The Supreme Court's recent decision to hear ExxonMobil's reasons to void the $2.5 billion punitive award in the Exxon Valdez case hit the town of Cordova, Alaska, hard. This small coastal fishing community - my hometown - along with the Alaska Native villages in Prince William Sound have borne the brunt of the largest crude oil spill in America's waters; a spill that took place more than 18 years ago, but one that continues to hold the region hostage.

from Crikey .....

Media freedom hampered by media irresponsibility 

Captain Andrew Paljakka, an explosives expert with the army, took his own life after a tour of duty in Afghanistan. His death has prompted a military inquiry. 

He served in Afghanistan for just six weeks, but it was enough time to see things that would haunt Andrew Paljakka long after his tour of duty ended. 

Mr Bush, as God knows best, is no Augustine; but the British historian Charles Freeman points to the latter as the epitome of a more general process that was underway in the fourth century: namely, ‘the gradual subjection of reason to faith and authority.’  

Top federal police officers told the Howard government on the same day it cancelled Mohamed Haneef’s visa that their investigations showed there was nothing to suggest the Gold Coast doctor’s involvement in violence or terrorism in Australia.

On August 9th, 1945, two-thirds of Japan's Catholics were annihilated. Nagasaki's historic importance as the center of Japanese Christianity and openness to the West, one would think, would have spared it from being targeted by a Western Christian nation.

You see, today the American government tells us that it can spy on us whenever and however it likes.

It can read our e-mail and postal mail, track our financial records, pry into our medical histories, force libraries to turn over lists of the books we read, force internet service providers to turn over records of our surfing habits, and tap our phones and record our calls.  

from the Centre for American Progress 

Not to stoke any of the inane conspiracy theories running wild on the Internet, but if Osama bin Laden wasn’t on the payroll of Lockheed Martin or some other large defense contractor, he deserves to have been.  

In a written response to questions from Senate Democrats yesterday, Attorney General nominee, Michael Mukasey, refused to say explicitly whether he believed waterboarding to be torture.

In America's darkest hour, Franklin Delano Roosevelt urged the nation not to succumb to "nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror." But that was then. 

Today, many of the men who hope to be the next president - including all of the candidates with a significant chance of receiving the Republican nomination - have made unreasoning, unjustified terror the centerpiece of their campaigns. 

There are experts. And then there are experts. When it comes to Islam and/or national security, these days just about anyone can pass themselves off as an expert. But how do the real experts behave? 

Some months back, a number of Muslims in Australia and New Zealand were approached by a leading expert in political Islam. William Shepard is a retired associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand.