When the Iranian soccer team whipped the U.S. team's butt in the World Cup last month, it was a reminder to us of just how big a grudge the Iranian people hold against the U.S. In this context, we should remember that the U.S. government spent nearly $19 million dollars to engineer the 1953 coup that toppled Mossadegh and replaced him with the hated Shah. In the years to follow, the CIA and Israel provided training, weapons, and support to SAVAK, the notorious secret police that hunted down, harassed, tortured, and murdered Iranian dissidents at home and abroad. The U.S. government provided aid to the Shah and helped him build an enormous military force, which he used to brutally squelch any dissent. In 1976, Amnesty International noted that Iran had the "highest rate of death penalties in the world, no valid system of civilian courts, and a history of torture which is beyond belief. No country in the world has a worse record in human rights than Iran." All of this makes the 1979 hostage crisis (the act of holding a few U.S. government personnel and businessmen hostage) seem kind of mild in comparison. A few flag burnings, men dancing in the streets, rants about the "satanic empire"--gosh, I guess I can forgive them. Maybe I might join in the fun a little bit, too. Anyone got a flag?--Maria Tomchick

David Corn of The Nation reports that "...Recently Barry Appleton, a Toronto-based lawyer who specializes in international trade, appeared before a parliamentary subcommittee in Ottawa and urged the Canadian government to investigate whether hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies provided to National Hockey League teams in the United States might violate NAFTA. He suggested that Canada's six NHL clubs challenge the tax breaks provided to American teams by local and state governments as an infraction of free-trade rules."

Better yet, Mexican cities should sue--on the grounds that the public tax subsidies are so expensive for Mexicans that they make the cost of attracting any NHL ice hockey franchise prohibitive. (Nevermind the fact that there is no ice in Mexico.) The WTO might be interested, too.--Geov Parrish

Who does Labor & Industries work for? Your boss, of course. A new alliance of high-tech temp workers found that out the hard way. It seems L&I grossly misrepresented public response to its proposed rule amendment to exempt high-tech contractors from earning time-and-a-half for overtime. L&I made the proposal in response to intense lobbying by the Washington Software Alliance (WSA), which works for major software manufacturers in the state of Washington (i.e., Microsoft). Like a typical government bureaucracy beholden to business interests, L&I did its best to limit public input into the proposed rule change. But the law is the law, so L&I had to have a public comment period.

Over 750 e-mail, fax, and letter responses poured in over the proposal to eliminate time-and-a-half for contractors. In a press release on the rule change, L&I printed a "selection" of the public comments: two were supportive and one was against the rule change. This left the press and public with the impression that two-thirds of the total comments were favorable to L&I's (and the bosses') position. However, Washtech, a new organization of high-tech temp workers, was not satisfied. They managed, through a public records request, to get their hands on the foot-high stack of letters and do their own tally. Washtech found only 30 pieces of correspondence that could be deemed supportive of L&I's position, another 13 comments that were requests for more information or clarification of the rule change, and the remaining 700 were protesting L&I's position. That means 90% of the public who cared about this issue wanted temp workers to be paid time-and-a-half. How did L&I respond to this? It implemented the proposal anyway.--M.T.

The gap between what men and women earn narrowed a bit in the last year, with women's median weekly wages now 76% that of men's. The figure is up three percent from last year's 73%, attributed by the Clinton Administration to a strong economy and a higher minimum wage. The gap had been slowly widening the previous four years, from the glory days of 1993 when women made a whopping 77% of what men did. Fortunately, as I-200 sponsors keep telling us, discrimination is dead.--G.P.

A perfect example of the mainstream press to the rescue, performing its job of propaganda and damage control, could be seen with the reporting of the bombing of two U.S. Agriculture Department buildings in Olympia last month. First of all, in spite of what local TV and newspapers say, it seems unlikely that the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) had anything to do with it, since it took nearly a week for the press to extract a somebody-from-our-group-probably-did-it response from an ALF "spokeswoman" way out in Minneapolis (after which a press release claiming responsibility was finally faxed to local newspapers here).

But the facts are these: no one immediately claimed responsibility for the bombing, no ALF graffiti or leaflets were left at the scene, and most importantly, no animals were liberated--all indicative that it wasn't a typical ALF action. But more importantly, the press coverage of the incident was quick to both accuse the ALF on flimsy evidence, and to cover up the true nature of one of the targets of the bombings: the Animal Damage Control division of the Department of Agriculture. Animal Damage Control is a euphemism for wildlife slaughter. In rural areas, agents respond to complaints by farmers that wildlife (coyotes) are killing their livestock; in semi-rural areas or suburbs they follow up on complaints such as: "something ate my kitty." Agents then hunt down, shoot, or poison any and all coyotes and other wildlife predators they can find in the area. Only later do they usually find out it was the neighbor's Doberman or a feral cat left behind by a previous tenant that ate little "Fluffy." As for livestock, packs of half-wild dogs left to fend for themselves by neglectful pet owners are the most common culprits.

Here in Seattle, Animal Damage Control organizes mass killings of geese who, because of disappearing wetlands in outlying areas (paved over for housing, industrial use, and airport runways), are now hanging out on the beaches of Lake Washington and driving up the e. coli counts in the water. It also supervises mass killings of birds around SeaTac Airport. While the press was quick to call the ALF "terrorists," it was even quicker to divorce the words "terrorists" and "murderers" from the Animal Damage Control division.--M.T.