Global News and Analysis

Source: The Independent

No wonder the Algerians stubbornly refused to help the French in their Mali adventure.  No amount of French government pressure last year could persuade  President Abdulaziz Bouteflika – which means the Algerian army – to march into the deserts of its southern neighbour and engage in battle once more with its al-Qa’ida opponents and their allies.  But Algeria’s enemies – and, of course, France’s enemies – came to Algeria yesterday, turning the Algerian desert into another battleground.  Foreigners, two of them reported dead, 41 held hostage on the In Amenas gas field, Algerian troops surrounding both the prisoners and their captors;  it sounds like a replay of Algeria’s own 1990s civil war.  And if precedent is anything to go by, don’t bet on a happy ending. read more

Source: The Nation

In the days following the tragedy, the young physiotherapy student who was gang-raped on a New Delhi bus in mid-December quickly became a woman of many names. Required by law to protect her anonymity, Indian publications jumped on the opportunity to rechristen her. The stirring pseudonyms were selected to reflect her newfound status as an icon of feminine power: Nirbhaya (Fearless), Damini (Lightning), Jagruti (Awakening).

The death of “Jagruti” was a rude awakening for the urban middle class, the most shocking in a series of wake-up calls over a year that witnessed a number of sensational sexual assault cases. Rich small-town boys from Rohtak who kidnapped and gang-raped a young woman in a suburb outside Delhi after following her out of a nightclub. The office shuttle driver in Kolkata who raped a housewife. A mob attack on a young girl outside a bar in full view of a television camera crew in Guwahati. The security guard at an apartment complex who killed a twentysomething lawyer in the course of trying to rape her. Each incident was followed by the now predictable cycle of media outrage and misogynistic blustering on the part of politicians. Some leaders offered child marriage as an antidote so that young girls and boys “do not stray,” while others blamed it on the effects of fast food—specifically chow mein—on the male libido. Still others preferred to deny the reality of rape entirely, claiming that more than 90 percent of rape complaints stemmed from a consensual sexual relationship gone awry. read more

An interview with Hanaa Edwar, general secretary of Iraqi Al Amal Association and head of the Iraqi Women Network.

BAGHDAD, Jan 16 2013 (IPS) – From full literacy declared in the seventies, Iraq is down to 40 percent literacy for women. From the first woman prime minister and the first woman judge in the Middle East in 1959, Iraq has slipped to a place where an abnormal number of widows struggle, and where child marriages are on the rise. Hanaa Edwar is putting up a fight to win Iraqi women their freedoms again. read more

Source: In These Times

In the late 1990s, in one of many chapters in the Colombian government’s decades-old dirty war with leftist guerrillas, more than 15,000 people in the northern region of Curvaradó were forced from their land. First came the army, they recall. And they told us to leave. ‘Don’t be afraid of us,’ the soldiers said. ‘Be afraid of those that follow us.’

Those that followed were las mocha cabezas—the beheaders—paramilitary death squads fighting as the military’s proxies. Thousands fled their massacres, bombardments and executions. read more

Source: The Guardian

As French war planes bomb Mali, there is one simple statistic that provides the key context: this west African nation of 15 million people is the eighth country in which western powers – over the last four years alone – have bombed and killed Muslims – after Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Somalia and the Phillipines (that does not count the numerous lethal tyrannies propped up by the west in that region). For obvious reasons, the rhetoric that the west is not at war with the Islamic world grows increasingly hollow with each new expansion of this militarism. But within this new massive bombing campaign, one finds most of the vital lessons about western intervention that, typically, are steadfastly ignored. read more

Source: Yes Magazine

Forty-five minutes after school let out Thursday afternoon, 19 teachers at Seattle‘s Garfield High School worked their way to the front of an already-crowded classroom, then turned, leaned their backs against the wall of whiteboards, and fired the first salvo of open defiance against high-stakes standardized testing in America‘s public schools.

To a room full of TV cameras, reporters, students, and colleagues, the teachers announced their refusal to administer a standardized test that ninth-graders across the district are mandated to take in the first part of January. Known as the MAP test—for Measures of Academic Progress—it is intended to evaluate student progress and skill in reading and math. read more