Marie-Monique Robin's investigation Death Squadrons: The French School helped shed light on the terrorist acts committed by the State during Argentina's Dirty War. Her new book, Our Daily Poison, investigates the pollutants that contaminate the production of food, and the corporations that want to cover them up.
On July 9, 2011 South Sudan is expected to become an independent state, Africa’s 54th. Prior to that date, much preparation must be done to establish a vigorous economy, stable government, and peaceful society.
Source: TVNZ
Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda had lost relevance, and the chance of reprisal attacks following the terrorist leader’s death are slim, says veteran journalist Robert Fisk.
Fisk, who interviewed bin Laden three times before the September 11 terror attacks, says he was little more than “a name and an icon”.
“He was never a hands-on person, he never planned operations,” Fisk told TV ONE’s Close Up programme.
“Secondly, he was a middle-aged man. He’d become rather vain, clearly. In his videotapes he began to wear embroidered clothes I noticed. He used to dress much more humbly.”
Source: Al Jazeera
Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s death is politically momentous for US president Barack Obama – witness the cheering crowds which gathered outside the White House even before his speech on Sunday night.
Its impact on al-Qaeda, though, is harder to measure.
Peter Bergen, an American journalist, said on CNN that bin Laden’s death marked “the end of the war on terror”. But many other analysts would disagree: Al-Qaeda, after all, is a very different organisation in 2011 than in 2001, with a new cadre of leaders and a wider range of affiliate groups.
Source: Al Jazeera
The Arab revolutions are not only shaking the structure of tyranny to the core – they are shattering many of the myths about the Arab region that have been accumulating for decades. Topping the list of dominant myths are those of Arab women as caged in, silenced, and invisible. Yet these are not the types of women that have emerged out of Tunisia, Egypt, or even ultra-conservative Yemen in the last few weeks and months.
Not only did women actively participate in the protest movements raging in those countries, they have assumed leadership roles as well. They organised demonstrations and pickets, mobilised fellow citizens, and eloquently expressed their demands and aspirations for democratic change.
Source: Truthout
Dispelling Donald Trump’s birther charges that Barack Obama is foreign-born, the president released his long-form birth certificate Wednesday. Politifact, the fact-checking site for politics, says its article about the issue (with a link to the certification of live birth) is the most popular item that it has ever published. The certificate and its release prove two things most people should already know: Obama is an American. And, as PBS host Tavis Smiley put it to MSNBC, the 2012 presidential race is shaping up to be “the ugliest, the nastiest, the most divisive, and the most racist in the history of this Republic.”
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