"In Italy, An Ambiguous Justice"
Salvatore Palidda (Genoa University)

[This article, “En Italie, une justice ambiguë”, was first published in French in
“Mediapart” on 20 July 2012. Translation by Statewatch.]

Everyone recalls the violence, abuses of power and torture by numerous police officers against demonstrators during the Genoa G8, as well as the violence by the self-styled “black bloc”. Eleven years after the 20th and 21st of July 2001, the third instance of Italian justice [the Corte di Cassazione, Italy’s highest appeal court] has just issued its definitive sentence against the officers accused of beating the 93 demonstrators who were sleeping in the Diaz school and then, straight afterwards, a second verdict against ten demonstrators who were charged for “destruction and looting” and accused of being responsible for the “devastation” of the city and for seriously endagering public order.

Narco-Mania! And Other Parodies of the War on Drugs
Films by Greg “Gringoyo” Berger

Friday, August 3, 7pm - 9:30pm
Alwan for the Arts, 16 Beaver Street, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10004
alwanforthearts.org / Map

Fundraiser for www.gringoyo.com and The Fund for Authentic Journalism.
Sliding scale admission, $0-$20. Suggested donation $10.

"Exposes the interests of the United States in the war against narco-trafficking." - Arturo Rodríguez García, Proceso.

"Berger spins out political parodies...to an audience eager for his lampoons." - Maddie Oatman, Mother Jones

Filmmaker Greg "Gringoyo" Berger and other collaborators will present the films. Co-Presented by El Museo del Barrio.

Filmmaker, journalist, and self-proclaimed “recovering documentary filmmaker” Greg Berger (known in Mexico as “Gringoyo”) has spent the last three years making satirical comedies about the Mexican War on Drugs. In the process, he has also documented the rise of the largest mass movement against the Drug War since Richard Nixon’s 1971 declaration. Disgusted by the absurdity of the War on Drugs, Berger stopped making documentary films for television and started making short satires distributed online through the website Narco News.

Christopher Hitchens, 1949–2011
Louis Proyect

About a year or so after Hitchens began writing defenses of the war in Iraq, I stopped reading him. Bombarded as I am from wall-to-wall stupidity on network and cable television, op ed articles by Thomas Friedman, and all the rest, I just found no reason to add Hitchens to the menu.

But when I learned that he had cancer, I began reading everything he had to say about his illness including the final riveting piece in Vanity Fair that made it clear that the end was near:

Design/History/Revolution Conferenmce
New School, NYC, April 27-28, 2012

CFP: Design/History/Revolution
Deadline: December 7, 2011
Conference: April 27 & 28, 2012, The New School, NYC

Keynote speaker: Barry Bergdoll, The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of
Architecture & Design, The Museum of Modern Art

Whether by providing agitprop for revolutionary movements, an
aesthetics of empire, or a language for numerous avant-gardes, design
has changed the world. But how? Why? And under what conditions? We
propose a consideration of design as an historical agent, a contested
category, and a mode of historical analysis.

This interdisciplinary conference aims to explore these questions and
to open up new possibilities for understanding the relationships among
design, history and revolution.

Egypt, since the fall of Mubarak in February, has been run by a military
junta, the SCAF, which has left untouched the basic structures of the
dictatorship. Protests and strikes have been met with extraordinary
violence, unions have faced draconian laws to make impossible any
action, torture has been widely practised, and there has been selective
repression against revolutionary militants in the social movements.
12,000 people have faced military courts during this
counter-revolutionary crackdown against the living forces and demands

I am not suggesting that Morgenson and Rosner pull their punches. To
the contrary, the authors deliver enough knockouts to be contenders with
Taibbi as world champions in exposing the reckless fraud that the US
financial sector and its regulators now epitomize.

The financial crisis, which is very much still with us, did not result
from accident or miscalculation; neither did it result because of a flaw
in Alan Greenspan's theory, as he told Congress when a feeble effort was
made to hold him accountable. It was the intentional result of people

Resistance High in Dutch Anti-Squatting Effort
squat.net

Today, the 1st of November 2011, there were quite a few squats on the list to be evicted in Amsterdam, including a popular social centre and squats where the owners did not start a courtcase yet.

After the successful “reclaim the hood” manifestation (posting in dutch language, but with photos) the squatters in Amsterdam started preparing for the “eviction circus” on 1/11/11, and that went very well.

It took the cops more than a full 12 hour day to evict more than five squats where people were inside with lockons (photo from webcam). This was a clear victory for the squatters.

Wall Street Firms Spy on Protesters In Tax-Funded Center
Pam Martens, Counterpunch

Wall Street's audacity to corrupt knows no bounds and the cooptation of government by the 1 per cent knows no limits. How else to explain $150 million of taxpayer money going to equip a government facility in lower Manhattan where Wall Street firms, serially charged with corruption, get to sit alongside the New York Police Department and spy on law abiding citizens.

According to newly unearthed documents, the planning for this high tech facility on lower Broadway dates back six years. In correspondence from 2005 that rests quietly in the Securities and Exchange Commission's archives, NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly promised Edward Forst, a Goldman Sachs' Executive Vice President at the time, that the NYPD "is committed to the development and implementation of a comprehensive security plan for Lower Manhattan...One component of the plan will be a centralized coordination center that will provide space for full-time, on site representation from Goldman Sachs and other stakeholders."

Staging Illusion: Digital and Cultural Fantasy Conference
Sussex, England, December 8-9, 2011

Sussex Centre for Cultural Studies &
The Centre for Material Digital Culture present:

Staging Illusion: Digital and Cultural Fantasy
December 8th and 9th, University of Sussex
Tickets £190 (£85 student)

Keynote speakers: Professor Vanessa Toulmin (Director of the National Fairground archive), Dr Sarah Kember (Goldsmiths) and Professor Sally R Munt (Director of the Sussex Centre for Cultural Studies).

Plenary speakers: Dr Astrid Ensslin (Bangor), Dr Melanie Chan (Leeds Met), Professor Nicholas Till (Sussex), and Dr Jo Machon (Brunel).

From magicians and mediums to immersive media, and from the circus to cyborgs, the celebration and/or mistrust of illusion has been a central theme across a range of cultures. Notions of fakery and deception remind us that our identities that are performative. The figure of the ‘mark’ of the fairground scam remains culturally ubiquitous, perhaps more so than ever, in an era of (post) mechanical reproduction. Is new technology a flight from the real or merely a continuation of older cultural forms? Is it necessary, or even possible, to define reality in relation to the illusory? What realms of ‘otherness’ remain to be embraced? This international conference will discuss staged illusions across a spectrum of historical, geographical and cultural contexts, featuring original and exciting papers and performances.

'Occupy' Goes Global: Is Another World Possible?
Francesca Rheannon

The Occupy movement is birthing a new global paradigm of democratic
governance. Can capitalism adapt?

On October 15, 2011, a tide of protests swept across 1,500 cities in 82
countries as the Occupy movement went global. The largest were in Spain,
where more than a million people filled squares in Madrid, Barcelona,
Valencia and other cities all over the country. That’s not surprising,
given that Occupy Wall Street, which sparked the global day of protests,
itself took inspiration from (among others) the massive demonstrations
of the Spanish “indignados” in May of this year.

In Santiago, Chile, 100,000 marched; Lisbon: 20,000; New York: 20,000;
Berlin: 10,000—to name only a few. Building on the protests occurring
earlier this year, from the Arab Spring to Spain, Greece, Chile, Tel
Aviv and now the USA, the Occupy movement is spreading a new culture of
participatory democracy around the globe.