Socialist Party USA Presidential Nominee Brian Moore was threatened with arrest Sunday afternoon by Brattleboro(Vermont) Police officers for petitioning in a supermarket parking lot to qualify on the presidential primary ballot of the Liberty Union Party of Vermont. The primary is scheduled for March 5th.

November 28, 2007 - Today, the Peace and Freedom Party - with the assistance of the Greater Fresno Area Chapter of the ACLU - won a small but important victory for free speech and political organizations. The Fresno County Public Library has been continually denying the Peace and Freedom Party the right to use library facilities to hold its general meetings. The denial cited a Fresno County ordinance against using its facilities for campaign or political activity in connection with any election.

California law has been settled since 1980, that large shopping malls must permit petitioning, even if that mall is private property. However, on October 5, a California State Court of Appeals ruled that when a large mall contains some very large stores with their own individual entrances, petitioning may be banned in front of those individual store entrances. The case is Vernon Van v Home Depot, B190831. It doesn’t make any difference whether the mall itself owns the property, or whether the individual store owns the property.

by Robert Fisk

Laila al-Arian was wearing her headscarf at her desk at Nation Books, one of my New York publishers. No, she told me, it would be difficult to telephone her father. At the medical facility of his North Carolina prison, he can only make a few calls - monitored, of course - and he was growing steadily weaker.