Stephen Lendman

In January 2010, Feeding America (FA, formerly America's Second Harvest) released its disturbing new report on growing hunger titled, "Hunger in America 2010." The Chicago-based organization is the nation's "leading domestic hunger-relief charity," serving the needy "through a nationwide network of member food banks, over 200 in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico."

Its study is based on interviews with over 62,000 clients served by the FA network, as well as information provided by 37,000 FA agencies - emergency food providers, including food pantries, soup kitchens, and emergency shelters for short-term residents.

FA's system serves an estimated 37 million people annually, up 46% since 2005, including 33.9 million pantry users, 1.8 million kitchen ones, and 1.3 million in shelters.

About 5.7 million people (or 1 in 50) get emergency food aid from the system in any given week, an increase of 27% since 2005, and one in eight Americans (37 million people, including 14 million children and three million seniors) are food insecure, meaning they don't get enough to eat. As a result, they need emergency help from food banks throughout the country. The latest data represent "a staggering 46 percent increase since" FA's 2006 study.

"Indeed, the existence of so many people without secure access to adequate nutritious food represents a serious national concern....More than one in three client households are experiencing very low food security - or hunger - a 54 percent increase" compared to 2006.

FA calls food insecurity "a complex, multifaceted phenomenon that varies along a continuum of successive stages as it becomes more severe." In contrast, food security enables "access by all people at all times to enough food for an active, health life."

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Mehdi Hasan

[Tony Blair:] "As I recall that discussion, it was less to do with specifics about what we were going to do on Iraq or, indeed, the Middle East, because the Israel issue was a big, big issue at the time. I think, in fact, I remember, actually, there may have been conversations that we had even with Israelis, the two of us, whilst we were there. So that was a major part of all this."

Blair, Bush, Chilcot and the Israelis.

I haven't been able to bring myself to blog on the Iraq inquiry since last Friday, when we were all transfixed by Tony Blair's defiant and unrepentant testimony. Sir John Chilcot and his team of long-winded, deferential establishment worthies did a stunningly inept and incomplete job, allowing our former premier -- as is his nature -- to duck, weave, dodge, distort and evade.

I felt like throwing my remote control at the television.

Here's Bob Marshall-Andrews, Labour MP and Queen's Counsel, writing in the Guardian:

Answer after answer descended into self-serving waffle of total irrelevance. His love of America, his closeness to President Clinton, his admiration for the armed forces, the indescribable nastiness of Saddam, "the calculus of risk" (what?), his experience as a junior barrister, even his silly asides to Fern Britton expanded endlessly to suffocate meaning. No one demanded a straight answer. No one deplored the obvious strategy of delay.

In the morass, essential questions surfaced briefly, were avoided and remained, amazingly, ignored. Question: "Had President Chirac phoned to say that his position was being misrepresented out of context?" Answer: "I remember speaking to Chirac on a number of occasions." Yes? And? What is the answer? We will never know, as the examination drifted gently on to another topic, and obscurity remained.

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William Rivers Pitt

"Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, ... are guilty of much more than the war crimes they committed in both Iraq and the United States. They are guilty of bankrupting this nation with two wars begun on false pretenses and perpetuated to enrich the few..."

With each passing day, it becomes more and more astonishing to encompass the fact that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and their henchmen from the prior administration have managed thus far to escape any accounting whatsoever for the massive battery of criminal activity committed during their time in office. More than a year has passed since these men had their hands on the levers of power, and evidence of their myriad crimes and frauds is laying all over the countryside, yet nothing has come of it.

The British government has been running a wide-ranging inquiry into the manner in which the UK and United States were led to war in Iraq by then-President Bush and then-Prime Minister Tony Blair. An astonishing amount of damning evidence and information has been uncovered and publicly aired, including the following statements delivered by a senior member of Parliament (MP) on Tuesday:

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Joe Mowrey

[Anthony Lawson & Joe Mowrey’s MUST SEE video can be viewed @ Creative-I, Gilad Atzmon or @ Palestine Think Tank.]

In articles acknowledging the one year anniversary of the assault on Gaza, blunt and unsparing language about what really happened is often avoided. Despite sympathy for and support of the Palestinian people in their struggle against dispossession and oppression, the description of what took place in January 2009 is sometimes buffered by a misguided sense of political correctness. Yes, it’s terrible. Yes, it is unjust. But we don’t want to be inflammatory or risk offending the sensitivities of those who through their own willful ignorance cling to the notion that Israel is a victim state, fighting for its very survival. The argument is that we should reach out to them and attempt to educate them and win them over. I’ll be more forthright in this commentary.

The sociopathic Zionist administration of Israel, as part of its continuing brutal colonization of Palestine, set out to deliberately devastate the already nearly-incapacitated infrastructure which supports the existence of one and a half million human refugees. The people of Gaza, second-, third-, and fourth-generation dispossessed Palestinians, are living in forced exile from land their families inhabited and cultivated for generations. Half of them are children under the age of fifteen. Their culture and their economy has been systematically ravaged by Israel for decades and since 2006 a criminal siege supported by the United States, as well as much of the international community, has deprived them of all but the most minimal resources for subsistence. This oppressed and brutalized population was then bombed, bulldozed and terrorized mercilessly for twenty-three days.

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