Since March 2012, Mali has been effectively divided into two roughly equal halves. As the conflict unfolds, what will happen next is unknown. One knows how an armed conflict starts but rarely how it might end.
Women’s rights have been in the forefront of international of international concern over the last few weeks.
An authentic Palestinian narrative – one that is positioned within an original Palestinian history and articulated through Palestinian thought – is mostly absent from western media and to a lesser degree, academia.
Source: In These Times
In the late 1990s, in one of many chapters in the Colombian government’s decades-old dirty war with leftist guerrillas, more than 15,000 people in the northern region of Curvaradó were forced from their land. First came the army, they recall. And they told us to leave. ‘Don’t be afraid of us,’ the soldiers said. ‘Be afraid of those that follow us.’
Those that followed were las mocha cabezas—the beheaders—paramilitary death squads fighting as the military’s proxies. Thousands fled their massacres, bombardments and executions.
Source: The Guardian
As French war planes bomb Mali, there is one simple statistic that provides the key context: this west African nation of 15 million people is the eighth country in which western powers – over the last four years alone – have bombed and killed Muslims – after Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Somalia and the Phillipines (that does not count the numerous lethal tyrannies propped up by the west in that region). For obvious reasons, the rhetoric that the west is not at war with the Islamic world grows increasingly hollow with each new expansion of this militarism. But within this new massive bombing campaign, one finds most of the vital lessons about western intervention that, typically, are steadfastly ignored.
Source: Yes Magazine
Forty-five minutes after school let out Thursday afternoon, 19 teachers at Seattle‘s Garfield High School worked their way to the front of an already-crowded classroom, then turned, leaned their backs against the wall of whiteboards, and fired the first salvo of open defiance against high-stakes standardized testing in America‘s public schools.
To a room full of TV cameras, reporters, students, and colleagues, the teachers announced their refusal to administer a standardized test that ninth-graders across the district are mandated to take in the first part of January. Known as the MAP test—for Measures of Academic Progress—it is intended to evaluate student progress and skill in reading and math.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019