He was a poor 26-year-old trying to eke out a living and help pay for his sisters’ schooling. He met the deep corruption of the Tunisian regime face to face in the most everyday and humiliating way — in the form of bribes he couldn’t afford just to keep his little stand open and the power of a bureaucracy to shut him down on a whim. In frustration, in protest, he doused himself with paint thinner and burned himself to death (though it took days for that death to come).

His name was Mohammed Bouazizi; he came from the town of Sidi Bouzid, which you’ve never heard of; and his is a terrible story. Now, he’s known across the Middle East as the man who started the Tunisian revolution and will undoubtedly go down in history — along with Thich Quang Duc, the Buddhist monk who calmly seated himself in a Saigon street in June 1963 and started a political firestorm by immolating himself to protest a repressive American-backed South Vietnamese government; and Jan Palach, the Czech student who did the same in Prague’s Wenceslas Square in January 1969 as a response to the Soviet invasion of his […]

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The overwhelming impression that emerges from the confidential records of a decade of Middle East peace talks is of the weakness and desperation of Palestinian leaders, the unyielding correctness of Israeli negotiators and the often contemptuous attitude towards the Palestinian side shown by US politicians and officials.

It is a picture that graphically illustrates the gradual breakdown of a process now widely believed to have reached a dead end. The documents reveal Palestinian Authority leaders often tipping over into making ingratiating appeals to their Israeli counterparts, as well as US leaders. ‘I would vote for you,’ the then senior Palestinian negotiator, Ahmed Qureia (also known as Abu Ala), told Tzipi Livni, Israel’s foreign minister, during talks at the King David hotel in Jerusalem in June 2008, as she was preparing for elections in her Kadima party. Given the choice, Livni shot back, ‘you don’t have much of a dilemma.’

Qureia’s comment echoed earlier private remarks by the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), to Ariel Sharon in a June 2005 meeting at the then Israeli prime minister’s residence which would have caused outrage if they had been made known at the time.

Having listened to Sharon berate him for failing to crack down […]

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The international human rights group Amnesty International has sent a letter to US Defence Secretary Robert Gates calling for the ‘inhumane’ conditions of US army private Bradley Manning to be reviewed.

Twenty-three year old Manning, who is accused of leaking information to WikiLeaks, has been held in a solitary cell for 23 hours a day and deprived of a pillow, sheets, and personal possessions since July 2010. He has been classified as a ‘maximum custody’ detainee, which requires him to be shackled at the hands and legs during all visits, despite having no history of violence.

‘We are concerned that the conditions inflicted on Bradley Manning are unnecessarily severe and amount to inhumane treatment by the US authorities,’ Susan Lee, Amnesty International’s Programme Director for the Americas, said in a media advisory.

Psychologists for Social Responsibility (PsySR) has also sent a letter to the defense secretary, asking him to ‘rectify the inhumane, harmful, and counterproductive treatment’ of the Army private.

Solitary confinement has been used in US prisons since the 19th century, but has become more prevalent with the rise of for-profit supermax prisons in recent years. Studies have found that, depending on the prison, anywhere from 0.5 percent of US prisoners to 20 […]

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Did you ever wonder how much it costs a drug company for the active ingredient in prescription medications? Some people think it must cost a lot, since many drugs sell for more than $2.00 per tablet. We did a search of offshore chemical synthesizers that supply the active ingredients found in drugs approved by the FDA. As we have revealed in past issues of Life Extension a significant percentage of drugs sold in the United Sta tes contain active ingredients made in other countries. In our independent investigation of how much profit drug companies really make, we obtained the actual price of active ingredients used in some of the most popular drugs sold in America .

Celebrex:100 mg
Consumer price (100 tablets): $130.27
Cost of general active ingre dients: $0.60
Percent markup: 21,712%

Claritin:10 mg
Consumer Price (100 tablets): $215.17
Cost of general active ingredients: $0.71
Percent markup: 30,306%

Keflex:250 mg
Consumer Price (100 tablets): $157.39
Cost of general […]

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House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) on Sunday threw a measure of support behind a key Republican lawmaker’s plan to dramatically cut Social Security and Medicare.

The plan, called ‘A Roadmap for America’s Future,’ was created by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), the new chairman of the budget committee, who promoted it last year as a means to cut the national debt.

‘The direction the roadmap goes is something we need to embrace,’ Cantor said on NBC’s ‘Meet the Press,’ praising the plan’s capacity for deficit reduction.

The roadmap would partially privatize Social Security benefits and turn Medicare into a voucher program, effectively ending two monumental welfare programs in the United States.

Cantor’s remarks earned an immediate rebuke from Democrats.

‘House Republican Leader Eric Cantor and House Republicans are now ‘full speed ahead’ on a devastating plan that would privatize Social Security and eliminate Medicare that American seniors earned,’ said Jesse Ferguson, a spokesman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. ‘House Republicans are doubling down on plans to gamble Social Security in the stock market and eliminating Medicare.’

In the run-up to the November midterm elections, Republican leaders declined to champion the specifics of the plan, treading carefully around the issue of slashing cherished entitlement programs.

But Cantor’s […]

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