The short animation, posted just a few hours ago on YouTube, cleverly and brutally imagines a meeting between George W Bush and Jesus Christ in the master bedroom of the White House.

As Bush kneels before his bed praying, a bearded man appears before him, a dove hovering at his shoulder.

"Oh my God!" screams Bush. A split-second later, the president reaches for a shotgun and blows away the dove, the Holy Spirit I guess, leaving Christ spattered with viscera.

"That's right Osama," says Bush. "And there's more where that came from." Jesus, who had looked somewhat swarthy, magically transforms himself into a blue-eyed blonde.   more »

In the money-dominated American political system, all major candidates are forced to court big business to some extent. Yet for a Democrat, the professed party of working people, Hillary has more ties than most.

She's more reliant on large donations and corporate money than her Democratic rivals, like Barack Obama and John Edwards.

Moreover, the advisers in her inner circle are closely affiliated with union-busters, GOP operatives, conservative media and other Democratic Party antagonists.

Her chief strategist, Mark Penn, not only polls for America's biggest companies but also runs one of the world's premier PR agencies, Burson-Marsteller, which helps corporations squash union organizing drives.   more »

— The US occupation is responsible for the death, displacement or disappearance of between 4 and 5 million Iraqis.

— Iraq has experienced a staggering and globally unprecedented increase in the rate of infant mortality. Since 1990, the year of the first Gulf war, the rate has grown by 150 percent. In 2005, 122,000 Iraqi children perished, half of them newborns.

— Half of Iraqi children suffer from some form of malnutrition, less than one-third attend school (compared to 100 percent before March 2003) and the war has produced thousands of orphaned and homeless children.

— The status of women in Iraqi society has been driven back generations as a result of the general social retrogression and the rise to prominence of Islamic parties and armed militias.   more »

efugees fleeing four days of intense fighting at the Nahr al-Bared camp said anger over the Lebanese army's indiscriminate shelling had reached boiling point, while some said sympathy was growing for the militant group Fatah al-Islam.

"The army have been killing us, they were hitting anything that moved," said 27-year-old Maher, who had left the camp the previous night for the relative sanctity of the nearby camp of Badawi.

"Nobody can step out of their house without being shot at. Even inside the houses it isn't safe from the bullets."

Abu Ali, 45, added: "We have never experienced violence like this. Not even the Israelis behaved like this."   more »

Much of the media agenda is noisy and negative, stripped of all meaning:

Superficial, often celebrity-dominated with little in-depth explanatory or investigative journalism.

They would rather market American Idol as the American Ideology. To them, the only “hegemony” in Canada is its beer and hockey.

The people who run our media are, after all, in the end, promoting a culture of consumption, not of engaged citizenship.   more »