Spanish artist’s religious persecution for 34-year-old film

This video says about itself:

In this video, musician Fermin Muguruza sings in the Basque language — a language which was forbidden in Spain during Franco’s regime. In this interview Fermin Muguruza speaks about his personal experiences with music censorship in Spain: Its mechanisms, its impact on the artist, and the authorities’ fear of what music can do.

From daily The Guardian in Britain:

Spanish artist faces prison over ‘how to cook Christ’ film

Javier Krahe prosecuted for ‘offending religious feelings’ after 1978 short film was broadcast on Spanish TV

A leading Spanish artist faces up to a year in prison after being prosecuted for “offending religious feelings” in relation to a short film he made more than 30 years ago that claimed to show “how to cook Jesus Christ”.

Javier Krahe, who has been a popular and provocative figure in Spain for nearly half a century, made the film in 1978 but it was only shown on Spanish TV in 2004 as a backdrop to an interview with its creator. The little-known charge – comparable with but not identical to Britain’s blasphemy law, remains part of the penal code despite never having been applied before in Spanish legal history.

Krahe’s 54-second film uses the tone of a cooking programme, with chefs advised to remove Jesus’ nails and separate him from his crucifix, which should be left to one side. Christ’s tiny white body – a small figurine is used – is then shown being washed, lightly smothered in butter, placed on a bed of aromatic herbs in a glass tray and popped into an oven. “One gaunt Christ” is apparently enough to feed two, and when the dish is ready (after three days) it miraculously emerges from the oven without assistance.

There have been two previous failed attempts to prosecute Krahe, who is currently on bail for €192,000 (£153,000). The latest prosecution is the result of a court action by the Catholic legal association the Centro Juridico Tomas Moro.

That Roman Catholic center, now persecuting an artist because of free speech, should think more about the Roman Catholic saint, Sir Thomas More from whom they derive their name. Thomas More (like in his famous book Utopia) criticized absolute monarchy, the death penalty, etc. Because of that free speech, the would-be absolute monarch of England persecuted him, and ultimately had him beheaded.

“How do you show that someone’s religious feelings have been hurt?” Krahe told El Pais newspaper, adding that he considers the prosecution to be absurd. “I’m accused of a series of things that I haven’t done. I don’t appear on television cooking Christ, and I haven’t ever used these images [in a performance].” His supporters say freedom of speech laws should be changed to allow room for blasphemy.

Krahe is due to appear in Madrid’s regional court, where statements from witnesses in the case are due to be heard on Monday.

See also here.

From Iberosphere:

Spain still doesn’t understand the separation of Church and State

Comedian Leo Bassi is facing legal charges for performing a show that made fun of the Pope and Catholic Church. His provocative pranks have once again brought out the ugly side of Spanish justice and the wrath of the far right.

By Nick Lyne

Pedophile priests who will never see the inside of a court, child robbers at large, unpunished crimes from the Franco era, corrupt politicians at all levels and in most parties, a banking system in cahoots with construction companies that has dragged the economy into ruin… Meanwhile a provincial court in Valladolid, seemingly unaware of the Spanish Constitution’s guarantee of freedom of expression nearly four decades after the death of the dictator, has hauled comedian Leo Bassi up before a judge to answer charges of “offending religious feelings, slander, and libel.”

Eyewitness Spain: Bank crisis fuels the rage against a rotten system: here.

BP oil disaster, new film

This video from the USA is called The Big Fix Official Trailer.

By Jan Lundberg, Culture Change in the USA:

The Big Fix: Documentary Exposes BP, US Government on Gulf Disaster

Sunday, 20 May 2012 14:41

One of the world’s biggest environmental crimes has been more or less forgotten. This is part of our collective guilt as the world’s ecosystem continues its accelerated collapse. But the new documentary film The Big Fix takes a detailed, daring look at what happened in the Gulf of Mexico with BP‘s Macondo offshore oil drilling rig. The story and facts that emerge are more than disturbing.

The movie is soon getting its major national release in theaters and on Netflix. Viewers will be made to recall the unsettling images of oil slicks, fouled fowl, suddenly unemployed fisher folk, and empty assurances by BP and the Feds.

The partially U.S.-owned British oil company has its origins in geopolitical skullduggery in Iran, explained in the film’s narration and images. The history makes more convincing the subsequent telling of of the corporation’s and the U.S. government’s going to great pains to lie that all was being done that could be done to minimize the blowout’s damage and to clean up the mess.

But there was even more going on, undisclosed to the public, such as the extent and effects of massive application of toxic Corexit. This amounted to a double assault on the Gulf, done deliberately. Those who believe that the whole episode from start to finish was an accident, and that industry and government did their best with a bad situation, are sadly ignorant. Or, they wish to simply keep driving and consuming petroleum in other ways, because deep change is inconvenient or frightening.

Corexit, a dispersant banned in the UK, was immediately employed by BP soon after the blowout, and was ordered stopped by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. But BP kept on openly using it, and then secretly so, as The Big Fix tells us.

Even more outrageous was that when the undersea oil well was capped, and scrutiny by the average news-consumer slacked off, people were soon misled by corrupt spokespersons that the oil was benignly disappearing. There were contradictory reports of remaining oil pollution that flew in the face of U.S. and industry claims that the oil was 75% gone. It certainly was not gone, and the bulk of it remains today — perhaps in part from additional ocean floor oil leaks. The oil has slowly been moving into the Atlantic, and may damage the Eastern U.S. seaboard.

What to do? The activist response

Some environmental activists during the crisis’ height did more than hand-wringing and crying out for a clean energy economy some day. We instead called for an immediate step-down in U.S. oil consumption to compensate for what the BP blowout was spewing. Our coalition, World Oil Reduction for the Gulf, was gathering steam when the blowout was capped, but everything naturally went back to business as usual.

But some activists, such as Josh and Rebecca Tickell, were just getting heated up. They could not keep their muckraking lens away from the Gulf, and be like almost everyone else who just moved on in their minds and ignored the plight of the Gulf. The BP blowout and subsequent reports of persistent damage to wildlife and human health were enough to draw the filmmakers to the New Orleans region, Josh Tickell’s boyhood home, to check out the whole situation in 2011. Along for the ride with the Tickells on their rolling headquarters-bus was Peter Fonda, friend to the sea and bait for star-struck Cajuns. The Big Fix’s first dramatic device was to show footage of Fonda in Easy Rider, synced with Steppenwolf’s Born to Be Wild hard-rock tune.

Oil Spill Residue Still Present – In Minnesota: here.

Two years on, the national spotlight seems to have turned away from the Gulf oil spill, but a massive assessment of the environmental impacts is quietly under way. As Cyrus Martin reports, several recent observations, and a study of deepwater coral communities, suggest we may not be out of the woods yet: here.

Department Of Justice Investigates BP For Faulty Oil Spill Estimates: here.

Greg Palast: BP Covered Up 2008 Caspian Sea Deepwater Blowout and Already Knew Cap Wouldn’t Work: here.

USA: It’s a Fact: Domestic Drilling Doesn’t Affect Gas Prices: here.

Britain: The bosses of the world’s biggest multinational defence and oil companies, including BAE Systems and BP, will be asked to account for why hundreds of millions of pounds of government money was used to help military dictators build up their arsenals, and facilitated environmental and human rights abuses across the world: here.

Bahrain documentary film controversy

This video is the documentary: Bahrain: Shouting in the dark.

From weekly The Observer in Britain:

Radio Times poll provokes online battle for Baftas

Fierce opposition to al-Jazeera‘s Bahrain documentary generates a million votes

Vanessa Thorpe

Sunday 6 May 2012

This year’s Bafta award for the best current affairs television programme, to be awarded later this month, has provoked an international struggle to undermine the content of at least one of the four powerful documentaries on the shortlist – a film about the uprising in Bahrain last spring.

A fortnight ago the Radio Times magazine launched an online poll to allow readers to vote for their favourite Bafta nominees. There are no prizes on offer, but the current affairs category has now registered an incredible one million votes, even though participants will not decide the final outcome. While fans of Benedict Cumberbatch’s portrayal of Sherlock Holmes or of Dominic West’s role as Fred West have together clocked up only 4,000 votes in the best leading actor poll, more than half a million voters across the world have backed the film Shouting in the Dark, made in Bahrain by journalist May Ying Welsh for al-Jazeera. Another half a million have voted for Channel 4′s film Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields, fronted by Jon Snow.

Welsh’s film, which was shot undercover over three months, went out on al-Jazeera’s English-speaking channel last summer and provoked outrage among officials in Bahrain. They claimed it painted an unfair picture of police brutality during the uprising and played down the involvement of Iranian-backed subversives among the crowds. But since then the controversial film has won a Royal Television Society nomination, a UK Foreign Press Association award and a series of prestigious US prizes.

The fight for the top spot in an innocuous British magazine poll first became part of an international public relations war last weekend, soon after Khalid al-Khalifa, Bahrain’s foreign minister and a member of the ruling family, tweeted a call for his 80,000 Twitter followers to cast a vote for any one of the other nominees in the Radio Times poll.

“I invite everyone to stand with Bahrain and vote against the harmful al-Jazeera film,” he wrote. The tweet caused a Twitter storm of support from the Middle East for the Sri Lankan film. One user called Jaguar wrote: “Oh noble people of the Gulf, vote for Sri Lanka and prevent the Shia infidels from defaming Bahrain.” Another typical tweet came from Ahmed, who wrote: “Everyone vote more than once for the film Sri Lanka in order to make al-Jazeera’s film which harms Bahrain fail to win.”

In response, others began to urge support for Welsh’s documentary. A tweet from Nuwaidrat read: “Urgent – by the time you finish reading this line the thugs will have turned the tables on us – vote for the film Shouting in the Dark.” Another, from a user called Allah Gifted us with Martyrdom, wrote: “Please intensify voting efforts for al-Jazeera’s film Bahrain Shouting in the Dark which uncovers part of the truth about the situation in Bahrain.”

RadioTimes.com acting editor Tim Glanfield said: “For a British entertainment website to become a battleground between Bahrain government loyalists and its opponents has been an unexpected and extraordinary turn of events.”

Al-Jazeera staff commented on the voting patterns in an article for the Radio Times site and drew attention to the abusive nature of some tweets, many of which urged supporters of the Baharaini authorities to vote more than once.

“For several days, thousands of Arabic language tweets – at peak hours several tweets a second – have been pouring out of Bahrain and the Gulf in a steady stream, many of them filled with religious epithets and hate speech,” said the article.

After the al-Jazeera response went up on the site there was a brief hiatus in the flow of votes for the Sri Lankan film, which the commissioning team on the Arabic channel agree is a brilliant and worthy competitor.

Because of its “distressing images”, Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields went out in a late night slot and showed what Channel 4 said appeared to be “extrajudicial executions filmed by Sri Lankan soldiers as war trophies on their phones; the aftermath of shelling in civilian camps and hospitals alleged to have been deliberately targeted by Sri Lankan government forces; dead female Tamil fighters who appear to have been systematically raped; and pictures which document Tamil fighters alive in the custody of Sri Lankan government forces and then later dead, apparently having been executed.”

The film, directed by Callum Macrae, also recognised atrocities alleged to have been carried out by the Tamil Tigers.

Bolivia nationalizes electricity

This video says about itself:

Extract from The Corporation documentary about the 2000 Cochabamba water wars. The Bolivian people took to the streets after the water giant, Bechtel, took over the public water infrastructure. The privatization of the water in Bolivia was a condition of loan from the World Bank.

From the Buenos Aires Herald in Argentina:

Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Morales announces expropriation of REE shares in Bolivia

Bolivian President Evo Morales announced the expropriation of the Red Eléctrica Española (REE) shares at a power transmission company in Bolivia and ordered the Army to take over the firm’s headquarters.

“As a fair homage to the workers and the Bolivian people that has fought for the recovery of their natural resources and basic services, we nationalize the Power Transmission company” (TDE), Morales assured during the May Day rally at the Government Palace in La Paz. The measure was announced in the midst of the tension generated between Argentina and Rajoy’s government over the expropriation of YPF.

The Head of State made the announcement a few hours before the inauguration of the gas processing plant at Southern Bolivia along with the President of Repsol oil company, Antonio Brufau, which will allow an increase of exports to Argentina.

The decree sets the “nationalization” of the “shares that form the stock of shares of the International Energy Mains-SAU,” subsidiary of REE.

Morales justified the expropriation by assuring that “this Spaniard international company has barely invested 81 million dollars in 16 years, an average investment of five millions per year,” which he considered insufficient.

Red Electrica officials were not immediately available for comment, but a Spanish government source in Madrid said authorities were in touch with La Paz to discuss technical and diplomatic aspects of the nationalization.

In 2006, Morales used the May 1 holiday to announce the takeover of petroleum companies operating in Bolivia. He later nationalized oil and gas reserves to redistribute wealth to the landlocked country’s indigenous majority.

Some background: from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, Bolivia was a colony of the Spanish empire. The empire brought serfdom for the indigenous people and exploitation of Bolivia’s gold mines and other resources.

More recently, pro-capitalist Bolivian governments (before Morales was elected) privatised resources like electricity and water. This led to huge price rises for poor people; and to resistance in the form of the “water wars“, when the Rightist regime tried to push through the privatisations with bloody crackdowns.

Argentinian MPs voted on Thursday to take back the country’s main energy firm from its Spanish owners Repsol: here.

Anarchy reigns as water companies continue to leak millions of litres of water while we keep filling the pockets of their shareholders: here.

Japanese fish, fish art, exhibition

The Sieboldhuis, today a museum about Japan in the inner city of Leiden in the Netherlands, used to be the home of Philipp Franz von Siebold (1796-1866), a pioneer in European studies of Japanese society and natural history.

Von Siebold sent, in the year 1829 alone, 540 Japanese fish of 255 species, mainly in alcohol bottles, also some as mounted skins, to the natural history museum in Leiden. He also sent pictures of the fish, made by Japanese artist Kawahara Keiga (maybe some were by Keiga’s pupils).

Now, there is an exhibition of those fish and those pictures in the Sieboldhuis.

This is a video about the exhibition.

The Sieboldhuis site writes about the exhibition:

‘Fish: From Shark to Koi’ is a family exhibition. It shows visitors how Siebold collected ‘his’ fish in Japan between 1823 and 1829. The exhibition explains how the collected fish were painted, described, preserved and finally shipped to the Netherlands. Visitors, young and old, will learn how these fish were recognized as new species in the Netherlands and how they were described and illustrated as such in the Fauna Japonica: the fundamental bookwork on the Japanese animal kingdom.

The fish in this exhibition have rarely been shown to the public since the collection was formed. Most of the vivid water colour paintings by Kawahara Keiga are shown to the public for the first time in history. Because of their photo sensitivity, these works will not be included in any future exhibition any time soon. Highlights of this exhibition are the water colour paintings, the two meter long [blue] shark and the large sunfish, which is almost five feet long. In addition, the exhibition includes several aquariums with live fish.

Today, I saw just one (big) aquarium, with young koi, Japanese crucian carp, and goldfish.

Goldfish was the only Japanese fish species mentioned by famous eighteenth century naturalist Linnaeus. So Von Siebold really increased knowledge about fish in Japan. Today, more zoologists in Japan study fish than other animal species. Even the emperor studies fish. Fish are traditionally important in Japan, surrounded by sea on all sides and with many lakes and rivers in the interior.

There were also several films. One was about a new luminous shark species, recently discovered near Japan. Others were about tuna; about catfish (there is a legend that a giant catfish living under the Japanese islands causes earthquakes in Japan); and about koi.

Koi carp are big business in Japan. They may sell from 10,000 to 100,000 US dollars. There are beauty contests for them. Koi are thought of as symbols of peace, as they don’t fight among themselves.

Among the fish, exhibited both themselves and as pictures by Kawahara Keiga, was Ariosoma anagoides, a conger eel species. One could see that the mounted fish had lost their original colours. This is why Von Siebold commissioned Keiga to depict the fish, to preserve their colours.

There was also a sandbar shark. And a live sharksucker. And the anglerfish Lophius setigerus.

Indonesian wayang theatre

This video is a Dutch interview with Indonesian dalang Ki Enthus Susmono.

From the International Institute for Asian Studies in the Netherlands:

Destroying or innovating tradition? The politics of authenticity in the Indonesian wayang puppet theatre

IIAS Lunch Lecture by Sadiah Boonstra

Date & time: Wednesday 10 May 2012, 12.30-14.00 hrs.
Venue: IIAS Conference Room, Rapenburg 59, Leiden, Netherlands

Ki [The Honourable] Enthus Susomo (1966) is one of Indonesia’s most famous dalangs or wayang puppeteers. He is widely regarded as a radical innovator for the incorporation in wayang of non-wayang characters such as Batman, Harry Potter, political figures like Barack Obama and Osama bin Laden, the use of innovative musical compositions, and the creation of Wayang Santri, dealing with Islamic daily life. These innovations make him extremely popular, but urge critics to see him as “Destroyer” of the “authentic” wayang “tradition”.

Combining historical and anthropological research, Sadiah Boonstra will focus on dalang Ki Enthus Susmono to show how processes of defining “authenticity” linked to “tradition” in contemporary Indonesia are the result of mutual interaction between individual, local traditions and (post)colonial and (inter)national heritage policies influenced by identity issues concerning appropriation and belonging, and in- and exclusion.

Following Sears (1996) I will demonstrate that “authentic” wayang is a colonial construction that turned wayang plays and puppets together with the sound of the gamelan into symbols of “authentic” Javanese culture with roots in a pre-Islamic past. Arguing that UNESCO has perpetuated this myth of “authentic” wayang in the context of the Indonesian nation-state with the enlisting of the wayang puppet theatre as a Masterpiece of Oral and Intangible Heritage in 2003, I will analyze the politics of “authenticity” and its negotiation in the context of the contemporary wayang performance practice, the creation of heritage and the concept of intangible heritage as a signifier in the cultural canon of contemporary Indonesia.

Workers’ struggles on film

This video from Scotland is called UCS Work In – John Foster in Clydebank.

By Chris Bartter in Britain:

Reel inspiration: Ann Guedes

Monday 23 April 2012

Ann Guedes is a truly remarkable woman.

Her life has taken her from interrogation by the French security forces to sleeping on a floor in Paisley during the UCS work-in 40 years ago.

Last month she returned to Glasgow from her home in Lisbon to participate in the showing of two of Cinema Action‘s most important films, shot inside the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders’ work-in 40 years ago.

Her experiences could be a feature film in themselves and go back to the Paris 1968 occupations and strikes.

Guedes, a journalist in the English-language service of French broadcaster ORTF, was part of the occupation there and travelled around France explaining to other activists that the broadcasts on their screens came from a state studio, not from ORTF.

It was after one of these missions that the young mother of three fell foul of the police. She was smuggled out of town and back to Paris but the next morning, returning to her flat, she was jumped by plain clothes police and driven to a police station.

After a night’s intensive interrogation, a security force convoy took her and other foreign nationals to the German border where she was expelled from France.

Naturally, her main concern was for her three children, who she had not been allowed to see since she was arrested.

“As it happens,” she recalls, “the children had been taken and looked after by the security forces and we were reunited before I was expelled.

“But all through the interrogation and journey I was pleading for a sight of them to find out they were all right.

“My clothes, the children’s clothes, my husband’s writings and all our personal possessions were lost in this expulsion.” They never got them back, but some German students helped by kitting the children out.

At that time the Paris events were being broadcast around the world and a helpful journalist who had tried to get Guedes’s then husband Gustav Lamche to publish his writings, intervened to get the family back to Britain.

Paris was to lead both to Cinema Action and, directly, to the Clyde shipyards.

“The French actions,” Guedes stresses, “linked workers’ struggles, students and other sections of the community – something that had not happened before.

“Occupations were a new development too. The idea of workers taking direct control over their workplaces was very important to all of us in Cinema Action.

“When I read about this happening on the Clyde, I had to get there to record it.”

Back in Britain, accompanied by the film she’d made about the French occupations, Guedes raised cash and organised screenings in workplaces across Britain.

Out of this the idea of Cinema Action to both produce campaign films and to record workers’ struggles was born.

Initially the collective produced five-minute “cinetracts” for workers in disputes as diverse as Merseyside Docks, GEC, Rolls-Royce Coventry and Vauxhall and against the In Place of Strife legislation proposed by the Labour government in 1969.

Guedes is very clear that this use of film was to support workers in dispute. “The difference between Cinema Action and the mainstream media is that in working-class film you listen to the workers,” she says. Reading about the work-in impelled her to persuade her future husband, then a cameraman, to go there.

It was “everything I could have dreamed of,” she recalls. Cinema Action first went to Glasgow to record demos in the first six months of 1971. They produced the short campaign film UCS 1, which gained them unique approval from the co-ordinating committee to access the work-in. They travelled there often and sometimes slept on Paisley folk singer Danny Kyle‘s floor.

Shipyard apprentice Stephen Farmer – adopted by the Cinema Action crew – remembers waking up to find Billy Connolly making breakfast.

Guedes says it was the support across the community and internationally that kept the work-in going. “Many people thought that the workers hadn’t a chance,” she remembers. “But the spirit was abroad. The spark was all-embracing and international donations flooded in.”

The shop stewards’ vision was also an important factor in the success of the work-in. Guedes remembers being affronted when on one occasion she was told that the film crew weren’t to be allowed into a co-ordinating committee meeting.

Thinking that a key decision was to be made that they would miss, she was flabbergasted to be told that the stewards had voted to make a large donation to Cinema Action that funded their Class Struggle: Film From The Clyde.

“They also voted to let us use a car that was in use as a sort of dog kennel,” Guedes says. “We were very pleased to use it too, only it was soon pulled over by the police and condemned as unroadworthy.

“We had the constant support of the stewards and they recognised the need to have their side of the Work-in documented.”

That support hasn’t diminished. Guedes was grateful for the opportunity to revisit some of the places and people that made such a difference 40 years ago.

“It was excellent of Unite the union to bring me over,” she says. “I was particularly glad to see the films again. I hadn’t seen them for such a long time and to meet the veterans again renewed my enthusiasm for the fight. The work-in was a key victory and should be part of every activist’s training.”

The political leadership of the stewards was crucial, but the films do not come across as a Marxist didactic exercise.

In a section of the Class Struggle film, the filmmakers literally get inside the work of the yards as the cameras follow workers into the double bottom of a ship. It’s footage that conveys the sights and especially the sounds of hell and it is no surprise that the stewards initially felt that this would be too dangerous for their inexperienced visitors.

The films give the workers their voice, not interpreting or narrating, but allowing them to speak for themselves.

Guedes is clear that remembering the UCS work-in is not an exercise in nostalgia.

“It was about looking forward,” she proudly claims. “We need a similar approach from current activists. It inspired other takeovers then and should be doing so now.

“I was losing confidence in the possibility of people learning those lessons. But when I arrived in Glasgow hope and confidence were rekindled. It is possible.

“That fire, that humour, is not something in the past. It’s there in every man, woman and child in Scotland.”

Ibiza lizards evolution video

This video says about itself:

Battle of the Sexes

by Day’s Edge Productions

WINNER of the 2011 Animal Behavior Society Film Festival (Non-commercial division).

A short film about Nate Dappen’s research on how males and females coevolve together. Nate is working on his PhD in evolutionary biology at the University of Miami, Florida. He studies sexual coevolution and color evolution in the Ibiza wall lizard (Podarcis pityusensis).

Film by: Nate Dappen & Neil Losin. Additional photography by Joris van Alphen. Narrated by John Astbury. See credits for music.

To learn more, visit daysedgeproductions.com/

See also here.

More Afghan war still?

This video is called END WAR. NATO Helicopter Slaughters 9 Children Collecting Firewood In Afghanistan, US Apologizes.

By Bill Van Auken in the USA:

Top general demands US keep “robust” combat force in Afghanistan

23 March 2012

Marine Gen. John Allen, the top US commander in Afghanistan, told Congressional committees this week that a “robust” American combat force must remain in the country next year.

Testifying before the House Armed Services Committee on Tuesday and the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday, Allen claimed that the decade-old US war in Afghanistan remained “on track”, despite acknowledging that recent months have been “trying”.

Allen was referring to a string of incidents that have underscored the growing tensions between the US military forces and the Afghan population after more than ten years of foreign occupation. These included the release of a video in January showing US Marines laughing and urinating on the bodies of slain Afghans; the burning of copies of the Koran at the US Bagram air base, which triggered nationwide rioting; and, most recently, the horrific massacre of 16 Afghan civilians, most of them women and children, by US Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales on March 11.

“My opinion is that we will need significant combat power in 2013,” General Allen told the Senate panel.

When Generals Love Their Wars Too Much: here.

US Troops Guarding Afghanistan To Get Guards To Guard Them From Their Afghan Guards: here.

US charges soldier with 17 counts of murder in Afghan massacre: here.

The US has had to pay compensation for the people killed and injured when US troops murdered 17 civilians earlier this month: here.

Afghans have been excluded from the judicial process after the shooting that left 16 dead. No wonder anti-US feeling is growing: here.

No U.S. access to sites of Afghan killings, officials say: here.

First Western Journalist to Speak With Survivors Of The Panjwai Massacre: here.

The Latest Twist In The Panjwai Massacre Tale: Witnesses Gone: here.

Twenty years in the making, Suzanne Bauman and Jim Burroughs’ remarkable film Shadow of Afghanistan is finally available on DVD and VOD, distributed by Cinema Libre: here.

William Rivers Pitt, Truthout: “At this moment, tens of thousands of Americans in Iraq, Afghanistan and all over the world are under arms and in peril, engaged in conflicts that serve only to prolong this terrible, endless age of war. At this moment, millions of innocent people are cowering somewhere because of it. Make no mistake: someone is, at this moment, bathing in riches at the expense of those soldiers, their families and the untold scores of civilians whose only crime was getting in the way of the first, best and biggest payday of this new century”: here.

Buddy Bell, Voices for Creative Nonviolence: “After the end of World War II, a group of nations in the north Atlantic established NATO to impede Russian influence over the reconstruction of Europe and to facilitate their own…. After the Cold War ended, the U.S. rebranded NATO and extended its mandate as a defender of liberty in regions beyond the north Atlantic. Seeing military action as a suitable solution to various global conflicts, it has had the effect of sowing discord and violence instead of alleviating these problems”: here.

USA: Andrew Bacevich on Changing Our Military Mindset (Video). Bill Moyers, Moyers & Co.: “This week, on an all-new Moyers & Company, Bill Moyers and Bacevich explore the futility of ‘endless’ wars, and provide a reality check on the rhetoric of American exceptionalism. ‘Are we so unimaginative, so wedded to the reliance on military means that we cannot conceive of any way to reconcile our differences with groups and nations in the Islamic world, and therefore bring this conflict to an end?’ Bacevich tells Moyers”: here.

British troops in Afghanistan are keeping two men locked up even though the deadline has passed to hand them over to the Afghan authorities: here.

British teenager arrested for Facebook comments criticizing Afghan war: here.

Robert Bales Charged: Military Scrambles To Limit Malaria Drug Just After Afghanistan Massacre: here.

Why the Huffington Post Needs to Immediately Retract Mark Benjamin’s Afghanistan Massacre Report. Jeffrey Kaye, Truthout: “A March 25 article by Mark Benjamin at The Huffington Post seriously misled readers about a link between the controversial antimalarial drug mefloquine and the mass murder in Afghanistan attributed to Staff Sgt. Robert Bales. Relying on a document he wrongly identified, and with zero evidence backing up his claims, Benjamin’s headline stated ‘Military Scrambles to Limit Malaria Drug Just After Afghan Massacre.’ As a matter of journalistic ethics, Benjamin should apologize to his readers and retract the story”: here.

Support In U.S. For Afghan War Drops Sharply, Poll Finds: here.

Maddow Writes on America’s Love Affair With War. Rachel Maddow, The Crown Publishing Group: “It’s not just the small-potatoes post-9/11 Homeland spending that feels a little off mission. It’s the big-ticket stuff too. Nobody ever made an argument to the American people that the thing we ought to do in Afghanistan would be to build a brand-new neighborhood in that country’s capital city full of narco-chic McMansions and buildings with giant sculptures of eagles on their roofs … But that is what we built”: here.

Study: Four Hundred Afghan Women Jailed for “Moral Crimes”: here.

Afghanistan Chronicles, Part 6: Near Ground Zero and in Af-Pak Region, Two Labyrinths : here.

Allies pay in blood while others plot to exploit Afghanistan’s rich natural resources: here.

Fracking risks in the USA

This video from the USA is called Gasland’s Josh Fox on Dimock, Fracking, and His Arrest.

Christine Shearer, Truthout in the USA: “Although the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Region 3 issued a statement last week that its preliminary tests of water samples near drilling and fracking sites in the Pennsylvania town of Dimock showed no health concerns, the group Water Defense and ‘Gasland‘ director Josh Fox went to Dimock to look at the EPA summaries themselves, which they say do report high levels of explosive methane, heavy metals and hazardous chemicals”: here.

See also here.

Fracking: Corruption a Part of Pennsylvania’s Heritage. Walter Brasch, Wanderings With Walter M. Brasch: “The history of energy exploration, mining, and delivery is best understood in a range from benevolent exploitation to worker and public oppression. A company comes into an area, leases land in rural and agricultural areas for mineral rights, increases employment, usually in a depressed economy, strips the land of its resources, creates health problems for its workers and those in the immediate area, and then leaves”: here.

So, Is Dimock’s Water Really Safe to Drink? Here.