Global News and Analysis
Street Report from the G20
Source: Common Dreams
The G20 in Pittsburgh showed us how pitifully fearful our leaders have become.
What no terrorist could do to us, our own leaders did.
Out of fear of the possibility of a terrorist attack, authorities militarize our towns, scare our people away, stop daily life and quash our constitutional rights.
For days, downtown Pittsburgh, home to the G20, was a turned into a militarized people-free ghost town. Sirens screamed day and night. Helicopters crisscrossed the skies. Gunboats sat in the rivers. The skies were defended by Air Force jets. Streets were barricaded by huge cement blocks and fencing. Bridges were closed with National Guard across the entrances. Public transportation was stopped downtown. Amtrak train service was suspended for days.
Thailand: Coup Anniversary Reveals its Two Faces
Source: Green Left Weekly
On September 19, the third anniversary of the military coup that wrecked Thai democracy, two demonstrations took place.
They sum up the two faces of Thailand.One demonstration, by tens of thousands of “Red Shirts” in Bangkok, was organised in order to continue the demand for full democracy. It was a peaceful and friendly demonstration.
Yet the military-backed Democrat Party government, headed by Abhisit Vejjajiva, declared a state of emergency and lined up thousands of police and soldiers to deal with the demonstrators.
The Beekeepers’ Revolution and the Looting of a Small Planet
Source: New Internationalist
For the past two centuries years we’ve been trying to dominate and control the natural world. Beekeeper Philip Chandler argues that it’s time to learn from our mistakes, while we still have time.
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Destruction in the name of progress: hardwood rainforest logs being stacked for export near Abidjan, Ivory Coast. Photo by Ron Giling / Still Pictures. |
Beekeeping in Europe and North America is no longer sustainable in its present form. We need to re-think our management methods from top to bottom – or face an unprecedented decline in the health and strength of the bee population and the end of honey as a pure, healthy food.
US: ‘Rural Brain Drain’ Turns Small Towns Into Ghost Towns
"What surprised us most was that adults in the community were playing a pivotal part in the town’s decline by pushing the best and brightest young people to leave, and by underinvesting in those who chose to stay, even though it was the latter that were the towns’ best chance for a future."
Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education
Civic and business leaders in the places most affected by hollowing out will tell anyone willing to listen how it is their young people, not hogs, steel, beef, corn, or soybeans, that have become their most valuable export commodity. Richard Russo, the Pulitzer Prize-winning observer of small town life, believes that any story of small-town America is, at its core, the story of the people who stay and the ones who go. Yet, what is different at this moment is how, in a postindustrial economy that places such a high premium on education and credentials, the flight of so many young people is transforming rural communities throughout the nation into impoverished ghost towns. A new birth simply cannot replace the loss that results every time a college-educated twentysomething on the verge of becoming a worker, taxpayer, homeowner, or parent leaves. And as more manufacturing jobs disappear every day, the rural crisis that was a slow-acting wasting disease over the past two decades has evolved into a metastasized cancer.