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Commercializing Childhood: The Corporate Takeover of Kids’ Lives
Source: Multinational Monitor
Susan Linn is associate director of the Media Center at Judge Baker Children’s Center and instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. She is also co-founder and director of the coalition Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC). She is the author of The Case for Make Believe: Saving Play in a Commercialized World (2008) and Consuming Kids: The Hostile Takeover of Childhood (2004).
Multinational Monitor: How much advertising and marketing is directed at kids in the United States? How has this changed over the last 20 years?
Remembering Mahmoud Darwish
Video by Al Jazeera
Free Speech Radio News: Internationally acclaimed Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish died on August 10th after complications from heart surgery. Considered one of the greatest contemporary Arab poets, Darwish’s work was regarded as the quintessential voice of Palestinian exile – and his death has come as a shock to Palestinians in the occupied territories and abroad.
CLICK HERE to listen to Darwish himself, reading "In Jerusalem", voiceover by Saed Bannoura, music by Marcel Khalife.
Making a Killing: The Military-Industrial Complex and Impacts on the Third World
In the late 1990s, well before Bush's 'war on terror', New Zealand TV screened a particularly awful US action drama called 'Soldier of Fortune Inc.', about an elite team (composed of former US Marines, Delta Force, CIA, British SAS personnel) who performed 'unofficial' covert missions for the US Government. They would get a briefcase full of money from a shadowy military liaison and head to the Middle East, Latin America, Haiti, or the Balkans, or smoke out foreign agents and assorted enemies within the USA, missions for which Washington could claim plausible deniability because none were active duty soldiers. It was a dirty job, but someone had to do it to keep 'US democracy' safe, for a price. Sounds familiar?
Apocalypse Now? Miami Model Applied to Republican National Convention in Minnesota
Five years ago this November, the Miami police department, with the assistance of Homeland Security, the FBI and other federal government agencies, unleashed a violent paramilitary occupation of Miami in order to curtail protests against the now defunct proposal to create a Free Trade Area of the Americas. This same anti-protest model will be applied at the September 1-4 Republication National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota.Police Force in Miami, 2003
Georgia On My Mind: From West Point to the Caucasus
One of the major causes of the recent war in Georgia has nothing to do with the historic tensions that make the Caucasus such a flashpoint between east and west. Certainly the long-stranding ethnic enmity between Ossetians and Georgians played a role, as did the almost visceral dislike between Moscow and Tbilisi. But the origins of the short, brutal war go back six years to a June afternoon at West Point.Georgians Flee Russia