United Nations official Idriss Jazairy is calling on world powers, especially the United States, to avoid applying sanctions against Venezuela unless approved by the U.N. Security Council.
Former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff said during a BBC interview that Western media outlets are covering political issues taking place in Venezuela in an “irresponsible” manner.
Residents of the Ampliación del Sevillano neighborhood in the Havana municipality of Arroyo Naranjo, described Cuba’s political system as genuinely democratic, during a community debate organized by the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR). Read More »
Arthur H. Compton was one of the many past and future Nobel laureates who worked in the secret US nuclear weapons project during World War II. He directed the Metallurgical Laboratory (Met Lab) at the University of Chicago, where refugee Italian Nobelist Enrico Fermi supervised the construction of the first reactor, future Nobelist Eugene Wigner, from Hungary, led the design of the plutonium-production reactors subsequently built at Hanford, Wash., and future Nobelist Glenn Seaborg developed the first chemical process for extracting plutonium from irradiated uranium.
With these tasks completed, some of the scientists at the Met Lab began to consider the implications of nuclear weapons for the future. One of the products of their concern was a memorandum on “Political and Social Problems” written in early June 1945 by a committee of project scientists chaired by the refugee German Nobelist, James Franck. Read More »
“American Planes Hit North Vietnam After Second Attack on Our Destroyers; Move Taken to Halt New Aggression,” was the Washington Post headline some 53 years ago, on August 5, 1964.
The front page of that day’s New York Times reported: “President Johnson has ordered retaliatory action against gunboats and ‘certain supporting facilities in North Vietnam’ after renewed attacks against American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin.”
Of course, as historians now acknowledge, there was no “second attack” by North Vietnam—no “renewed attacks against American destroyers.”Read More »
The following speech by Zwelinzima Vavi, General Secretary of the newly formed South African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU), was delivered in New Orleans at the 46th International Convention of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists(CBTU) a few days ago.
Greetings to my brother and comrade, President of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists (CBTU), Rev. Terrence L. Melvin. Revolutionary salutes to my big brother Bill William Lucy, the former President of CBTU and leading member of the AFL-CIO and AFSCME now trying to enjoy his well deserved retirement.Read More »
Barb Tiller is a mother of four boys, a wife, and a highly skilled operating-room nurse who has been working at Tufts Medical Center in Boston for 27 years. On July 12, for the first time in her life, she walked off the job along with 1,200 other nurses – almost all women – in the largest nurses’ strike in Massachusetts’s history, and the first in Boston for 31 years. “Nurses don’t stand up for ourselves,” says Tiller. “We stand up for our patients; we stand up for our families when we go home. We stand up for everyone else. But we can’t work under these conditions anymore – like being locked in the operating room with no water, no bathroom break, no meal break, for 12 hours at a time.”Read More »
In 1918, a few days before being jailed for pacifism, Bertrand Russell completed Proposed Roads to Freedom: Socialism, Anarchism and Syndicalism, a short, simple, and profound guide to the theories of anarchism, Marxist socialism, anarcho-socialism, and guild socialism—the associative form of socialism that existed in Great Britain in those days.Read More »
INVESTIG’ACTION interview with ANDRE VLTCHEK
Q1:You are preparing a new documentary film about a big island, Borneo, which is shared by three Asian countries. Which was the triggering
factor for making this film now?
AV: The triggering factor was a simple shock. I’m not what you’d call an environmentalist. Of course I care about our planet, about our wonderful creatures, plants, oceans, rivers and deserts. I don’t want them to suffer, to disappear. I wrote an entire book about the plight of South Pacific island nations, called “Oceania”, but that was all – I never made one single film about the environmental destruction.Read More »
A non-governmental organization (NGO) is a nonprofit and a political organization engaged in a wide range of activities, and take different forms in different parts of the world. It particularly works in the fields of humanitarian assistance and poverty alleviation. The term “non-governmental organization” was first coined in 1945, when the United Nations (UN) was created. It is estimated that about 2 million NGOs (just over one NGO per 600 Indians) are in welfare services.
It was observed that Government of India puts its attention for the rehabilitation of children in difficult circumstances aiming to build up strong future of nation under the Ministry of Women and Child Development. Similarly, the Ministry of Labour and Employment and Ministry of Human Resources Development introduced National Child Labour Project and Programme for Urban Deprived Children under Sarva Shikshya Abhijan respectively. The street children (i.e. pavements and slums dwellers, children of sex workers, and child labour, and so forth) of Metro cities like Kolkata had priority. For their rehabilitation, the Ministry of Women and Child Development of Government of India introduced the Integrated Programme for Street Children in 1993-94 and it was implemented in association with NGOs. This scheme included education, nutrition, recreation, counselling services for both street children, for their psychosocial development, and their parents, for their attitudinal changes towards care and attention for their children’s upbringing, and vocational training for street children between the age group of 6-14 years. Another two programmes as mentioned above targeted the restoration of lost childhood and the promotion of healthy childhood development. Interestingly after almost 10 years of services, the problems of children were in a static position because of faulty service delivery system and the members of NGOs who were basically nonprofessional and pursued their own profit and the preservation of their prestigious life style and life choices. Secondarily, government authorities were also responsible because of weak monitoring and evaluation of the programme.Read More »
Journal of People 