Archive | April, 2011

  Food Sovereignty Tour + Agroecology Short Course in Venezuela, July 10-22 July 10 to 22, 2011 Please register ASAP! You are invited to participate in a study tour to study food sovereignty, social movements, and social change in Venezuela, July 10 to 22.  The tour will examine issues of land reform, urbanization, rural development, […]

  A twenty-five person peace delegation made up of academics, lawyers, journalists and professionals will be departing for Libya on 9th April, to call for an immediate ceasefire in Libya and an end to all hostilities.  This is the first half of a two stage process that will involve reconciliation talks with tribal leaders, government […]

  Jon Stewart: Jon Stewart: Oh, people, we are now into our third week of a military bombing campaign in Libya, Operation Odyssey Dawn.  The operation cleverly named for the Odyssey, a 20-year harrowing journey through a hellscape where nearly everyone is killed.  Adding “dawn” . . . so it’s the earliest part of that […]

There is a lot of confusion about how many excess cancer deaths will likely result from the 1986 Chernobyl accident in Ukraine.  As we see below, 70,000 and 35,000 are reasonable estimates of the number of excess cancers and cancer deaths attributable to the accident. Much lower numbers of cancers and deaths are often cited, […]

  A tribute to Yuri Gagarin and his first human spaceflight, 12 April 1961. . . . Music by Zemlyane (“The Grass at Home”).  Cf. <www.roscosmos.ru/main.php?id=87>, <english.ruvr.ru/tag_45875342/>, <ciudad-futura.net/2011/04/05/soyuz-gagarin-2/>, <www.yuriesfera.net>. | Print  

Numerous mosques in Bahrain have been torched, vandalized, and demolished by the oppressive, sectarian Bahraini monarchy and its allies. The Press TV video was released on 5 April 2011 and the Ahlulbayt TV video on 6 April 2011.  Cf. . | Print

“Sarkozy the Murderer!  Sarkozy the Murderer!” Paris, France, 4 April 2011 Manche, France, 5 April 2011 Brussels, Belgium, 5 April 2011 Douala, Cameroon, 5 April 2011 Cf. Bruno Ben Moubamba, “Nicolas Sarkozy engage des actes de Guerre contraires au Droit International en Côte d’Ivoire” (4 April 2011).  What happened to the French Left?  Stop Sarko!  […]

In the weeks following the Fukushima accident, Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and nuclear industry officials have been asserting that US nuclear plants are better prepared to withstand a catastrophic event like the March 11 earthquake and tsunami than Japanese plants because they have additional safety measures in place. According to internal NRC documents, however, there […]

Paul Jay: The title of your upcoming book, Syria’s Democratic Experiment, first of all, what is the experiment?  And then talk a little about how we got there. Joshua Landis: Well, the book really deals with a period at the time of independence — 1946, ’45, ’46 — in Syria, when the French left and […]

This just in from Bloomberg: The West African nation’s 2032 bonds issued a year ago jumped 7.7 percent to 55.438 cents on the dollar, the highest since Dec. 2, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.  The debt has rallied 14 percent in the past two days after Gbagbo troops surrendered. . . .  The country’s […]

Washington is broken — there has been no real debate on the $126 billion requested to continue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, yet $33 billion is being cut from vital programs — from heating oil for poor families to milk for infants to Pell grants for college students.  We have a new opportunity to […]

A declaration by the Ecuadorian government that U.S. Ambassador Heather Hodges is “persona non grata” and must leave Ecuador as soon as possible should not come as a surprise, Mark Weisbrot, Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, said.  Weisbrot noted that the expulsion follows recent troubling revelations in cables released by Wikileaks […]

  Nik Theodore is Director of the Center for Urban Economic Development at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a leading theorist of the urban dimensions of neoliberal restructuring.  He has collaborated closely with the Right to the City Alliance, the National Day Laborers Organizing Network, and other groups that have been at the […]

  For weeks TEPCO and the Japanese government have tried to assure us that the crisis at Fukushima is stabilising and that the situation is under control.  However, the recent decision to dump over 15,000 tonnes of highly radioactive water directly into the sea seems to suggest just the opposite.  TEPCO’s decision to further contaminate […]

Some leftists, at long last, are seen walking out on the Libyan rebels they once loved. . . . Hossam el-Hamalawy, 2 April 2011: This is catastrophic.  The biggest imperialist force on the planet, NATO, is bombing Libya “in the name of revolution,” CIA operatives are active on the ground, Western “military advisers” become visible […]

  Juliano Mer-Khamis embodied the uncompromising struggle for freedom and for dignity.  With his brutal murder the Palestinian struggle has lost a brilliant, charismatic, and courageous fighter for justice and freedom.  Both parts of his life’s work were seamlessly joined.  His art was inseparable from his political commitment.  The dignity and humanity which his art […]

With respect to international law, in what ways does this intervention in Libya differ from those carried out in Afghanistan and Iraq? The intervention in Afghanistan, despite protestations to the contrary, was not authorized by the Security Council, whose relevant resolutions did not even mention Afghanistan, let alone authorize “all necessary means.”  That was because […]

  In Bahrain as well as in the rest of the Gulf states, the Tunisian and Egyptian method just doesn’t work to attain even the minimum goal of the majority.  Calling for negotiation as the ITUC does below, needless to say, is no solution in this case since the Bahraini ruling class has full support […]

Could it be that Syrian refinery workers thought it wise to warn imperialists not to descend on Syria to liberate their oil and jobs from them in the name of liberating them from Bashar? — Ed. Tartous, Syria, 29 March 2011 Cf. “Syria is the only significant crude oil producing country in the Eastern Mediterranean […]

Excerpt from Marc Bousquet, “Introduction”: The Occupation Cookbook is a “manual” that describes the organization of the student occupation of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences that took place in the spring of 2009 and lasted for 35 days.  It was written for two reasons: to record what happened, and to present the particular […]