March 2014 - Page 4 of 6 - Toward Freedom

Why I Didn’t Make it to Gaza for International Women’s Day

Medea Benjamin March 19, 2014 Medea Benjamin

Source: ZNet

When I boarded the plane to Cairo, Egypt, to make sure everything was in place for the women’s delegation headed to Gaza, I had no reason to think I’d end up in a jail cell at the Cairo airport and then violently deported.

The trip was in response to a call from women in Gaza to CODEPINK and other groups asking us to bring 100 women from around the world to Gaza for March 8, International Women’s Day. They wanted us to see, first-hand, how the seven-year Israeli blockade had made their situation intolerable. They talked about being unable to protect themselves and their families from frequent Israeli attacks and how the closing of the borders with both Israel and Egypt has made it impossible for them to travel abroad or even to other parts of Palestine. They wanted us to witness how the shortages of water, electricity, and fuel, coupled with severe restrictions on imports and exports, condemn most of the 1.6 million Palestinians in Gaza to a life of misery.
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Uganda and the Reconstruction of a Homophobic Colonial Legacy in Africa

Horace G. Campbell March 17, 2014 Horace G. Campbell

African progressives must stand up and speak out against the wave of anti-gay laws now blowing across the continent. This assault, fomented by some of the most conservative and racist Christian fundamentalists in America, is an attempt to reconstruct the divisive homophobic colonial legacy in Africa.

Washington’s Back-to-the-Future Military Policies in Africa: A New Model for Expeditionary Warfare

Nick Turse March 14, 2014 Nick Turse

Source: Tom Dispatch

Lion Forward Teams? Echo Casemate? Juniper Micron?

You could be forgiven if this jumble of words looks like nonsense to you. It isn’t. It’s the language of the U.S. military’s simmering African interventions; the patois that goes with a set of missions carried out in countries most Americans couldn’t locate on a map; the argot of conflicts now primarily fought by proxies and a former colonial power on a continent that the U.S. military views as a hotbed of instability and that hawkish pundits increasingly see as a growth area for future armed interventions. read more

Chile’s Student Movement Leads the Way: Progressive Prospects for Michelle Bachelet’s Second Term

Benjamin Dangl March 13, 2014 Benjamin Dangl

Michelle Bachelet’s return to the presidency, and her promise for structural changes to Chile’s educational and political system, is the result of a decades-long struggle to move out of the shadow of the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship, and is one of the fruits of the more recent student movement for a better society.

A Divided Ukraine Highlights Europe’s Next Big Challenges

Rene Wadlow March 13, 2014 Rene Wadlow

A politically divided and potentially more violent Ukraine highlights broad social, economic, and geopolitical orientations that will have long-range consequences. Currently Ukraine, as other countries in this post-Soviet area, has four socio-economic poles of attraction and options.

The United States of Coal

Bill Bigelow March 11, 2014 Bill Bigelow

Source: Yes Magazine

“The United States of Energy” was a colorful series of lessons on the advantages of coal, aimed at 4th-graders—and sponsored by Big Coal. Here’s how educators and activists worked together to get it out of classrooms.

While developing activities on coal and the climate crisis in 2011 for Rethinking Schools magazine, I ran across a curriculum, The United States of Energy, from Scholastic, the venerable education publisher.

It was a colorful series of lessons, aimed at fourth-graders, which explored the various sources for energy in the United States. The material on coal discussed its many “advantages.” But when I looked for discussion of the disadvantages … nothing. read more