by WIP

Emergency donations needed for Thurston County homeless

Please donate to Bread and Roses Homeless Advocacy Services which is open and accepting donations Monday through Friday at 1320 8th Ave E. in Olympia.

If you are able to donate this holiday season please consider the homeless community at Bread and Roses. The ice and snow has hit the homeless community hard this winter. There are not enough shelters for everyone. Some people are unable to access shelters because they lack “valid identification”. ...Small barriers, such as lack of I.D., prevent people from getting into housing and . . .

by Jeff Berryhill

How a father is challenging the unfair treatment of special education students in our public schools

Colton Daline is a student with special needs who has attended a number of schools in the Puyallup School District. Like many students with such conditions, Colton’s school experience has been marked by numerous hardships. These include harassment from other students, a generic curriculum, inadequate time with specialists, and the failure on the part of the school to provide appropriate services and learning devices to enhance educational experience. In addition, the school has . . .

by Peter Bohmer

I think there is a good possibility that we are about to enter a period of major uprisings, social movements and major protests focusing on but not limited to the global  re-cession/depression we are entering into. I am talking both about the United States and globally, although my comments focus primarily on the U.S..

by Matthew Green

Great articles about the Olympia City Council and the isthmus! Especially good was Sandy Mayes’ discussion of how The Olympian and some councilmembers try to con-flate certain political disagreement with hate speech and violence, to shut down legitimate debate that displeases them. I can add another example.

In its editorial about the violence directed at Jeff Kingsbury, The Olympian quoted Rhenda Strub as saying that council members have faced “constant abuse and bully-ing.” This implies that such violence is common.

by John Van Eenwyk

A psychological analysis of why vandalism is occurring in Olympia, as presented to the Olympia City Council.

My name is John Van Eenwyk. I’m a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst here in Olympia. I am a priest at St. Benedict’s Episcopal church in Lacey and have been a priest at St. John’s Episcopal church just up the street. I am also the clinical director and founder of the International Trauma Treatment Program here in Olympia, which has received a proclamation from the City Council contributing its support to our work. I have never sat through a whole council meeting, . . .

by B’Tselem

From B’Tselem, the Israeli

Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories

I have a metal workshop on Salah a-Din Street, near Zamu Square, nor far from the Palestinian Red Crescent.

On Monday [Dec. 29] my daughter Hibah, who is 22, told me that she heard on the radio that a metal workshop had been bombed in the area of my shop. I immediately called my sons to go with me and see what happened to the workshop, which is my only source of income. Relatives and neighborhoods joined us, and we all went there in our Mercedes truck. My son ‘Alaa drove.

by Nir Rosen

I have spent most of the Bush administration’s tenure reporting from Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Somalia and other conflicts. I have been published by most major publica-tions. I have been interviewed by most major networks, and I have even testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The Bush administration began its tenure with Palestinians being massacred and it ends with Israel committing one of its largest massacres yet in a 60-year history of occupying Palestinian land. Bush’s final visit to the country he chose to occupy ended with an educated secular Shiite . . .

by Marco Rosaire Rossi

In late August, inside a capital city in Central America, a giant banner was hung portraying Cuba’s revolutionary leader Fidel Castro, Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez, Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega and Bolivia’s President Evo Morales. The banner advocated the signing of ALBA—which in English stands for the Bolivarian Alterna-tive for the Americas and means “dawn” in Spanish. ALBA is a trade agreement between Latin American countries that supports the principles of solidarity, non-interference, respect for independence, complementarity, and fair trade, a trade . . .

by Amy Goodman

Tim DeChristopher is an economics student at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. He had just finished his last final exam before winter break. One of the exam ques-tions was: If the oil and gas companies are the only ones that bid on public lands, are the true costs of oil and gas exploitation reflected in the prices paid?