From AP, Aug. 22: Close election in Chiapas spurs another protest TUXTLA GUTIERREZ, MEXICO – The dispute over Mexico’s presidential vote took a new twist Monday as a gubernatorial candidate backed by the ruling party vowed to protest a state… Read moreMexico’s electoral crisis: Chiapas next?
The ongoing indigenous uprising in Ontario perculates up into the New York Times, Aug. 17. The Times gets a B for at least including some historical context, but a failing grade for consistency, having largely ignored this crisis for months,… Read moreNew York Times notes Iroquois land struggle —at last
The 9,500 workers at Volkswagen’s giant plant in the state of Puebla went on strike Aug. 18 after rejecting the company’s offer of a 4.5% pay raise coupled with demands for increased “labor flexibility.” Talks remained stalled on Aug. 19,… Read moreMexico: labor struggles escalate
Some 60 masked and mostly armed men, including “porros” (provocaterus) and municipal police, took over the local office of the Oaxaca daily newspaper Noticias in the town of Santa Cruz Amilpas Aug. 20. The municipal government is in the hands… Read moreOaxaca: general strike, paramilitary backlash
From AP via the Houston Chronicle, Aug. 21: Volunteers plan to man Texas border SAN ANTONIO — Hundreds of volunteers plan to keep watch over the Texas-Mexico border near Laredo beginning Sept. 11, aiding the U.S. Border Patrol’s effort to… Read moreVigilantes plan 9-11 border mobilization
From New Jersey’s Herald News, Aug. 16, also online at DeleteTheBorder.org: Detainee report ‘too damning’ to release? Nearly eight months after the Department of Homeland Security said it would issue the first official report on the treatment of immigrants in… Read moreHomeland Security detainee report “too damning” to release?
On Aug. 15, at the Adalberto United Methodist Church in Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood, immigrant activist Elvira Arellano told supporters she would not report to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) office that day for deportation, as she had been… Read moreChicago deportation resister seeks church sanctuary
Sometimes you have to look at your opponent’s propaganda to get a realistic sense of your own side’s weaknesses—call it an inoculation against groupthink. A case in point is this Aug. 21 analysis of the recent court ruling on the… Read moreRuling in surveillance scandal headed for overturn?
Hard to say if this is more bizarre or terrifying. Talk about the banality of evil. What about the evil of banality? From Reuters, Aug. 21: MUMBAI, India – A new restaurant in India’s financial hub, named after Adolf Hitler… Read moreIndia’s Jews protest Hitler-themed restaurant
The growing repression in China against peasants struggling to keep their lands before the onslaught of “development”—and now against their lawyers—is clearly analogous to peasant struggles raging throughout Latin America. Note the reference to forced sterilizations of peasants in the… Read moreChina detains lawyers for peasant advocate
Irshad Manji, the notorious “Muslim Refusenik” who supposedly advocates a principled, pluralist and secular Islam, has an op-ed in the Aug. 16 New York Times—where she once again betrays her disturbing flirtation with the very imperialism that fuels the fundamentalist… Read moreIrshad Manji’s myopia
Lebanese scholar Gilbert Achcar writes via e-mail: “Many of you have certainly seen an interview allegedly done with [Hezbollah leader] Hassan Nasrallah by a Turkish radical left newpsaper… I have enquired about it, and a source in Beirut in close… Read moreCounterpunch prints “fraudulent” Nasrallah interview
