Alternative News
Articles from non-mainstream as opposed to corporate for profit sources.
The Sword, The Pen and The Law -- On Julian Assange
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- Published on Thursday, 28 November 2019 00:52
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin ... No. 1943 ... November 28, 2019
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The Sword, The Pen and The Law -- On Julian Assange
Barbara Harriss-White
I follow the blog written by Craig Murray, a former British Ambassador with long experience of the UK’s deep state. When he wrote recently about the deteriorating state of health of Julian Assange, the Australian publisher of WikiLeaks, currently detained in solitary in high-security Belmarsh prison, with inadequate access to documents and lawyers to defend himself against extradition to the USA, I decided to join the rally supporting him in Trafalgar Square, London. Hardly anyone showed up on Saturday, November 16th -- at best 60 people.
This non-news is itself news. The more I pursued the question of why Assange has so little public support, the more disturbing and complicated the story became. If you want to follow this up with a single further source, I recommend prize-winning, independent journalist Jonathan Cook’s blog.
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Two Reports from Chile
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- Published on Wednesday, 27 November 2019 04:44
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin ... No. 1942 ... November 27, 2019
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The Neoliberal Miracle Under Fire
Carlos Torres
Unexpected turmoil erupted in Chile on October 18th, when high school students mobilized against a subway fare increase. On October 25th, another two million Chileans joined them in opposition to the impacts of neoliberalism in every aspect of life. They are in revolt against political, social and economic abuses stemming from the commodification of education, health, and retirement pensions.
The international media has published impressive images of the recent events, illustrating the result of years of accrued anger that began with the military dictatorship in 1973 when neoliberal economists, known as the Chicago Boys, used Pinochet’s Chile as a testing ground for their theories on the withdrawal of the state from economic activity. The state’s resources were transferred into private hands to enhance the free market and to further the privatization of common goods and social programs. Neoliberalism put an end to any tenuous forms of social cohesion in Chile.
The current state of social injustice and the profound gap between rich and poor are a...
Stand by the Protesters in Iran!
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- Published on Tuesday, 26 November 2019 02:00
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin ... No. 1941 ... November 26, 2019
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Stand by the Protesters in Iran!
The following is a statement by the Iranian leftist diaspora in the United Kingdom, France and Germany who have formed a loose coalition of academics and militants to express their support for the ongoing popular uprising in Iran.
"We are protesting against problems in the whole system in general. We reached a crisis where we noticed that the system cannot handle it anymore."
— a protester in Chile.
Our world is on fire. Not only forests but also cities are burning all over the world. Social conflicts of all sorts are erupting, spreading their flames across the planet: Algeria, Chile, Ecuador, Haiti, Hong Kong, Iraq, Lebanon, Sudan, you name it. Located within this global context of struggles against the social hell of neoliberal, financialized capitalism, there has been another mass uprising in Iran since November 15, 2019.
Sparked by the sudden tripling of fuel prices, tens of thousands of Iranian people have been protesting in more than 100 cities throughout the country. Of course, the fuel price per se did...
Awful news: Court blocks low Internet rates
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- Published on Monday, 25 November 2019 11:38
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Paov,
This is terrible: A federal court just suspended the CRTC's wholesale rates that brought lower Internet prices to Canada.1
This is a big win for Bell and the other Big Telecom corporations who are fighting to stop the CRTC from lowering rates the companies charge smaller providers for wholesale access to its networks. But they're not stopping there. Big Telecom has also asked Prime Minister Trudeau to get rid of new CRTC rules—and...
Attacking Palestine's Future
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- Published on Monday, 25 November 2019 00:36
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin ... No. 1940 ... November 25, 2019
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Attacking Palestine’s Future
Greg Shupak
Traveling across Palestine, as I did to give lectures earlier this year, means following a perpetually fresh trail of repression. Omnipresent are the prison guard towers, the barbed wire, the Israeli soldiers with their massive guns and the separation wall.
The day before an event at which I was speaking in Beit Sahour, a small town adjacent to Bethlehem, residents held a funeral for Sajid Mizher, a 17-year-old volunteer medic Israeli soldiers had just shot dead in Dheisheh refugee camp despite his wearing an identifying vest.
The night before my talk at Birzeit University near Ramallah, a group of undercover Israeli forces broke into its campus and kidnapped three Palestinian students. Persecuting students in this manner is part of a larger pattern as is Israel’s routine killing and maiming of Palestinian children, 44 of whom it shot on 25 October in Gaza.
The implications of these abductions and shooting sprees go beyond the direct physical and psychological harm to victims themselves and the agony and fear Israel...
Peoples' Paddle for the Coast!
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- Published on Sunday, 24 November 2019 17:00
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A half-billion gallons of water
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- Published on Sunday, 24 November 2019 06:04
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In just two weeks, officials will debate whether to let Nestlé drain nearly a half-billion gallons a year from a fragile spring in Florida.
Townspeople need your help to save their springs. Will you send a tweet to fight this corporate raid on community water?
A,
The fight is heating up to stop Nestlé’s attack on yet another small community’s water supply.
Florida officials are meeting on December 10 to debate whether to let Nestlé drain nearly a half-billion gallons a year from the fragile Ginnie Springs.
When local townspeople asked for your help, you and 108,000 other SumOfUs members stepped up to the plate.
Now we need your help again. Will you plaster Twitter with messages demanding that Florida officials say no to Nestlé’s corporate water grab?
Yes! I’ll send a tweet to stop Nestlé from leaving locals high and dry.
Ginnie Springs and the beautiful river it helps sustain are already running low. Experts say that...
Pull Together means business!
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- Published on Sunday, 24 November 2019 05:14
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Nurses Unions, Climate Change and Health
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- Published on Saturday, 23 November 2019 23:40
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin ... No. 1939 ... November 24, 2019
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Nurses’ Unions, Climate Change and Health:
Toward A Global Agenda for Action
Sean Sweeney, Irene Shen and John Treat
Energy and emissions trends provide a crucial backdrop for making use of the information on health impacts presented in this report. In the longer term, unless we collectively act to shift what is happening with energy production, distribution and use, then making meaningful inroads to tackling the health impacts of climate change will become increasingly difficult and costly. While the IPCC’s SR15 states that limiting overall warming to 1.5°C is still possible from a technical standpoint, doing so requires "rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society," involving essentially all aspects of modern society: land, energy, industry, buildings, transport and cities.
The necessity and urgency of making such profound systemic changes has implications for how nurses can make the best use of health-related information. In the context of that challenge, and complemented by the information on energy and emissions, nurses and their allies may find the health-specific information especially useful in educating their...
Are you our next Policy Director?
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- Published on Friday, 22 November 2019 11:18
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We're hiring! Be our next Policy Director
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...The Long Coup in Ecuador
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- Published on Friday, 22 November 2019 04:30
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin ... No. 1938 ... November 22, 2019
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The Long Coup in Ecuador
Fabio Resmini
Ecuador is facing some of its darkest days. The country is trapped with a highly unpopular president who has betrayed his mandate and proved his willingness to shed blood to implement a conservative economic agenda. Last October, the Lenin Moreno government unleashed a wave of repression to stifle widespread opposition to IMF-dictated policies.
Since taking office and after forcing a split within the ruling party Alianza País, Lenin Moreno has handed the state back to the powerful left-outs of Rafael Correa’s government. He used his mandate to subvert democratic institutions, persecute the opposition, and bring back the old neoliberal model to Ecuador, all in the name of the descorreización of the country. This has gained him the support of big business, the right-wing sector, the private media, and the US government, who are not willing to let him go easily.
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Will they listen to us over Big Oil?
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- Published on Thursday, 21 November 2019 14:28
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Friends,
Yesterday, Justin Trudeau officially swore in his new cabinet.
This 43rd government and newly appointed cabinet have a tremendous responsibility to govern through 4 of the 11 critical years scientists have given us to transform our economy to tackle the climate crisis.
We know corporate elites and Big Oil are gearing up to push their dirty agenda across our new government’s desk. That is why we need every single Member of Parliament to put partisan politics aside and accept their mandate to tackle the climate emergency and rising inequality at the scale necessary before Big Oil gets to them.
Tell your elected Member of Parliament to listen to people, not Big Oil, and govern for a Green New Deal. We’ve set up a tool that makes it easy for you to send your message with just one click.
Thanks to people-powered pressure, a growing number of MPs across the country have accepted their letters and committed to put politics as usual aside to govern for a Green New Deal.
The Green New Deal is the only real and...
From earth out past the moon
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- Published on Thursday, 21 November 2019 07:02
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Lessons from Bolivia: A View from Cuba
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- Published on Thursday, 21 November 2019 00:36
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin ... No. 1937 ... November 21, 2019
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Lessons from Bolivia: A View from Cuba
Yassel A. Padrón Kunakbaeva
Sad news comes from Bolivia. The coup has been accomplished. Once again, the military has decided the game in our Latin American region, treading on the very Constitution they swore to defend. President Evo Morales and Vice President Álvaro García Linera resigned. They said it was to avoid further bloodshed. It’s the end of an era in the history of that Andean nation, the same one that witnessed Che’s death.
No one can deny there was a coup. Evo’s decision to run for reelection may be questioned, but it cannot be ignored that there was a ruling by the judiciary power which authorized his candidacy. In any case, it can be said that there was an institutional crisis, as well as issues with the counting of the votes. What cannot be denied is that Evo should have been the legitimate President until another legitimate President took office. The intervention by the armed forces can only be considered a coup.
Evo and his...
Microsoft
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- Published on Wednesday, 20 November 2019 12:28
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AnyVision’s facial recognition tech is a repressive tool used by governments to hunt down ordinary people and silence them.
Tell Microsoft to divest from AnyVision and stop using people’s faces as weapons.
A,
Facial recognition tech can help you breeze through airport security in seconds or it can have you handcuffed in tie-wraps in a windowless room, it can all hinge upon the colour of your skin or what you choose to post on social media.
AnyVision, a cutting-edge facial recognition startup funded by Microsoft, is using its technology to facilitate repressive governments - China, Russia, and Israel so far - hunt down and silence ordinary people.
The AnyVision-Microsoft scandal has erupted in the US media. And since early 2019, many Microsoft workers are demanding that their company hold itself to higher standards and give them a say on how their work is used. Fearing the backlash, Microsoft has now hired former United States Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate...
The fight continues
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- Published on Wednesday, 20 November 2019 12:02
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The fight to end indefinite solitary confinement continues.
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...Bell won't back off
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- Published on Wednesday, 20 November 2019 11:50
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Paov,
Last week, Bell, Telus, Rogers, Shaw and other large Internet providers joined forces to push the newly elected cabinet to overturn a recent decision by the telecom regulator to slash wholesale Internet rates. This decision has already led to lower Internet rates for thousands of people across Canada and could lower them for millions more.
Since then, close to...
One Year of the Yellow Vests in France
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- Published on Tuesday, 19 November 2019 23:26
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin ... No. 1936 ... November 20, 2019
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One Year of the Yellow Vests in France:
Converge With Planned Labour Strikes
Richard Greeman
This past weekend the Yellow Vests (Gilets Jaunes) celebrated their first birthday, with convivial barbeques on traffic circles (roundabouts) all over France followed by direct actions like liberating tollbooths. Although number of protestors has declined to about 10 per cent of the estimated 400,000 who rose up a year ago on November 17, 2018 -- thanks to a year of violent police repression, media distortion, and sheer fatigue -- a surprisingly large number of women and men throughout la France profonde ("middle France") came out of ‘retirement’ and donned their yellow vests for "ACT 53" of the weekly Yellow Vest drama -- double the previous weeks’ numbers. Recent polls indicate that 10 per cent of French people consider themselves "Yellow Vests," and two-thirds still support them (although a majority wish they would go home!).
The first anniversary of the Yellow Vest uprising marks an historic moment: perhaps the first time in history that a self-organized, unstructured, leaderless, social movement...
Worse than Wexit
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- Published on Tuesday, 19 November 2019 07:14
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This just in -- CPP is investing more than 4 billions of your retirement savings in fossil fuels.
Call on CPP to divest from fossil fuel companies creating climate chaos.
A,
A major new study has revealed that the Canadian Pension Plan’s (CPP) massive fossil fuel investments - Enbridge, Trans Canada, Gazprom - will contribute to a world that is 2 degrees warmer setting off climate chaos.
At 2 degrees warmer, almost half of the world’s population will suffer extreme heat waves and hundreds of millions of people will have insufficient water supplies.
There is no other way to avoid a climate crisis death toll than to leave huge amounts of fossil fuels in the ground.
Canadians’ retirement savings need to fund a renewable path, not destroy our climate future. It’s our money so we need to have a say.
To CPP: stop using my money to fund climate-altering fossil fuel projects.
As revealed by the Canadian Center...
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