Obama’s Test on Iran
The signing of the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty signals a further shift in the focus of
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Danish Brewers Fight for Right to Drink Beer on the Job
For over a century workers at At Carlsberg Brewery
The Politics of Hungary’s Folk Music: Beyond Nationalism and Xenophobia
You hear them in Los Angeles, New York, Paris and Berlin: Punk bands, "world musicians" and cabarets filch Roma, or Gypsy, Jewish and Balkan melodies, and casually weave them into other musical traditions. In these metropolises, Eastern European folk music roosts on the margins, threading together broader Balkan, Jewish and Roma themes to survive. Yet on the edge of this musical map beats Budapest, a folk boomtown with thriving Magyar, Roma and the seedlings of the neo-klezmer scene. In a town where established folk communities are the norm, do they ever cross-pollinate?Photo by Daniel Spitzberg
Social Fault Lines: The Disaster of Poverty in Haiti
Laura Wagner, a Post-quake tent city
Bad Aid: Throw Your Arms Around the World
In December 1984, I walked into the HMV store on London's Oxford Street to spend a little discretionary money on an LP. Other albums drew me, but one had an advantage. It combined the talents of all the major "Top of the Pops" singers onto one song. Given the standards of British pop at the time (leaving aside Scritti Politti's "Jacques Derrida" and perhaps the Bronski Beat's "Smalltown Boy"), the diminishing marginal returns at the cash register were held in check with only one purchase. It had to be Bob Geldof's Do They Know It's Christmas?
Martin Luther King’s Death & Other Uncomfortable Truths
Forty two-years ago, on April 4, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on the balcony of a Memphis motel as he prepared to support striking Black sanitation workers there. Although James Earl Ray initially confessed to the crime - he later recanted - doubts about what happened persist. In the late 1990s, former FBI agent Donald Wilson, who investigated the murder, presented evidence he claimed to have found in Ray's car - slips of paper that support charges of a conspiracy involving federal agents.