On the 25th of May 2012, Federico Pizzarotti was proclaimed Mayor of Parma, the first mayor in a big city who was a candidate from the “5 Star Movement”. The youngest mayor of that city, and as stated in his official biography, one of the founders of the “Movement for Happy Degrowth” and for a long time involved in culture, in social works and in sports. There was a big fuss at his election and the spotligh ...

The correspondents heard that people were gathering at the central square of Kizilay, so they went out at 3pm walking down to the main road to Kizilay Square where many people were walking in that direction with slogans, banners and making noise with whistles. We accompanied them and when arriving at the square we saw that many other people were already there making music , singing and shouting slogans. The ...

I was surfing on a mom’s site, a website for mothers. You know the ones with tearful stories about little ones and their first words, steps and falls. Between these stories one was far different. The title was “Strike and imprisonment or inaction and falling in value?” She is a public teacher. Nine months ago it was assigned to her a place to teach in the countryside. So for nine months already, she is been ...

In the picture: graffiti on the exterior of an Afghan-owned bar in the Aghios Panteleimonas neighbourhood in Athens reads “Foreigners Out.” Greece’s government should move quickly to adopt measures to combat hate crimes and protect victims, Human Rights Watch said today. A bill on hate speech and racist violence has yet to be submitted in parliament because of disagreement among the three parties in the rul ...

It is not the first time that 'humanitarian' concerns are raised to make way for escalation of conflict. This week the UK and France have managed to twist their 25 European Union (EU) partner's arms (UK threatening to use its power of veto) in order to lift the arms embargo agreed to try and bring the warring parties to the negotiating table. Unsurprisingly UK and France are the biggest arms exporters of th ...

At the Hay literary festival Hans Blix, nuclear weapons inspector whose advice was spectacularly disregarded over Iraq's WMD, has told the UK that renewal of its Trident nuclear capability with a cost of £100 billion would not serve any purpose, or make Britain safer. He suggested it may have more to do with pride than protection. Nuclear weapons are illegal, unusable, unaffordable and immoral and yet, at a ...

Activist and scholar to lecture on current Romani issues by Aria Seligmann, UO Office of Strategic Communications MAY 22, 2013 Hungarian Romani activist Angela Kocze, currently a visiting Fulbright Scholar at Wake Forest University, will be at the University of Oregon on Friday, May 24, to present “Romani (Gypsy) Women and Activism: Challenges and Opportunities,” at 4 p.m., in 204 Condon Hall. Kocze is a re ...

The Robin Hood Tax, aka Financial Transaction Tax (FTT) or Tobin Tax was first proposed by John Maynard Keynes among others around 1936. Its purpose was to develop fairer taxation and curb speculation (today particularly relevant to rapid short-term currency speculation). The EU is in the process of implementing it also as a way of raising capital to soften austerity measures that followed the banks bail ou ...

The systemic changes to Hungary’s legal framework introduced by the government since 2010 weaken legal checks on its authority, interfere with media freedom, and undermine human rights protections, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. The continuing failure of the Hungarian government to comply with recommendations by European institutions should result in concrete European Union (EU) action, ...

Here are a few facts: 1) In the postwar period, the amount of money that Wall Street dealt with every year represented approximately 15 percent of the US GDP. In 1975 it was 17 percent, at the end of the 80s it was up to 35 percent and ten years later it reached 150 percent of the US GDP. In 2006, before the subprime bubble burst, it exceeded 350 percent. In other words, the money that circulated every year ...