Brighton is a party town with a liberal attitude to most things and most people. Micky McSharry, cabbie, counsellor and confessor, is now a sexual health provider too.

Since August, in his glove compartment and boot, McSharry has kept a couple of dozen sealed black envelopes, each containing two condoms and a leaflet about the scheme.

Safe Ride Home began in Brighton and, since its inception, the drivers of Radio Cabs have handed out 60,000 condoms.

It's entirely voluntary, says Nutley, over a drink in Heist, one of the 10 nightclubs and bars that participates in the scheme by handing out flyers.

"The drivers do their pay-ins on a Wednesday and they can pick up their samples then, if they want."

Nutley decided to be the first cab firm to pilot the scheme because "I read about the high levels of STIs [sexually transmitted infections] in the news, on TV. There is a lot of action in Brighton and this is a great idea."   more »

In just this past week, conservative legend William F. Buckley Jr. and neoconservative icon Francis Fukuyama have joined the swelling ranks of Americans judging George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq a disaster.

“One can’t doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed,” Buckley wrote at National Review Online on Feb. 24, adding that the challenge now facing Bush and his top advisers is how to cope with the reality of that failure.

“Within their own counsels, different plans have to be made,” Buckley wrote after a week of bloody sectarian violence in Iraq. “And the kernel here is the acknowledgement of defeat.”

Fukuyama, a leading neoconservative theorist, went further citing not just the disaster in Iraq but the catastrophe enveloping Bush’s broader strategy of preemptive military American interventions, waged unilaterally when necessary.

While those Americans who always opposed the Iraq War may see this unseemly scramble of Bush’s former allies as a classic case of rats deserting a sinking ship, the loss of these two prominent thinkers of the Right mark a turning point in the political battle over the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

If Bush can’t hold William F. Buckley Jr. – and if even the ranks of the neocons are starting to crack – Bush may soon be confronted with a hard choice of either acknowledging his errors or tightening his authoritarian control of the United States.   more »

TEN REASONS TO HATE ISRAEL'S TREATMENT OF PALESTINIANS

Israel has been engaged in a systematic policy of dispossession and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem for decades, not only without a meaningful response on the part of the Free World, but with steady support from the United States and spurts of approval and support from its democratic allies.

The ability of the Western political leaders, media and humanitarian intellectuals to get enraged at approved villains like Arafat, Chavez, and Milosevic, while treating Begin, Netanyahu and Sharon kindly as statesmen deserving of economic and military aid and diplomatic support, is a small miracle of self-deception, advanced double standards, and moral turpitude.

What makes it a miracle is that the basic premises as well as performance of the Israeli state fly in the face of the entire range of enlightenment values that supposedly underlie Western civilization.

ONE

It is a racist state as a matter of ideology and law. It is officially a Jewish state, 90 percent of the land in the state is reserved for Jews, Palestinians have been barred from leasing or buying state-owned lands that were seized in 1948 and later, and Jews from abroad have a right to immigrate and become citizens with privileges superior to those of indigenous non-Jews.   more »

The recent killings in Iraq are not due to entrenched divisions between Sunni and Shia. We explain what’s fuelling hatred – and the battle for unity.

On 23 February 47 factory workers were stopped at a checkpoint north of Baghdad, dragged out of their buses and shot dead. The brutal murders were reported across the world as another sectarian attack.

The victims were described as Shia Muslims. Their killers, we were to conclude, were Sunnis.

The next day it emerged that the men were a mix of Sunnis and Shias returning from a demonstration in Baghdad protesting at the destruction of the Golden Dome mosque in the northern city of Samarra.

Were they killed by Sunnis, or was this the work of the Badr Brigades – the US backed sectarian militia that runs Iraq’s interior ministry?

We will probably never know the truth behind these murders, or the attacks on shrines, religious gatherings and villages that have come to plague Iraq.

What is clear is that there are forces attempting to tear the country apart operating with the blessing of the US and Britain.   more »

"The largest democracy in the world and the oldest democracy in the world are becoming strategic partners, and that is a very consequential development in international politics," said U.S. Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns on 24 February after a visit to New Delhi. "Consequential" is the right word.

The two countries that will have the world's second- and third-largest economies a generation from now have made an alliance against the country that will have the biggest economy, China -- but hardly anybody in the media seems to have noticed.

It's not secret. The joint U.S.-Indian military training exercises of the past few years and the arms sales that are now eagerly awaited by American defense industry are public knowledge (but only if you have been paying close attention).

Indian Defense Minister Pranab Mukherjee went to Washington in person last June to sign the ten-year agreement on military cooperation and joint weapons production with the United States.

It's just that talking too loudly about all this would upset the Chinese, and it would upset some people in the United States, too. Not everybody in Washington welcomes the idea of a military alliance to "contain" China.   more »

Anyone who sees the photographs of the victims of the Nazi concentration camps must wonder how human beings could ever have allowed such things to happen.

They must wonder how people of good will could have stood by while their government committed atrocities in their name. In the wake of that nightmarish era, people often asked, "Where were the good Germans?"

After the publication of the long-suppressed pictures of Abu Ghraib victims and the United Nations finding that torture and abuse are still taking place at the US prison in Guantánamo Bay, America has fashioned its own nightmare.

We now must ask ourselves, "Where are the good Americans?"

After an eighteen-month study, five independent experts appointed by the UN Commission on Human Rights have just concluded that practices currently conducted at the US prison in Guantánamo amount to torture:

Excessive violence, force-feeding of hunger-striking detainees and arbitrary detention of prisoners that violates their right under international law to challenge the legality of their captivity before an independent judicial body.   more »

The mother of a British sergeant killed in Iraq last October delivered an impassioned letter [see below] to Tony Blair yesterday calling for the removal of British troops from an occupation which "has not achieved anything positive".

Pauline Hickey, mother of Sergeant Christian Hickey, 29, of the 1st Battalion, the Coldstream Guards, who died while on foot patrol in Basra, criticised the lack of armoured Land Rovers for her son's regiment, pointing out that Cherie Blair travels in a government-provided bulletproof vehicle.

She wrote: "I would question as to whom is at most risk, the British troops in a war zone or your wife driving round London."

As well as her own letter, Mrs Hickey was among parents who have lost family members in Iraq who delivered a joint letter to 10 Downing Street. They called Mr Blair a "coward" for his refusal to meet them.

He was at the House of Commons at the pre-arranged time for the delivery of their letters. The protest came as two soldiers who died while on patrol in Iraq on Tuesday were named yesterday as Private Lee Ellis, 23, and Captain Richard Holmes, 28, both of the Second Battalion, the Parachute Regiment.   more »

1 MARCH

God's Little Consumers: The 'Branding' of Children

Anti-Israel Play Banned in New York

Boy Bush Cried Terror

Israel: America's Fifth Column in the Middle East

Bush Now Known as NBC [Nothing But Contempt]

Flying: The Greatest Future Cause of Global Warming

Assassinating Iraqis Who Speak Out Against the Occupation

Bush's Imperial Tour of India