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Two of yesterday's bbc headlines: Black Friday bonanza and a shooting in Oxford Circus, London (Britain) 230 people shot dead in a mosque (in Sinai, Egypt) The one on the shooting in Oxford Circus is the main headline with a large photo. Next to it a small phone of the shooting in Sinai.  The BBC after all is a national corporation of a nation state. Local news, however minor they are, are more important. What happens in other countries, especially in places where the victims are not Westerners is of a less importance. Another legacy of what the nation state has made of us. The same conclusion persists: Some lives are more precious than others. Black Friday bonanza is also significantly important because it reflects "our way of  life".
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Paradises of the Earth (3) – a Documentary

Part 3 follows an international solidarity caravan to the third stop of the trip:  Oum Laarayes,  another   polluted and marginalised town  in Tunisia's phosphate mining basin.  Several issues were discussed in this episode – from the neocolonial nature of mining to the urgency of the requests sought by social movements including jobs, better infrastructure and access to water:  Paradises of the Earth - Part 3
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"But  la transición,  as it is known, was left unfinished. Spain’s democracy, in contrast to much of postwar Europe, was not erected upon an anti-fascist consensus. Instead, its foundation required a pact of silence. In exchange for returning to democracy, Francoist elites kept positions of social and economic privilege; the dictatorship’s crimes went unpunished as a blanket of  amnesty and amnesia  extended over the civil war and the systematic repression that followed it. After the 1982 Socialist (PSOE) landslide victory, Fraga and his followers consolidated as the leading opposition party. As a result, the PP became a peculiar conservative party. Unlike their French, German or even British counterparts, Spanish conservatives have never had to worry about electoral competition on their right flank. The party contains everything from center-right liberals and Christian democrats to far-right nostalgics for Franco’s dictatorship. In 2007 parliament passed ...
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It would be interesting to read an analysis of the socio-political implications of this: ROP means rate of profit HC means historic cost CC means current cost
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"Libya doesn’t want them, Europe doesn’t want them and even their own countries don’t want them." Apart from the smugglers, Libya, the EU and their "own countries" do not think that there is any profit to make out of these people at the moment. The migrant slave trade
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"The only politics that offers a way out of the dilemma of contemporary Third World sovereignty is an internationalism that recognizes that its subjects are political actors, not just suffering subjects; that the repression launched by struggling secularist regimes undermines secularism just as it invites intervention; that the beneficiaries of Western intervention are to be found in Moscow, Riyadh, Arlington, and Islamabad, not Homs and Benghazi; and that the struggles of global refugee diasporas are coextensive with the domestic political communities they were forced to leave behind." How humanitarianism became imperialism
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Beijing was particularly alarmed by an “indigenisation” law effectively seizing majority control of foreign-owned businesses and companies, many of them Chinese. “China’s political and economic stake in Zimbabwe is high enough to demand a close watch on developments,” Wang wrote in a prescient commentary in December last year. Was Mugabe's fall a result of China flexing its muscles?
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