In the wake of the worst garment factory tragedy in world history, which left over 1,200 dead in Bangladesh last month, a number of Western brands have signed an agreement to improve working conditions in their subcontracted factories there. Walmart was missing from the list of signatories.

The legally binding agreement, signed by retailers including H&M, Primark, C&A, Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein, Zara, Tesco and others, “aims to compel retailers to pay for rigorous and independent public inspections and blacklist any factories unwilling to comply,” the Guardian reports.

The agreement covers “independent safety inspections with public reports, mandatory repairs and renovations and a vital role for workers and their unions,” The Ethical Trading Initiative, which crafted the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh along with trade unions IndustriALL and UNI Global, writes.

“At the heart of the agreement is the commitment to Bangladesh’s Tripartite Plan of Action on Fire Safety, and for companies to share in the responsibilities for providing a safe environment for workers.”

Instead, however, Walmart refused to sign, saying that it has created its own agreement (of which it is the only party). The agreement claims that Walmart will conduct its own inspections of the 279 factories it uses in Bangladesh within six months.

It’s been 28 years to the day since Philadelphia police dropped explosives on the MOVE headquarters in West Philadelphia that set fire to an entire residential block and killed 11 people, including 5 children.

No official from the city was ever charged but 8 surviving members of MOVE remain in prison.

MOVE is an anti-racist organization for Black liberation based in Philadelphia.

http://cbsloc.al/10HwqBT

This is why I did not cheer in the streets for the Boston police after they captured the Marathon bombing suspect. Rather than keeping people safe, they have been spending the past few years spying on and arresting social justice activists around the city …

===

In the fall of 2011, a key Boston police counterterror intelligence unit — funded with millions of dollars in U.S. homeland security grants — was closely monitoring anti-Wall Street demonstrations, including tracking the Facebook pages and websites of the protesters and writing reports on the potential impact on “commercial and financial sector assets” in downtown areas, according to internal police documents.

The police monitoring of the activities of Occupy Boston — an off-shoot of the Occupy Wall Street protests that swept the country in 2011 — came during a period after the U.S. government received the second of two warnings from the Russian government about the radical Islamic ties of alleged Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev.

Violent bigotry = Terrorism.

===

Police say 81-year-old Piara Singh was targeted in a hate crime and nearly beaten to death outside a Sikh temple.

“Over the Line”: U.S. Agents Shooting Dead Innocent Mexicans Across the Border With Impunity

A joint investigation by The Washington Monthly and The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute has found over the past five years U.S. border agents have shot across the border at least 10 times, killing a total of six Mexicans on Mexican soil. The killings have gone unpunished after a court ruled the Mexican victims have no standing to sue in U.S. courts since they died on their own soil.

AFL-CIO: 150 workers A DAY die on the job.

“We wouldn’t tolerate 150 deaths every day because of terrorism. We shouldn’t tolerate it for deaths on the job.” - President Trumka

This is how fucked mainstream politics & media is in the U.S. The BIG STORY here is not that this person has yet to be arrested or brought to justice for overseeing torture — thus violating international law and committing crimes against humanity, but rather that she has failed to make the cut as the top spy in the CIA. Aw shucks … she’ll just have to be contented with remaining a high-level administrator within the American Gestapo.

===

WASHINGTON (AP) — One of the CIA’s highest-ranking women, who once ran a CIA prison in Thailand where terror suspects were waterboarded, has been bypassed for the agency’s top spy job.

The officer, who remains undercover, was a finalist for the job and would have become the first female chief of clandestine operations.

As one of the last remaining senior CIA officers who held leadership roles in the agency’s interrogation and detention program, however, she was a politically risky pick.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the Senate Intelligence Committee’s top Democrat, has criticized the interrogation program and personally urged CIA Director John Brennan not to promote the woman, according to a former senior intelligence briefed on the call.

Through a spokesman, Feinstein said she “conveyed my views to Mr. Brennan.”

CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Youngblood said the assertion that the officer was passed over because of her involvement in the interrogation program was “absolutely not true.”

An Algerian-American from Cambridge was attacked outside a Back Bay restaurant Saturday night, say police and a Muslim advocacy group,the latest of several assaults on Muslims since the ­Boston Marathon bombings three weeks ago.

The assailants allegedly called the 23-year-old college student, Amine Hadjeres, a “terrorist” and told him he looked like Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the suspects accused of planting bombs at the Marathon finish line on April 15, who was later killed while trying to elude police.

The victim, a US citizen, said he was attacked by two tipsy men outside the Cafeteria Boston restaurant on Newbury Street in Boston about 10 p.m. Saturday night after he left to buy a pack of cigarettes.

Hadjeres said he initially tried to ignore the men, who taunted and shoved him, but wound up brawling with them in the street after they would not leave him alone. He said the fight left him with bloody knuckles and a bruised elbow and hip, but he successfully fought off both men and walked back into the restaurant, where he was greeted with applause.

“They messed with the wrong dude,” Hadjeres said. “Their faces were pretty banged up.”

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advo­cacy organization, urged state and federal authorities to charge suspects with violating hate crime laws.

“We urge local, state and federal law enforcement authorities to take the suspects in this case into custody and to bring appropriate charges that reflect the apparent bias motive,” said council spokesman Ibrahim Hooper.

Police told the council the suspects have been identified, but not yet arrested.

FBI billboards not about Assata Shakur; it’s about repressing the black community
May 5, 2013

Following the ludicrous announcement that the Obama administration has placed Assata Shakur on its “most wanted terrorist list”, the FBI has erected billboards in Newark, New Jersey announcing its recently increased $2 million dollar reward. However, any critically thinking person knows that these billboards are not about capturing Assata Shakur but sending a message to the rest of us.

Is Assata Shakur in New Jersey? No, she is not and the FBI and the Obama administration know exactly where she is, in Cuba where she has lived since being granted political asylum by its government in 1979 after escaping from prison.

This is not about Assata Shakur, it is about sending a message to the Black community and those that live within it who stand up to police violence, oppression and murder of residents, one of the very reasons for the formation of the Black Panthers. It is about the political repression of those who advocate on the behalf of the many political prisons being held by the United States government often in torturous conditions. It is about sending a message to anyone who would take up arms in defense of life, liberty and true freedom in a country that is home to the largest prison population in the world which the federal government and various corporations use as slave labor. It is about sending a message to those that would dare stand up and point out that the US government is the most violent entity on the planet and one that commits acts of terrorism against non-white people and nations on behalf of maintaining the American imperialist status-quo.

This freedom fighter for Black liberation has just been added by Obama’s Department of Justice to the FBI’s Most Wanted list of domestic terrorists.

This is the exact opposite of reality. This woman is a freedom fighter and it is the FBI, the CIA, and the police who are the terrorist organizations in the U.S. and around the world.

Read more: http://www.assatashakur.org/

A friend writes: “This is truly incredible. The Obama Administration should be pardoning Assata Shakur, one of the greatest heroes of our time. Instead, Obama’s Justice Department is raising the bounty on her head. Again, the irony of the word “terrorist.” Assata and the Black Power movement were terrorized by law enforcement, and she was nearly killed by the police, but she’s the one cast as a violent threat. She IS a threat to ruling order, because her hope for a world free of oppression and her unrelenting fight for it is such an inspiration to so many.”

Also see http://www.assatashakur.org/

===

The reward for the capture and return of a fugitive member of a black militant group convicted of murdering a New Jersey state trooper was doubled to $2 million on Thursday, the 40th anniversary of the bloody gunbattle.

The FBI also announced it has made Joanne Chesimard, now living in Cuba as Assata Shakur, the first woman on its list of most wanted terrorists.

“She continues to flaunt her freedom in the face of this horrific crime,” State Police Superintendent Col. Rick Fuentes said at a news conference Thursday. Fuentes called the case “an open wound” for troopers in New Jersey and around the country.

The Justice Department has offered a $1 million reward for information leading to her capture. The additional money is being put up by the state of New Jersey through civil and criminal forfeiture funds and won’t fall on taxpayers, state Attorney General Jeffrey Chiesa said.

Good. Fight the power.

===

Two weeks after the Boston Marathon terror attacks, the American people are far more concerned about new government limits on civil liberties than the need for new law enforcement measures to prevent future attacks, according to a new TIME/CNN/ORC poll released Wednesday.

When given a choice, 61 percent of Americans say they are more concerned about the government enacting new anti-terrorism policies that restrict civil liberties, compared to 31 percent who say they are more concerned about the government failing to enact strong new anti-terrorism policies.

 … Concerns about government encroachment on civil liberties have grown in recent years, despite the Boston attacks. When asked if they would be willing to give up some civil liberties if that were necessary to curb terrorism, 49% of Americans said they were not willing, compared to 40% who were willing. A poll by the Los Angeles Times in 1996 after the Atlanta Olympics bombing asked the same question, and found resistance from only 23% of the country.

One is reminded of the phrasing of Peter Ustinov: that a poor person’s war is called terrorism; whereas a rich person’s terror is called war. Nations can drop bombs and use drones to kill but somehow this story is not said to be part of the terror”ism” narrative. Prisoners are unjustly detained in Guantanamo and presently on a hunger strike and are forced fed and yet this too remains outside the single story line about terror”ism”.

 … It is significant that the bombing in Boston is seen as a national tragedy while the explosion in West, Texas, was barely mentioned in the mainstream news. What is the single story here? It is too simple to say that Boston is about the America everyone wishes to embrace - educated, healthy marathoners and the privileged - because Boston is also poor and working class and underserved. But West, Texas, does not even make it into the single story of the American Dream, even if more mythic, than real today.

The greatest terror threat today that interweaves with the varied and multiple stories being written and lived across the globe is the veracious appetite of greed that is causing endless suffering and hunger and poverty for millions of people everywhere. The bombs and explosions and rape might just lessen if we hold the real criminals and killers accountable.