Source: IPS News

Women are still a small minority on Cuba’s hip hop scene. “If the situation is hard for us nationwide, imagine what it’s like in the eastern region, where this genre has very little recognition,” says Yaneidys Tamayo, leader of the group Las Positivas.

Tamayo, Irina Rodríguez and Orielis Mayet, who have the only all-woman rap group in Cuba, swim against the tide in Santiago de Cuba, a province at the eastern tip of the island marked by musical preferences that range from reggaeton to rumba and are directed at a public that is more interested in dancing than in hearing the messages these women want to send from the stage. read more

Source: IPS News

(IPS) – The lack of regulations for consulting indigenous communities in Bolivia on initiatives that affect their territories is at the heart of a dispute over a road to facilitate traffic from Brazil, which would run through an enormous tropical national park self-governed by indigenous communities.

The Bolivian government’s enthusiasm over the construction of roads that would make it possible for Brazil to transport goods to the Pacific Ocean has come under fire from academics and from native protesters who are marching from the Amazon jungle to La Paz. read more

Source: The Independent

With Gaddafi at large, a guerrilla war eroding the new powers is inevitable

Doomed always to fight the last war, we are recommitting the same old sin in Libya.

Muammar Gaddafi vanishes after promising to fight to the death. Isn’t that just what Saddam Hussein did? And of course, when Saddam disappeared and US troops suffered the very first losses from the Iraqi insurgency in 2003, we were told – by the US proconsul Paul Bremer, the generals, diplomats and the decaying television “experts” – that the gunmen of the resistance were “die-hards”, “dead-enders” who didn’t realise that the war was over. And if Gaddafi and his egg-headed son remain at large – and if the violence does not end – how soon will we be introduced once more to the “dead-enders” who simply will not understand that the lads from Benghazi are in charge and that the war is over? Indeed, within 15 minutes – literally – of my writing the above words (2pm yesterday), a Sky News reporter had re-invented “die-hards” as a definition for Gaddafi’s men. See what I mean? read more