On August 20th, 4,430 airline mechanics at Northwest Airlines went on strike. After several months of negotiations, it became obvious to the union that the company had no intention of budging from its initial offer and wanted to push the workers to walk out.

It's very, very early morning on Saturday, August 27, in Crawford, Texas. The roads are as dark as Dick Cheney's heart, and the stars as numerous as W's lies. All hell has not yet broken loose and may or may not do so later today. But the police are telling the media that they're preparing for trouble.

Iyad al-Dakhil, deputy director of planning in the Deir Ezzor governorate said that the workshop gave women a platform to discuss and call for their rights to be respected. “This has been absent in our society,” he said. "I was surprised to see that both men and women were open to this idea of promoting gender equality despite our traditions where men dominate society," he explained.

Remorseless ethnically-targeted human destruction in Darfur now garners only slim and diminishing news coverage. Perversely, this is true even as accounts from various international actors---especially the UN political leadership---become more deeply mired in disingenuousness and self-exculpatory pronouncements.

The old Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev once compared religious leaders who attacked the Soviet Union as comparable to the priests who threw holy water on the weapons of the Czar’s armies. But Pat Robertson has gone Nikita once better, advising the U.S. government on National Cable Television (actually the Family Channel, formerly the Christian Broadcasting Network) to murder Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez.

In internal memos, Roberts urged President Ronald Reagan to refrain from embracing any form of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment pending in Congress; he concluded that some state initiatives to curb workplace discrimination against women relied on legal tools that were "highly objectionable"; and he said that a controversial legal theory ...of directing employers to pay women the same as men ... was "staggeringly pernicious" and "anti-capitalist."

There's a press conference at 10:30 a.m. CT every day at Camp Casey 2 near Crawford, Texas, and today was no exception. Seven military family members and veterans spoke very briefly, then Cindy Sheehan spoke, and then Cindy answered questions from the assembled representatives of our (private) public communications system.

Call for "urgent and extraordinary actions" to halt worsening epidemic Health ministers from 46 Member States have declared tuberculosis an emergency in the African region - a response to an epidemic that has more than quadrupled the annual number of new TB cases in most African countries since 1990 and is continuing to rise across the continent, killing more than half a million people every year.

Groups demand that the Bush administration condemn right-wing televangelist Pat Robertson's call to assassinate Hugo Chávez. States revolt agains the No Child Left Behind school privatization scheme. Students demand real financial aid. Faith communities step up their role in the peace movement.

In recent weeks Bush administration officials have stepped up their public and covert attacks on the Venezuelan government, displeased with the South American country spending its oil profits on social and economic development programs and Chavez's refusal to tailor his foreign policy to US interests.

Eva Golinger’s outstanding investigation and documentation of the events of early April 2002 that led to the illegal coup against President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela is a must read. After unearthing US government documents for the past two years, Golinger has produced groundbreaking evidence of the extent to which the Bush administration illegally aided the opposition, influenced the Venezuelan military, and directly and indirectly supported the coup.

I came to Crawford today, and it's a little different from DC in several ways, but mostly it's hotter. I've been to both Camp Caseys, and am blogging this from the cool of the Crawford Peace House. At Camp Casey 1, I went across the road and talked to the half-dozen pro-war protesters.

According to experts, the 30-day extension application is an attempt by the US government to lengthen the process, and corresponds to an order by the US Attorney General who should decide whether to finally appeal the decision of the Eleventh Circuit Court.

“There have been almost daily revelations that Roberts was a charter member of the Reagan-Bush legal policy team that attempted to dismantle the civil rights remedies,” including affirmative action, previous presidents backed, said Ralph Neas, executive director of People for the American Way.

America’s biggest retailer—with $10.3 billion in profits last year—has a shameful record of child labor violations, sex discrimination, low wages and lousy benefits...More than 30,000 Working Family e-Activists have pledged to buy back-to-school supplies somewhere other than Wal-Mart this year...

The lack of clean drinking water in the town of Karakol, around 600 km east of the Kyrgyz capital Bishkek, is a problem which creates a variety of health hazards for the local people. It’s typical of many medium-sized communities in Central Asia in the post-Soviet era.

During the 55th session of the WHO-Africa committee, the director of the international organization for Africa asked the delegates to declare 2006 as the year of the fight against AIDS... According to the Joint United Nations Program on AIDS (UNAIDS), over 40 million people are infected with HIV, of which 64 percent live in South Saharan Africa. South Africa is the nation most affected by the disease, with over 5.3 million HIV positive people.

President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela is taking hateful comments from right-wing elites in the US in stride. Despite inflammatory comments by the Bush administration and the barely coherent ravings of Christian Coalition founder and former Republican presidential candidate Pat Robertson about assassinating the elected Venezuelan president, Chávez continues to express his solidarity with the people of the US who struggle for peace, democracy and social justice.

The provocation occurred on the eve of the Sixtieth UN General Assembly to be attended by 191 heads of states, in which topics of great significance for humanity will be discussed,including the eradication of poverty, the development of the countries of the South and UN Reform.

In many Latin American countries, death-squads work hand in hand with the police, but discretely, and function mostly at night. In Haiti, the collaboration between official and unofficial repressive forces is conducted openly and in broad daylight.Such was the case in the Port-au-Prince slum of Belair on Aug. 10. Several Haitian National Police (PNH) vehicles led dozens of hooligans armed with guns, machetes, axes and clubs into the Belair districts of Solino and Ti Chery.