News:
Kony2012 funds would be best spent on former child soldiers, says UN official
Sahel food crisis: Chadian women describe the hardships they face - audio slideshow
Salvadoran news website threatened for its reporting
Some good reads here. Check it out.
Ever since a member of the Qatari royal family took charge of the network, coverage was getting a bit weird. Don’t get me wrong, Al Jazeera can do some fantastic coverage on various matters in the region, such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They also did an amazing job…
As Clashes Continue in Egypt, a Media War Breaks Out
On the third day of clashes between security forces and protesters in the center of the capital, a new battle broke out Sunday between Egypt’s state-run and independent media over whom to blame for the violence.
Read more —> NYTimes
Joseph Stiglitz
The class warfare the rich don’t understand - Opinion - Al Jazeera English (via gonzodave)
Cops watching a man drown because they can no longer afford water-rescue training? Actually happening. That’s just what happens when one political party openly declares it wants to shrink the size of government until its small enough to drown in a bath tub. Our November/December cover story is up, and it’s a must-read.
“A Church Of Dissent”
That’s Matt Stoller’s description of Occupy Wall Street
Andrew Sullivan - The Daily Beast
(via brooklynmutt)
Nobel Peace Prize winners. From left to right: President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf of Liberia (AP Photo); Liberian activist Leymah Gbowee (AP); Yemeni Tawakul Karman who head the organisation Women Journalists Without Chains (AP).
They were awarded the prize for “for their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work.” Johnson-Sirleaf is Liberia’s first elected female president and has acted as a reformer in her time in office. Gbowee organized a group of Christian and Muslim women to stand up to Liberian warlords. Karman is a Yemeni journalist who is both a women’s rights activist and a leading protest organiser in Yemen’s Arab Spring uprisings.
NEW YORK — Sal Cioffi and Randy Otero are union electricians from Local 3 of the IBEW in New York. They’re working on the Freedom Tower a few blocks over in lower Manhattan. Over the past couple of days, they’ve taken to having their lunch in Zuccotti Park, in the middle of the Occupy Wall Street protesters who have set up camp here. The event has grown sufficiently that it’s now attracted almost as many food trucks and mobile falafel units as it has television-news trucks, so there’s always some place for Sal and Randy to buy lunch. So they park themselves on the stone bench, put their hard hats on the ground and, almost organically, they become part of the event.
“We’ve had demonstrations, and it never makes the news,” says Sal. “We could have 10,000 workers demonstrating, and it won’t make the news. At least, something like this, they get the publicity.”
“We had a rally for the workers, two months ago, and we marched across the Brooklyn Bridge, and there were people crossing that bridge for an hour-and-a-half, and it didn’t hit the news,” Randy adds. “All organized labor, no press coverage whatsoever.
“Now, this here, they’re not leaving, so the media has to cover it. And it’s very close to Ground Zero, and once the police get involved, they have to cover it.”
“They’re waiting for someone to do something wrong,” Sal says.
What the two of them have found for themselves, here amid the guitars and the drums, and the indistinguishable forms shifting in their sleeping bags against the advancing autumn chill, is a public space for ideas. If the primary criticism of the ongoing demonstrations is that they seem to lack, as a hundred media reports have put it, “a cohesive public message,” that is also one of their great strengths. This is a very loud and clear yawp against the irresponsible use of power by unaccountable institutions, including, increasingly, the government itself. The protests here are omni-directional. They appear inchoate because their target is so diffuse — an accelerating sense in the country that there is no pea under any of the shells, that the red Jack is not in the deck, that the wealth of the country is being swindled and gambled and frittered away by so many people in so many ways that to sharpen the focus on one of the long cons is to let a dozen others reach fruition.
Read more —> Esquire
