Global News and Analysis

(IPS) – Water scarcity is fuelling deadly inter-ethnic wars that continue to claim lives in Kenya, according to government officials. And if nothing is done to educate communities on how to conserve the valuable resource, the situation will escalate, governance experts and environmentalists warn.

On Sunday, Sep. 9, 38 people were killed in revenge attacks in the Tana River Delta district of Kenya’s Coast province. The deceased include eight children, five women, 16 men, and nine police officers. read more

Source: In These Times

Early this morning, Chicago teachers organized picket lines at all entrances to William H. Ray Elementary School in Hyde Park on the city’s South Side. They were joined by dozens of students, parents and local community residents. It was the first day in 25 years that the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU)–the first teachers union in the country–had gone out on strike, and picketers banged drums, gobbled doughnuts, waved at passing motorists (and the driver of a passing waste truck), and chanted with militant cheeriness: “Lies and tricks will not divide/parents and teachers side by side.” read more

Source: TruthDig.com

The ceaseless expansion of economic exploitation, the engine of global capitalism, has come to an end. The futile and myopic effort to resurrect this expansion—a fallacy embraced by most economists—means that we respond to illusion rather than reality. We invest our efforts into bringing back what is gone forever. This strange twilight moment, in which our experts and systems managers squander resources in attempting to re-create an expanding economic system that is moribund, will inevitably lead to systems collapse. The steady depletion of natural resources, especially fossil fuels, along with the accelerated pace of climate change, will combine with crippling levels of personal and national debt to thrust us into a global depression that will dwarf any in the history of capitalism. And very few of us are prepared. read more

Source: In These Times

Historians who look back to our time will surely conclude that our problem was not that we didn’t know where we were headed, it was that we didn’t act on what we knew.

Before the financial crash of 2008-2009 and the Great Recession that followed, there was ample warning. Whether you were a journalist who reported the news, a politician who made the news, or a citizen who read or watched the news, it was hard not to be aware that for the past 30 years, the following had been happening: read more

Source: The Nation

In the Declaration of Independence, the American colonists complained of the impossibility of receiving redress from the English crown, stating that “In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury.” That could be the tagline for the new documentary Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, directed by Alison Klayman, except that the famous Chinese artist and dissident’s constant petitioning, closely detailed in the film, was never exactly humble. But then, neither was the colonists’. Like them, Ai Weiwei is courageous, self-confident, blackly ironic. read more

Source: Al Jazeera

Tunisia’s uprisings were started neither by political action nor a military coup, but by a regime of banners and chants.

The uprisings in Tunisia were started neither by political action nor a military coup led by officers or opposition parties. Instead, the blade raised against the regime was made of banners and chants.

And none cut more deeply than Abu al-Qasim al-Shabbi’s poem, The Will to Live, which begins: “When the people demand freedom, Destiny must surely respond.” read more