10 June 2014 — Jazz on the Tube
In my top ten list of jazz greats, Ahmad Jamal’s Poinciana was one the first albums I ever bought. Recorded in Marciac, France. Written by Nat Simon in 1936, “Poinciana” has since become a jazz standard. The Cuban folk melody “La canción del árbol”, “The Song of the Tree” – provided the inspiration for Simon’s composition.
Personnel: Ahmad Jamal, piano; James Cammack, bass; Idris Muhammad, drums
1 July 2021 — Middle East Eye
Amnesty International report highlights how Israeli police protect Jewish supremacism from any challenge by Palestinian citizens
Israeli forces arrest an activist in occupied East Jerusalem on 25 June 2021 (AFP)
Police made sweeping arrests of Israel’s large minority of Palestinian citizens after protests rocked the country in May during Israel’s 11-day attack on Gaza. Officers were documented beating demonstrators, and in some cases torturing them while in detention. Police also failed to protect the Palestinian minority from planned, vigilante-style attacks by far-right Jewish extremists.
2 July 2021 — Global Research
How do you make a potentially dangerous and ineffective drug appear like a miracle of modern science? You could, for instance, enrol only certain people in clinical trials and exclude others or bring the study to a close as soon as you see a spike in the data that implies evidence of effectiveness.
There are many ways to do it.
3 July 2021 — Big Brother Watch
We have a lot to catch up on… Let’s start with some good news.
Multiple reports suggest that venues will be able to reopen from July 19 aka ‘Freedom Day’ without you having to produce unnecessary and deeply unfair Covid Passes.
2 July 2021 — Consortium News
April 10, 2018: Burkinabe soldier arriving at Niamey, Niger, during Operation Flintlock, an annual, integrated military and police exercise inaugurated in 2005. (U.S. Air Force, Clayton Cupit)
If the U.S. government was trying to destroy Burkina Faso, it could hardly have done it any better. This already impoverished, landlocked West African country is simply symptomatic of Franco-America’s Sahel-wide exercise in absurdity.
1 July 2021 — — Origin: New Eastern Outlook
The Biden State Department has just named career diplomat Jeffrey Feltman to be Special Envoy to the Horn of Africa. Given the geopolitical powder keg in the region and given the dark history of Feltman, especially in Lebanon and during the infamous CIA Arab Spring interventions after 2009, the relevant question is whether Washington has decided to explode the entire region from Ethiopia down to Egypt into a repeat of the Syria chaos only far more dangerous. And it’s not only the US which is active in the region.
1 July 2021 — Off Guardian
Following the (completely contrived) Capitol Hill “riot” on January 6th, Joe Biden made it clear – or rather, the people that control Joe Biden made it clear – “domestic terrorism” was going to be a defining issue of his presidency.
1 July 2021 — Good Law Project
On Monday we published a short post, pointing out that the so-called “transparency” data – which is supposed to list all of the external meetings Ministers have – failed to mention a meeting on 1 April 2020 that Lord Bethell had with Abingdon shortly before his department awarded it the first of two contracts worth up to £87.5m in total.
1 July 2021 — Institute of Race Relations
As we go to press, polls are open in Batley and Spen, where the scars left by the far-right murder of Jo Cox in the days leading up to the Brexit vote are far from healing. In a special section of our regular calendar on racism and resistance, we document evidence of communalism, bigotry and ‘dog-whistle racism’ in what must surely go down as one of the most toxic by-election campaigns in recent history. Regrettably, the sowing of division and blatant disrespect for community cohesion (remember how the government pushed that) is not confined to the campaign trail.
1 July 2021 — Big Brother Watch
Big Brother Watch Team
“Knowledge is power”, or so the old adage goes. Perhaps what the proverb overlooks is that those who facilitate the spread of knowledge hold more power than anyone. In human rights terms, freedom of expression is the right to impart and to receive information; and while a greater emphasis is often placed on the abilities of speakers to express themselves, what makes censorship so potent is that it is, in effect, the ability of an actor to exercise power over others by preventing them from receiving information.
1July 2021 — Tricontinental
Raúl Martínez (Cuba), Yo he visto (‘I Have Seen’), n.d.
Dear friends,
Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
In 1869, at the age of fifteen, José Martí and his young friends published a magazine in Cuba called La Patria Libre (‘The Free Homeland’), which adopted a strong position against Spanish imperialism. The first and only issue of the magazine carried Martí’s poem, ‘Abdala’. The poem is about a young man, Abdala, who goes off to fight against all odds to free his native land, which Martí calls Nubia. ‘Neither laurels nor crowns are needed for those who breathe courage’, Martí wrote. ‘Let us run to the fight … to war, valiant ones’. And in the rousing address by Abdala, comes these lyrical words:
1 July 2021 — Black Agenda Report
Margaret Kimberley, BAR senior columnist
The British crown and the colonists were both determined to seize lands from native peoples and to continue enslavement.”
(more…)
1 July 2021 — Indian Punchline
Zhou Enlai (left) and Mao Zedong (second from left) at Chinese Communist capital of Yan’an, c.1936. Photo by Edgar Snow.This is the season to reread Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China, the classic work on the birth of the communist movement in China. Alongside John Reid’s Ten Days That Shook the World, the gripping eyewitness account of the Bolshevik Revolution, Snow’s book was compulsive reading in the first flush of revolutionary enthusiasm as college students.
1 July 2021 — NetPol
Protester at a Black Lives Matter protest in London in 2020. Photo: Shutterstock
An Inquiry report published today by the All Party Parliamentary Group on Democracy and the Constitution has endorsed the demand – by local and national organisations and tens of thousands of members of the public who have supported Netpol’s Charter for Freedom of Assembly Rights – for clear guidelines on the way protests are policing.
1 July 2021 — — Origin: Media Lens
As we have pointed out since Media Lens began in 2001, a fundamental feature of corporate media is propaganda by omission. Over the past week, a stunning example has highlighted this core property once again.
1 July 2021 — Michael Roberts Blog
It’s 100 years today since the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was first formed by just 50 members, mostly intellectuals, but including railway and mine workers. 100 years later to the day, the official membership figure is 95m and there are 4.8m party branches. This is surely the largest political party the world has ever seen. A quarter of the membership is under 35 years; 29% are female, up from 12% in 1949 and over half of members have college degrees (that means half don’t!).
26 June 2021 — Medium
[As someone who has had the virus this is personal! WB]
Hooman Noorchashm
30 June 2021 — Good Law Project
Good Law Project can reveal the existence of a VIP lane for Test and Trace spend – and that ‘VIP stakeholder engagement’ was run from a private gmail address.
30 June 2021 — Netpol
Last week’s condemnation of proposed government restrictions on protests in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill as “oppressive and wrong” by the Joint Committee on Human Rights (JCHR) has somewhat overshadowed its call for greater openness and transparency over the way the police impose restrictions on protests.
