
Vandana Shiva: Food Sovereignty is the Need of the Hour
Two decades of corporate driven globalization has destroyed the biodiversity and cultural diversity of our indigenous food systems.
Two decades of corporate driven globalization has destroyed the biodiversity and cultural diversity of our indigenous food systems.
Source: Alternet
All eyes are on Iran. On December 28, as if from nowhere, protests broke out in Iran’s second most populous city, Mashhad – out in the far east, near the Turkmenistan and Afghanistan border. The protests moved with deliberate speed across the country, to Kermanshah in the west and Bandar Abbas in the south. Tehran was not spared, although it is not the epicentre of the protests. This is unlike the Green Movement of 2009, when Tehran’s reform minded citizens came onto the streets angry with what they saw as a stolen election. It is unlike the student uprisings of 1999, again centred in Tehran, when students protested over the closure of the reform newspaper Salam.
Source: Truthout
Forty years ago, a group of radical Black feminists who named themselves the Combahee River Collective released a statement defining their politics and describing their political work. The Combahee River Collective Statement has endured as a powerful document that clearly named the multiple oppressions that Black women faced due to their race, sex, class and sexual orientation; developed the idea of identity politics; and provided a key roadmap of the political work and organizing necessary to uproot all oppression.
Among Bloomberg’s many profitable activities is a convenient Bloomberg Billionaires Index that has just published its findings for 2017. It covers only the 500 richest people, and it proudly announces that they have increased their wealth by 1 trillion dollars in just one year. Their fortunes went up by 23% to top comfortable 5 trillion dollars (to put this in perspective, the US budget is now at 3.7 trillion). That obviously means an equivalent reduction for the rest of the population, which lost those trillion dollars.
2018 promises to be a decisive year for the future of all Palestinians and it will be a difficult one. Not only did the US pull out of the 'peace process', it is expected to do its utmost to jeopardize any Palestinian initiative aimed at holding Israel accountable for its 50-year-old illegal military occupation.
Ta’iz, Yemen was home to a vibrant, creative youth movement during the 2011 Arab Spring uprising. Young men and women organized massive demonstrations to protest the enrichment of entrenched elites as ordinary people struggled to survive. The young people were exposing the roots of one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world today.
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