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Harvey Wasserman – America’s Astounding Human Rights Hypocrisy in Cuba

Our American president’s long-overdue visit to Cuba has been a great thing for many reasons.

But maybe our elected officials should cease their hypocritical yapping about the human rights situation in Cuba until they come clean about what’s happening here in the United States.

To be sure, there is much to say about how this authoritarian regime has handled dissent. The details abound in the corporate media.

But the idea of the United States lecturing Cuba or any other country on this planet about human rights comes down somewhere between embarrassing and nauseating. Consider:

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Leid Stories – Obama’s Hemispheric Fix-It Tour – 03.24.16

And now, Argentina. President Obama yesterday added Argentina to his foreign-policy foray into the region, having first spending three days in Cuba to seal his commitment to normalize relations with the Communist state after 57 years of hostilities that reached the brink of war.

Listeners continue with their assessment of the significance of Obama’s Cuba visit and direct appeal to its government and people and, with Argentina added to his itinerary, what they make of the president’s hemispheric foreign-policy-fix-it tour.

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Bill Van Auken -Obama’s Cuba speech: “Democratic” veneer for US capitalist invasion

Barack Obama’s nationally televised speech in Havana, supposed to be the high point of the first trip by a US president to Cuba in 88 years, was overshadowed by the terrorist attacks in Brussels, part of the continuing fallout from over a decade of US imperialist interventions in the Middle East. US television networks cut from the address without a …

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Leid Stories – Obama in Cuba: Audacity and Hope – 03.22.16

President Barack Obama today caps his historic three-day visit to Cuba with a speech delineating his version of a working relationship with the Communist state, now that the United States has agreed to cease hostilities initiated in 1959.

Dr. Gerald Horne, John J. and Rebecca Moores chair of history and African American studies at the University of Houston and frequent analyst of world affairs on Leid Stories, discusses Obama’s visit and its implications.

Horne, who also teaches diplomatic history, is the author of more than 30 books (including Race to Revolution: The U.S. and Cuba during Slavery and Jim Crow) and more than 100 scholarly papers that focus on struggles against imperialism, colonialism, fascism and racism.

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Leid Stories – Cuba and Israel: The Media and Their Messages – 03.21.16

President Barack Obama yesterday began a historic, three-day visit to Cuba—the first by a U.S. president in 88 years, and the result of Obama’s diplomatic effort, which he began in December 2014, to normalize relations with Cuba since U.S.-imposed isolationist hostilities in 1959.

Also yesterday, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, considered the most powerful and influential lobbying group for Israel, began its three-day 2016 policy conference at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C. All presidential candidates, with the exception of Bernie Sanders, are slated to address the group.

Both events, fraught with implications for U.S. foreign policy, are receiving intense media attention, practically equating the weight and importance of both events. The tone of coverage, however, differs markedly. Leid Stories explains why.

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Marc Bekoff – 85% of Americans Support Animal Protection: A Positive Shift

The is so much literature out there about animal protection that a report about rising support for animal protection in the United States escaped my attention. The brief summary published in 2014 called “New Poll Shows Support for Animal Protection Rising in the U.S.(link is external)” begins, “Animal protection has the support of 85 percent of Americans, according to a …

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The Gary Null Show – 03.15.16

Prof. Joseph Hickman is an adjunct professor at Seton Hall University School of Law and a senior research fellow at its Center for Policy and Research. Joe is also a former Marine and army sergeant who has worked on a variety of sensitive operations worldwide, including security at Guantanamo prison in Cuba. His revelations about the abuse of prisoners at the facility resulted in his award winning story in Harper’s magazine and his book “Murder at Camp Delta.” Prof. Hickman’s most recent book “The Burn Pits: The Poisoning of America’s Soldiers” investigates the Department of Defense’s and its private contractors’ negligence and subsequent denial about the human health and environmental dangers of “burn pits” in Afghanistan and Iraq, which exposed tens of 1000s of soldiers to life threatening toxins. The book has been banned by the Defense Department, and Joe is donating his royalties to the non-profit advocacy organization, BurnPit360.org, that is fighting on behalf of 1000s of soldiers suffering from a wide range of diseases, including autoimmune disorders, untreatable respiratory illnesses, and a variety of cancers due to burn pit exposure.

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Andrew Emett – IPhone Just The Beginning: Obama Just Announced He Wants A Backdoor To Everything

While visiting South By Southwest (SXSW) on Friday, President Barack Obama argued that the government should be given a backdoor to all encrypted smartphones and communications devices. Although Obama repeatedly played the child molester and terrorist cards, he never confronted the possibility of U.S. intelligence agencies abusing their power at a level far more technologically advanced than the KGB, Stasi, …