from NAFTA's destructive effects on their lives.