(Photo by: Ahmad Al-Rubaye)

An Iraqi girl gingerly makes her way through oil spilled on a Baghdad street on Wednesday.

Also posted at DailyKos. (Link)

(Cross-posted in Orange – Swedish Charity: US troops stormed through Afghan Hospital )

A Swedish charity that runs a hospital in Afghanistan is accusing the US military of storming into the hospital, breaking doors, and tying up staff while searching for militants.

KABUL (Reuters) – U.S. troops burst into a Swedish charity-run hospital in Afghanistan and tied up patients’ relatives and staff, the charity said on Sunday, in what it called a breach of deals between the military and aid groups.

(also Also diaried at dkos.)

Despite what has been at times a cluster-fuck of an investigation (see below the fold), the murder trial is on.

The BART police officer caught on video shooting and killing 22-year-old Oscar Grant while Grant laid face-down on the ground, will stand trial for murder in Oakland.

After hearing seven days of testimony since May 18, Superior Court Judge C. Don Clay said prosecutors had presented ample evidence to show that (ex-BART police Officer Johannes) Mehserle could be found guilty of murdering Oscar Grant, 22, at the Fruitvale Station in Oakland.

Video of Grant’s January 1, 2009 killing has been widely distributed on the internet.

(Originally posted (link), on DailyKos. It was an “in-process” story, so it has lots of updates. Please excuse the disjointedness, thanks!)

(As we stagger into year 6 of the war, it seems appropriate to re-post this diary from last April –BL)

News item:

A team of American and Iraqi epidemiologists estimates that 655,000 more people have died in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred.

…

It is more than 20 times the estimate of 30,000 civilian deaths that President Bush gave in a speech in December. It is more than 10 times the estimate of roughly 50,000 civilian deaths made by the British-based Iraq Body Count research group.

…

(update)The survey was done by Iraqi physicians and overseen by epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health

655,000 Iraqis are dead.

That’s a scary number. And a big number. I tried to comprehend how big it is, but my imagination failed me. What’s needed is a visual model that illustrates the enormity of the situation.

Bravo to the Judiciary branch for doing what the other two can’t or won’t do!

Since the U.S. government announced new fuel efficiency standards in March of 2006, environmentalists and 11 states have argued that the standards do not go far enough to combat the harmful emissions that lead to global warming.

Today, the Ninth Court of Appeals gave a victory to environmentalists and a “rebuke” to the Bush administration in ruling that regulators “failed to properly assess the risk of global warming” in part at least for exempting larger SUVs and trucks.

The court decision is a rebuke to the Bush administration and its refusal to make meaningful steps to reduce global warming pollution from our automobiles,” said Pat Gallagher, director of environmental law at Sierra Club. “The decision tells the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that it can’t monkey the numbers when it sets fuel economy standards by ignoring the cost of carbon emissions.”

The court’s action invalidates the March 2006 fuel standards for minivans, light trucks and smaller SUV’s.

There are two major classes of falsehoods the U.S. government uses to justify its incursions into the Middle East and occupation of Iraq.

The first is a contrived threat to the U.S., like Saddams’s cache of WMD’s or links to Al-Qaeda, desgined to invoke fear and patriotism in mainstream Americans. Though much discussed and long ago debunked in the liberal blogosphere, it’s being dusted off and reused for Iran.

The second class of lies is aimed at a different group – the Christian right-wing of America. This catergory of lie says that the U.S. must invade and occupy the Middle East because America’s Christian way of life is threatened by “Islamo-Fascists.” (Any liberal who objects is fascist too.)

The standard m.o. for this class of lie is to denigrate Islam by equating it with terrorism and to paint a picture that shows Muslims hate America for its Christian beliefs. This 2nd class of lies is designed to rally the Christian right to support war and the Republican party – and is the focus of this diary.

Like the first, it allows them to kill with impunity.