Yemeni women set veils ablaze in protest at Saleh crackdown

Hundreds of Yemeni women set fire to veils on Wednesday in protest at the government's crackdown on demonstrators, after overnight clashes in the capital and another city left 25 people dead, officials said.

The women spread a black cloth across a main street in Sana'a and threw their full-body veils, known as makrama, on to a pile, sprayed it with oil and set it ablaze. As the flames rose, they chanted: "Who protects Yemeni women from the crimes of the thugs?"

Women have taken a key role in the uprising against President Ali Abdullah Saleh's authoritarian rule. This month the Yemeni activist Tawakkul Karman was awarded the Nobel peace prize along with two Liberian women, for their struggle for women's rights.

Wednesday's protest was not related to women's rights or issues surrounding the Islamic veil. The act of burning their clothing is a symbolic Bedouin gesture signifying an appeal to tribesmen for help, in this case to stop the attacks on the protesters. The women who burned clothing in the capital were wearing traditional veils at the time, many covered in black from head to toe.

The Russian state and surveillance technology

The Russian blogosphere has burgeoned into a open-door sanctuary for all strands of political opinion. Predictably, it has also attracted the attention of the country's security services. Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov present the first in a series of investigations outlining how the Russian state is now monitoring its online public...


Russia’s Internet has lived through several rows connected with the so-called System for Operative Investigative Activities, which enables the tapping and interception of Internet traffic. At the end of the 90s, ISPs complained that they were forced to buy equipment for this system with their own money, and in the 2000s activists demanded that the Ministry of Communications insist on the security services showing ISPs a court order sanctioning Internet traffic interception. This battle ended with the complete routing of the activists, and today the security services have the right not only to access the providers’ channels without a court order, but to do it remotely...


On 1st October 2011 the Italian journal ‘Internazionale’’s festival in Ferrara was addressed by the well known Chinese journalist and blogger Jing Zhao (also known as Michael Anti), who is famous for the fact that in 2005 Microsoft deleted his blog. When Anti was asked to describe the situation in China, he summed it up in a few words.

‘Instead of Facebook we have XiaoNei, and instead of Twitter, Weibo. The usual policy in China for introducing Internet technology is to allow people to use a new product just until a Chinese equivalent is developed. So now Facebook is banned, and so is Twitter. And the servers for the Chinese versions are in Beijing.’

Love and Anarchy: Emma Goldman's passion for free expression

'A handful of radicals throughout the centuries have intuited that a successful revolution includes a healthy passion for the inner life. One of them was the Russian-Jewish anarchist Emma Goldman, born in 1869. The right to stay alive in one's senses, and to live in a world that prizes that aliveness, was, for her, a key demand in any struggle she cared to wage against coercive government rule. The hatred she bore the centralized state was rooted in what she took to be government's brutish contempt for the feeling life of the individual. Fellow radicals who exhibited a similar contempt were to be held to the same standard. Comrades were those who, in the name of the revolution, were bent on honoring the complete human being.

Emma Goldman, just before entering jail in 1917 for conspiring against the newly instituted military draft

Although Mikhail Bakunin, that fiercest of Russian anarchists, was one of her heroes, his famous definition of the revolutionary as a man who "has no interests of his own, no feelings, no habits, no longings, not even a name, only a single interest, a single thought, a single passion—the revolution" was as abhorrent to Goldman as corporate capitalism. If revolutionaries gave up sex and art while they were making the revolution, she said, they would become devoid of joy. Without joy, human beings cease being human. Should the men and women who subscribed to Bakunin's credo prevail, the world would be even more heartless after the revolution than it had been before.

The conviction that revolution and the life of the senses dare not be mutually exclusive made Goldman eloquent in defense of causes—sexual freedom, birth control, marriage reform—that a majority of her fellow anarchists derided as trivializing the cause. Comrades repeatedly took her to task for, as many of them said, interpreting anarchism as a movement for individual self-expression rather than a revolution of the collective.

Hotly, she defended her need to define anarchism as she experienced it, with or without radical consensus. After all, what good was a revolution if at the end of the day one couldn't speak one's mind freely? To retreat from this insight, she insisted, was to ensure political disaster. Indeed, after the party of Lenin came to power, in 1917—declaring the proletariat glorious, the intelligentsia contemptible, and any who said otherwise an enemy of the people—she knew that the Russian revolution was lost. When she said so in Moscow in 1921, she was promptly invited to leave—exactly as she had been in the United States in 1919 after years of challenging the American democracy on much the same grounds. Keeping her company in one state of exile after another was the daily reminder—to herself and all who would listen—that the right to think and speak freely had always been the first article of faith nailed to Emma Goldman's front door..'

(NB: in an otherwise readable review, the statement attributed to Mikhail Bakunin is extracted from 'The Catechism of the Revolutionary', which most historians believe was written solely by Sergei Nechaev. Nechaev's revolutionary philosophy epitomised the doctrine of the end justifying the means. DS)

Mike Davis on Occupy Wall Street

Mike Davis “The great issue is not raising taxes on the rich or achieving a better regulation of banks. It’s economic democracy: the right of ordinary people to make macro-decisions about social investment, interest rates, capital flows, job creation, and global warming. If the debate isn’t about economic power, it’s irrelevant.”..


..One of the most important facts about the current uprising is simply that it has occupied the street and created an existential identification with the homeless. (Though, frankly, my generation, trained in the civil rights movement, would have thought first of sitting inside the buildings and waiting for the police to drag and club us out the door; today, the cops prefer pepper spray and “pain compliance techniques.”) I think taking over the skyscrapers is a wonderful idea, but for a later stage in the struggle. The genius of Occupy Wall Street.. is that it has temporarily liberated some of the most expensive real estate in the world and turned a privatized square into a magnetic public space and catalyst for protest... Personally I lean toward the anarchist position and its obvious imperatives.

First, expose the pain of the 99 percent; put Wall Street on trial. Bring Harrisburg, Loredo, Riverside, Camden, Flint, Gallup, and Holly Springs to downtown New York. Confront the predators with their victims—a national tribunal on economic mass murder.

Second, continue to democratize and productively occupy public space (i.e. reclaim the Commons). The veteran Bronx activist-historian Mark Naison has proposed a bold plan for converting the derelict and abandoned spaces of New York into survival resources (gardens, campsites, playgrounds) for the unsheltered and unemployed. The Occupy protestors across the country now know what it’s like to be homeless and banned from sleeping in parks or under a tent. All the more reason to break the locks and scale the fences that separate unused space from urgent human needs.

Third, keep our eyes on the real prize. The great issue is not raising taxes on the rich or achieving a better regulation of banks. It’s economic democracy: the right of ordinary people to make macro-decisions about social investment, interest rates, capital flows, job creation, and global warming. If the debate isn’t about economic power, it’s irrelevant.

Fourth, the movement must survive the winter in order to fight the power in the next spring. It’s cold on the street in January. Bloomberg and every other mayor and local ruler is counting on a hard winter to deplete the protests. It is thus all-important to reinforce the occupations over the long Christmas break. Put on your overcoats.

Finally, we must calm down-the itinerary of the current protest is totally unpredictable. But if one erects a lightning rod, we shouldn’t be surprised if lightning eventually strikes.

Bankers, recently interviewed in the New York Times, claim to find the Occupy protests little more than a nuisance arising from an unsophisticated understanding of the financial sector. They should be more careful. Indeed, they should probably quake before the image of the tumbrel.

Since 1987, African Americans have lost more than half of their net worth; Latinos, an incredible two-thirds. Five-and-a-half million manufacturing jobs have been lost in the United Sates since 2000, more than 42,000 factories closed, and an entire generation of college graduates now face the highest rate of downward mobility in American history.

Wreck the American dream and the common people will put on you some serious hurt. Or as Nada explains to his unwary assailants in Carpenter’s great film: “I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass ... and I’m all out of bubblegum.”

Northern lights – in pictures

There have been displays of the northern lights, or aurora borealis, further south in North America than usually expected: 





The northern lights, or aurora borealis, dance across the sky in Ozark, Arkansas, US

I've learned that making a living is not the same thing as making a life

'What I Have Learned..'

I've learned that you can't hide a piece of broccoli in a glass of milk. (age 6)

Solstice full moon over Sounion (Moon seen from earth)

I've learned that I like my teacher because she cries when we sing Silent Night (age 7)

I've learned that when I wave to people in the country, they stop what they are doing and wave back (age 9)

I've learned that just when I get my room the way I like it, Mum makes me clean it up (age 12)

I've learned that if you want to cheer yourself up, try cheering up someone else. (age 13)

I've learned that although its hard to admit it, I'm secretly glad my parents are strict with me (age 15)

I've learned that silent company is often more healing than words of advice. (age 24)

I've learned that brushing my child's hair is one of life's greatest pleasures (age 25)

I've learned that if someone says something unkind about me I must live so that no one will believe it (age 39)

I've learned that there are people who love you dearly but just don't know how to show it (age 41)

I've learned that you can make someone's day by simply sending them a little card (age 44)

I've learned that the greater a person's sense of guilt the greater the need to cast blame on others (age 45)

I've learned that children and grandparents are natural allies (age 46)

I've learned that singing Amazing Grace can lift my spirits for hours (age 49)

I've learned that motel matresses are better on the side away from the phone (age 50)

I've learned that you can tell a lot about a man by the way he handles these three things: a rainy day, a lost i-guage, and tangled Christmas lights (age 52)

I've learned that regardless of your relationship with your parents, you miss them terribly after they die (age 53)

Whisper of the wind: David Brosha

I've learned that making a living is not the same thing as making a life (age 58)

I've learned that if you want to do something positive for your children, try to improve your marraige (age 61)

I've learned that life sometimes gives you a second chance (age 62)

I've learned that you shouldn't go through life with a catcher's mitt on both hands - you need to be able to throw something back (age 64)

I've learned that if you pursue happiness it will elude you. But if you focus on your family, the needs of others, your work, meeting new people and doing the very best you can, happiness will find you (age 65)

I've learned that whenever I decide something with kindness I usually make the right decisions (age 66)

I've learned that everyone can use a prayer (age 72)

I've learned that it pays to believe in miracles. And to tell the truth, I've seen several (age 73)

I've learned that even when I have pain, I don't have to be one (age 82)

I've learned that every day you should reach out and touch someone. People love that human touch - holding hands, a warm hug, or just a friendly pat on the back (age 85)

I've learned that I still have a lot to learn (age 92)

Earth as seen from the Moon (taken by Apollo 8, December 24, 1968)

Jasmine the Greyhound

In 2003, police in Warwickshire , England , opened a garden shed and found a whimpering, cowering dog.  The dog had been locked in the shed and abandoned.  It was dirty and malnourished, and had quite clearly been abused.

In an act of kindness, the police took the dog, which was a female greyhound, to the Nuneaton Warwickshire Wildlife Sanctuary, which is run by a man named Geoff Grewcock, and known as a haven for animals abandoned, orphaned, or otherwise in need.

Geoff and the other sanctuary staff went to work with two aims: to restore the dog to full health, and to win her trust.   It took several weeks, but eventually both goals were achieved.  They named her Jasmine, and they started to think about finding her an adoptive home.

Jasmine, however, had other ideas.  No one quite remembers how it came about, but Jasmine started welcoming all animal arrivals at the sanctuary.  It would not matter if it were a puppy, a fox cub, a rabbit or, any other lost or hurting animal.  Jasmine would just peer into the box or cage and, when and where possible, deliver a welcoming lick. (greyhounds are meant to rip apart anything small and furry that moves!)