International

To speak of nonviolence obliges us to review what we understand by violence. The great backing received by the 15-M movement in Spain is due, apart from their demands, to the fact that their actions and protests are peaceful and non-violent. Nevertheless, we still don’t know very well what nonviolence as a methodology of social struggle is.

Bryan Farrell, a New York based writer and contributor to wagingnonviolence.org gives his view on the English riots and what MLK might make of it all, “It is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society.”

Since May protests have been ongoing in Chile against the profit-making Education system. Chilean students mobilized to demand a profound reform in education, rejected on Sunday the possibility of negotiating with Congress and reaffirmed they would hold further marches throughout August.

Berlin on Saturday marked the 50th anniversary of the day the Berlin Wall started to go up with a memorial service and a minute of silence in memory of those who died trying to flee to the West.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) has ordered the organisation’s security forces to prevent planned demonstrations in September from turning violent, according to the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz.

In recent weeks, radiation levels have spiked at the Fukushima nuclear power reactors in Japan, with recorded levels of 10,000 millisieverts per hour (mSv/hr) at one spot. This is the number reported by the reactor’s discredited owner, Tokyo Electric Power Co, although that number is simply as high as the Geiger counters go

London and other UK cities are descending into an uneasy, massive police deployment induced calm. The post-mortem has began, even if the beast is not quiet dead yet. Everybody has an opinion as to who’s to blame. Nobody is asking the kids (“thugs”? or “victims of social exclusion”?), now going through the courts, some as young as 10.

Britain is reeling after several nights of rioting in major cities across the country–the worst civil unrest in a least a generation. What began at the end of last week as a series of protests against police brutality and racism has escalated into a major crisis of the entire social and political order, with police apparently losing control in parts of major cities.

If we want to understand why there have been widespread incidents of street violence across London for the past few days, we need look no further than the comments of the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, when he announced this Wednesday, “a fight-back is under way!” As if it were another country that had invaded the city!

Credit Rating Agencies are at it again. If the hole in the real economy, the one in which real people live, created by the virtual economy, where the speculators live, aka “rescuing the Banks during the subprime crisis”, were not big enough, Standard and Poor, has “downgraded” the US Credit Rating sending the world economy into a deeper hole. So who are they?