Piquetero TV in Argentina

by Sebastian Hacher

Mute has recently covered the appearance of street TV in Italy [unavailable, check out these instead]. Here, Sebastian Hacher reports on the emergence of a new form of self-instituted community media out of Argentina's piquetero movement

Like the advertising people we talked about, I'm concerned with

the precise manipulation of word and image to create an action,

not to go out and buy Coca-Cola, but to create an alteration in

the reader's consciousness – William Burroughs

'Mister, mister! What time will we be on TV?'

'Film his ribs, look at how skinny he is!'



The children come in from playing, covered head to bare feet in mud, dragging behind them the smallest child in a box on wheels. They get excited when the camera focuses on them in the middle of the preparations for the transmission. They probably aren't aware that the subject of their questions and pleas is not a normal television producer come to cover some crime, accident, or fire, but a piquetero. The man hanging off a post trying to mount an antenna is setting up the first ever live transmission by a mobile television channel in Florencio Valera's San Rudecindo neighbourhood.

Virginia Judge Quits After Racist Comments

Jeremy Lazarus, Richmond Free Press

Richmond, Va. (NNPA) -- Facing disclosure of racially charged comments that
he had written on the Internet, Judge Ralph B. Robertson is quitting the
bench after 19 years of hearing criminal cases in the city General District
Court.

The veteran, snowy-haired jurist has stopped hearing cases, went on sick
leave and filed for retirement, which will be effective April 1. He threw in
the towel after the Free Press notified him of plans to publish an article
about the disparaging views he had expressed about Black people over the
past few weeks in participating in an on-line chat room.

"Protests, Even Buttons, Verboten in Crawford"

Matthew Rothschild, The Progressive

If you're ever thinking about going down to Crawford, Texas, to protest against Bush, beware. The police do not take kindly to demonstrators there -- or legal observers, for that matter. And even if you're just wearing an anti-Bush button, you could get arrested. That's the message a local jury sent last month.

San Francisco Action Shuts Down Bechtel Headquarters on Anniversary of Iraq Invasion

DASW (Direct Action to Stop the War)

San Francisco, March 19, 2004 -- Over 500 Bay Area
residents marked the anniversary of the U.S. invasion
of Iraq by taking direct action at the headquarters of
the Bechtel corporation to protest their exploitation
of the Iraqi people and misuse of U.S. tax dollars. Two
marches converged on Bechtel's offices, one led by
teachers holding a banner reading "Education Not
Occupation," and one led by healthcare workers marching
with banners reading "Healthcare not Warfare" and
"Democracy Not Empire". The march was flanked by a
marching band, yogis for peace, colorful puppets,
cyclists, and banners protesting the US occupation of
Iraq. While the crowd occupied the street, several
dozen people engaged in civil disobedience by blocking
the entrances to the building. By noon over twenty-five
people had been arrested. The actions were organized by
local grassroots mobilization Direct Action to Stop
the War (DASW) and will be among the first of hundreds
of anti-war actions happening this weekend in 250 U.S.
cities and over 50 countries.

Chicago Cops Upset by Plans to Name Park for Lucy Parsons

Associated Press

March 22, 2004 -- The Chicago Federation of Police is trying to dissuade the
Chicago Park District from naming a small Northwest Side park in honor of a
woman described by one 19th century police official as "more dangerous than
a thousand rioters."

In a letter to Park District board members, FOP president Mark P. Donohue
said he was "disappointed and disheartened" by plans to name the park after
Lucy Ella Gonzales Parsons, the widow of a man hanged in 1887 for his
purported role in the Haymarket Square bombing of the previous year.

"The Strange Afterlife of Cornelius Castoriadis"

Scott McLemee, Chronicle of Higher Education

The story of a revered European thinker, a literary legacy, family squabbles, and Internet bootlegging

As a student at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor during the early 1980s, Bill Brown began publishing Not Bored!, a photocopied journal of small circulation inspired by what Mr. Brown calls "the ultra-left milieu": revolutionary thinkers and organizations considered too extreme by orthodox Socialist and Communist parties. You can still subscribe to the hard-copy edition, but today most readers discover it through www.notbored.org. Many of them seek it out for the site's impressive archive of classic ultra-leftist texts.

Mr. Brown's Web site is prominent enough within a certain political subculture. But it is hardly the place one would expect to be the first English-language publisher of a book that would normally be issued by a major academic press. Then again, the circumstances behind The Rising Tide of Insignificancy (The Big Sleep), by Cornelius Castoriadis, are anything but normal.

Israel Kills Hamas' Sheikh Ahmad Yasin

Reuters

Israeli helicopter gunships have fired missiles at Sheikh Ahmed Yassin as he left a mosque before dawn, killing the Hamas leader and at least three other people.

A Reuters reporter who rushed to the scene on Monday after hearing three loud explosions found the blown-up remains of Yassin's blood-soaked wheelchair.

Bush's Ex-Terror Adviser Blasts President

Ted Bridis, AP

Washington, DC (March 20) -- Richard A. Clarke, the former White House
counterterrorism coordinator, accuses the Bush administration of failing
to recognize the al-Qaida threat before the Sept. 11, 2001, terror
attacks and then manipulating America into war with Iraq with dangerous
consequences.

Bottled Tap Water Withdrawn After Cancer Scare
Felicity Lawrence, The Guardian

First, Coca-Cola's new brand of "pure" bottled water, Dasani, was revealed earlier this month to be tap water taken from the mains. Then it emerged that

what the firm described as its "highly sophisticated purification process", based on Nasa spacecraft technology, was in fact reverse osmosis used in many modest domestic water purification units.

hydrarchist writes:

Telestreet [Pirate television] Etera 2 in Senigallia

Etera 2 meeting, March the 25th 2004 in Sennigallia, will be the second
meeting of the Telestrade or Telestreet. A national movement of micro-tv
stations (sometimes transmitting to no more than a few blocks) scattered
across Italy. Telestreet operates between the legal and technological
cracks of the Italian mediascape. Literally squatting the shadows or blank
spots where the signals of terrestrial broadcasters cannot reach, leaving
shadows on the spectrum which the Telestreet groups occupy.