Thursday’s landmark decision by the Pakistani high court in Peshawar is a remarkable document: Chief Justice Dost Muhammad Khan examines the US use of drones against Pakistan’s tribal areas and reaches several conclusions that, while obvious to most sensible observers, seem to have eluded American authorities for several years.

The case was filed last year by Shahzad Akbar, of the Foundation for Fundamental Rights (FFR), a legal charity based in Islamabad. The case was brought by …

Read more

Bangladesh’s government agreed on Monday to allow the country’s 4 million garment workers to form trade unions without prior permission from factory owners, a major concession to campaigners lobbying for widespread reforms to the industry following a building collapse last month that killed more than 1,100 people.

The cabinet decision came a day after the government announced a plan to raise the minimum wage for garment workers, who are paid some of the lowest wages in …

Read more

YANGON, Myanmar — Those who have wandered the fluorescent-lit aisles of America’s largest superstore would hardly recognize the “Wal Mart” in Myanmar’s crumbling city of Yangon.

For starters, the store is scarcely larger than a typical Wal-Mart parking spot. Only two incongruous items are sold there: cellphones and washing machines. The teen clerks must shoo out intrusive stray mutts and, by the showroom, a half-exposed sewer gurgles under the tropical sun.

Ask for the manager and out …

Read more

Julian Assange’s newly formed Australian WikiLeaks Party (WLP) announced that if elected, it will immediately introduce a national shield law to protect a reporter’s right not to reveal a source, as current state-based shield laws are “inadequate.”

“Only a uniform shield law covering the whole Commonwealth is acceptable,” WLP spokespersons Cassie Findlay and Sam Castro said. “Government agencies, at federal, state and local level, are increasingly gaining powers to obtain information about individual citizens.”

The proposed law …

Read more

Athens has threatened to arrest high school teachers if they carry out a strike this week, in a move seen as reassurance to Greece’s foreign bailout creditors that the country will not abandon its harsh austerity measures and unpopular reforms.

The announcement marks the third time this year that the Greek government has invoked emergency laws to force strikers to return to work.

Greece is due to receive €7.5 billion in loans soon, the latest tranche of …

Read more

Murder is our national sport. We murder tens of thousands with our industrial killing machines in Afghanistan and Iraq. We murder thousands more from the skies over Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen with our pilotless drones. We murder each other with reckless abandon. And, as if we were not drenched in enough human blood, we murder prisoners—most of them poor people of color who have been locked up for more than a decade. The United States …

Read more

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court usually isn’t friendly toward questionable patents, but it came down overwhelmingly on the side of agribusiness giant Monsanto Monday in a case that’s bound to resonate throughout the biotechnology industry.

The court ruled unanimously that an Indiana farmer violated Monsanto’s patent on genetically modified soybeans when he culled some from a grain elevator and used them to replant his own crop in future years.

“If simple copying were a protected use, a …

Read more

There is an overwhelming sense of disbelief when looking at David Maisel’s aerial photographs of open-pit mines, toxic waste sites, logging, freeways and other scenes that mark the toll humans have left on earth.

But the images found in Maisel’s recent book Black Maps—American Landscape and the Apocalyptic Sublime, published by Steidl, are all unaltered photographs of landscapes and the endless array of colors and strange patterns are abstracted visions of environmental devastation of land.

Maisel first …

Read more

In Michigan, emergency skews black.

State-appointed emergency managers currently run Detroit along with five other Michigan cities and three school districts. While the cities under emergency management together contain just nine percent of Michigan’s population, they contain, notably, about half of the state’s African-American residents.

Michigan’s Public Act 436 allows the governor to appoint emergency managers with near-absolute power in cash-strapped cities, towns, and school districts. Emergency managers can supersede local ordinances, sell city assets, and break …

Read more

The immigration reform measure the Senate began debating yesterday would create a national biometric database of virtually every adult in the U.S., in what privacy groups fear could be the first step to a ubiquitous national identification system.

Buried in the more than 800 pages of the bipartisan legislation (.pdf) is language mandating the creation of the innocuously-named “photo tool,” a massive federal database administered by the Department of Homeland Security and containing names, ages, …

Read more