This is a report from the Indian mainstream press …

In the rural areas of Banke district and neighbouring Bardiya district, the Maoists have taken control of thousands of acres of agricultural land and given it to the landless, says one human rights activist working as a conflict field monitor in Nepalgunj. The journalist explains this process: “The Maoists have made it clear that whatever land a person owns, has to be cultivated by that person’s family. No hiring of labour will be allowed.” He says that those who had hundreds of bighas of land have now left the villages for the relative safety of towns such as Nepalgunj and Kathmandu, leaving the Maoists in possession of their land. “The Maoists have become the biggest landlord in Nepal today,” he says. Previously, much of the land was under the traditional 50:50 sharecropping, with lower-caste communities like Tharus and Kamaiyas actually cultivating the land. “The Maoists with their slogan jiski jot, uski pot (harvest belongs to the actual cultivator) have practically abolished this system,” said the journalist.

Hudda told me how she comforted her dying sister by reading verses from the Koran. After four hours her sister died. For three days Hudda and her brother stayed with their murdered relatives. But they were thirsty and had only a few dates to eat. They feared the troops would return and decided to try to flee the city. But they were spotted by a US sniper.

Hudda was shot in the leg, her brother ran but was shot in the back and died instantly. “I prepared myself to die,” she told me. “But I was found by an American woman soldier, and she took me to hospital.” She was eventually reunited with the surviving members of her family.

On October 31, 2001, Attorney General John Ashcroft, secretly amended the SAM regulations – without notice to the public. As amended, the regulations allow the Bureau of Prisons to conduct videotape and audiotape surveillance with respect to attorneys’ communications with people in federal custody.

There is no exception for attorney-client privileged communications; indeed, the regulations contemplate that these sacrosanct conversations will be the very ones surveilled. Moreover, the regulations apply not only to convicted persons, but also to defendants awaiting trial – and even detainees against whom no charges are even pending. Finally, the surveillance can be broad: It can done “to the extent determined to be reasonably necessary for the purpose of deterring future acts of violence or terrorism.”

No warrant is necessary for the surveillance to occur. Nor is specific notice to the attorney or the client that they will be monitored; according to the regulations. Rather, routine notice that their communications “may” be monitored is enough.

Shell, which is indefatigably blond, is only one of several predators in Africa and the Third World. In Nigeria it has destroyed whole environments and rendered thousands homeless and suffering. BP – British Petroleum – is about to announce a similar quantum of profit and the five biggest British banks between them are about to announce total profits exceeding £30 billion (US 56 billion).

I’m new at this blogging thing, but already I can see that some ground rules are needed.

I do speaking engagements and activism tours. These and an occasional writing gig are how I pay my bills and compensate Sherry for all the stuff she gets stuck with when I am gone.

If anyone is interested in bringing me for a speaking or consulting gig, contact Sherry at sgoff@mha-nc.org. Do not use this email address for anything else, please. Sherry doesn’t want to answer questions about the content of my work or be brought into my debates. She coordinates my jobs, that’s all.

The standard fee for all trips is $500 for each night away from home, travel, food, and lodging. If there is university sponsorship, we ask $1,000 for the first night.

I do not make much money this way, but then again I am not working for some NGO that gets its money from Soros or the Ford Foundation and has to watch what it says to protect a funding stream.

Can there possibly be a gender angle to the tsunami story? Certainly, says Ammu Joseph, pointing out that women from economically and socially deprived communities usually bear the brunt of disasters, thanks to the gender dimension of social inequality and inequity.

From the Civil War until World War I, the US had built up its industry to surpass the British. The period from 1914 until 1939 was a period of continuous and profound crisis, during which the US was maneuvering to expand its influence throughout the world at the expense of the European capitals – in particular the British. The Roosevelt administration had imposed what Gowan called “repressive measures on the private financial pole of capital” in order to regain the monetary stability necessary to lay the foundation for a fresh upwave of capital accumulation after the war, using government finance capital in the international arena. Those stabilization measures were codified at Bretton Woods in 1944, where the debilitated Europeans consented to a new global system in which the US would be “first among equals,” in a system that fixed the dollar to gold and established periodically negotiable but fixed currency exchange rates, precisely to prevent overheated currency speculation, but also to establish dollar seignorage across the planet. (In fact, there was little that resembled “equality” in the Bretton Woods institutions – the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, when the US had a controlling plurality and exclusive veto power.) The fact was not unnoticed that during the run up to and conduct of the war, the US Treasury Department had absorbed the largest pool of gold in history.

Jimmy Carter’s former national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, has been making the interview circuit to inaugurate a high level resistance to the apparent intent of the Bush administration to escalate – perhaps even to the point of armed aggression – its demonstrated hostility toward Iran.

“An American civil rights lawyer was yesterday convicted of aiding terrorism by smuggling secret messages from an Islamist client, who was jailed for plotting to destroy several New York landmarks, to his followers outside.”

So begins the story of attorney Lynne Stewart’s conviction today, as reported by the Guardian – perhaps one of the least offensive reports from the craven press that refuses to tell the whole story behind this latest attempt to intimidate anyone who opposes the U.S. government.

Lest anyone be confused that this is the work solely of the Bush administration, the rule under which Ms. Stewart is being charged was put in place by the administration that was responsible for putting our prison population up to the 2 million mark and throwing untold numbers of poor women into the street… that would be Arkansas Bill’s administration. Until Slick Willy came along, it was a lawyer’s job to communicate for her client to the outside world, but the Department of Justice under Clinton fixed that with something called the SAM – Special Administrative Measure, an elastic clause that basically tells the court that the DOJ can arbitrarily cut any and all communication between defendants (who have not yet been convicted) and the entire world. Bush just one-upped Clinton after 9-11 by finding ways to hold people without charging them at all, and strenghtened the existing SAMs. In effect, these are blanket gag orders that have nothing to do with protecting the integrity of judicial proceedings, but everything to do with legally disarming defendents who are facing the DOJ, and now everything to do with intimidating attorneys and erasaing attorney-client privilege.