As popular organizations wage peaceful struggles against paramilitary violence, tourism projects that will displace campesinos, and illegal land takeovers, Pedro Faro and his colleagues at the Fray Bartolome de las Casas Human Rights Center are one of the few reliable sources on human rights abuses.
The Story of Electronics employs the Story of Stuff style to explore the high-tech revolution’s collateral damage—25 million tons of e-waste and counting, poisoned workers and a public left holding the bill. Host Annie Leonard takes viewers from the mines and factories where our gadgets begin to the horrific backyard recycling shops in China where many end up. The film concludes with a call for a green “race to the top” where designers compete to make long-lasting, toxic-free products that are fully and easily recyclable.
Source: The Independent
Why are the world’s governments bothering? Why are they jetting to Cancun next week to discuss what to do now about global warming? The vogue has passed. The fad has faded. Global warming is yesterday’s apocalypse. Didn’t somebody leak an email that showed it was all made up? Doesn’t it sometimes snow in the winter? Didn’t Al Gore get fat, or something?
Alas, the biosphere doesn’t read Vogue. Nobody thought to tell it that global warming is so 2007. All it knows is three facts. 2010 is globally the hottest year since records began. 2010 is the year humanity’s emissions of planet-warming gases reached its highest level ever. And exactly as the climate scientists predicted, we are seeing a rapid increase in catastrophic weather events, from the choking of Moscow by gigantic unprecedented forest fires to the drowning of one quarter of Pakistan.
Source: The Real News Network
Leo Panitch: US created financial crisis and European banks turned the Irish Miracle into a nightmare
Leo Panitch is the Canada Research Chair in Comparative Political Economy and a Distinguished Research Professor of Political Science at York University in Toronto. Panitch is also the author of “Global Capitalism and American Empire” and his most recent release “American Empire and the Political Economy of International Finance”.
In the midst of a cholera epidemic that has killed a reported 1,300 Haitians, the U.S., Canada and the United Nations insisted that Haiti’s elections go ahead yesterday, as scheduled. However elections might not be the most accurate term for the process by which a new Haitian president and lawmakers will be selected at the polls.
Over this past weekend Brazilians celebrated the annual Black Consciousness day, commemorating the anniversary of the death of Zumbi dos Palmares, Brazil’s most important black hero. Brazil is South America’s largest country and home to the largest black population outside of Africa.
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