Global News and Analysis

Source: IPS News

Five years into democracy, with the elections just a few weeks away, the majority of Congolese children continue to face a bleak future.

Years of bitter and bloody war in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have destroyed thousands of families, forcing them into abject poverty and giving scores of children no choice but to live on the streets – as beggars, thugs and drug addicts.

Naino Riziki sits on the only chair in her small, rickety shack built from planks and rusted, bent-open petrol cans in Kabutembu informal settlement, one of the worst addresses in Goma, the provincial capital of North Kivu in eastern DRC. read more

Source: The Nation

Each generation should see “The Battle of Algiers” (1966) and see it over again, as a chilling preview to the Long War. In the film as well as real life, a chart of “terrorist cell leaders” is posted on a French blackboard and, one by one, each is assassinated until there are no more. The Casbah is declared pacified, and the French military forces leave. Two years later, an Algerian uprising in the streets succeeds in liberating Algeria from colonial rule.

The French general in the film, who bears an eerie resemblance to Gen. David Petraeus, engages in an illuminating dialogue with the French liberal media. read more

Source: IWallsterstein.com

The Occupy Wall Street movement – for now it is a movement – is the most important political happening in the United States since the uprisings in 1968, whose direct descendant or continuation it is.

Why it started in the United States when it did – and not three days, three months, three years earlier or later – we’ll never know for sure. The conditions were there: acutely increasing economic pain not only for the truly poverty-stricken but for an ever-growing segment of the working poor (otherwise known as the “middle class”); incredible exaggeration (exploitation, greed) of the wealthiest 1% of the U.S. population (“Wall Street”); the example of angry upsurges around the world (the “Arab spring,” the Spanish indignados, the Chilean students, the Wisconsin trade unions, and a long list of others). It doesn’t really matter what the spark was that ignited the fire. It started. read more

Source: Al Jazeera

Protests against the world’s financial institutions are growing, but do most people even know where money comes from?

We spend a lot of time thinking about money, one way or another. We think about how to get our hands on it, how to keep it safe and how to spend it. When we aren’t asleep, there’s a good chance that we’re paying attention to money. But while money is never far from our thoughts, there is something curious about our relationship with it. For all that we use it to get through the day, most of us don’t know what it is. read more

On July 1, 2002, US planes bombed an Afghan wedding in the small village of Deh Rawud. Located to the north of Kandahar, the village seemed fortified by the region’s many mountains. For a few hours, its people thought they were safe from a war they had never invited. They celebrated, and as customs go, fired intermittently into the air.

The joyous occasion however, turned into an orgy of blood that will define the collective memory of Deh Rawud for generations.

It was reported that the US air force used a B-52 bomber and an AC-130 helicopter gunship in a battle against imagined terrorists. According to Afghan authorities, 40 people were killed and 100 wounded (The Guardian, July 2, 2002). Expectedly, the US military refused to apologize. read more

Source: Yes Magazine

Young people locking arms, facing arrest on a cold, wet Seattle street—it could have been the WTO protests that rocked the city more than ten years ago. Only this time, Seattle is just one of dozens of places where the movement for the 99 percent is taking hold.

And, unlike the WTO protests—whose motivation was unclear to many Americans—the demonstrations now spreading virally from Wall Street immediately strike a chord: we all know that neither our economy nor our government is working for the benefit of the 99 percent. read more