Neoliberalism as a Water Balloon. Kabul assault: British forces involved in fight back. IRANIANS WE LOVE U: a message to Iran from Israel. Robert Redford on the state of journalism, politics and film. Interactive: Investigate Britain's arms trade | News. Turn autoplay off Edition: <span><a href=" Beta About us Today's paper Subscribe Interactive: Investigate Britain's arms trade What weapons and other 'controlled exports' does Britain sell around the globe? Send to a friend Your IP address will be logged Share Short link for this page: Contact us Report errors or inaccuracies: userhelp@theguardian.com Letters for publication should be sent to: letters@theguardian.com. Christy Moore - Goose Green (Taking tea with pinochet) Tibetan monk sets himself on fire | World news. Another Tibetan Buddhist monk has set himself on fire in western China amid a wave of such protests against China's handling of the vast Tibetan areas it rules, overseas groups have said.
Tamchoe Sangpo set himself alight on Friday during a prayer ceremony at Bongtak monastery in a remote region of Qinghai province, the advocacy group Free Tibet said. It gave no details about his current condition, although US-funded broadcaster Radio Free Asia said he had died. The reports said Sangpo was around 40 years old and had served as one of the monastery's leaders after returning from three years of study during the 1990s in India, where Tibet's exiled Buddhist leader, the Dalai Lama, resides.
They said he had strongly objected to the presence of Chinese security agents who took up positions in the monastery last month, warning them of extreme acts if they did not leave. In Tibet acts of self-immolation rise amid a battle for hearts and minds | World news. Inside Tibet's heart of protest Link to video: Inside Tibet's heart of protest On the roof of the world, Chinese paramilitaries are trying to snuff out Tibetan resistance to Beijing's rule with spiked batons, semi-automatic weapons and fire extinguishers. Every 20 metres along the main road of Aba, the remote town on the Tibetan plateau that is at the heart of the current wave of protests, police officers and communist officials wearing red armbands look out for potential protesters.
Dozens more paramilitaries sit in ranks outside shops and restaurants in an intimidating show of force. At the nearby Kirti monastery, Chinese officers in fire trucks keep a close eye on pilgrims prostrating themselves, in case their devotion turns to immolation. Outsiders are not supposed to see this. The authorities have blocked internet and mobile phone signals. The latest occurred on Saturday.
Three days earlier, a former Kirti monk sacrificed himself in similarly horrific fashion. Teenage Tibetan nun sets herself on fire in China | World news. An 18-year-old Tibetan nun has set herself on fire in western China in the latest protest against Beijing's handling of the Tibetan regions it rules, an activist group said. Free Tibet said in a statement that the nun had set herself on fire on Saturday and was believed to have survived. The young woman, identified as Tenzin Choezin, was a nun at the Mamae nunnery in Sichuan province's Aba prefecture, the statement said.
It said Choezin shouted slogans of protest against the Chinese government before setting herself on fire at a junction close to the nunnery. "Soldiers and police came immediately and took her away," the statement said. As many as 18 monks, nuns and ordinary Tibetans have set themselves on fire over the past year, and Free Tibet says at least 12 have died from their injuries. A statement by two Tibetan monks exiled in India, Losang Yeshe and Kanyag Tsering, distributed by the International Campaign for Tibet, said Choezin was the eldest of four children and a good student.
Bc video: Sincerity makes rare, welcomed appearance in political speech. Christy Moore-Hurt. A Lesson for Anarcho-Capitalists. War is a Racket by Smedley Butler. Noam Chomsky on Adam Smith & Invisible Hand - americanfeud.org. Paul Mason: 'These revolts have ended the period of capitalist realism' - video. Why religion is like a penis. Britain has socialism in its psyche, too | Tristram Hunt. The Conservative commentariat has gone weak-kneed at the prime minister's "popular capitalism" speech.
Like no other political leader, we are told, David Cameron "gets" the creative, iconoclastic energy of capitalism. This is the kind of free-market economics, according to the Spectator's Fraser Nelson, writing in the Telegraph, that is "hard-wired into the national DNA". The Cameroonians like to think the ideological debate is over. For all those understandable qualms over City bonuses and bank bailouts, the neoliberal system of the past 30 years is defined as the only game in town. Or, as the Times columnist Danny Finkelstein put it on Newsnight, the choice comes down to the Soviet Union or Brent Cross shopping centre.
So, the only question you are left with is how to tinker around the edges: a tax break here, a nudge there. Yes, this politics often accepted the principle of market economics, but it was far more aggressive about controlling its exuberances. RSA Animate - Crises of Capitalism. George Carlin ~ The American Dream.
Blair Inc's 'baffling' increase in earnings | Politics | The Observer. Unemployment is rising and companies are going to the wall as the economic turmoil continues to inflict damage across the globe. But one organisation is thriving. Records recently filed at Companies House show Tony Blair Inc is going from strength to strength. They reveal that income channelled through a complex network of firms and partnerships controlled by Blair rose more than 40% last year to more than £12m. Of this, almost £10m was paid for "management services". The money was transferred via a network of firms and financial vehicles.
Accountancy experts are questioning the arcane nature of the network's finances, which makes it difficult to trace where its money is coming from, or where it is being spent. Accounts for Windrush Ventures, an obscure company that operates under the trading name "the Office of Tony Blair", suggest 2011 has been a successful year for the former prime minister. Guns as Christmas Gifts Went Up 100% in 2011. Newt Gingrich comments on Palestinians draw heavy criticism | World news. Leading Palestinian officials have rounded on the Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich for his description of Palestinians as an "invented" people and "terrorists". The Republican frontrunner insisted at a candidate debate on Saturday – to warm applause from the audience – that "these people are terrorists. They teach terrorism in their schools. They have textbooks that say, if there are 13 Jews and nine Jews are killed, how many Jews are left?
We pay for those textbooks through our aid money. "It's fundamentally time for somebody to have the guts to stand up and say, enough lying about the Middle East. " Palestinian officials said Gingrich's allegations were based substantially on material produced by an Israeli organisation, Palestinian Media Watch, which has published a long list of entries on its website under the heading 'Promoting Violence for Children'. "[Gingrich] is welcome to come to Palestine so he can stop speaking from talking points and speak about reality. Genial foreleser. Russians fight Twitter and Facebook battles over Putin election | World news. Russians have flooded Facebook and Twitter as they organise unprecedented protests against Vladimir Putin's United Russia party. But they are not alone. Thousands of Twitter accounts appear to have been created with the sole purpose of drowning out opposition voices by flooding the service's hashtag search function.
The automated attacks have dumped a blizzard of meaningless tweets with hashtags such as #Navalny, on which tweets about Alexei Navalny are collated, making it impossible to follow the flow of news about the arrested opposition leader. Many of the so-called "Twitter bots" have now been shut down. The flood of fake tweets came after liberal websites, including the LiveJournal blogging platform, the website for radio station Ekho Moskvy and weekly journal Bolshoi Gorod , were shut down by distributed denial of service attacks on Sunday, the day of Russia's disputed parliamentary vote. The website for Golos, an independent election monitor, was also shut down. Two Lesbians Raised A Baby And This Is What They Got. Lessons from Iceland: the people can have the power | Birgitta Jónsdóttir. The Dutch minister of internal affairs said at a speech during free press day this year: "Law-making is like a sausage, no one really wants to know what is put in it.
" He was referring to how expensive the Freedom of Information Act is, and was suggesting that journalists shouldn't really be asking for so much governmental information. His words exposed one of the core problems in our democracies: too many people don't care what goes into the sausage, not even the so-called law-makers, the parliamentarians. If the 99% want to reclaim our power, our societies, we have to start somewhere. An important first step is to sever the ties between the corporations and the state by making the process of lawmaking more transparent and accessible for everyone who cares to know or contribute. We have to know what is in that law sausage; the monopoly of the corporate lobbyist has to end – especially when it comes to laws regulating banking and the internet.
Why Iceland Should Be in the News, But Is Not. Norway's dirty little secrets | Mark Curtis. Can the European left look to Norway to push the world's powerful nations to act morally abroad? A Labour/socialist left coalition government is celebrating electoral victory there, the first time an incumbent government has won re-election in 40 years. Four years ago, it promised to act as a "peace nation" to support a "more democratic world order" and human rights. Yet socialist-led Norway – still living on its benign image abroad – has instead become the home of four dirty little secrets. The first concerns the government's pension fund, which invests its huge oil income in more than 7,500 companies in 46 countries and is worth about £250bn. Even worse is policy on oil. On the environment, Norway's benign image is also removed from reality.
Finally, Norwegian arms exports – little known outside the country – are booming. Norway has lost its ethical niche. A Brief History of The United States of America. Dalai Lama warns of backlash against immolations. Vladimir Putin scoops Chinese peace award | World news. The Russian prime minister, Vladimir Putin, is used to receiving accolades in friendly nations, but even he may raise an eyebrow at the prize he has just been awarded in China: peacemaker of the year. After two wars in Chechnya, one conflict in South Ossetia and two of the deadliest hostage relief operations in modern history, the former KGB officer was named on Monday as the winner of the second Confucian peace prize. It is unclear if Putin is even aware of the award which was chosen by an obscure cultural organisation, the China International Peace Research Centre, from a field of nominees including Bill Gates, Angela Merkel, Kofi Annan, Jacob Zuma and a Tibetan Panchen Lama imposed by Beijing.
The 16-judge panel said that Putin deserved the award because his criticism of Nato's military engagement in Libya was "outstanding in keeping world peace", regardless of the fact that it had no bearing on the outcome of the north African conflict. Mixed messages on climate 'vulnerability' 13 November 2011Last updated at 14:45 There are concerns that climate change may exacerbate flooding in cities such as Bangkok One of the most striking new voices on climate change that's emerged since the UN summit in Copenhagen two years ago is the Climate Vulnerable Forum. The grouping includes small island states vulnerable to extreme weather events and sea level rise, those with immense spans of low-lying coastline such as Vietnam and Bangladesh, and dry nations of East Africa.
It's currently holding a meeting in Bangladesh, with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon as the keynote speaker. These countries feel vulnerable as a result of several types of projected climate impact. In increasing order of suddenness, there are what you might call "steady-state" impacts such as rising sea levels; increased separation of weather into more concentrated wet periods and dry periods; and a greater occurrence of extreme weather events such as hurricanes, floods, heatwaves and droughts. UN vote on Palestinian state put off amid lack of support | World news. The UN security council on Friday put off a decision on admitting Palestine as a state while the Palestinian leadership considers whether to press for a vote it is all but certain to lose. The UN went through the ritual of adopting a confidential report from the admissions committee – which is the security council in another guise – that was unable to reach a common position on whether to recognise a Palestinian state in the face of strong US opposition.
But a vote was put off while the Palestinians decide whether to press the issue after concluding that they do not have enough support in the security council even to claim a moral victory in the face of a US pledge to veto recognition of a state. The Palestinians appear able to muster only eight of the nine votes they need to win approval after France joined Britain in saying it would abstain even though Paris last week backed recognition of a Palestinian state by Unesco. Vatican joins calls for crackdown on financial markets | Business.
A Vatican thinktank is calling for a global authority to police the financial markets. Above, the pope surrounded by cardinals. Photograph: Tony Gentile/Reuters If Vatican cardinals have yet to join the Occupy Wall Street protesters, a document released by the Holy See calling for a "world authority" to crack down on capitalism suggests some are considering it. Written by the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace and released on Monday, Towards Reforming the International Financial and Monetary Systems in the Context of a Global Public Authority, suggests a beefed-up United Nations could police the financial markets and inject a dose of ethics to replace rampant profiteering and reduce inequality. The pamphlet claims that in combination with a "central world bank", such an authority would help restore "the primacy of the spiritual and of ethics", as well as "the primacy of politics – which is responsible for the common good – over the economy and finance".
Incredible Speech By Wall Street Protester "End The Fed" 2011. America's child death shame. St Paul's may seek injunction to move Occupy London activists | UK news. Officials from St Paul's Cathedral and the wider City district are considering legal action to force protesters to remove a camp set up outside the church more than a week ago, following an impasse between the two sides.
The cathedral has been shut since Friday afternoon after its dean, the Right Reverend Graeme Knowles, said the presence of more than 200 tents and marquees beside the building's western edge was an unacceptable fire, and health and safety risk. Both he and the cathedral's canon chancellor, Giles Fraser, have publicly urged the activists to leave. It is the first time the cathedral has been closed since the second world war, and church officials say it is costing St Paul's around £20,000 a day in lost visitor revenues.
The Occupy the London Stock Exchange movement, part of a wave of similar global protests against the perceived excesses of the financial and banking systems, says it is sympathetic to the cathedral's plight but believes the closure is an overreaction. Links. Mmflint sin kanal. JohnPilger.com - the films and journalism of John Pilger. Immortal Technique at Occupy Wall Street: "We are here to stay" Turkish students hurl eggs at IMF speaker. The War On Democracy by John Pilger. The World vs Wall Street. Occupy Wall Street protests - Wednesday 6 October 2011 | World news.