contributions

Invitation
June 5/6 in Manchester
at Bridge 5 Mill, 22A Beswick Street, Ancoats
National meeting for the Local Social Forum in UK
hosted by Manchester Social Forum
We welcome the partecipation of people from Local SFs from other countries in Europe
Saturday 5 June 10-5 pm
Sunday 6 June 10-1 pm
The agenda, the workshops and the layout of the meeting will be discussed at the beginning
A possible outline might be:
Introduce and meet each other.
The work of each (…)

There is an emergency situation right now in the Gaza Strip and the town of Rafah, in particular, with scenes that bring to mind Israel’s invasion of Jenin and Nablus in the spring of 2002. So far today, 18 Palestinians were killed, but the action continues. Last weekend, 116 homes were destroyed, making over a thousand people homeless (www.btselem.org). Hundreds more are slated for destruction. Amira Hass, filing dramatic daily reports from inside Rafah, describes the scenes of (…)

a uterus is not a substitute for a conscience What Abu Ghraib Taught Me
By Barbara Ehrenreich, AlterNet
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=18740
Even those people we might have thought were impervious to shame, like the secretary of Defense, admit that the photos of abuse in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison turned their stomachs.
The photos did something else to me, as a feminist: They broke my heart. I had no illusions about the U.S. mission in Iraq — whatever exactly it is — but it (…)

Ken Livingstone
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1219822,00.html
The Guardian (UK)
When you are in a hole, stop digging. That is the maxim that should now be applied to the war in Iraq. All of my life I have watched as Britain and America have become embroiled in conflicts, only to find that a purely military solution is rarely available. But the situation in Iraq is turning into something more unpleasant than anything since the war in Vietnam. The grisly state of affairs (…)

Prisoners’ affidavits taken in Abu Ghraib earlier this year - published in WAPO today in .pdf format, obtainable here
A couple of things stand out.
1) Reading the statements of Kasim Mehaddi Hilas it is clear that his questioning re the abuse was LIMITED to incidents occurring at Abu Ghraib. As he indicates in his statement, the place where he was previously held was also ’very bad’ but it appears that he was not permitted to discuss this
2) The ’supplementary’ questions asked of the (…)

An Ocean Apart by Ta-Nehisi Coates When Haitian prime minister Gerard Latortue came to Manhattan last week, he had a curt message for his cousins up north—butt out. Since the overthrow of Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide in February, Latortue has been under fire from African American leaders who view him as an illegitimate steward of the first free black state in the Western Hemisphere. Just last month, 1,500 protestors gathered in Brooklyn to voice their opposition to Latortue and (…)

By Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman Christian Science Monitor
DURHAM, N.C. - The US prison boom of the past 30 years which has nearly doubled the number of state prisons to more than 1,000 and increased the nation’s prison population from 218,000 to 1.3 million - has had widely recognized economic, political, and social effects. But one important political effect of the forced relocation of millions of inmates has been largely overlooked: The dilution of the urban black vote to the benefit (…)

The stories sound familiar: Muslim prisoners beaten and sexually humiliated by American guards. But it happened in Brooklyn, not Baghdad.
By Michelle Goldberg
May 19, 2004 | BROOKLYN, N.Y. — The American guards took Mohamed Maddy’s glasses before they slammed him into the wall. A portly middle-aged father of two, Maddy was crying, trying to move his shoulder in front of him so it would take the blow, but they kept smashing him into the concrete, leaving him with dark purple (…)

By Amira Hass, Haaretz Correspondent, Haaretz Service and Agencies
At least 23 Palestinians, most of them said to school students, were killed Wednesday afternoon when Israel Defense Forces helicopter gunships and tanks fired missiles and shells into a crowd of protestors in Rafah refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip.

By Amira Hass, Haaretz Correspondent, Haaretz Service and Agencies
At least 13 Palestinians, including two children, were killed Wednesday afternoon when Israel Defense Forces helicopter gunships and tanks fired missiles and shells into a crowd in the Rafah refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip, bringing the day’s death toll in the area to at least 18.
At least sixty people, including many women and children, were wounded in the incident, witnesses said.
The witnesses said the four (…)