United States ambassador to Syria Robert Ford is quite a feisty diplomat. He shows up unannounced and uninvited at various hot spots in the country, greeted with varying degrees of enthusiasm and, oftentimes, anger.
Source: The Guardian
A Brazilian judge has ordered construction to be suspended on a controversial hydroelectric dam in the Amazon.
In his ruling, Judge Carlos Castro Martins said that all working on the Belo Monte dam that interfered with the natural course of the Xingu river should be halted because of the risk that fish stocks would be damaged.
The £7bn dam would reputedly be the third largest in the world, after China’s Three Gorges and the Itaipu project on the Brazil-Paraguay border.
Over the last two decades or more, Republicans have been denouncing as “class warfare” any attempt at criticizing and restraining their mean one-sided system of capitalist financial expropriation.
More than demanding any particular policy proposal, the occupation is reminding Wall Street what real democracy looks like: a discussion among people, not a contest of money.
Source: Democracy Now!
The “Occupy Wall Street” protests in the financial district took a dramatic turn on Saturday when protesters tried to march across the Brooklyn Bridge. When police arrested 700 of the demonstrators, the event quickly turned into one of the largest arrests of non-violent protesters in recent history. Some protesters claim police lured them onto oncoming traffic on the bridge’s roadway; others said they did not hear instructions from police telling them to use the pedestrian walkway. Meanwhile, similar “Occupation” protests have spread to other cities, including Chicago, Boston and Los Angeles, where hundreds of protesters are now camped out in front of City Hall. We host a roundtable discussion with Marisa Holmes, an organizer with the main organizing group of Occupy Wall Street, called the General Assembly, Marina Sitrin, an attorney who is part of Occupy Wall Street’s legal working group, and Laurie Penny, a writer and journalist who reported on protests in London earlier this summer.
El periodista de Le Monde diplomatique, autor de En finir avec l’eurolibéralisme (“Terminar con el euroliberalismo”, 2008), y de numerosos libros sobre política y economía europea, se expresa sobre el oscuro porvenir de Grecia y de la zona Euro.
Bernard Cassen fue director general de Le Monde diplomatique desde 1996 hasta 2008, años en que este colectivo periodístico se destacó por tener una participación decisiva en el surgimiento de nuevos movimientos sociales. En 1998 fue uno de los fundadores de la Asociación por la Tasación de las Transacciones Financieras y por la Ayuda al Ciudadano (ATTAC) que, recuperando una idea del economista James Tobin, proponía un impuesto sobre las transacciones de cambio y así recaudar dinero para combatir situaciones de pobreza. En el año 2000, Cassen abrió las puertas de su pequeña oficina de Paris para diseñar junto a otras organizaciones sociales el Foro Social Mundial (FSM), que debido a su insistencia fue llevado a cabo por primera vez en Porto Alegre. Cassen es todavía hoy presidente honorario de ATTAC, pero la asociación ha ampliado su campo de acción para concientizar sobre el poder que la esfera financiera ejerce sobre todo los aspectos de la vida política, económica, social y cultural.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019