Friday news round-up (slow news day)

Where would we be without a healthy dose of news to whittle away the hours. Pilger starts us off with a comment on slow news.

He writes: “Regular news: “We have been making real progress in areas where the insurgency has been strongest,” says a U.S. military spokesman in Iraq. Slow news: The U.S. military has lost all control over al-Anbar province, west of Baghdad, including the towns of Fallujah and Ramadi, which are now in the hands of the resistance. This means the U.S. has lost control of much of Iraq.”

Next - Iran news: Today the International Atomic Energy Association protests against a US congressional report that the EIAE said contained “an outrageous and dishonest suggestion” that an inspector was dumped for having not adhered to an alleged IAEA policy barring its “officials from telling the whole truth” about Iran. Hmm, this sounds like someone was telling stories about Iran in order to fit an agenda!

Next door in Iraq: Fake News - otherwise known as propaganda. The pentagon hires some former spooks to create a positive spin on those headlines in Bagdhad. The company they ran planted more than a thousand stories in the local press. But dont worry - the stories were ‘basically factual’. Meanwhile back in the US some
bad News: A freelance journalist jailed in the US for refusing to hand over video footage of a protest in San Francisco.

Extraordinary News: As Spain admits to being a stopover for the US’s policy of extraordinary rendition, a new doco outlines the stpry of two men who were victims of extraordinary rendition. A new book is out too, looks interesting.

Some good news for those of you too depressed to continue reading - try some anarchist therapy (strictly for revolutionaries).

And finally, some more slow news - the UN relief agency in Gaza is struggling to get enough food for the population in a “desperate and unprecidented crisis”.