IRELAND is in the grip of a "heroin epidemic", while alcohol abuse among the young is leading them towards drug use, two youth support organisations warned yesterday.

The Oireachtas Committee on Health and Children were told by Spunout and the Aislinn Adolescent Addiction Centre that alcohol was both a gateway and relapse drug and that issues such as the availability of alcohol and its below-cost selling needed to be tackled as a matter of urgency. ... read full story / add a comment

Proof that the Garda Ombudsman is a paint job. ... read full story / add a comment

Bad news for the AGW deniers. Another one of their papers is discredited. Even the editor of the journal that published it is resigning.

The editor of a science journal has resigned after admitting that a recent paper casting doubt on man-made climate change should not have been published.
The paper, by US scientists Roy Spencer and William Braswell, claimed that computer models of climate inflated projections of temperature increase.
It was seized on by "sceptic" bloggers, but attacked by mainstream scientists. ... read full story / add a comment

Lee Sustar of Socialist Worker, US writes on developments in the Strian revolutionary movement and US sanctions and and attempts to lead the movement astray.

AFTER NEARLY six months of continuous mobilization in the face of savage repression, the Syrian revolutionary movement is debating its future as the U.S. tries to manipulate the opposition to suit its own aims in the Middle East.

Peter Harling and Robert Malley of the pro-imperialist think tank, the International Crisis Group, correctly point out that these economic changes helped set the stage for the revolution:

"For the most part, the regime has been waging war against its original social constituency. When Hafez al-Assad, Bashar's father, came to power, his regime, dominated by members of the Alawite branch of Islam, embodied the neglected countryside, its peasants and exploited underclass. Today's ruling elite has forgotten its roots. Its members inherited power rather than fought for it, grew up in Damascus, mimicked the ways of the urban upper class with which they mingled, and led a process of economic liberalization at the provinces' expense."

... read full story / add a comment

How will the revolution in Libya advance now that Gadaffi has fallen? The dangers and opportunities are discussed in this article by Richard Brenner. More material regarding the Libyan revolution is available at the League for the Fifth international website.

In Tripoli in the early days of the uprising, Gaddafi’s forces had already murdered between 200 and 700 unarmed demonstrators. Like all victorious uprisings the Libyan Revolution will have to crush the remaining elements of the old regime including Gaddafi and his sons. They should not be tried but put to swift revolutionary justice. At the same time the revolution needs to discipline itself. The horrifying cases of killings of black people need to be stopped. Gaddafi hired sub-Saharan mercenaries but in Tripoli gangs seem to be treating black people all as Gaddafi mercenaries. Anyone doing this should be tried and punished harshly.
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In the current economic climate, the issue of drug policy is all too easily swept under the carpet by our politicians, who instead prefer to focus on budgetary cuts as a means of addressing our massive fiscal deficit. What our politicians apparently fail to recognize however, is the economic idiocy of continuing to pour hundreds of millions of euros of taxpayers money into a failed drug policy. ... read full story / add a comment

See this breaking news interview with War correspondent Pepe Escobar on Russia Today television.

The hostility persists in Tripoli and the Libyan rebels continue the search for Gaddafi, but who is leading the rebels? Who are the beneficiaries of the fall of Gaddafi? What will the blowback be for those in Libya and across the globe? Pepe Escobar, a correspondent for Asia Times, gives us some answers to these questions. ... read full story / add a comment

Maciej Zurowski encountered angry locals and grinning cops when he went to Tottenham Police Station. Here are some excerpts from his article and interviews with locals. Full text at link.

On Sunday afternoon, it looked as if the police had been instructed to use a new tactic to contain the public anger: grin. The area around Tottenham police station, which had been subject to severe rioting the previous night, was cordoned off by the boys and girls in blue, each of them sporting an unpersuasive, frozen smile. Gathering in front of the police line were those who have not got much to smile about these days: the overwhelmingly working class denizens of the impoverished north London neighbourhood, which had seen its last major riot during Thatcher’s reign in 1985.

“Murderers! You’ve shot a young father dead,” the woman shouted, following the accusation with assorted expletives. As she walked off, two officers turned to each other and chuckled. You would have thought that homicide is not exactly a laughing matter, especially when you consider that 333 people have died under British police custody since 1998 and not a single police officer has been successfully prosecuted. But then that’s just human defence mechanisms for you.

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This report from the WSWS site accurately sums up the situation in Britain today and the outcome of the riots. It confirms most people suspicions that the state has used this to launch a vicious assault on the working class (read ordinary folk) of Britain. It has used the very same press that was embroiled just weeks ago in a huge phone hacking scandal. The state repression and right-wing hysteria unleashed reveal the preparations of the ruling class for police-state forms of rule

It is amazing that despite all the arrests and sentencing that: The riots were triggered by the police execution of Mark Duggan, a black 29-year-old father of four, in Tottenham, north London on August 4, followed by an unprovoked police assault on a peaceful protest over his killing two days later. Almost a fortnight later, no officer has been identified, let alone charged, for these crimes.

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Peter Manson writes about the London Riots. What was positive about and what was negative. But rioting itself is no answer to the problems facing the Working Class. Full text of the article is at the link below.

A positive and progressive rebellion against deprivation or unashamed and backward criminality? The reaction of the left to the riots in towns and cities across Britain has been polarised between these two extremes.

As readers will know, what started as a peaceful protest outside Tottenham Hale police station on Saturday August 6 was violently transformed after several hours and eventually sparked full-scale rioting and looting, first in London and then in major conurbations the length and breadth of the country. The original demonstration was against the brutal killing by police of Mark Duggan and their subsequent lying excuses and justifications.

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The High Court has ruled in favour of millionaire employers. Setting a legal minimum wage for the Catering Trade is unconstitutional. Baling out the banks is constitutional, banning strikes is constitutional. Letting multinationals rob our national resources is constitutional.

But catering workers cannot be paid e9.65 an hour. Thats unconstitutional. But the millionaire employers are going to get compensation from the State! No money for hospitals, plenty of money for bankers and exploiters.

Its time to say Enough! http://enoughcampaign.org/
Join in the Enough Campaign, join in other protests. ... read full story / add a comment

Interesting information regarding the lull in global warming from 1998 to 2008. Full story at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14002264

The lull in global warming from 1998 to 2008 was mainly caused by a sharp rise in China's coal use, a study suggests. The absence of a temperature rise over that decade is often used by "climate sceptics" as grounds for denying the existence of man-made global warming. But the new study, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, concludes that smog from the extra coal acted to mask greenhouse warming. ... read full story / add a comment

This report from the WSM highlights the deepending crisis in the Irish prison system. Over the years the number of people per capita going to prison has been steadily rising and there are huge dangers with disease and infection from the practice of slopping out. And now an outbreak of TB is reported in three of the prisons. As elsewhere an dangerous drug resistant and largely incurable form of TB is on the rise.

This might not seem of relevance to most people but it is not well known that in 2010 there were 520 people were imprisoned for non payment of fines like TV licences, parking fines etc. ... read full story / add a comment

Climate scientists lives are at risk. Why? Because they have produced evidence which shows the erxtent of Global Warming and the damage done to the environment. The deniers don't like this and neither do the big mining and oil companies. They go crazy at the idea of paying a carbon tax. These companies have deep pockets and it wouldn't be surprising if they slipped a few dollars to the nuttier deniers to threaten scientists and perhaps go further.

Most deniers are harmless folk, they rarely leave their computers and wouldn't have the nerve to counter protest at an environmental demo. But there is always the mad few, looks as if they may be at work in Autralia.

A number of Australia's leading climate scientists have been moved into safer accommodation after receiving death threats, in a further escalation of the country's increasingly febrile carbon price debate. The revelation of the death threats follows a week of bitter exchanges between the government and the opposition in the wake of a pro-carbon price TV advert featuring actor Cate Blanchet. Being a denier of GLOBAL warming and supporting the destruction of the Environment is easy. ... read full story / add a comment

Ireland’s foreign-affairs minister assured the US ambassador in Dublin in 2006 that the Irish government was prepared to change the law that had allowed the acquittal of five anti-war activists for damaging a US Navy plane.

The revelation that a senior Irish official discussed possible amendments to domestic criminal law with the US ambassador is contained in a Wikileaks cable (see below) that has not been published or reported upon elsewhere, but which has been seen by Counterpunch.

At the time of the acquittal of the so-called Shannon Five, or Pitstop Ploughshares, in July 2006, the US embassy made a public statement expressing its disquiet about the verdict. The then foreign minister, Dermot Ahern, responded with what was seen as a firm public statement of his own, underlining the independence of the judicial system and stating that its verdicts were not a matter for discussion by government officials or between governments.
... read full story / add a comment

On May 28, Hands Off the People of Iran organised a roundtable discussion to debate the question of the uprisings in the Middle East, the connection to the capitalist crisis and the impacts on Turkey and, crucially, Iran. ... read full story / add a comment

SF Minister John O'Dowd sacks more public servants as evidence emerges of how the previous SF Minister had presided over lavish junkets organised by department members............. two articles from the Belfast Telegraph ... read full story / add a comment

Once again the climate skeptics have been uncovered as cheats. Why research information when you can just make it up or copy bits from here and there? Full article at link below.

Evidence of plagiarism and complaints about the peer-review process have led a statistics journal to retract a federally funded study that condemned scientific support for global warming. The study, which appeared in 2008 in the journal Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, was headed by statistician Edward Wegman of George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. Its analysis was an outgrowth of a controversial congressional report that Wegman headed in 2006. The "Wegman Report" suggested climate scientists colluded in their studies and questioned whether global warming was real. The report has since become a touchstone among climate change naysayers. ... read full story / add a comment

Two recent articles make the strong case that IMF chief Strauss-Kahn has been caught up in a palace coup as it were from the extremist side of the IMF.

While it is easy to hate the IMF and row in with the corporate media and pronounce him guilty we have got to remember to step back from this story and examine the context. What is also interesting is the way that this is the same media that so eagerly brought us the Afghan War, Iraq war, bailout of the rich and austerity and impoverishment for the rest of us, here they are now attacking one of the key figures in this global institute. It is all rather strange ... read full story / add a comment

LINK-"Opposing the British Queen's Visit to Ireland"- Radio Interview with John, Mark and Memet from the Irish Anti-War Movement Activists and Catholic Worker/ Plowshares activist Ciaron

http://www.archive.org/details/CiaronOReilly2011.05.15

... read full story / add a comment