Positive Universe Abstracts

Who Is Killing Mexico’s Musicians?

By IOAN GRILLO/MEXICO CITY

Since the 1990s, popular Mexican singers have been increasingly crooning about Kalashnikovs and cocaine alongside their traditional ballads of hard work and lost love. Take “Contraband in the Border” by Valentin Elizalde, one of the thousands of drug ballads or narco corridos that are played in cantinas and [...]

TIME

Thursday, Dec. 27, 2007 By ARYN BAKER

Just days before parliamentary polls in Pakistan, leading Prime Ministerial contender and anti terrorism crusader Benazir Bhutto was shot dead during an election rally in the garrison city of Rawalpindi, near Islamabad. “She has been martyred,” said party official Rehman Malik. The Associated Press, citing Malik, reported that Bhutto was [...]

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER EDITORIAL BOARD

Surprise, surprise: After a year investigating itself, the Israeli military (OK, its prosecutors) concluded that it was justified in using cluster bomblets — millions of them — in its war with Lebanon last year. The reports tell us that, “the matter is now closed.” Well, that depends on whom you ask. [...]

Organiser, India

By Sandhya Jain

The sinking dollar is an undeniable fact, as is the rising euro; and this has triggered off an international trend of diversification of currency transactions. Already the currency units of different nations are joining the pool of major reserve currencies.

New Delhi has done well to send foreign secretary S.S. Menon to Teheran [...]

Vanity Fair, NY

by GRAYDON CARTER December 2007

n Robert Harris’s crackerjack new political thriller, The Ghost, a former British prime minister has settled into a borrowed house on Martha’s Vineyard to work on his memoirs. The ex-P.M. happens to be very much like the one who just stepped down—indeed, he has a wife very much like the [...]

Consortium News

By Brent Budowsky

Editor’s Note: Increasingly, U.S. government officials, including senior military officers, must go through verbal gymnastics to avoid implicating George W. Bush in an obvious crime: the authorization to torture al-Qaeda suspects.

In this guest essay, former congressional staffer Brent Budowsky warns that the rhetorical gyrations are now endangering U.S. troops:

In unprecedented congressional testimony, [...]

The Daily Scare, OH

Robert Parry

Last month, Democratic Sens. Charles Schumer of New York and Dianne Feinstein of California joined Republicans to ensure Michael Mukasey’s confirmation as Attorney General, even though he refused to acknowledge that the simulated drowning of waterboarding was torture.

Senate Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada helped the Bush administration, too, by [...]