For weeks in Thailand armed troops have encircled thousands of anti-government protesters who in turn have been busy fashioning makeshift fortifications with tires and cement blocks. The equally entrenched opposing forces are gearing up for what many see as an inevitable confrontation.
The 40th anniversary of the original Earth Day is upon us, and many seasoned environmentalists are nostalgic for the heady days of the 1970s, when 20 million people hit in the streets and eventually got Richard Nixon to sign a series of ambitious environmental laws. Those laws managed to clean up waterways that were turning into sewers, saved the bald eagle from the ravages of DDT, and began to clear the air, which in the early 1960s was so polluted that people were passing out all over our cities.
Anyone who saw the episode of the BBC documentary Tropic of Cancer last month in which journalist Simon Reeve traveled across
This year's Roma Day on April 8th marked the twenty-year anniversary since the Gypsies of East Europe freely acknowledged their ethnicity. The day has been celebrated throughout the region in gypsy style with music and dance, skewered pork or lamb and plenty of drink as means of celebrating life. The day memorializes the roughly one million Roma exterminated by the Nazis in what has been commonly dubbed the forgotten holocaust, though which Roma scholars have termed Porrajmos, the devouring.Roma at Pata Rat, Romania Garbage Dump
Soldiers armed with live and rubber bullets attacked the peaceful pro-democracy Red Shirt protests in the centre of Bangkok on April 10. At least 12 people, including a Japanese Reuters reporter, have been shot dead. Tanks were used against peaceful pro-democracy demonstrators. Hundreds more people have been injured. Some soldiers have been taken prisoner and weapons seized. Red Shirt protesters outside Bangkok have seized many provincial headquarters. Protests in Thailand
Source: Truthdig
My search for the I.F. Stone of the 21st century took me to the campus of the
The university, long shackled with a reputation for conservatism, might be considered an odd place to look for a potential successor to Stone, a crusading liberal journalist ostracized by the mainstream media during the Cold War who nevertheless broke major stories in his own I.F. Stone’s Weekly. But USC is changing. And even the old conservative USC produced progressives such as my personal hero, Carey McWilliams, who was editor of The Nation from 1955 to 1975. Truthdig’s editor, Robert Scheer, is on the Annenberg faculty.
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