Pressenza IPA

A fully bilingual press briefing will be held on March 3, 2012 in Fukushima City, co-sponsored by Green
Action, Peace Boat and FoE Japan.
The briefing will be an opportunity to hear directly from Fukushima citizens’ groups in the leadup to the
first anniversary of the disaster on March 11 about their activities to monitor and protect children and
citizens from radiation.

A report from the Occupy Wall Street forum on the commons

Both the commons movement and Occupy spring from a shared sense of urgency about need for a different path toward the future.

OTC program director Alexa Bradley was one of the presenters at Occupy Wall Street’s inaugural forum on the commons February 16-19 in Brooklyn.
Here is her report on all that happened.

Tullow Oil plc announced that it has completed the farm-down of two thirds of its Ugandan licences to China National Offshore Oil Corp (CNOOC) Limited and French oil major Total for $2.9 billion earlier today. The news that British firm Tullow has finally brought in partners to develop its oil fields in Uganda paves the way for commercial oil production to begin in the country.

A photographer for the English-language news site “The
Santiago Times” was detained on Thursday while covering a protest related to the Aysén movement.
Jason Suder, a volunteer photojournalist for the news site and U.S.
citizen, was photographing a confrontation between Chile’s police force
and protesters when an officer detained and
placed him into a police vehicle.

For years, the image of Chile as an example of the success of the neo-liberal model has been exported to the world. In terms of social justice, this model is a complete failure, since only a very small percentage of the country’s inhabitants have benefited from it. Today, when hundreds of thousands of Chileans are protesting on the streets, the world can finally see the truth.

New York – UN General Assembly (UNGA) President Nassir Abdulaziz Al-Nasser is committed to convening an international conference directed at establishing a nuclear-weapons-free zone in the Middle East.

Finally, there is some argumentation in the West supportive of a nuclear free zone for the Middle East. Such thinking is still treated as politically marginal, and hardly audible above the beat of the war drums.

The deaths caused by the U.S. in Iraq are “untold” by the media, writes Danny Lucia.

Over a million Iraqis are dead from America’s war.

That sentence is a cognitive litmus test. Some people’s immediate reaction is, “That can’t be right,” because the United States couldn’t do that. Or because crimes on that scale don’t still happen.

Berlin – “We want a nuclear weapons free world.” More than 80 percent of people around the globe have expressed this overwhelming desire to authors of a new report. But a close look shows that very little is happening rather slowly in terms of reducing nukes and putting a halt to proliferation. This is cause of profound concern also to atomic scientists.

So yes, this larger-than-life psychodrama we call “Iran” may turn out to be as much about China and the US dollar as it is about the politics of the Gulf, or Iran’s nonexistent bomb. The question is: What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Beijing to be born? [We took permission from Mr Escobar to run his story on Pressenza, appeared Asia Times.