Region

New Yorkers are escalating protests against austerity measures contained in Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s latest budget. In a major protest Tuesday, thousands of New York City union members rallied at City Hall demanding an end to layoffs and cuts to social spending. Sam Coleman is a third grade teacher at a public school in Brooklyn.

Steven Starr from Physicians for Social Responsibility writes about the dangers of creating so much radioactive waste in the world’s 440 nuclear reactors, the ongoing situation in Fukushima and the legacy of the radioactive exclusion zone around Chernobyl. “It is time to admit that nuclear power is neither a “safe” nor “clean” method to produce energy.”

More details have emerged today about the Obama administration’s plan to wage a secret war inside Yemen. In what the Wall Street Journal describes as a major expansion of the United States counterterrorism efforts in Yemen, the CIA is preparing to launch a complete secret program to kill al-Qaeda militants in the country.

In a referendum vote held on last Monday, 95 percent of Italians voted in favor of blocking a nuclear power revival in Italy. The vote comes less than a month after Germany announced it would phase out nuclear power over the next decade. Italians also voted against water privatization and against Belusconi’s special privileges.

Reflecting profound concerns of developing countries, a new report – ‘Catalysing Catastrophic Climate Change’ – has strongly criticized the World Bank group for promoting false solutions to climate change, such as carbon trading, mega-dams, agro-fuels and industrial mono-culture tree plantations.

Article by Jutta Wolf

Last Sunday, **los Indignados** who remained in the most representative camp of the 15M movement, simply because of being there first, agreed to dismantle the Sol camp after debating the proposal to postpone it until the 15th and turn it into an itinerant camp. A reconstruction party is planned with an orderly work plan which includes removing the camps and cleaning up

A caravan of Mexican anti-violence protesters arrived in the United States over the weekend. Mexican poet, Javier Sicilia, led the traveling protest, which began last week south of Mexico City and ended in El Paso, Texas, on Saturday. Sicilia demanded the United States end the Merida Initiative, which provides training and support for the Mexican army in its “war on drugs.”

Newly released government data shows the Obama administration approved $200 million in military sales to Bahrain last year just months before the Gulf nation launched a violent crackdown on pro-democracy protesters. Part of the military sales involved the sale of rifles, shotguns and assault weapons. There have been a number of developments in Bahrain.

Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s AK Party has scored a third consecutive election victory. In a victory speech, Erdogan pledged to work with opposition parties to rewrite Turkey’s constitution.
Soon after the Turkish election results were announced, a bomb exploded in southeast Turkey, injuring eleven people.

We present a short amazing video of a conference recently held by Julia Bacha regarding the stories that can change the so called “confirmation bias” (or previous believes) that we all have, and help us open our minds and have a new cognitive resonance or comprehension of a fact that usually we tend to look with some prejudice. Such is the case of non-violence in Palestine.