Global News and Analysis

Source: The Indypendent

DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania — I first met Saidi W., a 20-year-old gay Tanzanian university student, in a cramped, humid room in Dar es Salaam. I sat on a mattress on the floor, cross-legged, while four young men slouched against the wall, telling me stories of the brutal treatment they endure for being gay.

In 2010, Saidi, who sometimes does sex work to make ends meet, was on the street looking for clients when a police officer posing as a client took him to a guest house and then arrested him. The officer forced him at gunpoint to call five gay friends and tell them to meet him at a bar. When they arrived, the police arrested all of them. They proceeded to undress and beat the five friends before taking them into custody. Saidi recalled, “They said, ‘We’re arresting you because you’re gays and you’re shaming us. Our country does not allow homosexuals. Our law and our religion and customs don’t allow this.’” read more

Source: Yes Magazine

Daniel Agnew, Melanie Andrade, and Jabari Mickles are members of a group that occupied Florida’s capitol building after the Zimmerman acquittal.

On the night of Monday, July 15, members of a social justice group called Dream Defenders spent their first night on the hard marble floors of the state capitol building in Tallahassee, Fla. Last night, they spent their tenth night there. In the interviews that follow, three of them explain the most recent developments, their reasons for taking action, and what they hope to change. read more

Source: The Hankyoreh

As people near retirement age, they enter the twilight years. Sometimes, they rebel against retirement. They want to keep working. They’re not interested in shuffling out of their office never to return. And if they’re in fact the owner of the workplace, conflicts often ensue. Those who have power rarely want to give up that power.

The United States is relatively young as a country. It is even younger as the “leader of the free world.” But for at least three decades, reports have circulated that the American empire has entered its twilight years, perhaps even its dotage. read more

Source: Foreign Policy in Focus

Secretary of State John Kerry’s latest foray into Middle East negotiations should be called the Einstein peace process. Doing the same thing over and over again and still expecting different results is the great scientist’s definition of insanity. This time around, indications are that Kerry actually believes, all evidence to the contrary aside, that this latest iteration of the decades-old industry known as the “peace process” might really succeed. But unfortunately for Kerry, his political calculations are about to run aground on the unforgiving shoals of political reality. read more

Source: The Guardian Unlimited

Writing on the protests in Brazil recently, a New Yorker columnist posed the conundrum of “revolt in the midst of relative prosperity“: “Since 2003, some 40 million Brazilians have joined the middle class … the protests have been widespread, popular and, most striking of all, dominated by the middle class.” The explanation, he said, was that Brazil is a middle-class country with the infrastructure of a poor country.

This is not a new trope. According to the UN assistant secretary general, Heraldo Muñoz, a “new middle class” is responsible for a wave of protests across Latin America. Francis Fukuyama, seer of “the end of history”, says we’re in the middle of a global middle-class revolution. This analysis suggests that protest arises from the thwarted aspirations of a thrusting new petty bourgeoisie. The UN says a member of the new global middle class earns between $10 and $100 a day, and thus has spare income for consumption. On this basis, it estimates the middle class will grow from 1.8 billion in 2009 to 3.2 billion in 2020. read more

Source: The New York Times

On May 25, 1948, a former United States Army flier entered the American Embassy in Paris, renounced his American citizenship and, as astonished officials looked on, declared himself a citizen of the world.

In the decades that followed, until the end of his long life last week, he remained by choice a stateless man — entering, leaving, being regularly expelled from and frequently arrested in a spate of countries, carrying a passport of his own devising, as the international news media chronicled his every move. read more