Yesterday’s discovery of the body of Yolanda Ordaz de la Cruz, a crime reporter and columnist for the regional daily Notiver in the east-coast port city of Veracruz, adds her name to the long list of journalists who have been murdered or have disappeared in Mexico. A total of 77 have been killed since 2000 and 23 have gone missing since 2003.
When one of the most arrogant men in the world is forced to issue a full-page apology in national newspapers, you know that he feels he has little other choice. That must have been the calculation in the inner sanctum of News Corporation when billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch signed off on a full-page ad in several of his (and his competitors’) British newspapers.
When you don’t acknowledge China’s stupendous achievements, what you find is a country that has little to show and still far to go. When you don’t see the political foundations of economic policies that freed the vast majority of dirt poor and backward Chinese from awesome feudal inequalities, it is taken to be the success of capitalist impulses alone.
Military expenditure amounted to 1630 billion dollars in 2010, i.e, 236 dollars per person in the world. Meanwhile, UN asks for 16 dollars to save each one of the over two million children needing urgent life-saving actions if they are to survive in drought-affected countries in the Horn of Africa. Half a million could soon die or suffer long-lasting mental or physical damage.
While headlines in global media focus upon candidates for the presidency and new parties jostling for electoral advantage, the dynamics of change in Egypt are being shaped at the grass-roots. After six months of political tumult familiar problems dominate the lives of most Egyptians. What is the price of bread? Are jobs available – and what do they pay?
They give life almost in every way – they deliver generation after generation; they plant seeds and grow crops, feed their families and sell food in rural markets; they bring water and heat and sacrifice themselves for the sake of their families. Yet, they are the victims of a nearly invisible, silent crime as millions of them die every year from preventable causes.
Demonstrators take to the street tomorrow in Malaysia calling for reforms of the electoral system to make elections clean and fair. The rally, organised by the Coalition for Clean and Fair Elections (Bersih) is supported by the three largest opposition parties in the country but deemed illegal by the government.
They give life almost in every way – they deliver generation after generation; they plant seeds and grow crops, feed their families and sell food in rural markets; they bring water and heat and sacrifice themselves for the sake of their people be them newborns, adults or elderly.
A social phenomenon exploded almost fifty years ago: young people began to make their voice heard and took control of the social space. Different cities witnessed the simultaneous uprising as this clamour became the visible form of the much-discussed Gasset y Ortega thesis on generational dialectics as the driving force of history with extraordinary empirical evidence.
Apparently every body is keen to save the planet Earth. But hardly a few ever think of changing lifestyle which is too heavily based on an over-consumption of energy and so many other things.
