Nationalists promote their agenda by masquerading as rights advocates | Glenn Greenwald Readers of the American and British press over the past month have been inundated with righteous condemnations of Ecuador's poor record on press freedoms. Is this because western media outlets have suddenly developed a new-found devotion to defending civil liberties in Latin America? Please. To pose the question is to mock it. It's because feigning concern for these oppressive measures is a convenient instrument for demeaning and punishing Ecuador for the supreme crime of defying the US and its western allies. But this behavior illustrates how purported human rights concerns are cynically exploited as a weapon by western governments and, more inexcusably, by their nationalistic, self-righteous media enablers. This exploitation of human rights concerns drives even the most seemingly straightforward cases, such as the universal condemnation among All Decent People of Russia's obviously repellent punishment of Pussy Riot, the anti-capitalist, hardcore-leftwing punk rock band.
Pursued by violence, pawns in Syrian conflict await an endgame | World news 'I escaped from Homs in February," said Abu Mohammed as his three children played in a nursery yard in Damascus. "We moved to Seida Zeinab and then that was bombed last month." All over the Syrian capital, in schools, hotels and houses, tens of thousands of people who have fled their homes because of war are now living in misery. They include hundreds who moved from other cities to what they thought was the safety of Damascus and have had to flee again. Attacks on the capital's outlying districts continue relentlessly. The cafes halfway up the tawny brown ridge of Mount Qassioun, which stretches along the city's northern edge, remain open but visitors have to pass army checkpoints to get there, under the big guns on the plateau above. As destruction creeps nearer, the mood has changed dramatically in the six months since I was last here. Khaled, a young man who lives with his parents in Old Mezzeh, showed me around in February. After the FSA retreated, the security forces moved in.
Why didn't CNN's international arm air its own documentary on Bahrain's Arab Spring repression? | Glenn Greenwald | World news In late March 2011, as the Arab Spring was spreading, CNN sent a four-person crew to Bahrain to produce a one-hour documentary on the use of internet technologies and social media by democracy activists in the region. Featuring on-air investigative correspondent Amber Lyon, the CNN team had a very eventful eight-day stay in that small, US-backed kingdom. By the time the CNN crew arrived, many of the sources who had agreed to speak to them were either in hiding or had disappeared. Regime opponents whom they interviewed suffered recriminations, as did ordinary citizens who worked with them as fixers. The CNN crew itself was violently detained by regime agents in front of Rajab's house. Lyon's experience both shocked and emboldened her. But she also resolved to expose just how abusive and thuggish the regime had become in attempting to snuff out the burgeoning democracy movement, along with any negative coverage of the government. CNNi's refusal to broadcast 'iRevolution'
Jack Kerouac's ex-girlfriend lifts lid on beat novelist's rise and fall | Books | The Observer The former girlfriend of the leading novelist of the beat generation Jack Kerouac has revealed details of their affair and his descent into bizarre behaviour on finding fame, in a new book to be published more than 40 years after his death. Joyce Johnson, an accomplished author, also dispels the myth that Kerouac's writing was effortlessly spontaneous. Where he claimed his novel On the Road was written in a blast of energy during three weeks in 1951 she recalls that he spent years revising his work and carefully crafted each paragraph. Her book is just part of a revival of the cult that surrounded Kerouac which has this year prompted three feature films and a documentary, as well as books and an exhibition at the British Library. Johnson, now 77, describes him as a "very odd person" who treated her dreadfully but was the love of her life. She was 21 when she met Kerouac. She said: "He spoke Joual, a Canadian dialect of French.
Syria: the foreign fighters joining the war against Bashar al-Assad | World news Soldiers! Soldiers!" The man hissed his warning as he hurried past, two bullets from a government sniper kicking up dust from the dirt road behind him. It was enough for Abu Omar al-Chechen. Abu Omar gave an order in Arabic, which was translated into a babble of different languages – Chechen, Tajik, Turkish, French, Saudi dialect, Urdu – and the men retreated in orderly single file, picking their way between piles of smouldering rubbish and twisted plastic bottles toward a house behind the front line where other fighters had gathered. Their Syrian handler stood alone in the street clutching two radios: one blared in Chechen and the other in Arabic. The fighters sat outside the house in the shade of the trees, clutching their guns and discussing the war. "What do the foreign news organisations and the outside world say about us?" Hundreds of international fighters have flocked to Syria to join the war against Bashar al-Assad's government. "This is my duty," he said. Advance Bab al Hawa
US food aid programme criticised as 'corporate welfare' for grain giants | Global development Two-thirds of food for the billion-dollar US food aid programme last year was bought from just three US-based multinationals. The main beneficiaries of the programme, billed as aid to the world's poorest countries, were the highly profitable and politically powerful companies that dominate the global grain trade: ADM, Cargill and Bunge. The Guardian has analysed and collated for the first time details of hundreds of food aid contracts awarded by the US department of agriculture (USDA) in 2010-11 to show where the money goes. ADM, incorporated in the tax haven state of Delaware, won nearly half by volume of all the contracts to supply food for aid and was paid nearly $300m (£190m) by the US government for it. Cargill, in most years the world's largest private company and still majority owned by the Cargill family, was paid $96m for food aid and was the second-largest supplier, with 16% of the contracted volume. The potato industry also hopes to raise its share of US food aid business.
Why Marxism is on the rise again | World news Class conflict once seemed so straightforward. Marx and Engels wrote in the second best-selling book of all time, The Communist Manifesto: "What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable." (The best-selling book of all time, incidentally, is the Bible – it only feels like it's 50 Shades of Grey.) Today, 164 years after Marx and Engels wrote about grave-diggers, the truth is almost the exact opposite. The proletariat, far from burying capitalism, are keeping it on life support. The irony is scarcely wasted on leading Marxist thinkers. That hope, perhaps, explains another improbable truth of our economically catastrophic times – the revival in interest in Marx and Marxist thought. Later this week in London, several thousand people will attend Marxism 2012, a five-day festival organised by the Socialist Workers' Party. There has been a glut of books trumpeting Marxism's relevance.
Iran sanctions now causing food insecurity, mass suffering | Glenn Greenwald (updated below) The Economist this week describes the intensifying suffering of 75 million Iranian citizens as a result of the sanctions regime being imposed on them by the US and its allies [my emphasis]: "Six years ago, when America and Europe were putting in place the first raft of measures to press Iran to come clean over its nuclear ambitions, the talk was of "smart" sanctions. The West, it was stressed, had no quarrel with the Iranian people—only with a regime that seemed bent on getting a nuclear bomb, or at least the capacity for making one. Pervasive unemployment, inflation, medicine shortages, and even food riots have been reported elsewhere. That sanctions on Muslim countries cause mass human suffering is not only inevitable but part of their design. "We are now in there responsible for killing people, destroying their families, their children, allowing their older parents to die for lack of basic medicines. That is a fact that should be deeply disturbing to any decent person.
Land grabbers: Africa's hidden revolution | World news | The Observer Omot Ochan was sitting in a remnant of forest on an old waterbuck skin and eating maize from a calabash gourd. He was lean and tall, wearing only a pair of combat pants. Behind him was a straw hut, where bare-breasted women and barefoot children cooked fish on an open fire. A little way off were other huts, the remains of what was once a sizable village. Our conversation was punctuated by the rumble of trucks passing on a dirt road just 20 metres away. Gambella is the poorest province in one of the world's poorest nations – a lowland appendix in the far south-west of Ethiopia. Only three flights a week go to the provincial capital, also called Gambella. Of late, the central government in Addis Ababa has stopped pretending that the province of Gambella doesn't exist. I set out along the only road south from Gambella town to find the land grabbers. Amoudi has been eyeing agriculture since the world food price spike in 2008 sent Saudi Arabia into a spin about its food supplies.