World Other Press Newswire Archive

Daniel Loeb, a Wall St. billionaire
involved in private equity, a former
vice president of Citigroup,
whose wealth is estimated by Forbes
to be 1.5 billion, in a hostile takeover
wrested Yahoo with the help of 3 of his
Wall St. cronies from Jerry Yang in 2011 and 2012. But this week
he has accelerated the slashing of Yahoo Groups

Bill Gates gave 3 months notice before he totally eliminated Microsoft Groups, as he
broke his contract and word.

Only the most foolish, thoughtless and inexperienced could possibly believe the latest propaganda warfare lie about chemical weapons in Syria, hardly different from the blatant lies justifying the war against Iraq. The main reason to consult Western news media now is to find out what the enemies of humanity have to say about their latest crimes. For readers in English, the most prestigious, quasi-plausible media tend to be NATO psychological warfare outlets like the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, the BBC, Independent Television News, the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian, the Independent, the Irish Times and the main corporate owned news agencies.

For people outside North America and Europe, the internal spat within the West's ruling élites offers little of interest. Very clearly, almost the entire Western corporate and alternative media network operates on the basis of psychological warfare criteria ultimately at the service of the imperialist tendencies of their countries' societies and the aggressive élites that control them. Like that of their corporate counterparts, the role of the West's supposedly alternative or progressive media, and the similarly funded non-governmental sector, is to provide a moral alibi for their countries' imperialist crimes against humanity.

Last week Inigo Gilmore’s documentary, South Africa’s Dirty Cops, was screened on British television. It deals with the torture and murder that have become common at the hands of the South African police and includes an examination of the two most high profile cases of political violence on the part of our police in recent years – the murder of Andries Tatane in Ficksburg in April 2011 and the Marikana Massacre in August last year.

The scale of the Marikana Massacre, in which thirty four people were killed, made it a unique event in post-apartheid South Africa. But the Tatane murder was just one of the many murders of protestors by the police in recent years. There is no properly researched body count but a quick internet search throws up media reports of nearly forty people having being killed by the police during protests since the killing started on a university campus in Durban in 2000. The Tatane murder became so well known for the simple reason that it was captured on video and screened on national television.

"The awful truth is that in a white supremacist society the black body remains a location of violence. The reality is that the black body has an identity that is still confined to and judged upon the colour of the skin. It is this skin, this exterior of the body, which becomes the fundamental focus in a racialised identity. As Fanon denoted, the white man sees only the black skin. It becomes the foundation for all relations. The black man is reduced to his outer coating and body. There is no depth – only surface. He is flattened out and stripped of psychology, emotion and intelligence. Thus the black man does not really exist as a fully-fledged human in this imaginary – he is an object. But more so he is an object that presents a danger to whiteness. He becomes nothing more than a signifier in service to white fear."

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This article by Gillian Schutte was originally published on SACSIS under a Creative Commons License

Schutte is an award winning independent filmmaker, writer and social justice activist. She is a founding member of Media for Justice and co-producer at Handheld Films.

What's missing from this government-subsidised list of what "ethical fashion" means?
- Fair Trade (or ethical trading), the second one would be
- Organic, manmade, bio-degradable fabrics, and the third is
- Recycling and upcycling.

"We carry a new world here, in our hearts. That world is growing in this minute." - Buenaventura Durruti

After spending the last few days in São Paulo, I return to Florianópolis with all my thoughts taken up by the subject that has monopolized conversations in the city: the demonstrations of the Free Pass Movement. I do not know exactly whether it was by choice or due to the necessities of life (perhaps a mix of the two) that I left São Paulo to live in the capital of Santa Catarina, but the truth is that despite more than 5½ years that have gone by, I have never broken the political and emotional ties that tie me to São Paulo, ties which are now stronger than ever because of the political situation the city is going through.

I hope the colder and more impersonal among you will forgive me, but I was never able to hide my emotions. The truth is that today I can no longer think without using my heart. Even the quotation up there must have sounded a bit "tacky". But I bet there are many more besides me who also feel the same emotion.

Tower Hamlets is notorious deprived, crisis-ridden, wrong-headed local Borough Council. Right now, its head of legal is involved in a most secretive employment tribunal tussle being very strangely held only yards from the main Council Town Hall. The Central Govt has repeatedly condemned the Council Administration for wasting public money on running a propaganda organ called East End Life, aka 'Tower Hamlets Town Hall's very own pravda'.

The Canadian Parliament has been investigating the
fraud regarding US testing for Mad Cow. Recent
outbreaks in Brazil, Denmark, Netherlands, Japan,
Switzerland and the US to name a few make silence
on this issue criminal.

Animal welfare groups and greyhound protection organizations are appalled at the deliberate cruelty to greyhounds in Ireland revealed in the course of a recent court case, where a man admitted getting someone to shot two greyhounds that refused to chase hares (link to item on case below)

The US reporting by the BBC is wall to wall, live and full to brimming with close up shots of injuries, endless shots of the injured accompanied with numerous interviews with security consultants keen to engineer the terrorist agenda. The same is true of Sky, RT, al-Jazeera and print and other TV media. There is no coverage at all of the situation in Iraq bar a few lazy, innacurate and badly written print reports on a few newspaper websites.

A 20 years old male, neo-nazi has been arrested on suspicion of belonging to a racist gang that mounted a string of attacks on Pakistani immigrants in Athens last September.

KATY BOURNE SUSSEX POLICE CRIME COMMISSIONER NAMED IN COVER PEDOPHILES COVER UP. KATY BOURNE MAKING SUSSEX SAFER FOR PEDOPHILES

Katy Bourne Sussex Police Crime Commissioner under attack over Paedophiles cover up.

Remove Martin Richards as Chief Constable and ask an outside Police Force to investigate corruption and gross misconduct inside Sussex Police Force

Tingout is an internet platform created to give more visibility to independent information

Katy Bourne Sussex Police Crime Commissioner under attack over Paedophiles cover up

Long term Parliament Square peace campaigner Barbara Tucker has lived round the clock opposite the Houses of Parliament for over 7 years. She has slept in the open for over a year now without a tent and has been treated for exposure. She is on a hunger strike in the hope of getting her confiscated tent back.

Two Corporate Watch researchers are currently in Palestine and we will be publishing our findings as we go, initially this will be in the form of research blogs and photo blogs. We will be publishing more in-depth analysis in the coming months.

You can also follow us on Twitter: @CorpOccupation

Our research is intended to serve as a resource for the international movement for Boycott Divestment and Sanctions [BDS] against Israeli apartheid, colonisation and occupation. Please contact us if you can think of any info that might be useful to your campaign.

Reading about crimes of state over many years, it is tempting to try to fathom the mind-set of political leaders. What actually is going on in their heads when they order sanctions that kill hundreds of thousands of children? What is in their hearts when they wage needless wars that shatter literally millions of lives? Are they desperately cruel, mindlessly stupid? Do they imagine they are living in a kind of hell where monstrous acts have to be committed to avoid even worse outcomes? Are they indifferent, focused on what will bring them short-term political and economic gain? Are they morally resigned, perceiving themselves as essentially powerless in the face of invincible political and economic forces ('If I didn't do it, someone else would.')?

Cameron's announcement that next year's G8 summit meeting will take place in County Fermanagh.

Welcome to this Week in Palestine, a service of the International Middle East Media Center, www.imemc.org, for November 10th to the 16th, 2012

Hi George

It's good to know that your email is intended in a 'friendly and constructive spirit'. We hope you will post a link to this response on your home page and via Twitter.

You write that Media Lens is a 'project whose purpose is to engage and persuade progressive journalists by critiquing their work and encouraging people to write to them'.

We do, of course, encourage readers to send polite emails to journalists. But our primary purpose is to raise public awareness by highlighting examples of corporate media bias. What people do with that awareness is really up to them. Our hope is that it feeds into activism, campaigning and the creation of non-corporate media like MediaBite, News Unspun and BS News.

Above all, we're trying to stimulate debate and participation. Engaging with journalists is certainly part of that, but we have few illusions about influencing media employees who often have little room for manoeuvre and who are deeply dependent on the corporate system. We do hope for marginal improvements as a direct result of our work - they do happen and do matter - but it's not a primary concern.