That Sarkozy was always going to eviscerate France's tenuous military and political neutrality once he took office should have been obvious to all. Long before he somehow managed to win the 2007 French elections, he was already known as 'Sarko the American' not to mention 'President Bling Bling'. It seems it's just not possible for a French politician to truly admire the American empire builders (as Sarko seems to) and not grovel at their feet.

This citizen was Tasered for refusing to lie down, and then Tasered again for refusing to get back up. Long live the Taser!

I was asked to attend a Citizens Police School as part of our local police department's community outreach program. This program is held a couple times a year and lasts 12 weeks. Although this sort of thing wouldn't normally interest me, given the large amount of bad press the police are getting across the country I decided to sign up in order to learn more, in effect, to do some research. What I discovered left me with the strange urge to check if my passport was still valid.

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Are you an activist, an author, a journalist, a patriot, or maybe a scholar who speaks out his or her mind in the defense of democracy? If you are, then, the chance of having your boarding pass stamped with the ominous symbol of "SSSS" on your next flight from the United States is very high.

SSSS stands for "selectee for enhanced security screening." That means that Home Land Security and TSA have labeled you as a US citizen-security risk, and used your tax money to transform themselves into your dictators.

According to a tally maintained by the ACLU, the nation's terrorist watch list has hit one million names and is still growing by the minute. That is based upon the government's own reported numbers for the size of the list. Members of congress, nuns, war heroes, reverends, former assistant attorney general, ACLU administrator, people with difficult names and all American names like Robert Johnson and Gary Smith, have become caught in the vast tentacle of this list. [1].

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After every test case, the media assume the worst is over: that Britain's libel laws, designed to protect the powerful from public scrutiny, have been fanged, and freedom of speech will no longer be treated like a crime. And then it gets worse.

On the website of Craig Murray, the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, you can read a letter his publishers have received from the law firm Schillings(1). It contains something I have never seen before: a threatened injunction against a book they haven't read and that won't be published until September. Acting on behalf of the "private security contractor" Tim Spicer, Schillings gave the publishers three days (the deadline was last Friday) to guarantee that the book does not defame its client, or face "an injunction to restrain publication".

No publisher can afford to ignore a letter like this. Though libel is a civil rather than a criminal matter in this country, the consequences can be much graver than most criminal convictions. I would rather go to prison for a few weeks for committing a crime than spend five years fighting a libel case, then lose my house and my savings. It is better to be caught mugging than to be caught speaking freely.