Notes from the Surf
Mouse vs Mouse Trap
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Plz9JxsnhH4
Ah fate, thou art cruel.
Weekend life
http://drawingboard.smackjeeves.com/comics/626704/weekend-will-wind/
Makes me wonder where we'll be 10 years from now.
AT-ATs in Kansas
http://wtfispantone.com/post/339417057/my-mom-has-been-sending-me-pictures-of-wintry-fog
Another nail in the coffin of photographic evidence.
Food and Agriculture Organisation Highlights Speculators as Exacerbating Food Prices
http://business.asiaone.com/Business/My%2BMoney/Opinion/Story/A1Story20100106-190014.html
"Speculation in agricultural commodities may not have reached fever pitch yet but with food shortages expected in 2010, it could."
IMF to Haiti: Freeze Public Wages
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion/517494
"the IMF is pursuing the same kinds of policies that made Haiti a geography of precariousness even before the quake... the IMF is still using crisis and debt as leverage to compel neoliberal reforms... in 2003, Haiti spent $57.4 million to service its debt, while total foreign assistance for education, health care and other services was a mere $39.21 million. In other words, under a system of putative benevolence, Haiti paid back more than it received."
Head of Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs versus Crazy Conspiracy Theorists
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/01/15/sunstein/index.html
proposing that the U.S. Government employ teams of covert agents and pseudo-"independent" advocates to "cognitively infiltrate" online groups and websites -- as well as other activist groups -- which advocate views that Sunstein deems "false conspiracy theories" about the Government. This would be designed to increase citizens' faith in government officials and undermine the credibility of conspiracists.
Proposed Web video restrictions cause outrage in Italy
http://www.thestandard.com/news/2010/01/15/proposed-web-video-restrictions-cause-outrage-italy
"New rules to be introduced by government decree will require people who upload videos onto the Internet to obtain authorization from the Communications Ministry... He said the government was also keen to restrict the uncontrollable circulation of information over the Internet to preserve its monopoly over television news."
India: Reports of Government Forces Attacking Poor and Their Supporters
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Bihar-cops-thrash-Jamia-professor-brand-him-Naxal/articleshow/5379196.cms
"Associate professor at Jamia Millia Islamia, Rahul Ramagundam, was assaulted, abused and branded a Naxalite by Bihar police for daring to ask the cops why the hutments belonging to Musahars... were being demolished." (Journalists and students) "were forcibly prevented from leaving... They were assaulted and their cameras taken away." "The poorest sections of the society who join the police and other armed forces for their livelihood are systematically dehumanized, brutalized and transformed into killing machines and deployed against their own people."
Haiti - a history of intervention, occupation and resistance
http://www.indymedia.ie/article/95531
in 2005, the then MINUSTAH force commander, Lieutenant-General Augusto Heleno Ribeiro Pereira testified at a congressional commission in Brazil that "we are under extreme pressure from the international community to use violence”, mentioning Canada, France, and the United States in particular as the source of that pressure... A July 6th 2005 raid on the Cité Soleil shanty town probably saw at least 20 killed. 75% of the wounded who turned up at one clinic were women and children.
Greece: Employees occupy factory. Farmers block highways. Police murder trial starting.
http://libcom.org/news/tension-start-alexandros-grigoropoulos-assassins-trial-16012010
"After a month of strike the workers of Elite, the country's second biggest shoe producing industry have stepped up their struggle by occupying the company's main factory in Athens."