from the page: "Bolivia's army occupied the installations of the country's electricity grid Tuesday after President Evo Morales nationalized the Spanish-owned company that runs it. The president..ordered the seizure of the assets of Madrid-based firm Red Electrica in Bolivia... Until Tuesday, the Spanish utility owned 99.94 percent of Transportadora de Electricidad (TDE), the company that has run Bolivia's creaking transmission grid since 1997 when the electricity sector was privatized. "As a just homage to the entire Bolivian people, which has struggled for the recovery of its natural resources, its basic services..," He went on to accuse the Spanish company of investing just $81 million in Bolivia's transmission grid in the last 16 years... It also comes just two weeks after..Argentina President..sparked a major international outcry by nationalizing YPF, the local subsidiary of Spanish oil company Repsol. The news comes as yet another blow to Spain’s stalled economy.

from the page: "..At the end of the summit's first day, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez announced that member countries had agreed to contribute 1% of their international reserves toward the bloc's main bank in order to create a reserve fund. The Bank of the Alba was established in 2008 with the intention of providing economic support to people-centred regional projects and to contribute to sustainable social and economic development across the region. The Bank is also cited as acting as a continental alternative to the International Monetary Fund... The heads of state also discussed the possibility of increasing the commercial use of the sucre, the bloc's virtual currency. The sucre is currently used for direct trading between the ALBA countries, allowing them to circumvent the U.S dollar and minimise the foreign-exchange risk.

from the page: ".. Through Argentines’ experiences in these “horizontal” projects, new forms of social relationships and new identities emerged based on values of mutual support and solidarity over individualism and exploitation... “Nestor Kirchner’s policy consisted of simultaneously enacting strategies to integrate, co-opt, and discipline the piquetero organizations,” writes Svampa... While not all piquetero groups could be co-opted, those that have chosen to ally with the government have been rewarded with economic and organizational resources... “We were neighbors. We didn’t have anything else in common other than our neighborhood, no kind of ideology,” says Eva Sinchecay of the Villa Puerrydon assembly. It was something that turned out to be both a strength and a weakness as assemblies were more independent but became susceptible to the agendas of left groups that used them as a means of recruitment. “It began to dissolve,”...

from the page: "...From a vacuum of political power and severe economic necessity, grew new political formations outside of traditional party politics. Hundreds of neighborhood assemblies came together to meet peoples’ most basic needs and create a space for local dialogue. Bartering clubs (with their own forms of currency) experimented in alternative economics, and workers of bankrupt businesses began to occupy and run enterprises on their own... Neighborhood assemblies referred to themselves as “autoconvocados” (self-convoked) and made decisions using a consensus model in which all had equal say and majority voting was often a last resource. There was also a renewed sense of solidarity between classes, as assemblies in middle-class neighborhoods directed many programs to the poor and unemployed... In a country where inequity often pits the poor against the middle class, this kind of solidarity was unique and critical..."

from the page: "...'Committee of 24' Also Forwards Three Traditional Texts in Support Of Decolonization Declaration to General Assembly; Hears Petitioners from Guam... Today, the militarization of Guam was tied to the building of new military bases and the transfer of more than 8,000 United States Marines from Okinawa to Guam. With that movement, the Chamorro people would face many of the same problems that the Okinawan people had faced, including field fires and bomb accidents caused by live ammunition, plane and helicopter crashes, as well as noise pollution, traffic accidents, the destruction of environmental and historical sites and the loss of indigenous cultural heritage. The Okinawan people were against the movement of United States Marines to Guam, as well as the construction of new military bases, as they feared that the island’s colonial situation would become “deeply fixed”. They insisted that Guam be demilitarized in accordance with United Nations decolonization..."

from the page: "A plant pathologist experienced in protecting against biological warfare recently warned the USDA of a new, self-replicating, micro-fungal virus-sized organism which may be causing spontaneous abortions in livestock, sudden death syndrome in Monsanto’s Roundup Ready soy, and wilt in Monsanto’s RR corn... Huber, who has been studying plant pathogens for over 50 years and glyphosate for over 20 years, has noticed an increase in pathogens associated with the herbicide. In an interview with the Organic and Non-GMO Report last May, he discussed his team's conclusions that glyphosate can, “significantly increase the severity of various plant diseases, impair plant defense to pathogens and diseases, and immobilize soil and plant nutrients rendering them unavailable for plant use.”This is because “glyphosate stimulates the growth of fungi and enhances the virulence of pathogens.” In the last 15-18 years, the number of plant pathogens has increased...

from the page: "A group of international scientists has released a report detailing health and environmental hazards from the cultivation of genetically modified (GM) Roundup Ready soy and the use of glyphosate (Roundup®) herbicide. The report, GM Soy: Sustainable? Responsible?,[1] highlights new research by Argentine government scientist, Professor Andrés Carrasco,[2] which found that glyphosate causes malformations in frog and chicken embryos at doses far lower than those used in agricultural spraying... In Argentina and Paraguay, doctors and residents living in GM soy producing areas have reported serious health effects from glyphosate spraying, including high rates of birth defects as well as infertility, stillbirths, miscarriages, and cancers. Scientific studies collected in the new report confirm links between exposure to glyphosate and premature births, miscarriages, cancer, and damage to DNA and reproductive organ cells...

from the page: "..unethical human experimentation in the United States did not stop... Between 1950 and 1972 mentally disabled children were intentionally infected with hepatitis... Pharmaceutical companies routinely turn to countries such as Nigeria and South Africa for drug trials that would be illegal in the US. Often these populations are left to their own devices at the end of the trial or if things go wrong. According to a study conducted by the Tufts Center for Drug Development, in 1997 the US conducted 5 percent of clinical studies outside of the United States and Western Europe, but by 2007 the share had increased to 29 percent. In 2008 in Argentina..12 children died after they were used in a study of a new flu drug by the GlaxoSmithKline pharmaceutical company that involved thousands of impoverished children across South and Central America. None of the trials took place in Europe or the United States, due to high cost and more stringent standards..."

from the page: "The September 21, 1976 murder of Letelier and an American aide, Ronni Moffitt, was the most spectacular act of international terrorism on US soil up to that time... With the full backing and encouragement of the US government, and with the CIA in particular playing the leading role, right-wing military regimes were established in Brazil (1964), Bolivia (1971), Ecuador (1972), Uruguay (1973), Chile (1973), Peru (1975), Argentina (1976). This period also saw the US invasion and occupation of the Dominican Republic... These dictatorships embarked on a program of extermination of left-wing opponents who were in exile. This program, supported by the Ford administration in the US, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and CIA Director George H. W. Bush, was known as "Operation Condor." ...The new documents reveal..it was Kissinger himself who ordered the note rescinded and thus ended the last effort to hold back Operation Condor. On September 16, 1976, Kissinger sent a cable...

from the page: " What is at stake are, according to British Geological Survey estimates, as many as 60 billion barrels of oil under the waters off the Falklands/Las Malvinas... Ilya Kramnik wrote that "along with the neighboring islands controlled by the U.K., the Falklands are the de facto gateway to the Antarctic, which explains London's tenacity in maintaining sovereignty over them and the South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, as well as territorial claims regarding the South Shetland and South Orkney Islands under the Antarctic Treaty." ...Under the ice, under the continental shelf, there are enormous mineral resources and the surrounding seas are full of bio-resources. In addition, the glaciers of Antarctica contain 90% of the world's fresh water... If the United Kingdom succeeds in provoking a new war, it in turn will appeal to its NATO allies for logistical, surveillance and other forms of assistance, including direct military intervention if required. "

from the page: "... The study concludes that in Argentina, in spite of its relatively high level of human development compared to its neighbours, young people between the ages of 15 and 29 suffer from "unfavourable social inclusion," with precarious jobs, high school drop-out rates, and newer challenges like urban violence and discrimination... Among upper and middle class youth, the interviews show "a tendency to blame the poor for their situation,"... In upper and middle income sectors there is a certain amount of "modernity" in terms of diversity of sexual orientation, religion and other differences viewed as "non-threatening." However, social differences do tend to carry "stigma," they say... The Mercosur giant [ Brazil] has always been affected by structural inequality, but social differences have diminished lately because of social policies in favour of the poorest, within a framework of economic growth which made them possible... "

from the page: "...what has been delineated in Colombia is a classic colonial strategy: the use of repressive force to protect the economic and military interests of the dominant power... The main purpose of this assistance to Colombia is to defend oil company pipelines, which are central to the US drive to achieve a monopoly over world oil reserves... The premises of capitalist political economy rest on a search by central economies for the monopolistic control of global resources. Therefore current capitalist militarism is precisely an expression of the normal expansion of capital. Colonialism is not capitalist production transformed; it is the implementation of capitalist relations on a world scale... The distribution of the world into spheres of influence leads to a situation of conflict, where war is not an expression of a further stage, but rather an integral part of the necessity for capitalist reproduction... "

from the page: "... Real power remains with strongmen from the Tajik and Uzbek minorities and local, drug-dealing tribal warlords who are paid by Washington to pretend to support Karzai. Behind the Tajiks and Uzbeks stand their patrons, Russia, India and Iran... The Taliban arose during the chaotic civil war of the early 1990s as a rural, mostly Pashtun religious movement to stop the wide-scale rape of women, impose order, and fight the drug-dealing Afghan Communists. The so-called "terrorist Taliban" received U.S. funding until four months before 9/11. Washington cut off aid after the Taliban made the fatal error of giving a major pipeline deal to an Argentine rather than U.S. oil firm for which Hamid Karzai once reportedly worked as a consultant... The West must cease backing minority Tajiks and Uzbeks against majority Pashtun... Government should revert to the old "loya jirga" system of tribal sit downs, where decisions are made by consensus, often after lengthy haggling...."

from the page: "The right obliges us to forget, the left changes the history and the society goes that way, forgetting pathologically and tripping again and again over the same stone... It was bad and it is worse to let this history go by the wayside: the shame of not knowing the truth more than 33 years after the last military dictatorship, the shame of managing it in the face of so much spilled blood and the shame of believing that the revision of the past can be managed, making disappear the memory of those disappeared, those that still call to us for justice. While the administration of CFK (Cristina Fernández de Kirchner) is concerned about bringing the topic of "human rights" back to the front pages, she degenerates the history once again by trivializing the topic and returning to the story of her thunderous fight with the rural rightwing, ...while kids keep dying of hunger in the country of "I don’t remember," ... Once more history and the memory are being managed..."

from the page: "Every diplomat at the United Nations will tell you that the work of the world body is about achieving consensus. Those who have the courage to speak frankly and honestly will also admit that there is a trend away from consensus that troubles many. The recent special session on the question of the protection of civilians caught up in the armed conflict in Sri Lanka is a case in point... Powerful states like India and China were told to participate if they could agree with the European position. ...most Asian, African, Middle Eastern and some Latin American governments opposed the call for a special session, viewing it as just another example of bullying a weaker country... Marred by political divisions from the start, the special session was eventually overwhelmed by the expediency of politics... Similar to the text adopted a few weeks earlier at the Durban Review Conference against racism, it appeared that the conclusion had been arrived at before the special session.."

from the page: "... Laura believes that her country's current situation requires a different political priority. "What happened during the seventies is of lesser importance at the moment.." When I ask Vera about it, she says, "Argentina is a paradoxical society. People claim human rights while they are not willing to fight for them. They don't feel responsible, reasoning that the whole country is corrupt..." ... Nora feels differently. "The destruction of my reference points made me the person I am now, a person with a new identity that feels responsible to show what is invisible to many..." Though the government is trying to create public discourse with the installation of the Space for Memory and Judgements for Truth, Vera foresees a long process. "... the first years of military domination, the middle class lived very well... Afterwards, one's [ambivalence] might have been hard to accept..." She also recognizes the same stubborn tendencies in the dictatorship's victims..."

from the page: "International law would be mere farce, said the chief US chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson, “if, in future, we do not apply its principles to ourselves”... the George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley compared the status of George W. Bush with that of Pinochet. “Outside [the United States] there is not the ambiguity about what to do about a war crime,”... Donald Rumsfeld... no longer travels. Rumsfeld has twice been indicted for war crimes in Germany... The Spanish high court is currently investigating a former Israeli defence minister and six other top Israeli officials for their role in the killing of civilians, mostly children, in Gaza. Henry Kissinger, who was largely responsible for bombing to death 600,000 peasants... is wanted for questioning in France, Chile and Argentina. Yet... President Barack Obama’s national security adviser, James Jones, said, “I take my daily orders from Dr. Kissinger.”""