“The struggle to tell the truth through stories”: An interview with British film and television producer Tony Garnett—Part 1

23 October 2013 — WSWS

Part 2 Here

In a retrospective this summer, “Seeing Red,” the British Film Institute (BFI) celebrated the work of veteran film and television producer Tony Garnett. The BFI described Garnett as one of television’s “most influential figures,” who “produced and fostered a succession of provocative, radical and sometimes incendiary dramas.” Continue reading

History Will Absolve Me: Fidel Castro, Sixty Years Later By Maximilian Forte

17 October 2013 — Zero Anthropology

fidel_cuba_7

Today marks the 60th anniversary of Fidel Castro’s famous “History Will Absolve Me” speech, given in his defense during his trial following the unsuccessful guerrilla attack on the Moncada barracks on July 26 of that year.

The complete speech, which was transcribed after the fact entirely from memory, is available here in English and aquí en Castellano, and below I am highlighting certain extracts which I think are still critically relevant today.

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Iran Foreign Minister: “We Informed US of Chemical Weapons Transfer to Syria 9 Months Ago”

1 September 2013 — Iran Times

Interview with Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif
By: Aseman Weekly

Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif says the Islamic Republic had sent an official memo to the United States through the Swiss Embassy in Tehran (which serves as the US interests section in Iran) last December, in which Washington had been forewarned that “handmade articles of chemical weapons, including sarin gas, are being transferred into Syria.”

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SYRIZA: The Great Social and Political Movement of Subversion

7 August 2013 — The   B u l l e t • Socialist Project • E-Bulletin No. 860

Political Resolution, First Congress of SYRIZA

1 The Conference of the Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA) is a continuity and a breakthrough in its course, which started in 2000, continued with its official founding in 2004, and was sealed when it took on the historic responsibility to deliver the Greek people from the catastrophic neoliberal memoranda policies that have turned our country into a debt colony and led its creative, social, and productive forces to marginalization.

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A Socialist Programme for London? By Carl Rowlands

30 July 2013 — New Left Project

It is easily forgotten that the 1980s were nearly not the 1980s at all, politically speaking. At the decade’s outset, an aggressively organised, ideologically diverse Left insurgency was the ascendent force in a Labour Party hovering around 50% in opinion polls, as the British public recoiled from the initial, monetarist-brutalist phase of Thatcherism.

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Corruption, Accountability and Media Power By Justin Schlosberg, Tom Mills

15 July 2013 — New Left Project

Justin Schlosberg is lecturer in journalism and media at Birkbeck, University of London and the author of Power Beyond Scrutiny, a book examining how the British media cover cases of institutional corruption.  In an interview with NLP’s Tom Mills he discussed media power and democratic accountability in the UK.

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Questions surrounding 2011 triple murder point to government cover-up in Boston Marathon bombing By Thomas Gaist and Barry Grey

12 July 2013 — WSWS

The New York Times published a front-page article Thursday (“In 2011 Murder Inquiry, Hints of Missed Chance to Avert Boston Bombing”) that raises new questions about the alleged perpetrators of the April 15 Boston Marathon bombing and adds to the evidence of a government cover-up in the explosions that killed three people and wounded more than 260 others.

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Video: Glenn Greenwald: “Rogue” Actions of U.S. in Snowden Row Yield Latin American Offers of Asylum

8 July 2013 — Democracy Now!

Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua have opened the door to granting asylum to National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden in a standoff with the United States. The offers came after a plane carrying Bolivian President Evo Morales was forced to land in Austria after France and Portugal barred it from their airspace over false suspicions that Snowden was on board. The United States has refused to confirm or deny whether it was responsible. We discuss the latest with Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, who broke the NSA surveillance story based on Snowden’s leaks last month. Continue reading

Racist David Brooks Applies His Mental Equipment to the Egypt Coup By Jim Naureckas

5 July 2013 — FAIR Blog

David Brooks

David Brooks

“Islamists…lack the mental equipment to govern,” New York Times columnist David Brooks writes today (7/5/13). “Incompetence is built into the intellectual DNA of radical Islam.”

Now, Brooks has been known to cite eugenicist  Steve Sailer on “white fertility rates” (12/7/04;Extra!4/05).  But let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that rather than making a racist argument, he’s simply appearing to be racist as a metaphor (as when he wrote recently that interracial marriage was producing a “nation of mutts”–6/27/13).

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Escalation of Syria War: Ahmed Al-Assir, America’s Pawn in Lebanon By Phil Greaves

28 June, 2013 — Global Research

This weeks conflagration near Sidon, a majority Sunni city in the South of Lebanon has been on the cards for some time. Sheikh Al Assir, the instigator of the street battle’s with the Lebanese Armed Forces, (LAF) has been on a concerted campaign to incite sectarian strife and division between the Sunni and Shi’a sects in Lebanon, with one major goal; to draw Hezbollah into a sectarian-based conflict.

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Escalation of Syria War: Ahmed Al-Assir, America’s Pawn in Lebanon By Phil Greaves

28 June, 2013 — Global Research

This weeks conflagration near Sidon, a majority Sunni city in the South of Lebanon has been on the cards for some time. Sheikh Al Assir, the instigator of the street battle’s with the Lebanese Armed Forces, (LAF) has been on a concerted campaign to incite sectarian strife and division between the Sunni and Shi’a sects in Lebanon, with one major goal; to draw Hezbollah into a sectarian-based conflict.

Continue reading