The logic of terrorism is violent political theatre ― the aim is not just to inflict harm but to be widely noticed inflicting harm.
From this perspective, the Somali militia al Shabaab’s September 21 seizure of the upmarket Westgate Shopping Mall in Nairobi, Kenya, and massacre of at least 61 hostages, was a successful act of terrorism.
But while al Shabaab successfully dominated world headlines with their brutal attack, the media has almost entirely ignored the context: the Western-backed occupation of Somalia by Kenya, Uganda and Burundi.
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During a visit to New York for the United Nations General Assembly, Ecuador’s foreign minister Ricardo Patino joined independent media outlet Democracy now! on September 23 to discuss his government’s involvement in two closely watched environmental legal battles.
Ecuador’s foreign ministry announced on September 20 that the US has seemingly denied visas to a delegation set to travel to the United Nations General Assembly in New York, RT.com said the next day. The Ecuadorians were planning to present their case in an ongoing dispute against Chevron-Texaco.
The ministry said the visas for the five Ecuadorian nationals were returned by the US Embassy in Quito “without any explanation”.
Bangladesh police have used batons, rubber bullets and tear gas in a bid to stop ongoing protests by garment workers demanding higher wages.
But the fifth day of protests in two industrial districts near the capital Dhaka, on September 25, forced the closure more than 100 factories for the day, police said.
Gazipur and Narayanganj house hundreds of factories that supply garment products to numerous global brands, including Wal-Mart and H&M.
After a three-day work stoppage in the wake of the protests, bosses tried to restart the factories today, but the efforts failed.
The third Swan Island Peace Convergence was held in Queenscliff, Victoria from September 22 to 26. About 50 peace activists from around the country converged in Queenscliff with the aim to blockade the top secret Swan Island Military Base.
The military base on Swan Island is used as a training facility for SAS troops, a special operations force of the Australian army. This includes troops involved in counter-terrorism operations in Afghanistan.
It is also a communications centre for the Australian Secret Intelligence Service.
NSW parliament narrowly voted down a September 17 motion to discipline Liberal MLC Peter Phelps over comments he made in parliament defending General Augusto Pinochet’s violent military coup against Chile’s president Salvador Allende in 1973.
Members of the Chilean community have vowed to continue the campaign to hold Phelps to account for his outrageous comments.
On September 11, 40 years to the day of the coup, Phelps praised Pinochet as “a reluctant hero, a morally courageous man” and said he supported a military coup that deposed a democratically elected government.
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As a huge fan, I'm really disappointed to hear that, despite looking at the situation closely, Amanda Palmer has decided to cross the picket line of the Palestinian call for a cultural boycott of Israel and organise a gig in Tel Aviv.
I had the honour for the first time of rocking out with Palmer live for myself earlier this month.
1. GM FOODS WON’T SOLVE THE FOOD CRISIS
A 2008 World Bank report concluded that increased biofuel production is the major cause of the rise in food prices. GM giant Monsanto has been at the heart of the lobbying for biofuels (crops grown for fuel rather than food) — while profiting enormously from the resulting food crisis and using it as a public relations opportunity to promote GM foods.
2. GM CROPS DO NOT INCREASE YIELD POTENTIAL
Schools across Western Australia were shut down by a statewide stop-work on September 17, called to fight education funding cuts proposed by the state Liberal government.
About 500 education assistants are set to lose their jobs. A change in the school staffing formula also means that there will be 585 fewer teaching places next year, in comparison to what there would have been under the previous funding model. Program cutbacks on top of this mean that altogether there will be up to 1000 less teachers next year.
A new investigation has shed light on Australia’s role in the overthrow of Chilean leftist president Salvador Allende and exposed the continued veil of secrecy surrounding the precise activities of Australian intelligence agents, 40 years on.
Allende was elected president in 1970, but was deposed on September 11, 1973 by a US-backed military coup that put General Augusto Pinochet in power. Pinochet remained in power for 17 years, presiding over a regime of terror that left thousands dead or disappeared.
Something is looming in the shadows that could help erode our basic rights and contaminate our food. The Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) has the potential to become the biggest regional free-trade agreement in history, both in economic size and the ability to quietly add more countries in addition to those originally included.
"We are at a critical point in human history," prominent Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki told an audience of about 500 people at a public forum at Sydney University, on September 25.
"What we do or do not do in the next period will determine the future of the human species and the planet,” he said.
The meeting, called "The challenge of the 21st century: Setting the real bottom line”, was sponsored by the Sydney Environment Institute, University of Sydney. It was part of a series of talks and media appearances by Suzuki on his Australian visit.
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