The power of the Palestinian people, when united beyond factional allegiances, is immense. It disrupts Israel’s political and military tactics entirely, and places Tel Aviv wholly on the defensive.
“Our grandma is in jail,” Madeline tells a woman wrestling a shopping cart at Target.
“She went over a war fence and tried to make peace,” Seamus adds helpfully. “They arrested her, and she is in jail now.”
On April 7, 2018 in Brazil Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva was arrested and taken to prison in Curitiba to begin a twelve-year sentence. He was Brazil’s president from October 2002 to January 2011. He was so popular that when he left office in 2011, he had a 90% approval rate. Today, the outlook for Brazil and for Latin America as a whole is highly uncertain.
Source: Boston Globe
DURING SEVEN DEVASTATING years, war in Syria has killed at least 150,000 people, turned more than ten million into refugees, and reduced once-thriving towns and cities to rubble. Finally it is winding down. Syria now has a chance to begin rebuilding. The country can be reunited, its economy can start to function again, and a measure of political stability can return. None of that, however, is likely to happen. American military and security planers are determined to prevent it as long as President Bashar al-Assad is in power. The specter of a peaceful and prosperous Syria under Assad’s leadership terrifies them. They believe that until he is gone, it is in America’s interest to keep Syria divided, unstable and impoverished.
Where local governments collaborate with ICE, deportations have increased more than 75 percent. New Mexico shows a different way.
Source: The Nation
Twenty-five years ago, young Russian journalists created an independent newspaper to tell the truth about the past and present without censorship or fear. Since then, Novaya Gazeta has remained the chief outpost of freedom of speech, courageous investigations, and protection of human rights in Russia.
The terrible fire in a Kemerovo mall in March that took dozens of lives, half of them children, stunned the nation. The disaster, which happened almost immediately after the presidential elections, the cynicism of officials who had more sympathy for the leadership of the Siberian region and the country than for the victims’ families, and the belated reaction from Moscow brought people out into the streets of Kemerovo and dozens of other cities in Russia. The demonstrations of solidarity with the mall-fire victims in Kemerovo blended with the protests against toxic dumps in the Moscow region and in Yekaterinburg with the rallies against the decision to abolish mayoral elections.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019