Bear Left!

Fact of the Week

**Fact of the Week**
When President Bush invoked the Taft-Hartley Act this month and ordered the members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union back to work, he did something that no other president had done. While no president since Jimmy Carter in 1978 had even attempted to use the Act to stop a strike, no president had ever used the act to halt a lockout by management. Because the lockout ended through a federal injunction and not through voluntary action by port owners, the union cannot engage in any sort of strike or slowdown during the 80-day cooling-off period. Working to rule, or adhering strictly to health and safety regulations, is considered a slowdown. Source: Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 8 October 2002.

**This week's columns**
Negotiating from Strength Paul Corrigan President Bush is right to negotiate from strength, but he is dead wrong to abuse that strength.	No Jack Kennedy Tim Francis-Wright President Bush has declared war with Iraq to be both necessary and urgent, yet in 1962, one of his predecessors avoided war in a much more dire situation.

Red Pepper news on Iraq.
No Rush to War: a collection of articles from The Nation.
Target: Iraq from GlobalSecurity.org.
Iraq's Nuclear Weapon Programme from the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Iraq WMD Dossier from the International Institute of Strategic Studies.
Iraq dossier presented to Parliament by Tony Blair.
New York Times op-ed ad signed by 33 international relations scholars (HTML version of the ad).
More, alas, likely to come.

Outrage as Iraq Views UK Arms: If Iraq is so dangerous, why are its representatives attending the Sofex military fair (Jason Burke, The Observer)?
The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962: Recently declassified documents shed new light on what happened 40 years ago (National Security Archive).
Sowing Disaster?: Genetic engineering of corn is endangering the crop's insurance policy, its original cultivars (Mark Schapiro, The Nation).
Inspection as Invasion: The United States has been seeking to prevent a resolution of the Iraq crisis for the past eight years (George Monbiot, The Guardian).
The Bush Purge of Science: The Bush administration is cleansing and discarding scientific advisory committees for political ends (Frederick Sweet, Interventionmag.com).
Servile States: The nominally sovereign countries of Europe are allowing themselves to be mere satellites (Ignacio Ramonet, Le Monde-Diplomatique).
America's For-Profit Secret Army: The Pentagon now depends on mercenaries provided by "private military contractors" (Leslie Wayne, New York Times).

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