Archive | April, 2010

Red Shirt leader Wira has stated that, if the government dissolves parliament in 30 days and calls elections 60 days after that, the protesters will go home.  The government must also set up an independent committee to investigate the killings on 10 April and the government must stop all aggressive actions against the Red Shirts. […]

Uncle Sam to Europa: You must sing the Common Position at the highest pitch. Tomás Rafael Rodríguez Zayas (Tomy) is a Cuban cartoonist. This cartoon was published by Cambios en Cuba on 19 April 2010.  Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (@yoshiefuruhashi | yoshie.furuhashi [at] gmail.com).  | | Print

By now it has been well established that the teabaggers are by and large rich white men who are implacably opposed to pro-working-class economic policy, real or imagined.  It turns out that they are not even libertarians à la Ron Paul, Reason Magazine, or the Cato Institute — they are just a bunch of hawks […]

National Security Adviser James Jones was the headline speaker at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy‘s 25th-anniversary gala dinner in Washington last night.  Substantively, General Jones’ speech focused on “two defining challenges” confronting the United States and its allies in the region: “preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them, […]

Pegging their arguments on the still ongoing drama relating to sovereign debt in Greece, conservative opinion is making a case for a reduction of the size of public debt in developed and developing countries across the world.  The latest signatory to the appeal is IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn who reportedly told an audience at the […]

Watching the news in August 2009, you may have heard about three U.S. citizens being detained in Iran.  Arrested for allegedly crossing the Iran-Iraq border on July 31, 2009, they remain in detention nine months later in Iran’s Evin prison.  Dubbed “the hikers” due to the fact that they were on a hiking trip in […]

“April 17, Palestinian Prisoners’ Day, is an important commemoration for the Palestinian people.  Over 30% of Palestinians have been imprisoned by Israel, and there are more than 10,000 Palestinian political prisoners currently languishing in Israeli jails.  Israeli abuses of power further include administrative detentions, i.e. those without charges or trial, juvenile incarceration, and torture and […]

  We asked queers in our city to tell us why they are against Israeli apartheid.  Here’s what they said. Video by Alexis Mitchell * * * Editor’s Note: QuAIA has come under attack by the pro-Israel lobby and Toronto city bureaucrats: “An April 18, 2010 feature story in the Toronto Star revealed that City […]

  As the representatives from the European Union, the IMF, and the Greek government are trying to flesh out how Greece can use the EU’s and the IMF’s funding to remedy its fiscal position, the main question hovering above their negotiations is whether Greece can and should follow Estonia’s example in massively cutting public spending. […]

Christianity Fair and Foul The Limits of Liberalism Faith and Reason Culture and Barbarism . . . Why are the most unlikely people, including myself, suddenly talking about God?  Who would have expected theology to rear its head once more in the technocratic twenty-first century, almost as surprisingly as some mass revival of Zoroastrianism or […]

April 21, 2010, New York — In response to a government motion today asking for jurors in the case of Fahad Hashmi to be anonymous and kept under extra security, the Center for Constitutional Rights issued the following statement: The case against Fahad Hashmi in itself raises many red flags related to the violation of […]

Mark A. Lause.  Race and Radicalism in the Union Army.  Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009. In the decades following the U.S. Civil War there was a rash of monument building.  Plaques were sunk into ground still littered with shards of weaponry and human beings; statues appeared on the landscape like mute and […]

Armed soldiers are again threatening to use lethal force against peaceful pro-democracy Red Shirts who are camped on the road at Rajprasong.  They have surrounded the protest site.  The nearby luxury hotels have been told to evacuate all guests.  A small group of fascist royalists is also cooperating with the soldiers by trying to incite […]

The right-wing Tea Party “movement” has recently grabbed attention in the dominant media again.  On Tax Day last April, it garnered headlines by rolling out its standard high-decibel complaints against “big government,” deficits, taxes, and the supposed “radical” agenda of “Obama, Pelosi, and Reid” and the rest of the Democratic Party.  As usual, the Tea […]

Thank you.  Thank you for the invitation, and, as we don’t have much time, let me go straight to some of the main points supporting this motion “Europe is failing its Muslims.”   Let me start by saying that we are living in a difficult situation.  If you listen to what is said in the European […]

Palestinians are in Israel today because they managed to survive the depopulation of 1948, the year the Jewish state was founded (Arabs constitute about 20% of Israel’s population).  Ironically, while Benny Morris’ scholarship suggests that the mere existence of these Palestinians in Israel — and millions more in the occupied territories — irks him, Israel’s […]

Unfortunately, I shall not be able to be with you.   Something has come up that prevents me from traveling. But I’d like to be, in some way, part of this meeting of yours, this meeting of mine, since I have no choice but to do the little that I can rather than the much that […]

Jesse Freeston: In Part 1, we described the landmark deal negotiated by the campesinos of the lower Aguán, despite the ongoing militarization of their communities.  Land conflicts in the Aguán region are not new.  Regular occupations by landless peasants in Aguán and elsewhere in Honduras during the 1970s forced the military dictatorship to enact land […]

Cf. See, also, Andrew Fischer, “On China” (MRZine, 29 March 2010). Andrew Fischer is Senior Lecturer at the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam.  This PowerPoint file was presented at the IDEAs Conference on “Reforming the Financial System: Proposals, Constraints and New Directions,” Muttukadu, Chennai, India, 25-27 January 2010; it is reproduced […]

The ongoing political crisis in Thailand has been capturing headlines for some time now, and now even appears to be heading towards some kind of climax.  This political instability reflects more than the resistance of the existing establishment to the increasingly vociferous demands of those who have been marginalised from most of the benefits.  It […]