‘The CIA worked with two of America’s top Mafia mobsters in a botched attempt to assassinate the Cuban President Fidel Castro with poisoned pills, according to previously classified documents released by the spy agency yesterday.

The extraordinary details of the 1960 plot were contained in more than 700 pages of documents that revealed some of the agency’s past illegal activities, including the targeting of foreign leaders, wiretapping of US journalists, CIA break-ins and thefts.

‘Sometimes numbers can strip human beings of just about everything that makes us what we are. Numbers can silence pain, erase love, obliterate emotion, and blur individuality. But sometimes numbers can also tell a necessary story in ways nothing else can.

Long-serving Sydney political journalist Alex Mitchell writes:

This is the last throw of the dice for John Howard. He is doing one big favour for the mining industry that he has faithfully served in public life for the past 30 years, by rolling back Aboriginal ownership of their tribal lands.

Cynically, cruelly but utterly predictably, he’s doing it under the hypocritical colours of humanitarianism. (Very similar to the invasion and occupation of Iraq sold as “spreading democracy”).

Sacred Children and flimsy hearsay

Guy Rundle writes:

In all the debate surrounding the Little Children Are Sacred report, one assumption has held amongst all participants -- that the report is well-founded and clear-eyed.

The more I plough through it, the more I'm beginning to doubt even that.

Consider things from this point of view. The writer of this Jakarta Post opinion piece is Professor of International Affairs, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

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China would view a club of big power democracies in Asia as an ideologically charged move that is likely to evolve into a security grouping over time. Such a development is provocative to Beijing which would also see it as a threat to regional stability. And Beijing may have a good point there. The theory of "democratic peace" holds that democracies do not fight one another.

from Crikey …..

Make no mistake, Howard's NT plan is a new apartheid

Guy Rundle writes:

‘Vice President Dick Cheney's refusal to comply with a presidential order regulating the handling of classified information might be scary were it not so ludicrous.

‘The union movement's hard men are babes alongside John Howard's mob. Really. Profanity in a blue singlet is meaningless, comparatively. The real goons in public life are mostly in parliamentary politics, whatever their ideological allegiance, and not on the shop floor. There is a stunning quote in the book The Hollow Men that says: "We assume politicians are without honour. Not that men in high places lie, only that they do so with such indifference, so endlessly, still expecting to be believed. We are accustomed to the contempt inherent in the political life."

‘Here is the first paragraph from today's New York Times article on our latest offensive, based exclusively on the claims of our military commanders:

The operational commander of troops battling to drive fighters with Al Qaeda from Baquba said Friday that 80 percent of the top Qaeda leaders in the city fled before the American-led offensive began earlier this week. He compared their flight with the escape of Qaeda leaders from Falluja ahead of an American offensive that recaptured that city in 2004.

‘An Army officer with a key role in the U.S. military hearings at Guantanamo Bay says they relied on vague and incomplete intelligence and were pressured to declare detainees "enemy combatants," often without any specific evidence.

His affidavit, released Friday, is the first criticism by a member of the military panels that determine whether detainees will continue to be held.

General's Report on Iraq Progress Has Competition

By DAVID E. SANGER and THOM SHANKER

Published: June 24, 2007

Bushit’s maladministration is laying the groundwork for an announcement that “aussie tony” is to be appointed as a special Middle East envoy for Palestinian governance & economic issues, after he steps down as Britain's prime minister, following two months of behind-the-scenes negotiations, according to U.S. officials.

Academy Award-winning filmmaker Michael Moore sat down with Amy Goodman ahead of the release of his new film SiCKO.

The film is a seething indictment of the US healthcare system.

It focuses not on the more than 40 million people who don't have healthcare but on the 250 million who do - many of who are abandoned by the very health insurance industry they paid into for decades.

"They are getting away with murder," Moore said of the health insurance companies.

‘The first ever Australian field trials of genetically modified wheat will take place in Victoria this year, as the government aims to fight possible food shortages caused by drought.

The trials were approved by the federal gene technology regulator, who granted "the limited and controlled release of GM wheat lines containing introduced genes for drought tolerance," according to a government report.

Government by grandstanding

Graham Ring from The National Indigenous Times writes from Alice Springs

The Prime Minister has today announced a raft of clumsy and heavy handed policies in respect to Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory, without any apparent consultation with Indigenous communities or with the NT Government.