April 2007

Words and photographs by Jon Elmer
Briarpatch Magazine
May 2007

For four weeks in the fall of 2006, photojournalist Jon Elmer traveled through South Lebanon and the southern suburbs of Beirut — the front lines of Israel’s summer war against Hezbollah — documenting the aftermath of Lebanon’s devastation and Hezbollah’s declared victory.

THIS HEZBOLLAH RECONSTRUCTION tent in Dahiya, a southern suburb of Beirut, is the headquarters for the rebuilding process in Lebanon. Since the bombing ended in August 2006, Hezbollah officials have been meeting with families and merchants to register losses and coordinate compensation.

According to Dr. Bilal Naim, the chief of Hezbollah’s reconstruction effort, more than 5,000 housing units in the Dahiya suburb were destroyed and 17,000 more were damaged. Twenty schools were bombed and three were completely leveled. Entire apartment blocks were flattened under massive Israeli bombardment.

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Briarpatch does gender:

Our gender identities, in all their complicated incarnations, continue to limit the choices and opportunities of many of us. In the face of an ongoing ideological onslaught against equality for women and sexual minorities, Briarpatch throws gender in the blender—and whips up a challenging and thought-provoking blend of ideas and arguments for bending gender hierarchy till it breaks!

Click image to enlarge.

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Three-story-high dumptrucks carry coal out of Cerrejón for export to Canada and other countries.

Words and photographs by Chris Arsenault
Briarpatch Magazine
May 2007

Thirteen years ago, the world turned upside-down for Miluolis Arregoces and his five children.

The family lived in Caracolí, a small farming community in Colombia’s parched La Guajira province, until bulldozers contracted by El Cerrejón, the world’s largest open-pit coal mine, demolished their home. Buttressed by a heavy police presence, mine officials confiscated land from around 30 families in Caracolí. The mine says some residents were compensated. Mr. Arregoces says he received nothing.

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By Ashley Walters
Briarpatch Magazine
May 2007

“We sell water . . . so we’ve got to be clever.”

Senior vice president of Nestle Waters’ Global Marketing and Communications division

IT OFTEN SELLS FOR three times the price of gasoline, and more and more of us are guzzling it — even though we can get the equivalent for next to nothing simply by tapping into the publicly owned infrastructure. It’s bottled water, and it’s a lucrative business. But why would we pay 240 to 10,000 times more for something that we can get for less than a penny by simply turning on a tap?

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[Just came across this -- it's dated, but deserves to be repeated. -D.O.M.]

by the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom
September 17, 2004

One of the world’s leading news agencies is accusing Canada’s largest newspaper chain of altering words and phrases in its stories covering the conflicts in the Middle East.

Reuters says that CanWest Global, owner of the National Post and dozens of other newspapers across Canada, has been routinely an inappropriately inserting the word “terrorist” into newswire copy, thereby changing the meaning of those stories.

The global managing editor for Reuters, David Schlesinger, told the CBC that such changes are unacceptable and that CanWest had crossed the line from editing for style to slanting the news from the Middle East.

“If they want to put their own judgment into it, they’re free to do that, but then they shouldn’t say that it’s by a Reuters reporter,” Schlesinger was quoted as saying.

Schlesinger cited a recent Reuters story, in which the original copy read: “…the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, which has been involved in a four-year-old revolt against Israeli occupation in Gaza and the West Bank.”

In the National Post version of the story, it became: “…the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a terrorist group that has been involved in a four-year-old campaign of violence against Israel.”

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The need for strong independent voices in Haiti is greater than ever. Here is your chance to support the work of a young Haitian photojournalist whose work is appearing on HaitiAction.net, Haitianalysis and other media important to the struggle for democracy.

Wadner Pierre has been living and working with Father Gerard Jean-Juste for the last ten years. For the last two years, he has been reporting and photographing important human rights issues in Haiti. He brings to the world information and analysis directly from Haiti’s poor, something absent in the mainstream media. Right now, Canadian photographer Darren Ell and human rights lawyer Brian Concannon are trying to raise $1000 US in order to buy Wadner a new camera that will serve him in the years to come. To do so, they are selling photographs made by Darren and Wadner in Haiti over the last year.

Click HERE to view the photographs and place your order !

by Nik Basque

Maritimes Indymedia
March 30, 2007

This April Fools Day marks the beginning in a dangerous shift in power. The Alberta and BC governments have signed an agreement that empowers corporations to sue governments if regulations limit their right to make a profit. In effect, these governments have undermined their own ability to set regulations in the interest of the public good, in exchange for the interests of corporations’ responsibilities to shareholders. And, the icing on the cake, the agreement was not subject to legislative debate or public consultation.

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“If human equality is to be forever averted, then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity.”
George Orwell

Briarpatch Magazine and On Edge ‘Zine (and their sibling editors) are collaborating to produce a dynamic September/October issue of Briarpatch focused on mental health.

As the global and national political picture continues to worsen, depression and other mental illness diagnoses and psycho-pharmaceutical prescription rates are at record levels.

Coincidence? We think not!

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by Adam Morrow / Khaled Moussa al-Omrani
Inter Press Service
April 12, 2007

CAIRO - Israel’s rejection of the Arab peace initiative, which was reiterated at last month’s Arab Summit, drew emphatic criticism from Egyptian commentators. Although Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert later called for peace talks with “moderate” Arab heads of state, most local political observers say Tel Aviv wants to have its cake and eat it too.”Olmert’s response was an attempt to normalise relations without responding to the initiative’s demands,” Mohamed Basyouni, former Egyptian ambassador to Israel and head of the committee for Arab affairs in the Shura Council (the upper consultative house of the Egyptian parliament) told IPS. “It was a totally unacceptable manoeuvre that puts the carriage before the horse.”

The Saudi-backed peace plan, first tabled at the 2002 Arab Summit in Beirut, offers across-the-board Arab recognition of Israel in exchange for core Palestinian demands.

According to the proposal’s terms, Arab capitals would extend full diplomatic relations to the Jewish state in exchange for total Israeli withdrawal from territories occupied in 1967. The plan seeks a “just solution” to the Palestinian refugee issue on the basis of UN resolutions, and the establishment of a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.

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By Murray Dobbin
TheTyee.ca
April 4, 2007

Citizens in industrialized societies, including Canada, will cling to their extravagant lifestyles and massive over-consumption for a while yet, it seems. Global climate change is still seen by most people — even those who have no doubt of its human origins — as something that can be fixed by legislation, tougher rules and punitive penalties on big polluters — and that allegedly clean and green quick fix, ethanol.

Yes, we can all keep our individual chunks of steel, rubber and glass, those symbols of 20th century excess and irrationality, so long as we shift to burning alcohol.

This particular mass delusion was madness enough to inspire the still-ailing Fidel Castro out of his bed to write the first editorial he has written for the country’s principal newspaper, Granma, since last falling ill last July. It’s not as if there is a lack of issues for the grand old commander-in-chief to comment on. But this one he deemed the most important. Why?

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