A heartwarming addendum to a horribly tragic story. Newsday‘s May 24 coverage of the funeral notes that the late Amber Sadiq was the product of mixed Pakistani-Dominican (and Muslim-Catholic) marriage. Repudiating New York’s usual tabloid-enflamed culture of law-enforcement-as-personal-vengeance, Amber’s father… Read moreWHY WE FIGHT
Top officials from Mexico’s official National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) say that 23 cases of sexual abuse and rape have been documented following the violent clash between protesters and police in San Salvador Atenco. At a press conference, CNDH inspector… Read moreMexico: abuse charges mount in Atenco case
On May 19, four Mapuche rights activists resumed their open-ended hunger strike at the Hernan Enriquez hospital in Temuco, in southern Chile’s Region IX (Araucania). Mapuche activists Juan Patricio Marileo Saravia, Florencio Jaime Marileo Saravia and Juan Carlos Huenulao Lienmil… Read moreChile: Mapuche resume hunger strike
After protesting for several weeks with no answer to their demands, on May 18 more than 1,000 Chilean high school students demonstrated in Santiago to press for free public transportation, free university entrance exams and improvements in the quality of… Read moreChile: police attack student marchers
Boogie for your right to defy gringo imperialism, y’all. From Reuters, May 23: CARACAS – Among the shabby high-rise tenements overlooking Venezuela’s capital, hip-hop beats rather than the usual gunfire kept the Caracas neighborhood of Pinto Salinas awake one night… Read moreVenezuela: the hip-hop revolution
From Upside Down World, May 24: The nullification of Occidental Petroleum’s oil-drilling contract by the Ecuadorian government has generated mixed reactions in the Americas. Ecuador’s oil minister revoked the California-based oil giant’s contract last week for allegedly not informing the… Read moreEcuador boots Oxy
A year after he was arrested on immigration charges, Posada Carriles is being investigated by a federal grand jury–but the media are no longer paying attention. From our sibling journal Upside Down World, May 24: Convicted terrorist Luis Posada Carriles… Read moreGrand jury probes Posada Carriles
Another restive ethnic group in Iran is making demands for culture and autonomy felt—and meeting with harsh repression. Following the Arabs of Khuzestan and the Kurds of Kordestan, now the Azeris—who, like the Kurds, had a short-lived independent state under… Read moreIran: Azeri uprising in Tabriz
A statement from the New York-based Campaign for Peace and Democracy: Just as it did before its invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration is manufacturing a climate of fear in order to prepare public opinion for another act of aggression… Read moreIran: Neither US aggression nor theocratic repression
This one is really funny. The ultra-conservative hyper-interventionist Islamophobes at the oddly named Human Events managed to score an interview with Reza Pahlavi, son of the late Shah of Iran and pretender to the throne. But this self-promoting monarchist restorationist,… Read moreIran: monarchist pretender not reactionary enough for neocons!
From CNN, May 23: Wave of violence in Afghanistan Fighting this week in Afghanistan has been among the most intense since the U.S. invasion more than four years ago, with up to 300 people reported killed since last Wednesday. The… Read more300 killed in one week in Afghanistan —including civilians
The vote for secession in Montenegro is being posed as the final chapter in the disintegration of Yugoslavia that began in 1990 with Slovenia’s vote for seccession. Technically, “Yugoslavia” ceased to exist in 2003 when what was left of it… Read moreMontenegro secession: Balkans still re-balkanizing
