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Japan and Russia have never signed a peace treaty over World War II. The reason for this is that there is a dispute over four islands off Hokkaido that were occupied by Soviet forces that were once in Japanese hands. A 1956 Japanese-Soviet joint declaration signed in Moscow stated that Shikotan island and the Habomai islets would be returned to Japan after a peace treaty was concluded between Japan and the Soviet Union.

Front Page Magazine article about the disappearance of free speech rights seen in France, after a certain well known actress criticised a few cultural practices of the incoming Muslim immigrants, eg. ritual slaughter of animals. Support for PETA has now become a criminal act in France, it would seem, made so in the name of tolerance.

Stories we shouldn't forget ... a few days after 9/11, a traditional sikh from Virginia is arrested for ... dressing like a traditional sikh. Quoting ... "At the police station, Singh was fingerprinted, strip searched, and photographed, and he said that instead of interrogating him, the police asked him questions like 'Why do you look like this?'" Racism, diluted by little other than cultural intolerance.

Another example of what has become of the rule of law in the United States.

If it had been revealed that Jeffrey Immelt once hired an undocumented nanny, or defaulted on his mortgage, he would be forced to resign as head of President Barack Obama's "Council on Jobs and Competitiveness." But the fact that General Electric, where Immelt is CEO, didn't pay taxes on its $14.5 billion profit last year-and indeed is asking for a $3.2 billion tax rebate-has not produced a word of criticism from the president, who in January praised Immelt as a business leader who "understands what it takes for America to compete in the global economy." What it takes, evidently, is shifting profit and jobs abroad: As of last year only 134,000 of GE's total workforce of 304,000 was based in the U.S. and, according to The New York Times, for the past three years 82 percent of the company's profit was sheltered abroad. Thanks to changes in the tax law engineered when another avowedly pro-business Democrat, Bill Clinton, was president, U.S. multinational financial companies can avoid taxes on their international scams. And financial scams are what GE excelled in for decades, when GE Capital, its financial unit, which specialized in credit card, consumer loan and housing mortgage debt, accounted for most of GE's profits. That's right, GE, along with General Motors with its toxic GMAC financial unit, came to look more like an investment bank than a traditional industrial manufacturing giant that once propelled this economy and ultimately it ran into the same sort of difficulties as the Wall Street hustlers. As The New York Times' David Kocieniewski, who broke the GE profit story, put it: "Because its lending division, GE Capital, has provided more than half of the company's profit in some recent years, many Wall Street analysts view G.E. not as a manufacturer but as an unregulated lender that also makes dishwashers and M.R.I. machines." Maximizing corporate profits at the taxpayer's expense is what top CEOs are good at, and after all it

Commentary on how many Americans continue to fall for Obama's rhetoric after he's done wrong.

"We will fight it through all available means […] To quote what they say every day on Libya, all options are on the table." That's what the chief lobbyist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce told the New York Times after hearing the White House may issue an executive order requiring corporations that do business with the government to disclose their political spending. The Chamber's pledge to fight tooth and nail to keep the American people in the dark about conflicts of interest in government is appalling, but not surprising. If corporations and their executives are spending on politicians in an effort to "win" government contracts, the American people should know.  Urge President Obama to stand up to the U.S. Chamber and fight for disclosure. Sign the petition today!

DemocracyNow.org -The manhunt for Osama Bin Laden is over. Nearly 10 years after the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, U.S forces are said to have assassinated the Saudi-born founder of Al Qaeda inside Pakistan. At the time of his death, Bin Laden was living in a heavily fortified mansion just a mile from the Pakistani Army's principal military academy. The U.S. operation was reportedly carried out by 25 Navy Seals under the command of the Joint Special Operations Command. It is unclear what role Pakistan played in the killing. For analysis, Democracy Now! interviews Jeremy Scahill, the national security correspondent for The Nation magazine. This clip is part of an hour-long roundtable discussion about Bin Laden's death and the ongoing war on terrorism. Click here to watch the entire interview: http://www.democracynow.org/shows/2011/5/2

t's increasingly clear that the operation was a planned assassination, multiply violating elementary norms of international law. There appears to have been no attempt to apprehend the unarmed victim, as presumably could have been done by 80 commandos facing virtually no opposition - except, they claim, from his wife, who lunged towards them. In societies that profess some respect for law, suspects are apprehended and brought to fair trial. I stress "suspects." In April 2002, the head of the FBI, Robert Mueller, informed the press that after the most intensive investigation in history, the FBI could say no more than that it "believed" that the plot was hatched in Afghanistan, though implemented in the UAE and Germany. What they only believed in April 2002, they obviously didn't know 8 months earlier, when Washington dismissed tentative offers by the Taliban (how serious, we do not know, because they were instantly dismissed) to extradite bin Laden if they were presented with evidence - which, as we soon learned, Washington didn't have. Thus Obama was simply lying when he said, in his White House statement, that "we quickly learned that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by al Qaeda." Nothing serious has been provided since. There is much talk of bin Laden's "confession," but that is rather like my confession that I won the Boston Marathon. He boasted of what he regarded as a great achievement.

"Never has the time been so right," Louisiana State Representative Noble Ellington told conservative legislators gathered in Washington to plan the radical remaking of policies in the states. It was one month after the 2010 midterm elections. Republicans had grabbed 680 legislative seats and secured a power trifecta-control of both legislative chambers and the governorship-in twenty-one states. Ellington was speaking for hundreds of attendees at a "States and Nation Policy Summit," featuring GOP stars like Texas Governor Rick Perry, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. Convened by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)-"the nation's largest, non-partisan, individual public-private membership association of state legislators," as the spin-savvy group describes itself-the meeting did not intend to draw up an agenda for the upcoming legislative session. That had already been done by ALEC's elite task forces of lawmakers and corporate representatives. The new legislators were there to grab their weapons: carefully crafted model bills seeking to impose a one-size-fits-all agenda on the states.

United States v. Dougherty was a 1972 decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in which the court ruled that members of the D.C. Nine, who had broken into Dow Chemical Company, vandalized office furniture and equipment, and spilled about a bloodlike substance, were not entitled to a new trial on the basis of the judge's failing to allow a jury nullification jury instruction. The Appeals Court ruled, by a 2-1 vote: " The fact that there is widespread existence of the jury's prerogative, and approval of its existence as a "necessary counter to casehardened judges and arbitrary prosecutors," does not establish as an imperative that the jury must be informed by the judge of that power. On the contrary, it is pragmatically useful to structure instructions in such wise that the jury must feel strongly about the values involved in the case, so strongly that it must itself identify the case as establishing a call of high conscience, and must independently initiate and undertake an act in contravention of the established instructions. This requirement of independent jury conception confines the happening of the lawless jury to the occasional instance that does not violate, and viewed as an exception may even enhance, the over-all normative effect of the rule of law. An explicit instruction to a jury conveys an implied approval that runs the risk of degrading the legal structure requisite for true freedom, for an ordered liberty that protects against anarchy as well as tyranny. " Nonetheless, the defendants were given a new trial on the grounds that they had been denied their right of self-representation.[1] The Circuit Judges' assumption that jurors know about their nullification prerogative has since been brought into question by other empirical evidence.[2] According to Irwin Horowitz, "Beyond the empirical issue, lack of nullification instructions maintains a deceit. After all, juries can nullify, but they know this fact only on a so

[Barring unforeseen events, I'm going to leave this post at the top of the page for today and tomorrow, as I think the events it examines, rather in detail and at length, are vitally important and merit much more attention than they've received] The Obama DOJ's effort to force New York Times investigative journalist Jim Risen to testify in a whistleblower prosecution and reveal his source is really remarkable and revealing in several ways; it should be receiving much more attention than it is.  On its own, the whistleblower prosecution and accompanying targeting of Risen are pernicious, but more importantly, it underscores the menacing attempt by the Obama administration -- as Risen yesterday pointed out -- to threaten and intimidate whistleblowers, journalists and activists who meaningfully challenge what the government does in secret. The subpoena to Risen was originally issued but then abandoned by the Bush administration, and then revitalized by Obama lawyers.  It is part of the prosecution of Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA agent whom the DOJ accuses of leaking to Risen the story of a severely botched agency plot -- from 11 years ago -- to infiltrate Iran's nuclear program, a story Risen wrote about six years after the fact in his 2006 best-selling book, State of War.  The DOJ wants to force Risen to testify under oath about whether Sterling was his source.

Yesterday -- more than a full year after it first released selected portions of purported chat logs between Bradley Manning and government informant Adrian Lamo (representing roughly 25% of the logs) -- Wired finally published the full logs (with a few redactions).  From the start, Wired had the full chat logs and was under no constraints from its source (Lamo) about what it could publish; it was free to publish all of it but chose on its own to withhold most of what it received. 

Martin Luther King - A Time to Break Silence Starting in 1965, King began to express doubts about the United States' role in the Vietnam War. In an April 4, 1967, appearance at the New York City Riverside Church - exactly one year before his death - King delivered Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence. In the speech he spoke strongly against the U.S.'s role in the war, insisting that the U.S. was in Vietnam "to occupy it as an American colony" and calling the U.S. government "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." "Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land." "At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless in Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called "enemy," I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor." Martin Luther King, Jr. (January 15, 1929 -- April 4, 1968), was one of the main leaders of the American civil rights movement. A Baptist minist

Planet Money has obtained a secret government report outlining what once looked like a potential crisis: The possibility that the U.S. government might pay off its entire debt. It sounds ridiculous today. But not so long ago, the prospect of a debt-free U.S. was seen as a real possibility with the potential to upset the global financial system. We recently obtained the report through a Freedom of Information Act Request. You can read the whole thing here. (It's a PDF.) The report is called "Life After Debt". It was written in the year 2000, when the U.S. was running a budget surplus, taking in more than it was spending every year. Economists were projecting that the entire national debt could be paid off by 2012.

While politicians from Athens to Washington are pushing through devastating austerity programs, Argentines voted in droves Sunday to re-elect their populist, welfare queen of a president, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner. Fernandez is the widow of Nestor Kirchner, who died a year ago after winning the award for world's best husband (Nestor decided not to run for re-election so that his wife could take a turn). But before he left office, Nestor Kirchner infuriated global elites by defaulting on Argentina's $95 billion foreign debt. Greece, facing an external debt load five to six times that amount, has decided instead to severely cut back on public spending while it works with other governments to address its debt crisis. Argentina, on the other hand, pumped money into subsidies and social programs. And while the rest of the world has been circling the drain, financially speaking, Argentina's economy has been booming, with GDP growing last year by more than 9 percent. There are a lot of learned fellows who don't approve of the economic policies of Nestor and Cristina Kirchner, but the undisputed result in the short term is a thriving economy and a landslide re-election.  −PZS

One of the most fascinating things to come out of the current We Are 99%/Occupy Wall Street protests is the We Are 99% Tumblr.  At the site, people hold up signs that explain their current circumstances, and it tells the story of a whole range of Americans struggling in the Lesser Depression.  It is highly recommended. DATA The site features pictures of individuals holding their signs, and occasionally the tumblr reproduces the text of the signs themselves underneath the image as html text.  Sometimes the text under the image is blank, sometimes it is a different message, but often it is the sign itself. In order to get a slightly better empirical handle on this important tumblr, I created a script designed to read all of the pages and parse out the html text on the site.  It doesn't read the images (can anyone in the audience automate calls to an OCR?), just the html text.  After collecting all the text on all the pages, the code then goes through it to try to find interesting points. It's a fun exercise, pointing out things I wouldn't have seen otherwise.  For instance, I found this adorable little rascal, pictured below, mucking up the algorithm, as the first version of the code assumed all the ages would have two digits.  I found that he, and the sign his mom made for him as a confessional to her son, hit me a ton harder than any of the more direct signs of despair in this economy: