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Refugee Film Festival Joins Western Sahara Independence Struggle

Audience member at festival
During the 1960s, when decolonization movements were sweeping the world, it was joked that after achieving independence a country had to do three things: design a flag, launch an airline and found a film festival. Western Sahara has a flag but no airline and despite a 35 year struggle has yet to achieve independence. The closest it comes to its own film festival is the Festival Internacional de Cine del Sahara (known as FiSahara), the world's most remote film festival, which had its seventh annual gathering this week in a refugee camp deep in the Algerian desert.

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Somalia: Pirates or Protectors?

The hijacking of merchant ships by Somali pirates in the Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Aden has been widely condemned in UN resolutions and news reports. Yet illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing and the dumping of nuclear and toxic waste in Somali waters by foreign fleets continues to be ignored.

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Floodlines: An Interview with Jordan Flaherty

Floodlines: Stories of Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six is a firsthand account of community, culture, and resistance in New Orleans in the years before and after Katrina. The book weaves the interconnected stories of prisoners at Angola, Mardi Gras Indians, Arab and Latino immigrants, public housing residents, gay rappers, spoken word poets, victims of police brutality, out of town volunteers, and grassroots activists.

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Reading The Grapes of Wrath in 2010: Capitalism and Immigration

One of the most popular and well-written American books of all time, The Grapes of Wrath gives a very human perspective on the harsh lives of migrants, personified by the Joads - a family of poor sharecroppers from Oklahoma. Evicted from their family farm, just as the millions of Mexicans who have suffered enclosure from their land and become homeless and jobless because of NAFTA, the Joads travel to California in a desperate search of work, only to encounter the harassment of authorities and the hatred of the local population.

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US Space Weapon Now Circling the Globe

The X-37 (Photo: USAF)
The US space weapon X-37 is now circling the globe in relative secrecy. It is an unmanned space plane that looks like a smaller version of the Space Shuttle and was launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on April 22, 2010. This new weapon poses threats to global peace and risks sparking an arms race in space.

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Environment and Food in Haiti: Two Crises, One Solution

Peasant Movement Garden
In this interview, Haitian peasant movement leader Chavannes Jean-Baptiste discusses the role that agriculture can play in Haiti in addressing both the environmental and food crises. The solutions he and many other Haitians propose reside in part in one set of policies and programs which can restore land and other riches of nature, and another set which can protect small-scale, sustainable agricultural production from agribusiness.