_Section

While politicians in rich countries have been rescuing powerful “market lord”–private corporations and banks that have unleashed the global financial crisis or strongly contributed to it– for the sake of receiving their ‘electoral blessing’, the prices of grain and milk in the drought-hit Horn of Africa have risen to record highs.

Expensive studies prepared by prestigious organisations come now to say that the “physical” trading in human beings is the third most profitable “illicit” business after drug and arms trafficking.

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.”

Myanmar’s democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi is on Sunday set to make her first political trip outside her home city since she was freed from house arrest, despite a government security warning. Suu Kyi, who was released from seven straight years of detention days after a controversial election last November, will visit the Bago region, about 80 kilometres north of Yangon.

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.

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.

The area where the first spark of rioting started, following the fatal shooting by police of a local resident, today saw a large and peaceful demonstration calling for an end to the violence on all sides but also for changes in the recent austerity measures that most of those marching see as the root cause of the recent disturbances.

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