Category: media
The 72-hour ceasefire in Gaza has entered its final day. Talks are ongoing to extend the truce, but no agreement has been reached. Palestinian and Israeli officials are in Egypt, however have not held face-to-face negotiations on securing a lasting ceasefire. Meanwhile, Gaza is in a state of devastation and ruin. Close to 1,900 Palestinians were killed during the 29-day conflict, including at least 1,354 civilians, of whom 415 are children. More than 10,000 people have been injured. There are 373,000 children who require psychological support. Some 500,000 Palestinians have been displaced with 187,000 still living in U.N. emergency shelters. An estimated 10,000 homes have been completely destroyed, and 30,000 homes partially destroyed. On the Israeli side, 64 soldiers were killed in Gaza, and three civilians in Israel. We go to Jerusalem to speak with Christopher Gunness, a spokesman for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: The 72-hour ceasefire in Gaza has entered its final 24 hours. Talks are ongoing to extend the truce, but no agreement has been reached. Palestinian and Israeli officials are in Egypt but have not held face-to-face negotiations on securing a lasting ceasefire.
Meanwhile, Gaza is in a state of devastation and ruin. Close to 1,900 Palestinians were killed during the 29-day offensive, including at least 1,354 civilians, of whom 415 are children. More than 10,000 people have been injured.
AMY GOODMAN: There are 373,000 children who require psychological support. Half a million Palestinians have been displaced, with at least 187,000 still living in U.N. emergency shelters. Ten thousand homes have been completely destroyed, 30,000 homes partially wrecked. Meanwhile, 64 Israeli soldiers were killed in Gaza, three civilians in Israel.
We go now to Jerusalem, where we’re joined by Christopher Gunness, spokesperson for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees.
Can you talk about the devastation on the ground right now in Gaza, Chris?
CHRISTOPHER GUNNESS: Look, it’s devastation which is both physical and emotional. What we’re seeing physically, you’ve seen on your TV sets. And unfortunately, we need to get scores of site engineers out into the field before I can make an empirical determination and tell you exactly how many homes have been destroyed, but there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence. And the fact that people are leaving our shelters, going out and then coming back suggests that they’re going back to destroyed homes. And don’t forget, these were homes they were told to leave, in leaflets that were dropped by the Israeli army. Well, it now would appear, at least from this anecdotal evidence, that a lot of those homes—and we estimate the homes of about 10,000 people—have been destroyed or damaged. So, we’re now in a situation where this catastrophic human displacement crisis is morphing into something equally disturbing for us, which is a huge homelessness crisis.
Panel members said phone data had limited role preventing terrorism in testimony before Senate judiciary committee
- Spencer Ackermanin Washington
- com,Tuesday 14 January 2014 21.44 GMT
excerpt…
The members of president Barack Obama’s surveillance review panel on Tuesday rejected some of the central contentions offered by the National Security Agency for its bulk collection of phone records, including the program’s potential usefulness in preventing the 9/11 attacks.
Testifying before the Senate judiciary committee, members of the panel said that restricting the NSA is necessary in order to rebalance the competing values of liberty and security.
Richard Clarke, who was the White House’s counter-terrorism czar on 9/11, echoed the 9/11 Commission in saying that the biggest obstacle to preventing the terrorist attack was not the NSA collecting an insufficient amount of data, but a failure to share information already collected.
“If the information that the federal agencies had at the time had been shared among the agencies, then one of them, the FBI, could have gone to the Fisa Court and could have in a very timely manner gotten a warrant to monitor” US-based al-Qaida conspirators, Clarke told the Senate judiciary committee…
British Psychological Society research digest:
‘You’ve probably experienced this. You’re in the middle of telling your friend a story when his eyes flick across to his phone. Perhaps he even picks it up, checks the screen. “Sorry, go on,” he says. But your flow is interrupted. And you know his mind is at least half elsewhere.
Shalini Misra and her team approached 100 pairs of people (109 women; average age 33) in cafes across Washington DC and neighbouring districts. They asked them to chat for ten minutes at a table in the cafe about a trivial topic (plastic festive trees) or about the most meaningful events of the past year. For each pair, the researchers observed from a discreet distance and checked whether either party put a mobile device on the table, or held one in their hand. After ten minutes was up, each person in each pair was asked to fill out a few questionnaires about the conversation and their partner.
Feelings of “interconnectedness” (rated by agreement with statements like “I felt close to my conversation partner”) were reduced for pairs in which a mobile device was placed on the table or held by one of them. Similarly, “empathetic concern” (measured by items like “To what extent did your conversation partner make an effort to understand your thoughts and feelings about the topic you discussed?”) was rated lower by pairs in which a mobile device was brought into view. The topic of conversation made no difference to these results, but the reduction in empathetic concern associated with the presence of a mobile device was especially pronounced for pairs of people who were in closer relationships, perhaps because their expectations about the interaction were higher…’
::: click on through to the results @ BPS research digest :::
August 2014
… assault on Gaza; Egypt’s workers struggle on; Syria’s new artists in exile; IT,
how much for your data? rise of the web documentary;
Piketty in the light of Marx; Latin America’s very modern coups;
Balkans, hope after the rains, Algeria’s frustrated youth;
Vietnam’s Costa del Cam Ranh;
Gabriel Garcia Marquezr emembered …
::: click cover to access :::
Russia has lost contact with its only missile detection satellite in geostationary orbit above the US. The satellite was originally supposed to operate until at least 2017, but began malfunctioning shortly after its launch in 2012. Russia still has two remaining missile detection satellites in elliptical orbits around the planet, but they are reportedly able to monitor US missile activity …click story for more @ the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute
:::::::: <<< >>> ::::::::
What is the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute?
The Global Catastrophic Risk Institute (GCRI) is a nonprofit think tank working on the topic of global catastrophic risk. GCRI was founded in 2011 by Seth Baum and Tony Barrett. GCRI is geographically decentralized, meaning that it has no central headquarters and its affiliates are located in many places. GCRI works with researchers from many academic disciplines and professionals from many sectors.
As of July 2013, GCRI is a project of the fiscal sponsorship organization Social and Environmental Entrepreneurs.
George Monbiot’s SPERI Annual Lecture, hosted by the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Sheffield, 2014.
‘…If we surrender to the financial agenda and say, “This market-led neoliberalism thing is the way forward,” then we shift social values. Environmentalists are among the last lines of defence against the gradual societal shift towards extrinsic values. If we don’t stand up and say, “We do not share those values, our values are intrinsic values. We care about people. We care about the natural world. We are embedded in our communities and the people around us and we want to protect them, not just ourselves. We are not going to be selfish. This isn’t about money”, who else is going to do it?’
Palestinian death toll exceeds 1,000, medics say
More than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed in the Israel-Gaza conflict, according to Palestinian medical officials.
The news comes as foreign ministers from seven nations called for an extension of the 12-hour ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, according to Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister.
“All of us call on the parties to extend the military ceasefire that is currently underway,” Mr Fabius told reporters, following a meeting that included the foreign ministers of Britain, France, Qatar, Germany, Italy, Turkey and the United States.
Israel’s military pledged to hold fire for 12 hours from 8am (0500 GMT), but will continue searching for tunnels used by militants. The Islamist group Hamas, which dominates Gaza, said that all Palestinian factions would adhere by the short ceasefire.
Meanwhile, Gaza health officials said rescue workers have so far gathered 40 bodies from under rubble since the truce started. Eighteen members of a family died from tank shelling near Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip shortly before the ceasefire begun, the Gaza Health Ministry stated.
Hatred as violence spreads to West Bank – video
25 July 2014
Is this the start of the third intifada?
25 July 2014
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- Gaza conflict: 12-hour truce as deaths top 900 bbc.co.uk
- Gaza crisis: Israelis and Palestinians observe 12-hour cease theguardian.com
July 22, 2014 |
On last night’s Daily Show, every time Jon Stewart uttered the word “Israel,” his team of correspondents started to yell at him. “Self-hating Jew!” one screamed in his face.
“Obviously there are many strong opinions on this issue,” Stewart said. “But just merely mentioning Israel or questioning in any way the effectiveness or humanity of Israel’s policies is not the same thing as being pro-Hamas.”
Watch below:
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A deleted social media post by a separatist militia leader has led to accusations that pro-Russian rebels in Ukraine are to blame for the Malaysia Airlines crash that has left at least 295 people dead.
Igor Girkin, who also goes by the nom de guerre Strelkov, is reported to have claimed that his forces shot down a plane in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine at 5.50pm (GMT+4), shortly before reports emerged the passenger jet was missing.
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Australia is pursuing draconian measures to deter people without visas from entering the country by boat.
In doing so, it is failing in its obligation under international accords to protect refugees fleeing persecution.
The New York Times, July 2014.
Bestselling author and researcher Jon Kabat-Zinn explores how mindfulness-based stress reduction can help you to go beyond the self, to identify and alleviate suffering in others. This clip is from the “Practicing Mindfulness & Compassion” conference on March 8, 2013. The Greater Good Science Center co-hosted this event.
Jon Kabat-Zinn is Professor of Medicine Emeritus and creator of the Stress Reduction Clinic and the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Kabat-Zinn was a student of Zen Master Seung Sahn and a founding member of Cambridge Zen Center.
艺术界 LEAP : 27 INTRO…’In this issue’s cover feature we see artists in rural Beijing in the mid-1990s employing queerness as means to further marginalize themselves, and with others in the past couple years, to stand out among their peers and predecessors. Yet given the paucity of queer art and artists here at home, we also look beyond these borders: Douglas Crimp walks us through the queer heyday of 1970s New York, Travis Jeppesen peers into the queer gaze of experimental film elsewhere in Asia, and Cosmin Costinas and Chantal Wong elucidate issues of sexuality in Hong Kong and their roots in race and urbanization. Finally, we examine queer art on the Mainland, only to discover that sometimes, appearances deceive. Bisecting these four articles are a peppering of artworks from Jaanus Samma, Wu Tsang, Wang Taocheng, and Trevor Yeung…
Filling out the middle section of the magazine are two features on rising young artists Qiu Xiaofei and He Xiangyu. What we see in the practice of Qiu is both a reverence for and avoidance of the past that in the present find a rational reconciliation by way of the artist’s granting greater autonomy to the canvas. He Xiangyu, meanwhile, distances himself from his previously “big” art, returning to inner reality and bringing painting, sensation, and the body together on the same plane.
In the top section of the magazine, we recount the Art Basel Hong Kong Salon “The Gift of Tongues,” wherein LEAP deputy editor-in-chief Einar Engström set out together with curators Pauline J. Yao and Anthony Yung to delineate the intersections of art and language as seen, and heard, in the practices of Chow Chun Fai and Xu Tan…’
More footage emerges from the Sri Lankan civil war, but this time, journalist Callum Macrae says, it is “amongst the worst I have ever seen.”
The footage appears to show Sri Lankan soldiers sexually violating the dead bodies of female Tamil Tiger fighters. In two cases the dead have serious head wounds – possibly a sign that they were executed.
Ahead of the UN Human Rights Council vote, Channel 4 News also aired an interview with a Sri Lankan doctor, who stayed in Sri Lanka’s “No Fire Zone” at the end of the civil war to care for the injured.
He was imprisoned at the end of the war, and, he says, offered his freedom if he agreed to deny that human rights violations had been carried out by the Sri Lankan military.
Now free, he told Channel 4 News of the horror of trying to care for the wounded elderly and women, as food and medical supplies ran out and the government shelled hospitals.
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His protégée Rebekah Brooks may have been spared, but the mogul faces a police grilling, more possible charges against News Corp from Scotland Yard, and a looming US Senate probe…
When Rupert Murdoch flew into London as the phone-hacking allegations exploded in 2011, he was asked for his top priority. “This one,” he said, gesturing at Rebekah Brooks. He got his wish this week when she was spared by a jury, but Murdoch is expected back in the city to face dozens of new burning priorities, many of which threaten to diminish or even destroy his newspaper empire.
It can now be reported that the FBI has copies of at least 80,000 emails taken from the servers at News Corp in New York. These messages, including those sent up the chain of command by Brooks, were not part of the mass deletion that was ordered in London when it became clear that police officers were soon going to be searching for evidence of a vast criminal conspiracy…
:::: more @ the Daily Beast :::
Sonja Lyubomirsky, PhD, examines happiness and how we can use our minds to better handle life’s challenges…
AMY GOODMAN: From disease to addiction, parenting to attention deficit disorder, Canadian physician and bestselling author Gabor Maté’s work focuses on the centrality of early childhood experiences to the development of the brain, and how those experiences can impact everything from behavioral patterns to physical and mental illness. While the relationship between emotional stress and disease, and mental and physical health more broadly, is often considered controversial within medical orthodoxy, Dr. Maté argues too many doctors seem to have forgotten what was once a commonplace assumption, that emotions are deeply implicated in both the development of illness, addictions and disorders, and in their healing.
Dr. Maté is the bestselling author of four books: When the Body Says No: Understanding the Stress-Disease Connection; Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do about It; and, with Dr. Gordon Neufeld,Hold on to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More than Peers; his latest is called In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction.
In our first conversation, Dr. Maté talked about his work as the staff physician at the Portland Hotel in Vancouver, Canada, a residence and harm reduction facility in Downtown Eastside, a neighborhood with one the densest concentrations of drug addicts in North America. The Portland hosts the only legal injection site in North America, a center that’s come under fire from Canada’s Conservative government…
DR. GABOR MATÉ: When people are mistreated, stressed or abused, their brains don’t develop the way they ought to. It’s that simple. And unfortunately, my profession, the medical profession, puts all the emphasis on genetics rather than on the environment, which, of course, is a simple explanation. It also takes everybody off the hook.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean, it takes people off the hook?
DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, if people’s behaviors and dysfunctions are regulated, controlled and determined by genes, we don’t have to look at child welfare policies, we don’t have to look at the kind of support that we give to pregnant women, we don’t have to look at the kind of non-support that we give to families, so that, you know, most children in North America now have to be away from their parents from an early age on because of economic considerations. And especially in the States, because of the welfare laws, women are forced to go find low-paying jobs far away from home, often single women, and not see their kids for most of the day. Under those conditions, kids’ brains don’t develop the way they need to…
::::::::
“…if you look at the preponderance of ADD in North America now and the three millions of kids in the States that are on stimulant medication and the half-a-million who are on anti-psychotics, what they’re really exhibiting is the effects of extreme stress, increasing stress in our society, on the parenting environment. Not bad parenting. Extremely stressed parenting, because of social and economic conditions. And that’s why we’re seeing such a preponderance…”
::::click here for piece in full @ AlterNet::::
This is a record of a supposed ‘native title’ meeting staged by the iron ore miner, Fortescue Metals Group (FMG).
ps. greetings to our Washington DC based followers – Hisham, Nancy, Eric, Jonathan F, Dan, Bob G. et al…Good luck with the Abbott Junta invasion…we’d rather not have him back…any room for him @ Guantanamo?
Current issue: June 2014
… Ukraine, behind the barricades;Israel/Palestine, talks fail, can sanctions work?Latin America, all eyes to the left; Hungary’s turn to the Orient; Japan, islanders against nuclear; TTIP 7-page special report; World Cup, forgetting the fans; counting the cost of sleep; it ain’t what you say… and more…
::: just click cover shot to access :::
Frame grab shows an NBC News Exclusive interview with Brian Williams and Edward Snowden, excerpted from the May 28, 2014 TV primetime special. (AFP Photo / NBC NEWS / Handout)
“…You know, and this is a key question that the 9/11 Commission considered. And what they found, in the post-mortem, when they looked at all of the classified intelligence from all of the different intelligence agencies, they found that we had all of the information we needed as an intelligence community, as a classified sector, as the national defense of the United States to detect this plot,” Snowden said. “We actually had records of the phone calls from the United States and out. The CIA knew who these guys were. The problem was not that we weren’t collecting information, it wasn’t that we didn’t have enough dots, it wasn’t that we didn’t have a haystack, it was that we did not understand the haystack that we have…”
With the disappearance of an airplane high up in its skies the mysterious region that is Southeast Asia re-appeared in our line of sight. Have we also lost touch with the complex world of art from this region? The forms Southeast Asian art takes reveal feelings familiar to Chinese artists: contempt for bureaucracy, tension with Western contemporary art rhetoric, a reluctant embrace of and distance to quotidian social reality, and a sidestepping around modernist painting.
In this issue’s cover feature, we invite leading scholars from the region to elucidate these peculiarities and others: art historian T.K. Sabapathy recalls four seminal art happenings from the 1970s; David Teh proposes a rubric for video art; Zineng Wang offers an overview of ethnic Chinese painters; Iola Lenzi delineates the roots of conceptual art; and Alia Swastika considers the governance of Singapore over a contemporary art otherwise informed by a densely plural cultural context.
For this issue’s artist feature, Fang Tze-Hsu peeks behind the screen of Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen’s practice, which since 2009 has gradually generated work less and less narrative in nature. This issue also sees the introduction of our new experimental and alternative features, here discussing the state of street art in Hong Kong, the Treasure Hill movement in Taipei, and the latest instant-auction craze in the Mainland.
::: simply click cover shot for more 艺术界 LEAP 26 :::
A direct consequence of Rupert Murdoch installing a former News Ltd employee as PM of Australia, is that we the people are being harassed, berated and bullied by a sneering, lying, balding, misogynist, monarchist called Tony, who has just handed down a budget so draconian that it would make even a Thatcherite blush.
We the people are being royally screwed by this Murdoch-minion and his cabinet of reptilian sociopaths. To add insult to injury, these faux moralising conservative thugs are parroting Murdoch mantras, such as that old chestnut, THE AGE OF ENTITLEMENT IS OVER!
Well, Rupert Murdoch could be tasting a bloody great dose of his own medicine in the not too distant, as United States Government Accountability Office, (GAO), lifts the lid on some pretty questionable entitlements of his own…
United States Government Accountability Office, (GAO):
Highlights of GAO-09-157, a report to Financial Privacy Jurisdictions
INTERNATIONAL TAXATION
Large U.S. Corporations and Federal Contractors with
Subsidiaries in Jurisdictions Listed as Tax Havens.
Number and location(s) of subsidiaries in jurisdictions
listed as tax havens or financial privacy jurisdictions:
News Corporation
Belize (1), Bermuda (1), British Virgin Islands (62), Cayman Islands (33),
Cyprus (1), Hong Kong (21), Ireland (1), Latvia (4), Luxembourg (4), Marshall Islands (1), Mauritius (15), Panama (1), Singapore (5), Switzerland (2)
‘…the Abbott government’s first budget is in a category of its own. The nation is reeling as people come to terms with the extent to which the Prime Minister has shafted and lied to people and lead those who believed in him like lambs to the slaughter. Before the recent Western Australian Senate election I said at the Press Club that people were frightened by the Prime Minister because they didn’t know what he would do next or who he really is, what he really believes in. But now the real nature of the chameleon has been revealed…
…It is breathtaking to watch the Prime Minister and his cigar-smoking Treasurer, together with their hand-picked commissioners of audit, aided and abetted by the Murdoch press, try to con the community into believing that everyone has a moral obligation to share the burden of a confected crisis, arguing that the burden is being shared fairly whilst making absolutely sure that the full weight is carried by those who have no power to fight back-the young, the sick, pensioners, students and those least able to shoulder it, not to mention the natural environment and future generations. If you are privileged, the Liberals will protect that privilege; if you are already struggling, they will stamp you down and make your life harder. Prime Minister Abbott, your heroes, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, would have been proud of you.’
Chrsitine Milne is Leader of the Australian Greens ::: click here for more on this story :::
Sam Wainwright, Socialist Alliance councillor for the City of Fremantle, via Green Left Weekly:
“This mob were always going to introduce a budget like this. The question is — how seriously are we going to fight it? The Victorian Trades Hall has called a mass meeting and demonstration, which is a good start. This has to happen in every town and city. This is the time for some serious resistance, not a token demo and then, ‘That’s it. We’ve done all we can.’
“If the government is intent on taking us down the path of austerity like we’ve seen in Europe, then we need to build a movement of resistance like that in Spain and France, where millions of people have mobilised against austerity.
“I think the Greens are wrong to support an increase in a regressive tax like the fuel levy, as it hurts the poorest while doing little for the environment. At the same time, they have announced they will oppose the deficit levy on high income earners. While this is a temporary and inadequate measure, it is still a more progressive tax.
“When you read that the top 75 earners in Australia paid no tax, you start to see where the revenue crisis really lies. We need to remove regressive taxes (especially the GST) and increase the top marginal rate and company tax.
“If the Greens are serious about resisting these attacks, they should commit to blocking the budget in the Senate, as should the ALP.
“Unless we can push the government back now, the budget won’t be the end of the pain. Worker’s rights and entitlements, including penalty rates are next. A full-bench decision by Fair Work Australia on May 14 means that hospitality workers will have their penalty rates cut by 25% now. Following a review of the Fair Work Act amendments due out in June this year, and the Productivity Commission inquiry, due to report to the government in April next year, further attacks on workers and penalty rates are a certainty.
Budget day may well have been the best day of Hockey’s life, but it’s up to us to make sure the feeling doesn’t last.”
::: click here for ‘The movement to stop the war on the poor’ @ Green Left Weekly :::
Australia’s deafening silence on series of Murdoch-Abbott meetings…
Chief UN investigator of North Korean human rights abuses, Michael Kirby, discusses the allegations of crimes against humanity:
North Korea is truly a totalitarian state … It is not content to take control of the physical lives of the citizens, it has to intrude into their way of thinking, into their attitudes to government … [It implements] the system of characterising citizens according to their loyalty to the government and the party. This is truly a state without any real equivalent in the modern world.
Michael Kirby
The UN-mandated inquiry team says the country’s leadership should be hauled before at the International Criminal Court:
…the inquiry found that pregnant women are starved, while their babies are fed rats and snakes; more than 100,000 people are in gulags; there is systematic torture; everyone is forced to inform on each other; entire communities are denied adequate food; and the bodies of the dead are burned and then used for fertiliser.
The commission of inquiry says all abuses have been sanctioned and enforced by the government of Kim Jong-un….
::: click here for reports @ Al Jazeera :::
a highlight from ‘balding monarchists for balding monarchists’ roadshow
AlterNet:
Thomas Piketty is no radical. His 700-page book Capital in the 21st Century is certainly not some kind of screed filled with calls for class warfare. In fact, the wonky and mild-mannered French economist opens his tome with a description of his typical Gen X abhorrence of what he calls the “lazy rhetoric of anticapitalism.” He is in no way, shape, or form a Marxist. As fellow-economist James K. Galbraith has underscored in his review of the book, Piketty “explicitly (and rather caustically) rejects the Marxist view” of economics.
But he does do something that gives right-wingers in America the willies. He writes calmly and reasonably about economic inequality, and concludes, to the alarm of conservatives, that there is no magical force that drives capitalist societies toward shared prosperity. Quite the opposite. He warns that if we don’t do something about it, we may end up with a society that is more top-heavy than anything that has come before — something even worse than the Gilded Age…
Like buying a house, it’s easy to get a free trade agreement if you don’t care what you get or how much you pay. Since coming to office, Prime Minister Tony Abbott has closed a number of free trade agreements in record time, and it shows.
The so-called free trade agreement with Japan ensures Australia will not be able to export a single grain of rice to that country. Some tariffs will fall slightly, over the next 18 years, and many tariffs and quotas remain in place. It doesn’t sound very free, does it?
You should be able to write a free trade agreement on a single page. The key sentence would be “there will be no restrictions on trade between Australia and Japan”. But of course these documents often top 1000 pages because that’s how long it takes to spell out all of the exceptions and exemptions.
But don’t worry about the details, modern politics is about symbolism. Signing a fat document that lists all of the restrictions on trade between us and Japan is a good look as long as you do it at the Emperor’s house and call it a free trade agreement. It’s a pretty safe bet that no one will ever read it.
Dr Richard Denniss is Executive Director of The Australia Institute, a Canberra-based think tank, http://www.tai.org.au
SPIEGEL ONLINE: You and others are launching a global campaign to ensure the legal protection of Web users’ rights internationally. What would you include in your personal Magna Carta for the Web?
Tim Berners-Lee: First, I would like us to have that conversation together. That is why we created webwewant.org. I want us to use this year to define the values that we as Web users are going to insist on. I would like every country to debate what that means in terms of their existing laws. In what areas must we enhance our regulations to guarantee fundamental rights on the Internet? The right to privacy must be in there, the right not to be spied on and the right not to be blocked. The commercial marketplace should be completely open. You should be able to visit any political website apart from the things that we all agree are illegal, nasty and horrible. Access to the Web is, of course, a fundamental right…
webwewant.org
Steve Hickman, Psy.D., Executive Director of the UC San Diego Center for Mindfulness joins William Mobley, MD, PhD for a discussion of how to be present in the moment and leverage the practice of mindfulness to stay engaged, focused, and fulfilled.
click here for Current issue: April 2014
… Tunisia, political equilibrium but what about the economy? Ukraine special report;middle Venezuela takes to the streets; Cambodia’s peasants revolt; India considers voting for Modi; Algerians move on; will theScots vote for independence? employment and the EU, special report… Mexico, art on a grand scale, and more…
pic courtesy of US LIbrary of Congress
Frustrated by politics of obstruction and deference when our nation needs serious democratic leadership and action – and with our respective books on America both coming out on April 8th, we decided to consider the legacy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, our nation’s longest serving president, indeed, the greatest president of the Twentieth Century. And after much deliberation, we offer here the Top Ten Reasons FDR was Hot.
Enjoy and stay strong – We have nothing to fear but fear itself!
~~Harvey J. Kaye & Nomi Prins
1) FDR was hot because instead of talking “hope and change” – and playing blame-game politics – he signed 15 major bi-partisan bills in his first 100 days as President and turned alphabet soup into powerful, stabilizing New Deal agencies like the SEC, the CCC, the WPA, and the NLRB during a Great Depression.
2) FDR was hot because he always walked arm-in-arm – and even when he was sitting down he was standing up for America.
3)…click here for more reasons @ AlterNet…
As Australia’s ‘Mendacious Morrison’, (aka Abbott Junta ‘reichsfuhrer of refugees’), refuses to comment on Guardian reports that his Department for Immigration offered repatriation to two Syrian asylum seekers on Manus Island, despite one saying he faced “certain death” if returned, UK’s Channel 4 News are reporting on the increased use of ‘barrel bombs’ against Syrian civilian populations, still trapped in the war torn country…
“….Channel 4 News cannot show some of the video footage, which often includes severed limbs and mutilated corpses, because it is too distressing to watch. However, the footage we can show speaks to the mass destruction of lives and neighbourhoods that is taking place.
The barrel bomb is just that, a barrel filled with TNT and shrapnel. When it explodes the shrapnel sprays around the blast zone killing anyone in its path.
But the horrific simplicity of this weapon should not lead you to underestimate its devastating power. Barrel bombs typically carry between 1,000kg and 1,500kg. On impact, within a 250m radius, everything is destroyed – buildings are flattened, cars are torched, civilians die.
The barrels are so large the air roars as they plummet to earth – the briefest of warnings before mayhem hits.
And in 2014 their use has dramatically escalated…”
Current estimates are that a total of between 5,000 and 6,000 barrel bombs have been dropped during Syria’s civil war, killing at least 20,000 people.
1,600 of these deaths have taken place in Aleppo in the last month alone…Mendacious Morrison – take note!!!
艺术界 LEAP 25
Historically, the number of artists who left their homeland is too great to count: the Flemish Rubens and French Poussin in Italy; the Dutch Mondrian and Spanish Picasso in France; the French Duchamp and German Beckmann in the States; the Chinese artist exodus of the 1920s and 30s…the list goes on. Beyond being attracted to the great art capitals of world, artists have left their home countries to escape war and political persecution, as well as for personal reasons. This issue attempts to trace the footsteps of Chinese artists abroad over the last thirty years, starting with Berlin and then making our way to Paris and New York. Our explorations look at their creative journeys in terms of both cultural immersion and cultural conflict, and at how the concepts of homeland, separation, struggle, and limitation impacted the formation of artistic language. Barbara Pollack reviews the American perception of Chinese contemporary art; Zheng Shengtian discusses the roles Chinese artist émigrés have played in North America over the last several decades; Yu Hsiao Hwei does the same for their compatriots in France; and Chaos Y. Chen offers a glimpse into their lives in Berlin. Finally, we take a look at the artist Li Mu, who after years of avoiding the small village that is his hometown, returned to undertake a rather curious project…
click cover above for 艺术界 LEAP 25
the interpretOr 