Global News and Analysis

Source: Mother Jones

It’s hard to imagine a quiet town like Okemah spawning a rabble-rousing, labor-loving, leftist. But then, once you walk around for a bit, it’s also really hard to imagine Woodrow Wilson Guthrie coming from anywhere else.

The legendary folk singer’s childhood home in Okfuskee County sits halfway up a hill (“the hill,” if you ask for directions in town), one block south of the public library, roughly equidistant from Oklahoma City, Tulsa, and the surface of the sun (about an hour each way, I think).* If you drove 14,000 miles to see the home of a folk hero, it’d be more than a little dispiriting to discover it’d been turned into a McMansion with a swimming pool for the poodle and quarters for the servants. But don’t worry; Woody Guthrie’s childhood home is totally the mess you’d hope it’d be. read more

Source: Women’s E-News

Female refugees take many paths to a Vermont resettlement program. But a drive to support their families–sometimes with the first paid employment of their lives–buoys many along, often more successfully than male counterparts.

COLCHESTER, Vt. (WOMENSENEWS)–These days Hsar Ra Bin Ji chats breezily about the difficult times she’s survived. The 22-year-old refugee from Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, fled her homeland in 2001 and spent her teen years in a western Thailand refugee camp. read more

Source: Truthout

If someone broke into your house, pinned down your loved ones and began pouring poison down their throats, would you stop that person?

What if someone poured crude oil all over your crops and livestock? Wouldn’t you try to stop them from doing it?

Pointed questions like these come from a man named Derrick Jensen. They provide a lens through which to view the havoc that corporate capitalism is wreaking on our planet. They are meant to jolt us into the awareness that we are watching life on earth annihilated. They are also meant to challenge us into thinking about what form our resistance to this should take. read more

Source: The Age

The impact of screen culture on the human brain merits the same public debate and funding for research as climate change, says one of the world’s most eminent neuroscientists.

As the online world continues to expand, Oxford University’s Baroness Professor Susan Greenfield has warned excessive screen culture may be changing the way our brains are wired.

The effect of screen culture on the brain is not dissimilar to symptoms associated with attention deficit disorder, such as a shorter attention span and decline in empathy. read more

Source: Truthout

Just as the media lied to help us get into a war, they are now lying us out of one.

In the introduction to season five of HBO’s critically acclaimed series, “The Wire,” Det. Bunk Moreland and fellow murder investigators laughed as they duped a hapless, young street gangster into confessing to a murder by pretending a copy machine was a polygraph test. “The bigger the lie, the more they believe,” he said.

The statement reflects the political dialogue in this country perfectly over the last month, ever since Barack Obama touted the troop drawdown in Iraq in an August 2 speech in Atlanta and leading up to tonight’s Oval Address celebrating the “end of combat operations in Iraq.” The president, the DC establishment and the media have been perpetuating a lie on a massive scale: the war in Iraq is now over, they claim. read more

Source: Green Left Weekly

Peru’s Amazonian indigenous people have announced the creation of their own political party and will contest the presidential elections in April 2011.

The indigenous people clashed with Peruvian President Alan Garcia’s government in 2009 to defend their ancestral lands in the largest indigenous uprising in recent history.

The Interethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Jungle (AIDESEP), Peru’s largest and most representative indigenous organisation, announced the formation of the Alliance for an Alternative for Humanity party (Alianza para la Alternativa de la Humanidad — APHU). read more