News links

San Francisco Friends and friends peace vigil in the newspaper!

From the San Francisco Chronicle. With a couple of photos, too. I was happy because this came out the day of our monthly meeting's retreat.


Cal State Fullerton lecturer allowed to add to oath
"A Cal State Fullerton lecturer who lost her job because she objected to signing a loyalty oath was reappointed Monday to teach next fall in an agreement worked out between the university and a national civil rights group. Wendy Gonaver, a Quaker and pacifist who said that California's required loyalty oath violated her religious beliefs and her right of free speech, will be allowed to attach a personal statement of her views when she signs the pledge."

The following links are from Common Dreams:

Maine novelist [Quaker sympathizer] stirs controversy
Nicholson Baker questions ethics of World War II.

Destroying African Agriculture
Published on Wednesday, June 4, 2008 by Foreign Policy in Focus by Walden Bello [who spent time in the late 1980s/early 1990s as a Fellow at Friends Committee on National Legislation]

"Biofuel production is certainly one of the culprits in the current global food crisis.... [T]he more primordial problem has been the conversion of economies that are largely food-self-sufficient into chronic food importers. ...the destabilization of peasant producers by a one-two punch of IMF-World Bank structural adjustment programs that gutted government investment in the countryside followed by the massive influx of subsidized U.S. and European Union agricultural imports after the WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture pried open markets. African agriculture is a case study of how doctrinaire economics serving corporate interests can destroy a whole continent’s productive base."

Canada’s House Backs War Resisters
published on Wednesday, June 4, 2008 by the Los Angeles Times
Lawmakers Pass a Motion Urging the Government to Let US Military Deserters Stay. Dozens Seek Refugee Status. On Tuesday, Canada’s House of Commons passed a motion urging the government to allow deserters to stay. The measure, though nonbinding, could lead to a last-minute reprieve for Glass and nearly 40 others who have asked for refugee status. Perhaps 200 more war dodgers are living in the country unannounced, waiting to see how Canada will ultimately declare itself, the War Resisters Support Campaign says.