Call for Legal Defense Funds: Support the Fight Against Carbon Trading and for Climate Justice!  Nine-Day Tree Sit Ends, Sitters Vow Not Over Until Blasting Stops Food & Water 1 in 5 US Households Went Hungry in 2009

Afghan Law Legalizes Rape Within Marriage     The Afghan government, meanwhile, is coming under international pressure to drop a law that effectively legalizes rape within marriage and further restricts women’s rights. According to The Guardian  of London, the law bans women from refusing to have sex with their husbands and says they can only seek work, education or medical care with their husbands’ permission. Afghan President Hamid Karzai signed the measure into law last month. New Afghan Law Allows Men to Starve Wives If They Refuse Sex       In other news from Afghanistan, a new law has gone into effect that allows a husband to starve his wife if she refuses to have sex. The law also prohibits women from working without their husband’s permission. Critics of the bill have accused President Karzai of selling out Afghan women for the sake of support from conservative Shiites in this week’s election. The bill also grants guardianship of children exclusively to their fathers and grandfathers, and it effectively allows a rapist to avoid prosecution by paying “blood money” to a girl who was injured when he raped her.

MC Lowkey Responds to Freedom Flotilla Killings Artists and Activists Protest Tel Aviv Program at Toronto Film Fest Gil Scott Heron announces cancellation of Tel Aviv concert: Artist won’t play in Israel “until everyone is welcome there” Thank You Carlos Santana     Artists Against Apartheid  and the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel would like to extend our thanks to Carlos Santana for honoring the call for the Cultural Boycott of Israel, by electing not to perform in the apartheid state. The Yes Men withdraw their film from Jerusalem Film Festival, endorsing BDS  Naomi Klein Boycotts Life as Normal in Israel The Art of Resistance: Culture and the Boycott of Israel   was the closing panel of the international Israeli Apartheid Week, which took place in New York City and more than forty cities around the world during the first week of March, 2009 Found Art Criminalized in Palestine-Israel Jewish Activists Protest World Zionist Organization  Here in New York, a group of Jewish activists have been staging a twenty-four-hour protest in front of the Midtown Manhattan building that houses the World Zionist Organization and the Jewish Agency. Jane Hirschmann helped organize the event. Jane Hirschmann: “My parents were Holocaust survivors. And when I was a young girl, they taught me that it was important to have a Jewish homeland. But I question all that, because if getting a Jewish homeland means that you have to persecute 750,000 Palestinians and remove them from their land to get the state of Israel and then to continue for sixty years to persecute other people to control their air, their land, their sea, to control their water, to decide where they can go and when they can go, to put up barbed wire and keep them behind a wall, then I don’t want my children to grow up learning that because you’ve been persecuted in the past, you have a right to persecute others. And that’s why I’m standing here today as a Jew.” Other protesters included the artist Abigail Levine. Abigail Levine: “I don’t feel conscionable with this senseless violence being perpetuated in the name of the Jewish people and Jewish culture. And in one of the centers of the Jewish community in the world, here in New York, I feel like we have to stand up and say no to the occupation and no to violence against Palestinians. These people have a right to a humane existence and to education and to a decent home, like we demanded in our history.”

The Fear of Sicko: CIGNA Whistleblower Wendell Potter Apologizes to Michael Moore for PR Smear Campaign; Moore Says Industry Was Afraid Film Would Cause A 'Tipping Point' for Healthcare Reform  Acne, Pregnancy Among Disqualifying Conditions  As Baucus Unveils Health Plan Absent of Public Option, New Study Finds 45,000 Uninsured Die Every Year  Promoting Healthcare Reform, Obama Admits US Can’t Insure All Americans Without Single Payer Doctors, Nurses and Activists Arrested Again for Protesting Exclusion of Single-Payer Advocates at Senate Hearing on Healthcare Single Payer Action - everybody in. nobody out [Join the Action] Togba Porte[Sopranos]:  “Any country as good as the United States of America should be able to have affordable healthcare for all of its citizens. When 41 million people do not have the right to healthcare, it’s a travesty, it’s an injustice, it’s unfair.”