About 150 people rallied outside the Ferguson Police Department on October 22 to demanding justice for the murdered unarmed Black teenager Michael Brown, and the arrest of the police officer who shot him, Darren Wilson.
Part of the National Day of Protest Against Police Brutality, similar protests were held in Sacramento, San Francisco, New York, among others.
The protests were organised by the Ferguson October movement, an African American-led movement demanding a halt to police vience against Black people.
United States
Malala Yousafzai, the 17-year-old Pakistani activist, has won a well-deserved Nobel Peace Prize, putting her and her amazing, tragic story back in the spotlight.
But as usual, the corporate media have taken this positive development and exploited it in the service of US imperialism.
The corporate media love talking about Malala's remarkable bravery and strength in standing up for girls' rights to education ― and highlight the brutality of the Taliban forces that tried to assassinate her on her school bus.
“Iraq is our main effort, and it has to be, and the things that we’re doing right now in Syria are being done primarily to shape the conditions in Iraq,” General Lloyd Austin, the US commander overseeing the air strikes against Iraq and Syria told an October 17 Washington press conference.
However, the first significant victory against the official enemy in the latest US-war in the Middle East ― the ultra-violent terrorist group that calls itself “the Islamic State” (IS) ― is being won in the Kurdish town of Kobane on the Syrian-Turkish border.
Richard Avedon People
Exhibition, Art Gallery of Western Australia
Until November 17.
More than ever, we live in the “society of the spectacle” that Guy Debord theorised in 1967.
Bourgeois commodification is augmented by reducing reality to a shallow image of itself. However, the spectacle itself “is the historical movement in which we are caught”.
Two months after a white cop shot an unarmed African American teenager, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri, and the police responded to angry demonstrations with a military-style assault, there was a mass four-day protest called “Ferguson October”.
The four-day action centred not only on Michael Brown, but on an epidemic of similar police killings nationwide.
Ferguson is part of the greater St Louis area, and marches and other events were also held in the city.
In transmitting President Richard Nixon's orders for a “massive” bombing of Cambodia in 1969, Henry Kissinger said: “Anything that flies on everything that moves.”
As Barack Obama ignites his seventh war against the Muslim world since he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the orchestrated hysteria and lies make one almost nostalgic for Kissinger's murderous honesty.
As a witness to the human consequences of aerial savagery — including the beheading of victims, their parts festooning trees and fields — I am not surprised by the disregard of memory and history, yet again.
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine released this statement on October 13.
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The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine expresses its solidarity with the Kurdish resistance in Kobane struggling to defend themselves and their community from the reactionary armed group, ISIS, whose entry into our region has been facilitated and supported by imperialist powers and their lackeys.
St Louis officer shoots unarmed Black teen ― yes, again
“Angry protests erupted again in St. Louis on Wednesday night after an 18-year-old man was shot and killed by an off-duty police officer ― reigniting tensions in a city still reeling from the killing of Mike Brown in nearby Ferguson in August …
“Things are looking positive and the wind is with us,” Major General Craig Orme, commander of Australian forces in the latest war in the Middle East, told AAP on October 11.
If the US-led military coalition has a strategy against its latest enemy, the terrorist gang that calls itself the “Islamic State” (IS), Orme was not revealing it.
“If they want to stay in one spot, we are very happy for them to do that,” he said. “We will just bomb them. When they do mass we will smack them and smack them hard.”
After speaking at the United Nations climate change summit on September 23, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro seized the chance to visit community leaders, local activists and grassroots groups in an event hosted by Hostos Community College of the South Bronx in New York City. About 1000 people attended the event, which was organised by Citgo, a subsidary of Venezuela's state-own oil company. Many arrived early to wait outside for good seats and to hold signs welcoming Maduro as “president of the people”. The Bronx community
Cuba said it will send nearly 300 more doctors and nurses to West Africa to help fight the Ebola epidemic, Al Jazeera reported on September 26.
The Cubans will work in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia, Regla Angulo, head of the Cuban medical relief agency said in a statement that day. Al Jazeera said: “The announcement means that up to 461 Cuban medical personnel would have been sent to help address the epidemic spreading across West Africa.
The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI
Betty Medsger
Knopf, 2014
596 pages, $46.95 (hb)
As far as burglaries go, this one was pretty audacious. On March 8, 1971, nine anti-Vietnam-war activists in Pennsylvania burgled the FBI. They stole secret files in the regional FBI office in the small town of Media.
With careful planning, a little luck and plenty of pluck, the amateur burglars exposed, for the first time, the FBI’s political spying and suppression of democratic dissent.
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