Politics

Is ’New Labour’ a thing from the past?
The excentric Boris Johnson was elected mayor of London on the 4th of May with a significant majority. The man is at best a jester... As Shadow Minister for Higher Education, Johnson was quiet - breaking the silence only in order to make provocative remarks about Islam, homosexuality and even the ’collective mentality’ of people in Papua New Guinea ("cannibals" and "chief killers").
I was very sorry to hear about Ken Livingston’s defeat in London, (…)

The British Atomic Energy Authority had concluded in a report given to the government in 1990, before the First Gulf War, that every ton of depleted uranium (DU) left in a given area could foster about a thousand cancers.
It has been estimated in fact that 900 tons of DU dust has been spreading well beyond the area it was initially used in combat- that is the Saudi- Iraqi bordering regions, Kuwait, Baghdad and southern Iraq, which recieved more bombs in six weeks than the entire planet (…)

The adventure is set in Europe, it has a dark beginning and a happy ending, or is it a happy middle bit? The subject is the patenting of software. So far, software is being used under copyright laws. European legislators now want it to rule in the happy land of patents. And that is a grave danger to this extremely important production/art/tool.
The ability of patenting computer software, means that the simplest mecanisms used by software (what you click on when you use your computer) can (…)

Last month, as I was towards the end of a relatively stressful period of time, I decided to leave town and go to the countryside for a while. Doesn’t this make sense? It’s even rather banal. Well... In the beloved society we live in, facts seem to indicate the contrary.
This affirmation comes from observations of people around me as I told them about my intentions, that I wanted to go to the countryside on my own for a period of a month. At first I was hesitating between this and traveling (…)

A World Bank draft report on Mexico stated this year that NAFTA had brought "significant economic and social benefits to the Mexican economy." In her 11/19 article of the NY Times, Celia Dugger mentions the Carnegie Endowment Report issued on November 18th, which presents a much bleaker picture of the Mexican economy today.
The unilateral liberalisation that the Mexican government has been endorsing in the context of the North American Free Trade Agreement has proved nowadays its limits (…)

"When the President of the United States can bomb a country because he perceives it to be a threat, then what moral authority does that government have to tell the bully on the street that he cannot beat on somebody because he perceives a threat?" Bhairavi Desai, Director of the NY Taxi Workers alliance
This week, Nabeel Siddiqui, 24, a computer science major who had just graduated from New Jersey Institute of Technology, has died from a recent attack perpetrated in Orange, New (…)

There I am, unfortunately, shopping in a large super/hypermarket, over here is France. A father is shopping for food with his 3 year old son. I go past them as I choose my cereal. Father - "So which cereal do you want ?"Son - "Hmmmm.... That one." Pointing to a branded chocolate cereal.Father - "Which one is it ?"Son - "The one with the troll on it." As I look down to the cereal packet he is going for, you can barely see what product you are buying, more than half of the packet is covered (…)

After transforming Iraq into an immense ghetto during the UN sanctioned embargo in the 1990s, the US-led coalition administration, the Occupation Authority, is now covering the dismantling of its economy, above all its oil and gas extraction industry, to the benefit of US and European multinationals. Meanwhile, Iraqi unemployment reaches 70%.

Today, the academic value of Gary Gerstle’s American Crucible could seem at first severely jeopardized. It was published in 2001, evidently before September 11th, when in its immediate aftermath the issues of race, nation were brought back to the forefront of national debate and policy-making. American Crucible was not updated, since the approach deliberately overlooks the last quarter of the 20th century, to emphasize on the far reaching legacy of the American nation-building process (…)

These look like uncertain times dear friends... Junior is now head of the most powerful state in the world, and has already used his cool awesome military power against Saddam Husain, by killing more Iraqi civilians in the last recent bombing of Baghdad.
In another country not far from Iraq, and who strangely has the same kind of history as the United States- just replace American Indian native by Palestinian Arab, another right wing maniac has managed to fool the majority of the (…)