by Phan Nguyen

On July 15, the Olympia Food Co-op Board of Directors agreed to honor the international boycott of Israeli products, in recognition of the 2005 Palestinian civil society call for BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions). Since then, there have been a lot of condemnations of the boycott before attempting to understand it. Proponents of the boycott have at best been accused of being "misguided" and at worst been called "anti-Semites" or race traitors. These condemnations occurred before questions about the boycott were even posed.

from WIP News Service

On July 14, in a surprising move, the Board of Pharmacy unanimously announced it intends to reverse its 2007 decision requiring pharmacists to fill prescriptions regardless of their personal moral or religious beliefs. If the ruling is indeed reversed, any pharmacist will be able refuse to dispense a prescription citing moral objection as long as they refer a client to another pharmacy that is willing to sell it. While the proposed rule change does not specifically name any type of medication, and therefore applies to all prescriptions, it's obvious that the new ruling will most negatively affect equal access to birth control, especially for low-income women and women in rural areas of the state, as well as adding additional stigma for rape victims needing emergency contraception.

Evergreen State College has decided to build its highly polluting campus biomass incinerator and is fast-tracking plans to fund it. Toxic emissions in five key pollutants would jump compared to the current Evergreen natural gas boiler.

by Rochelle Gause and Noah Sochet

Rachel Corrie and I organized the doves in the Procession of the Species as a creative response to the war in Afghanistan. Her death opened my eyes to a reality on the ground in Palestine that I continue to carry with me each day. I funneled my grief into helping to build the Olympia-Rafah Sister City Project because it was one of Rachel's goals, and because I wanted to understand what had happened. I have traveled to Gaza twice since her death, most recently in 2005 - 2006 where I spent 4 months living in the West Bank and Gaza. If I could take each of you there for a week we would not even need to have this conversation; honoring the boycott would seem like the least we could do.

"Israeli Apartheid must be challenged and ended, and, like the movement to end apartheid in South Africa, the tools of boycott, divestment, and sanctions, coupled with popular education and collective organizing, are important ways to raise awareness of the Palestinian struggle for justice and to make clear that the world will no longer accept apartheid in Israel. Olympia BDS has made an important contribution to that ongoing struggle."
-Anthony Arnove, co-author, Voices of a People's History of the United States, author, Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal, Brooklyn, NY

by Gar Lipow

Those of us supporting the Boycott Sanction Divestment (BSD) movement have to deal with false accusations of Anti-Semitism. Jews and non-Jews alike are involved in supporting the movement. Further supporting Palestinian rights does not mean opposition to the survival of Israel as a Jewish state. Noam Chomsky is an example of a pro-Palestinian Zionist.

by Brendan Funtek

A remarkable summary introduction about Latin American societal advancements surfaced in print recently that deserves attention. Published in the July/August issue of Monthly Review, Marta Harnecker, Chilean author of Rebuilding the Left, concisely covered the ideological and practical problems the people of Latin America faced in a post-Soviet collapse and what approaches led to solutions.

by Marco Rosaire Rossi

For many people dedicated to environmental sustainability, President Barack Obama's energy policy has been less than satisfying-to say the least. Even before his election, Obama has defended the most arcane and dangerous sections of our energy systems: coal, oil, and nuclear power. Unfortunately two of these forms of energy-coal with the Massey Energy explosion, and oil with the BP oil spill-have already seen tragic accidents which have not only resulted in the lost of life of workers, but immense destruction to the environment. Such accidents should make the president and congress leery of promoting and/or deregulating dirty and dangerous forms of energy. Sadly though this is not the case. Instead of imposing tighter restrictions, or better yet encouraging the growth of renewable sources, the tragedies in coal and oil are being used to promote a reckless deregulating of nuclear power as part of a new bill-titled the American Power Act-that is currently being drafted in congress.

by Haden Michaels

The recent arson fires at the new City Hall building were followed by the rapid arrest of a registered sex offender whose GPS device placed him in the vicinity of the fires. This prompt arrest brings to mind the prompt, convenient and mistaken arrest of a homeless man in the rape of an eleven year old girl in 2007. In the rape case, the prompt arrest may have given an immediate sense of efficient policing, but DNA evidence led to the conviction of another person and in retrospect, that whole episode leaves an impression that the "usual suspects" had been rousted in response to the rape incident. We are following the arson story and waiting for production of physical evidence to support the GPS tracking.

by Coffee Strong

Jim Lommasson, noted photographer and artist, has assembled a very powerful book-although Jim is clear in pointing out that he is NOT the author, nor photographer, of this collection. "If I get in the way that could taint their [soldiers'] stories. The viewer/reader can follow the soldier through their eyes; not through the eyes of an interpreter."

by Planned Parenthood Votes! Washington, and Legal Voice

Today a federal court in Tacoma granted an order delaying the trial of the Stormans et al. v. Selecky et al. lawsuit, originally scheduled to begin in late July. The lawsuit involves a challenge brought by two pharmacists and a pharmacy to a Washington State Board of Pharmacy (BOP) rule requiring all licensed pharmacies to fill patients' prescriptions without discrimination or delay, regardless of an individual pharmacist's personal beliefs about a particular medication.

by Janet Blanding

This month, WIP reprinted two pieces about the recent history of the fight for easy access to birth control in Olympia. Hopefully, the Pharmacy Board's recent reversal is not the end of this local struggle.

from WIP News Service

Since President Nixon declared war on drugs 40 years ago, an estimated $500 billion has been spent trying to eliminate production, trade, and consumption of illicit drugs in the U.S. - Rolling Stone

2008: An estimated 20.1 million Americans aged 12 or older had used an illicit drug in the last 30 days. The overall rate of current illicit drug has remained stable since 2002 (8.3 percent). - ONDCP

The Vienna Declaration is a statement seeking to improve community health and safety by calling for the incorporation of scientific evidence into illicit drug policies. The declaration is the official declaration of the XVIII International AIDS Conference (AIDS 2010) held in Vienna, Austria from July 18 to 23, 2010. The declaration was drafted by a team of international experts and initiated by several of the world's leading HIV and drug policy scientific bodies: International AIDS Society, the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, and the International Centre for Science in Drug Policy (ICSDP). It was prepared through an extensive consultative process involving global leaders in medicine, public policy and public health.

by Norm Stamper, former Seattle Chief of Police

Over the last 34 years I have dedicated myself "to protect and serve" the people of my community. But after more than three decades in law enforcement, I can say with certainty that the war on drugs is achieving precisely the opposite effect.

Interview by Max Blumenthal, Electronic Intifada

On 13 July, the Israeli Parliament - the Knesset - voted by a large margin to strip the parliamentary privileges of Haneen Zoabi, a member of the Palestinian Israeli party Balad. The measure was a punishment for Zoabi's participation in the Gaza Freedom Flotilla. As described in the Israeli daily Haaretz, during the raging debate, Member of Knesset (MK) Anasatassia Michaeli rushed toward Zoabi and handed her a mock Iranian passport with Zoabi's photo on it. "Ms. Zoabi, I take your loyalty to Iran seriously and I suggest you contact Ahmadinejad and ask him to give you an Iranian diplomatic passport that will assist you with all your diplomatic incitement tours, because your Israeli passport will be revoked this evening," said Michaeli, who is a member of Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman's explicitly anti-Arab Yisrael Beiteinu party.

by Jonathan Cook, Dissident Voice

Hundreds of Israeli college professors have signed a petition accusing the education minister of endangering academic freedoms after he threatened to "punish" any lecturer or institution that supports a boycott of Israel. The backlash against Gideon Saar, a member of the prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party, comes after a series of moves suggesting he is trying to stamp a more stridently right-wing agenda on the Israeli education system.

from CISPES

In a July 13 statement after the arrest of 8 suspects in connection to the murders of anti-mining activists from the rural department of Cabañas, El Salvador, the National Roundtable Against Metallic Mining (the Mesa) criticized the investigation for ignoring glaring ties to gold mining interests in the region. On July 1, the National Civil Police (PNC) and the Attorney General's Special Organized Crime Unit (DECO) announced the arrests of 8 individuals for the murders of Dora Alicia Sorto Recinos and her unborn child, Ramiro Rivera and Felicita Echeverría in December of last year. Rodolfo Delgado, the director of the DECO, announced that the murders were due to a family feud and that two families had contracted gang members to kill members of the rival families. He went on to say that the mining conflict was not the principal motive for the murders and that the Attorney General was satisfied that all the material authors and the two intellectual authors of the crime were in custody.