May 2013

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The Case of the US vs Bradley Manning: Journalists and their Sources

Picture: As seen on Frontline Club. Video In February this year Private First Class Bradley Manning pleaded guilty to sending restricted documents to WikiLeaks in violation of military regulations, making him the source of the largest intelligence leak in US history. In his statement to the court he talked about "revealing the true costs of war". Ahead of his trial in June, a panel of media and human rights specialists, including former Guardian investigations editor David Leigh, Al Jazeera's Richard Gizbert, New...

Why Cops Bust Down Doors of Medical Pot Growers, But Ignore Men Who Keep Naked Girls on Leashes

Picture: Alternet Kristen Gwynnne - Thanks to the drug war, police have much more incentive to go after drug crimes than more heinous crimes. Earlier this year, men wearing black ski masks whipped out their guns and raided the home of 62-year-old Cathy Jordan, a medical marijuana patient and activist in Florida. They seized 23 of her plants, two of which were mature enough to be used for her medicine. Police officers with the Manatee County Sheriff's Department, the team of armed men, made no arrests, but later charged...

Sir Ken Robinson: How to Escape Education's Death Valley

Picture: As seen on TED. Video Creativity expert, Sir Ken Robinson, challenges the way we're educating our children. He champions a radical rethink of our school systems to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types of intelligence. In this funny, stirring TED Talk, he outlines three principles crucial for the human mind to flourish -- and how current education culture works against them. Robinson tells us how to get out of the educational "death valley" we now face, and how to nurture our youngest...

Capital's Insatiable Drive for Profits at the Heart of South Africa's Wage and Employment Crisis

Picture: uusc4all/Flickr Dale T. McKinley - If capital is to be believed, it is the worker who is the main source of South Africa’s contemporary social and economic problems. Every time the annual season of wage negotiations is about to begin, as it is now, representatives of capital unleash a tsunami of propaganda about workers’ ‘high and unaffordable’ wage demands. Dire warnings of destructive social unrest/conflict, high inflation rates, poor competitiveness and generalised economic devastation roll off...

Manuel Castells: "Social Movements are Destined to Die"

Picture: Atomische • Tom Giebel/Flickr Video How did the financial crash in Iceland inspire the Spanish Indignados and Occupy Wall Street movements? Why did the Arab Spring in North Africa end with Islamists running Egypt? How did the peaceful movement against a dictatorship in Syria degenerate into an all out civil war? World famous Spanish sociologist, Manuel Castells, best known for his research on the information society, communication and globalization, talks about the emergence and characteristics of new social movements around...

Socio-Economic Rights Still Eluding Marikana Communities

Picture: GovernmentZA/Flickr Video John Capel of the Bench Marks Foundation talks about the efforts of his organisation to widen the scope of the Marikana Commission of Inquiry (also known as the Farlam Commission), such that the investigation goes beyond and behind the killings of the 34 striking mineworkers, which shocked the world last year, to the socio-economic root causes of the strikes in the Rustenburg mining belt. A study by the Bench Marks Foundation, first released in 2007 and later updated in 2011, shows huge...