Sometimes the most seemingly innocuous “local” news reports are the ones that contain the seeds of the most profound global understanding. Such is the case with a May 8 report in the Mexican newspaper Excélsior detailing a meeting between a Mexican security official in the southern province of Chiapas (site of the famous popular rebellion led by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation) and a representative of the Israeli military. What’s going on here? Short answer: further evidence of how tools of surveillance and repression field-tested on Palestinians are being used throughout the world. In other words, we are looking at another example of why I argue that we live in a ...
Weave Blogs
Written by weavestreetteam on May 9, 2013 
Originally published on the Weave on November 24, 2009 - reprinted here as part of the "Weaving the Street" People's Archive!
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During my year-long stay in Spain, I have been keeping my eye out for interesting examples of "street ephemera" - graffiti, posters, and other interesting interventions in the urban landscape. These expressions offer important insight into everything from political activism to popular culture. In this post I present a brief photo essay featuring some of the street ephemera that have caught my eye so far. I hope to create a few more posts of this sort before I return to the U.S. in June. (To view all the images as a slideshow, just click on the first...
Written by johncollins on May 8, 2013
To inaugurate our new “Weaving the Streets” blog, I’d like to take a trip down memory lane—back to 2003, to be exact. Shortly after the US war in Iraq began, I traveled to Spain to promote the Spanish-language edition of Collateral Language, a book I co-edited on the rhetoric used to justify the US response to the September 11 attacks. Traveling with my co-editor and another of the book’s contributors, I had the chance to speak with a number of local journalists and activists and also participate in one of the massive anti-war demonstrations in Madrid. Hundreds of thousands of Spaniards were in the streets that day to say “No a la guerra! (No to the war!).”
One of the journalists we met, a freelance contributor to the...
Written by johncollins on Apr 15, 2013 
This article is not meant to disrespect the victims of the Boston Marathon bombings, nor is it meant to make light of the tragedy. On the contrary, it is meant to honor the victims and give additional meaning to their deaths and injuries by placing them in a broader human context.
The following is a list of news items published online during a (roughly) 24-hour period on/around April 15, 2013. All concern bombings and explosions. They are organized alphabetically by the locality in which the events took place.
Aleppo (Syria): 18 people, including three journalists, were killed in a car bombing about 500 meters from the state security headquarters. A report from PressTV attributes the bombing to “foreign-...
Written by Tzintzun on Apr 13, 2013
We human beings are a made of hidden drives and unconscious desires. For centuries, governments and the powerful factions of society have been trying to control these hidden forces. The battle over our minds has shaped the course of history. This inner war has not been linear; on the contrary, it is like a video loop, continually repeating itself throughout history. The human mind is an unruly subject, it is hard to control and delve int0 its shadowy inner workings. The theorist and scientist Sigmund Freud is one of the most recent thinkers who attempted to unravel this mystery. While in his own lifetime Freud’s theories were used by psychoanalysts and governments, it was after his death that we can see the true results of Freud’s ideas. In the second segment of the documentary, “...
Written by Łukasz W. Niparko on Apr 10, 2013 
Over past days, after seeing me more excited and energized than usually, people keep asking: What is so special about the Conference on Media Reform that I had a chance to attend in Denver, between April 4th and 7th that became an ultimate reason for me get my momentum for action. To explain that, let me tell you the story of Scheherazade from “One Thousand and One Nights…”
Scheherazade became a wife of the king Shahryar, who after the wedding always beheaded his bride once the dawn came, after her marriage she was the next to be killed… Yet she started telling to the king stories that made him interested, and each night, before the dawn came she cut the story in the middle – so the king had to keep her alive to continue the next night. Scheherazade had saved her life and helped the king change himself, and made him even able to love, what resulted in the well-being...
Written by johncollins on Mar 31, 2013
Given the tremendous lack of media coverage of the World Social Forum, held this year in Tunisia, I am reprinting the March 29 Declaration of the Social Movements Assembly. It deserves to be circulated and discussed widely, and something tells me we can't rely on CNN or even MSNBC (which likes to "lean forward" but not nearly far enough to reach the WSF) to do the job.
Declaration of the Social Movements Assembly – World Social Forum 2013 - 29 March 2013, Tunisia
As the Social Movements Assembly of the World Social Forum of Tunisia, 2013, we are gathered here to affirm the fundamental contribution of peoples of Maghreb-Mashrek (from North Africa to the Middle East), in the construction of human civilization. We affirm...
Written by chloeanne on Mar 28, 2013 
When in doubt, make an analogy, as I always say (actually, that’s the first time I’ve said that). That’s what I did to put the Federal Communications Commission cross-ownership policies and the importance of media-ownership diversity into terms that made sense to me, to make the ideas more tangible. So what, do you ask, do I compare the media industry to? My answer: the beef industry.
Oh yes. I went there.
I think I may have just heard a collective sigh from the majority of students from St. Lawrence University (or anyone else who has seen the film Food Inc. countless times). They know exactly what I’m talking about already (also, I'd like to make it clear that no matter how many times I watch the film, I still am impressed with it every single time).
To start off with, both beef and information have become turned into products...
Written by andreateti on Mar 27, 2013 
For those who missed the Italian general elections last month, here is a small summary of the issues at stake which first appeared in Egypt Independent a couple of weeks ago as "An Italian spring? Italy’s 2013 general election."
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As results from Italy’s general elections on 24–25 February began trickling through, it was clear that the country’s scandal-ridden political class had received a wake-up call.
Berlusconi put a on brave face by emphasizing his comeback. But gaining 5 percentage points on his all-time low of 17 percent in December would be nothing to cheer about, had his opponents’ campaign not been such an unmitigated disaster. The Democratic Party was expected to win comfortably, and yet one of its leaders, Piero Fassina, sat stumped for words live on...
Written by andreateti on Mar 27, 2013
The recent surprise success of the Movimento Cinque Stelle (Five Star Movement, or M5S) in Italy's recent elections and the heavy losses suffered by both Berlusconi and his centre-left counterparts in the Democratic Party have produced a kind of Mexican standoff in which the stakes are not just who will form the next Italian government, but how the country's politicians will deal with enormous social and economic challenges in an EU country which is truly 'too big to fail'.
…The short version:
This is a very confused and complicated stage: in essence, Democratic Party (PD) leader Pierluigi Bersani is trying to form a government while balancing a) the M5S who accuse him of being complicit with Berlusconi's deeply corrupt twenty years' hegemony in Italian politics; b) Berlusconi who accuses Bersani of being 'irresponsible' by refusing to work with him; and c) internal PD...
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