With a population just shy of 2.4 million and a labor force of 640,000, the West Bank exists in perpetual economic depression. This reality, according to a 2009 United Nations report on trade and development, is “rooted in the relentless Israeli internal and external closure policy, the attrition of the Palestinian productive base and the loss of Palestinian land and natural resources” that has occurred since 1967 under the Israeli occupation. In reality, these policies result in crippling unemployment and generations of unrealized economic potential.

From counterpunch.org

Just five days prior to the 7.0 earthquake that shattered Port-au-Prince on January 12th, the Haitian government’s Council of Modernisation of Public Enterprises (CMEP) announced the planned 70% privatization of Teleco, Haiti’s public telephone company.

A brief synthesis of the ‘Mapuche Question’

The issue of native peoples in Chile is still sprinkled with blood. Today historic grievances demand recognition, such as the creation of a multinational state where all Chilean can live together in harmony.

Arauco1 has a sorrow that can’t be silence
Centuries of injustice applied to everyone
That haven’t been remedied.
Rise up, Huenchullán
Blood flows, the native is lost
They take the land he must defend
The native falls, the stranger stands

The show ended with a plot twist that revealed an old enemy of Olivia Benson hired a corrupt biologist who lifted her fingerprints from a drinking glass, amplified the DNA, and planted it. Since art often imitates life, the writers probably borrowed the story idea directly from a recent CNN investigative report  on a new technology that allows unscrupulous scientists to fabricate the science of DNA.

While bike riding is not in and of itself a revolutionary activity, recent conflicts in Philadelphia between bike, pedestrian and car culture and the intrusion of city government as a "regulator" force questions about the future of our city, the kind of city we want, who is allowed to use or navigate the city in ways they want and who gets to decide. City government responses to two recent pedestrian (allegedly biker perpetrated) deaths focused on punishing and regulating bikers, many of whom rely on bikes for livelihood, not on the problematics of road/sidewalk use in general. In the debates over safety and the growing use of bicycles, what is truly at stake is a different kind of city where more people from across the class spectrum can navigate urban space freely.

Rev. Doris Green on healing communities from the impact of imprisonment and HIV

Six months earlier, on April 6, the Supreme Court all but shut the door on Mumia’s 28-year fight for justice and freedom when it refused to grant a hearing (writ of certiorari) despite its own decision in the 1986 case of Batson v. Kentucky that the systematic and racist exclusion of Blacks from juries voids all guilty verdicts and mandates a new trial.

By Jeff Rousset

“The dispossessed of this nation -- the poor, both white and Negro live in a cruelly unjust society. They must organize a revolution against that injustice, not against the lives of persons who are their fellow citizens, but against the structures through which the society is refusing to take means which have been called for, and which are at hand, to lift the load of poverty.”
- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., 1967

Long Island Food Not Bombs Makes Call For Solidarity

Account from a member of Long Island Food Not Bombs

Call to action! Police raze Huntington Station Tent City, hundreds homeless and facing the possibility of freezing to death! Long Island Food Not Bombs (LIFNB) needs your help to prevent that from happening! 

From the Justice for Lynne Stewart website: “Radical human rights attorney Lynne Stewart has been falsely accused of helping terrorists. This is an obvious attempt by the U.S. government to silence dissent, curtail vigorous defense lawyers, and install fear in those who would fight against the U.S. government’s racism, seek to help Arabs and Muslims being prosecuted for free speech and defend the rights of all oppressed people.” She is currently serving a 28-month sentence and is in need of medical attention.

December 4, 2009