Source: The Independent

The world is watching China’s economic surge with understandable awe – while politely and passively ignoring the country’s ecological disintegration.

When the journalist Jonathan Watts was a child, he was told, like so many of us: “If everyone in China jumps at exactly the same time, it will shake the earth off its axis and kill us all.” Three decades later, he stood in the grey sickly smog of Beijing, wheezing and hacking uncontrollably after a short run, and thought – the Chinese jump has begun. He had travelled 100,000 miles criss-crossing China, from the rooftop of Tibet to the deserts of Inner Mongolia and everywhere, he discovered that the Chinese state was embarked on a massive program of environmental destruction. It has turned whole rivers poisonous to the touch, rendered entire areas cancer-ridden, transformed a fertile area twice the size of Britain into desert – and probably even triggered the worst earthquake in living memory. read more

Source: Foreign Policy in Focus

Infamous for fomenting mass disobedience on bicycles during the Copenhagen climate Summit, touring the UK recruiting a rebel clown army, running courses in post-capitalist culture and falling in love with utopias, the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination exists somewhere between art and activism, poetry and politics. The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination is not an institution or a group, not a network nor an NGO, but an affinity of friends who recognize the beauty of collective creative disobedience. It treats insurrection as an art, and art as a means of preparing for the coming insurrection. read more

Source: IPS News

One billion dollars and just over four years after Boeing won a contract to build a “virtual fence” on the Arizona-Mexico border, the high-tech project was canceled last week by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) amid widespread recognition that it has been a failure.

The Secure Border Initiative Network (also known as SBInet) was created by the administration of George W. Bush in November 2005 to track down undocumented migrants crossing the 3,200-kilometre land border between the U.S. and Mexico. Estimates of the number of people that make it across range from 400,000 to one million a year, many of whom hike miles of uncharted northbound trails and roads through steep ravines and hills of the desert to evade border patrols. read more