In 1895, when Oscar Wilde was arrested for "Gross Indecency," it was not only his sexuality, but also his art, that stood accused. During his trials, the opposing counsel cited the evidence of some of Wilde's aphorisms, his poems, a letter to Lord Alfred Douglas -- "those red rose-leaf lips of yours ... have been made ... for madness of kisses" -- and The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Source: Foreign Policy in Focus
Minutes before he started to sew his mouth shut, Jorge Alberto Parra Andrade explained his rationale to me: “Essentially GM gave us a choice: to die of hunger or to die waiting for them to solve this problem.”
Mr. Parra is one of 68 injured workers fired by General Motors Colombia who started a protest in front of the U.S. Embassy in Bogotá one year ago, on August 1st, 2011. The Association of Injured Workers and Ex-Workers of General Motors Colombia (ASOTRECOL) had two simple demands: fair compensation for injuries incurred in the workplace and reintegration into GM’s workforce. In commemoration of their protest’s anniversary — and without any movement on their case — four leaders of ASOTRECOL decided to sew their mouths closed and initiate a hunger strike. Another three joined on August 8th, and a small group will join each week until their cases are resolved.
The neoconservatives are back with a vengeance. While popular uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and other Arab countries had briefly rendered them irrelevant in the region, Western intervention in Libya signaled a new opportunity. Now Syria promises to usher a full return of neoconservatives into the Middle East fray.
Source: CorpWatch
When Blackwater offered Salva Kiir, the president of South Sudan, a package of military aid, they arranged a delivery of ten special encrypted satellite phones. In a similar bid to befriend the King Abdullah of Jordan they presented him with the “mercenary version of a fruit basket: an assortment of Glocks, along with a Remington shotgun and a Bushmaster M4 rifle.”
Blackwater, a 15 year old North Carolina private security company, is best known for an incident when its employees gunned down 17 civilians in Nissour Square, Baghdad in September 2007.
When the blind-deaf visionary Helen Keller learned that poor people were more likely to be blind than others, she set off down a pacifist, socialist path that broke the boundaries of her time—and continues to challenge ours today.
Source: In These Times
Noam Chomsky, at 83, is still full of beans. In 2005, Chomsky was named the leading living public intellectual by the British Prospect magazine, and he has been called the “father of modern linguistics.” On his desk in his office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., freshly printed books on the subjects of globalization, politics and linguistics are piled up. He recently published Occupy, in which he describes the movement as the first major public response to 30 years of class warfare in the United States. In this interview, Chomsky talks about his understanding of the political system, Occupy, the Tea Party, the so-called Euro-crisis and President Obama’s first term.
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