Global News and Analysis

Source: TomDispatch.com

The 1960s — that extraordinary decade — is celebrating its 50th birthday one year at a time. Happy birthday, 1965!  How, though, do you commemorate the Vietnam War, the era’s signature catastrophe?  After all, our government prosecuted its brutal and indiscriminate war under false pretexts, long after most citizens objected, and failed to achieve any of its stated objectives.  More than 58,000 Americans were killed along with more than four million Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians. read more

Source: Waging Nonviolence.

There are plenty of lessons to be taken from Syriza’s victory and the rise to power of Spain’s Podemos party, but striving to speak to people rather than politics might be chief among them.

On January 25, Syriza—a previously marginal, left-leaning coalition party in Greece—made history by winning the country’s general election. Winning 149 of 300 parliamentary seats, the party fell just two votes shy of an outright majority. Syriza’s leader, 40-year-old Alexis Tsipras, will become prime minister at the head of a coalition anti-austerity government, beating out the conservative New Democracy party and its now former prime minister, Antonis Samaras. read more

Source: The Guardian Unlimited

For a whole year, a Chilean artist using the name Fried Potatoes (Papas Fritas) planned his revenge. Saying he was collecting material for an art project, the 31-year-old visual artist sneaked into a vault at a notorious private, run-for-profit university and quietly removed tuition contracts.

Fried Potatoes – whose real name is Francisco Tapia – then burned the documents, rendering it nearly impossible for the Universidad del Mar to call in its debt – which he claimed was worth as much as $500m (£297m). “It’s over. You are all free of debt,” he said in a five-minute video released earlier this month. Speaking to former students, he added: “You don’t have to pay a penny.” read more

Source: In These Times

The artist blew our minds wide open.

Philosopher Simon Critchley starts off his new book, Bowie, by introducing us to David Bowie the way he discovered him: July 6, 1972, on the BBC’s “Top of the Pops,” in a catsuit with spiked orange hair and makeup, singing a song about a man come down from the stars. Critchley was 12. Later, his mother bought the single they had heard, “Starman,” and when he played it the first time, “the sheer bodily excitement of that noise was almost too much to bear.” read more

Source: The Nation

In Buenos Aires, on January 18, Alberto Nisman, a government prosecutor, was found dead in his apartment, shot with a 22. The death, either a suicide or a murder, has rocked Argentine politics. One’s opinion on what the killing means depends on one’s opinion of the country’s president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.

Nisman, who had spent years investigating the 1994 bombing of the Argentina Israelite Mutual Association, which killed 85 and wounded hundreds, had accused Kirchner and her foreign minister, Héctor Timerman (son of Jacobo Timerman, one of Argentina’s most famous victims of the dirty war, author of Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number) of conspiring to protect Iran (and Hezbollah) from being held accountable for the bombing. Kirchner and Timerman made this deal, according to Nisman, in exchange for cheap oil. Nisman’s accusations are contained in a nearly 300-page report, released just before his death. He was about to give testimony before Congress, but died the night before his scheduled appearance. read more

Source: Vice News

The Syriza party’s big win in Greece’s legislative election last weekend is a turning point in the long political fight over Europe’s botched recovery from the financial crisis and world recession of 2008-2009. The occasion presents a milestone for the eurozone, which has been plagued by mass unemployment and economic stagnation, but it remains to be seen how much this election will speed up the reversal of the destructive policies that brought the eurozone to its present state. read more