Seven weeks before Jill Stein declared her candidacy for president, the Lexington, Mass., physician outlined her priorities in a plan she called the "Green New Deal" – jobs, climate change, universal health care and peace. When she announced her bid for the Green Party nomination on Oct. 24, 2011, the Chicago native presented herself as an alternative to the two "Wall Street parties.”

“They’re privatizing education, rolling back civil liberties and racial justice, plundering the environment and driving us towards the calamity of climate change,” she said in a news release accompanying her announcement. "… We need people in Washington who refuse to be bought by lobbyist money and for whom change is not just a slogan.”

I was not sure what to do on the tenth anniversary of Sept. 11. I did not plan to attend any events, but I still found my mind full of thoughts. I had the urge to remind myself that 10 years ago we all witnessed an attack on humanity and a gross representation, in fact a clear misrepresentation, of Islam.

Muslims have been trying to actively engage in an open dialogue with people of other faiths and of no faith for the past 10 years. I don’t know how far we have actually come. It will be nice to know if we have made any headway. I had no idea how to get these questions answered until my car rolled out of the parking lot of the local Islamic Center.

Cindy Sheehan doesn’t sit down and relax very often. The internationally known peace and human rights activist just returned home to California from a two-week trip to Japan and soon afterwards embarked on a bus tour of the Northwest.

“Today,” she wrote in her blog for Aug. 21, “the Re-Creating Revolutionary Communities or Bust Tour kicked off our nine-city tour in Oregon and California with some exciting visits in Eugene, Ore.”

The day following the fall of Tripoli to CIA/NATO backed rebels, Cynthia McKinney spoke at Cleveland State University in downtown Cleveland about her fact-finding mission to Libya. The Aug. 22 event, which had been arranged weeks in advance of the dramatic events transpiring in Libya, was part of a 21-city tour by the six-term congresswoman and Green Party presidential candidate.

Flanked by an honor guard of the New Black Panther Party dressed in black uniforms and black berets, McKinney opened her remarks by drawing parallels between the way the mainstream media has repeatedly lied to the public about Libya and quotes from Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebels – “If you repeat a lie a thousand times, people will come to believe it." – and Muammar Qaddafi – “If you tell one truth, you will smash a thousand lies.”

In 1953, at the beginning of his presidency, Dwight D. Eisenhower gave a speech in which he said, "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."

That quotation is apt today. According to the War Resisters League, the United States spends 59 percent of its budget on the military. When spending on veterans’ affairs and nuclear weapons programs are added, Businessinsider.com says, the grand total is $1.01–1.35 trillion spent on national defense in 2010.

Cindy Sheehan, internationally renowned peace activist, will speak in Bloomington at 7 p.m. on Wed., Oct. 5, at the Whittenburger Auditorium on the IU campus.

The title of Sheehan's address is "The War Economy and You."

Sheehan is the mother of Spc. Casey Sheehan, who was killed in action in the Iraq war on April 4, 2004. Since then she has been an activist for peace and human rights.

Change is in the air. Some of this is welcome change: the grassroots democracy movement across the Middle East and North Africa comes to mind. As does the worker uprising in Madison, Wis., and cities and towns across these United States.

More often than not, however, this change has been catastrophic. Weather-related disasters of historic proportions are wreaking havoc on the people and the land across the American South. Overseas, the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant continues to threaten public health and safety in northeast Japan and beyond.

The U.S. military, especially the CIA, is relying increasingly on unmanned aerial vehicles, or “drones,” to conduct both surveillance and bombing in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq. Indiana is home to multiple sites of manufacturing, testing and support of drones and drone technology. Purdue University is involved, as are several Indiana companies.

In Bloomington at 7 p.m. on March 2, Quigley will outline those Indiana connections and the legal and moral concerns over aerial robotic attacks. He will also discuss the growing resistance to drone warfare. The talk will take place in room 1B of the public library, and its title is, “Indiana Drones: Robotic Warfare in the Heartland.”

At a time when the U.S. military is relying increasingly on unmanned aerial vehicles -- also known as UAVs or "drones" -- ever deeper connections between the drone industry and the Hoosier state have become apparent.

Newly uncovered documents show that an Indianapolis-based manufacturer of lithium-ion battery systems, EnerDel, has two multimillion dollar contracts with the U.S. Navy to develop batteries for minidrones.

One of Indiana's largest educational institutions is connected to a controversial trend in modern warfare, as Purdue University's Research Park is home to a West Lafayette company that receives millions of dollars in U.S. military funding for the development of robotic technology for remote-controlled attacks, along with flying surveillance, which is promoted as the future of domestic law enforcement.

Several sites in Indiana host the development and use of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology, commonly known as "drones," which have been variously described as the United States' best response to global terrorism and as an illegal and counterproductive approach to military and law enforcement challenges.