(photo: grenade/flickr)

The coffee’s freshly ground, there’s a wide selection of teas and the sticky buns are homemade.

  • Free Bradley Manning!!! “For seven days, a makeshift court inside a sprawling military base in Maryland has been hearing evidence in a case that that has raised questions of freedom of speech, the practices of US army intelligence, gender identity and the place of gay personnel in the armed services. Sitting sometimes in secret, at other times in a kind of pseudo-public forum, this idiosyncratic court has been considering whether a full court martial should be held for Bradley Manning, an army intelligence analyst with a troubled background who is alleged to be the source of the biggest leak of US state secrets in history.”
  • Did I read somewhere that Anonymous was no longer active? “The activist hacker group Anonymous says it has stolen thousands of emails, passwords and credit card details from a US-based security think-tank. The hackers claim they were able to obtain the information because the company, Stratfor, did not encrypt it. They say Stratfor’s clients include the US defence department, law enforcement agencies and media organisations.”
  • “How the West was caught out by the Arab Spring. The Year of Revolution: In the first of a series of articles on the Middle East’s tempestuous year, Donald Macintyre explains how decades of diplomatic strategy was undone by the popular risings.”
  • “Senior British officials believe that a “last push” in 2012 is likely to definitively destroy al-Qaida’s remaining senior leadership in Pakistan, opening a new phase in the battle against Islamist terrorism. So many senior members of the organisation have been killed in an intense campaign of air strikes involving missiles launched from unmanned drones that “only a handful of the key players” remain alive, one official said.”
  • Mr Robert: “Just for a moment, put aside the current Franco-Turkish war over the 20th century’s first Holocaust – of the Armenians – and remember that Nicolas Sarkozy’s electoral venality (500,000 French-Armenian voters want to hear him tell the truth) and Turkish nationalism (which feeds on holocaust denial) make a bad cocktail.”

Interviews

  • Richard Wolff’s weekly radio program Economic Update. This week he interviews a psychoanalyst about “How economic developments affect the intimate, personal lives of all of us, as we try to cope with the current economic reality.” Scroll down to Saturady, 24 Dec at 12:00pm (on the right) or look for the program Economic Update on the left.

Editorial Cartoon

The truth will set you free but first it will piss you off.