Hundreds of UK Climate Activists Blockade Oil Refineries Today hundreds of climate activists taking part in the Crude Awakening day of action have successfully blockaded the Coryton and Shell Haven oil refineries in Essex, including the UK's busiest oil refinery and distribution centre.

FBI Demands GPS Tracker Back Kim Zetter, wired.com A California student got a visit from the FBI this week after he found a secret GPS tracking device on his car, and a friend posted photos of it online. The post prompted wide speculation about whether the device was real, whether the young Arab-American was being targeted in a terrorism investigation and what the authorities would do. It took just 48 hours to find out: The device was real, the student was being secretly tracked and the FBI wanted its expensive device back, the student told Wired.com in an interview Wednesday.

Fractal Mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot Dead at 85 CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Oct. 16 (UPI) -- Benoit Mandelbrot, a pioneer in fractal mathematics and the person who coined the term, has died in Cambridge, Mass., at the age of 85. Aliette Mandelbrot told The New York Times her husband suffered from pancreatic cancer and died Thursday in Cambridge.

Anarchism Demystified ">Ralph Shaw Although the anarchists are unanimous in their detestation of state-sponsored capitalism, they have divergent views on capitalism if state sponsorship is removed. To the individualists, the evil is not capitalism itself, rather it is the collusion between the state and those who own capital.

Musopen Is Freeing Classical Music From the Chains of Copyright David Bollier, On the Commons Ludwig von Beethoven died 183 years ago. So why is his music still locked behind copyrights and not available for free to everyone? Because even if the music itself is in the public domain, the recordings of his music, or perhaps the sheet music (with special arrangements or notation) can be copyrighted by the orchestras that perform the music or the composers who notate it.

News Outlets Follow NPR's Lead: No Staffers at Stewart and Colbert Rallies Nate Freeman, NY Observer After a memo banning staffers from attending rallies — specifically the two high-profile ones to be orchestrated by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert later this month — made its way around the internet and collected backlash in its swath, NPR is trying to get other news outlets to join its side of the fight.

IMF Considers Replacing the Dollar as Key Currency Telepolis Introduction of a World Currency Could Follow Attacks on the Dollar Ralf Streck The attacks of the BRIC-states on the US dollar have left behind traces. Almost unnoticed, the IMF in a study pondered replacing the dollar as key currency with a currency still to be created. The “Bancor” once proposed by John Maynard Keynes as a world currency is discussed. The reasons go beyond the Chinese and Russian proposals [1] to replace the dollar with special drawing rights of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The considerations go along with the growing influence of China whose voting rights in the IMF have increased. China has moved up to second place to Japan.

Scott McLemee Reviews Richard Wolin's "Wind From the East"
The National

The Chinese revolution's influence on French thinking

"The Wind from the East" examines the effect on the Chinese Cultural
Revolution on French political and philosophical discourse, writes Scott
McLemee

The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution,
and the Legacy of the 1960s
Richard Wolin, Princeton University Press

During even the coldest years of the Cold War, there were small circles,
far to the left of the communists, who warmed themselves with the
thought of revolutionary socialism. To be sure, they meant by this
something bearing no resemblance to the monstrosity embodied in those
regimes where May Day was celebrated with tanks and choreographed
expressions of obligatory mass cheer. Their egalitarianism was
essentially libertarian, and vice versa. In France, one such group was
led by Cornelius Castoriadis, who had, in the 1940s and 1950s, analysed
the Stalinist system as a form of what he called “bureaucratic
capitalism” – fit only to be abolished by revolts from below.