Your 14-year-old daughter is dumped on your freezing front lawn in a state of chemically induced incoherence with her shoes off and frost stuck in her hair. She tells you she was raped. You hear her 13-year-old best friend was also raped that same night.
Your daughter is then bullied as a tape of the incident passes around her high school. You wait for the indictments and some semblance of justice, but one of the accused is a football star from one of the area's most prominent and politically connected families.
-
-
Several thousands of people marched and rallied in the United States’ capital on October 26 in protest against the mass surveillance of almost all Americans and hundreds of millions of citizens of other countries. The huge Big Brother program, conducted by the US National Security Agency (NSA), has been exposed by Edward Snowdon, considered a hero by those demonstrating. Beginning in May last, Snowden’s trove of revelations keeps coming through releases by Glenn Greenwald in the British Guardian. ’Thank you’ -
Murder in Mississippi John Safran Penguin, 2013 368 pages. There probably has never been a true-crime book quite like Murder in Mississippi. Melbourne-based “documentary filmmaker of sorts” John Safran filmed a segment for his most recent TV show Race Relations that featured Mississippian white supremacist Richard Barrett. Barrett took legal action, however, preventing any footage of him being used. -
Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison on August 7 for leaking classified US government documents to WikiLeaks. These documents revealed evidence of war crimes and human rights abuses carried out at the behest of the US government. Diplomatic cables leaked by Manning also show the lengths to which the Bush administration was prepared to go to ensure that those responsible for such crimes would remain unreachable under international law. Immunity -
The bid by Republicans to defeat President Barack Obama’s health care program by shutting down the government and threatening to cause a default ended in failure. The result opened fissures within the Republican Party between its “moderate” right wing and the further right-wing Tea Party. The difference is not over “Obamacare”, which the whole Republican Party is against, but over the Tea Party’s tactics. The Tea Party drove the failed effort to force its way. So what does the Tea Party represent? -
Naming the Dead is a project run by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, a not-for-profit research organisation based in London. The project aims to identify those killed in CIA drone strikes on Pakistan on its website. The site said: “Over the past nine years, the tribal region of Pakistan’s north west has been hit by hundreds of drone attacks ... Missiles launched from these high-tech, unmanned aircraft have hit homes, cars, schools, shops and gatherings.
-
“It’s a massive display of powerful corporation dick-shaking,” British-born Tamil singer MIA said in response to being sued by the National Football League in the United States over her performance at last year's Superbowl performance. “They want me on my knees and say sorry so they can slap me on my wrist.”
-
Discussing the last-minute deal in the United States Congress to avoid triggering a debt default, Gail Collins, a columnist in the New York Times wrote: “Well, um, yippie. Wow. “Congress has decided it won’t trigger a global financial crisis out of pure pique. Can’t get any better than that.” Much could be written about the antics of the far right in the Republican Party on display for the world these past weeks. -
Amid bitter recriminations between the Democrats and Republicans over the partial shutdown of the government and the Republican threat of forcing of a United States government default, it is easy to forget what their policies have in common. Both have intervened to protect the interests of the capitalist class as a whole in the aftermath of the Great Recession at the expense of the working class. This is indisputable given statistics showing profits are soaring while real wages are declining. Both parties have implemented policies that cut the social wage for working people. -
This month's battles over the budget and the Tea Party Republicans' fanaticism about the health care law obscure the two parties' common commitment to austerity, the US Socialist Worker said in an October 1 editorial. It is posted below. * * * The federal government officially went into shutdown mode at midnight on October 1 --in another spectacular display of dysfunction in the highest offices of the "world's greatest democracy". -
Washington’s refusal to allow Venezuela's President Nicolás Maduro to over-fly its colony of Puerto Rico on September 19 attracted little attention in the North American and European media. But in Latin America this arrogant gesture drew immediate outrage. It recalled the July 2 denial by four European countries — France, Italy, Spain and Portugal — of landing and refuelling rights and passage through their airspace to Bolivia’s president Evo Morales while he was returning home from a trip to Moscow. -
Ecuador’s foreign ministry announced on September 20 that the US has seemingly denied visas to a delegation set to travel to the United Nations General Assembly in New York, RT.com said the next day. The Ecuadorians were planning to present their case in an ongoing dispute against Chevron-Texaco. The ministry said the visas for the five Ecuadorian nationals were returned by the US Embassy in Quito “without any explanation”.