The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room.

It was a noise that set one's teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one's neck. The Hate had started.

As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, had flashed on to the screen. There were hisses here and there among the audience. The little sandy-haired woman gave a squeak of mingled fear and disgust.

Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago (how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activities, had been condemned to death, and had mysteriously escaped and disappeared.

The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party's purity.   more »

There is mounting anger among Muslims worldwide over the Pope's comments on Islam seen as criticising the religion.

Indian Muslims burned an effigy of the Pope in Varanasi and called on him to apologise for a speech which quoted an argument that spreading the faith through violence is unreasonable.

There have been protests demanding an apology in several Muslim countries. In Gaza, the Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh said the Pope's speech - made in Germany on Tuesday - had missed the truth and offended Islamic history.

"In the name of the Palestinian people, I express our condemnation of the statement by the Pope regarding Islam."Pope Benedict's speech at Regensburg University, which mentioned Islam and jihad, has provoked a firestorm of controversy.

The address is more complex and subtle than the press on it represents. But let me just signal that what is most troubling of all is that the Pope gets several things about Islam wrong, just as a matter of fact.   more »

>When I began working as a journalist, there was something called "slow news". We would refer to "slow news days" when "nothing happened" - apart from, that is, triumphs and tragedies in faraway places where most of humanity lived.

These were rarely reported, or the tragedies were dismissed as acts of nature, regardless of evidence to the contrary.

The news value of whole societies was measured by their relationship with "us" in the west and their degree of compliance with, or hostility to, our authority. If they didn't measure up, they were slow news.

Few of these assumptions have changed. To sustain them, millions of people remain invisible, and expendable.   more »

The War on the American People – that psychological operation against our minds and emotions that began with the demolition of the World Trade Center and has continued unabatedly for five consecutive years – has been reinvented and redeployed, its army of lackey journalists...

Talking heads, government institutions and authoritarian politicians eager to spread the language and images needed to resurrect emotions and feelings, spreading the filth designed to manipulate our fears and hatreds, conditioning us into accepting the dictates of the state and the corporation along with the reality of a world of perpetual war and perpetual terror.

Once more we are being reminded, at the expediency of those in power, and just in case we had begun to forget, that fear is bravery, war is peace, authoritarianism is freedom, dissent is treasonous and a police state is security.   more »

“ONE NATION under god, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all,” goes the Pledge of Allegiance. But in reality, there are two Americas.

Jean Reynolds lives in one of them. She is a 51-year-old nursing assistant who makes $11 an hour--more than double the federal minimum wage.

Still, she finds herself struggling to make ends meet, taking care of a houseful of children and grandchildren, including her daughter Bridget, who suffers from advanced thyroid cancer. “I’ve worked hard all my life, and I’m still stuck,” she told the makers of the documentary Waging a Living, which premiered on PBS recently.

Robert Powell lives in an entirely different America. A California real estate developer, he recently spent $32,000 on rare wines at the Napa Valley Wine auction--as much on some bottles to be shared over dinner with his rich friends as Jean Reynolds will earn in 18 months of full-time work.   more »