Source: MR Zine

The way Egyptian scholar and researcher Samir Amin sees it, nothing will be the same as before in the Arab world: protest movements will challenge both the internal social order of Arab countries and their places in the regional and global political chessboard.

Hassane Zerrouky: How do you see what’s happening in the Arab world six months after the fall of Ben Ali in Tunisia and that of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt?

Samir Amin: Nothing will be the same as before — that is certain.  That is because the uprising isn’t only about toppling the reigning dictators, but it is an enduring protest movement challenging, at the same time, both various dimensions of the internal social order, especially glaring inequalities in income distribution, and the international order, the place of Arab countries in the global economic order — in other words seeking an end to their submission to neoliberalism and the US and NATO diktats in the global political order.  This movement, whose ambition is also to democratize society, demanding social justice and a new national and (I’d say) anti-imperialist social and economic policy, will therefore last for years — though to be sure it will have its ups and downs, advances and retreats — for it won’t be able to find its own solution in a matter of weeks or even months. read more

Source: Democracy Now

After a lightning fast advance by opposition fighters who poured in Tripoli with surprising ease, much of the city appears to be under rebel control although heavy fighting is underway in many areas. Al Jazeera reports that clashes are continuing in the capital, with the rebels facing off with tanks near Libyan leader Col. Muammar Gaddafi’s compound. Three of Gaddafi’s sons have reportedly been taken into rebel custody and the presidential guard has surrendered. We go to Tripoli for an update from Robin Waudo, an International Red Cross spokesperson, who is part of a small team able to come to their office amid fighting and distribute medical aid for as many as 5,000 people who have reportedly been wounded. read more

Source: The Nation

I keep hearing comparisons between the London riots and riots in other European cities—window smashing in Athens or car bonfires in Paris. And there are parallels, to be sure: a spark set by police violence, a generation that feels forgotten.

But those events were marked by mass destruction; the looting was minor. There have, however, been other mass lootings in recent years, and perhaps we should talk about them too. There was Baghdad in the aftermath of the US invasion—a frenzy of arson and looting that emptied libraries and museums. The factories got hit too. In 2004 I visited one that used to make refrigerators. Its workers had stripped it of everything valuable, then torched it so thoroughly that the warehouse was a sculpture of buckled sheet metal. read more