LiP Media Blog

This Week's Picks:

1. Uprising in Bolivia
   Gualberto Choque, leader of the peasant farmers of the Department of La Paz and, as such, leader of the rural Aymara people, said it yesterday: "This is a time of war." Although nobody listened to him, it was a warning. This morning at 9:30 more than 10,000 Aymara peasant farmers, from the twenty highland provinces, came down from El Alto's Ceja neighborhood into La Paz. "This is not about demonstrations or speeches, brother," Choque told Narco News. "Now we are going to take the Palace of Government."

   Luis Gomez | Narco News
   http://narcosphere.narcon ews.com/story/2005/5/24/174716/841
   
   Narco News is regularly updating their website with breaking news on the situation in Bolivia: http://www.narconews.com
   
   Great pictures are up on Bolivia Indymedia (and updates en español): http://bolivia.indymedia.org/es



2. The Newsweek Retraction
   Why the spirit, if not the substance, of the Newsweek Koran-flushing story was on the mark after all—and how the mainstream media is ignoring the truth about American religious violence against Muslim prisoners.

   Matthew Rothschild | The Progressive/Common Dreams
   http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0 518-29.htm



3. Flushed With Enthusiasm
   Document from an interview with a twenty-one-year-old Afghan man whose name is withheld for his protection, conducted last summer in Gardez by Daniel Rothenberg, an American human-rights researcher. The interviewee, who was upset when his interrogators placed a copy of the Koran into a latrine, showed a Department of Defense discharge letter stating that he was detained from December 2002 through May 2004.

   Harper's
   http://harpers.org/TheArmyWeHave.html



4. VIDEO | Indigenous Community in Columbia Fears Start of Dirty War
   Indigenous communities in rural Colombia are facing increasing violence and under-handed political maneuvering, carried out by Colombian government and para-military organizations and instigated by government and corporate interests from abroad. In this interview, Ezequiel Vitonas, former mayor of Toribio, Colombia, and an Elder Councellor of the Association of Indigenous Councils of Northern Cauca, and Manuel Rozental, a surgeon and human rights activist from Toribio, Colombia who represents the community and its struggles internationally, explain their plight.

   Democracy Now!
   256K Video: http://play.rbn.com/?url=demnow/demnow/demand/2005/may/video/dnB20050520a.rm& proto=rtsp&start=46:35
   Transcript: http://www.democracynow.o rg/article.pl?sid=05/05/20/1425246



5. Monkey Trial or Kangaroo Court?
   Once again, evolution has been pitted against intelligent design—a thin psuedo-scientific veil for Christian fundamentalism—in the courts of the United States.

   Stan Cox / AlterNet
   http://www.alternet.org/story/22042



6. CARTOON | The War on Rationality
   About those stork-hating secular reproductionists.

   Tom Tomorrow | This Modern World
   http://www.workingforchange.co m/comic.cfm?itemid=19060



7. Waste Lines
   Since 2003, Freecycle has been the place to go to get rid of still useful junk without sending it to the dumpster. Recently however, executive director Deron Beal accepted the group's first corporate support—a $130,000 sponsorship from none other than the largest garbage company in the US, Waste Management, Inc. He claims the move was necessary, but others are abandoning Freecycle with cries of "hypocrisy."

   Matt Weiser | Grist
   http://www.grist.org/news/maindish/2005/05/19/weiser-freecycle/index.html?source=daily
   
   Check out Freecycle: http://freecycle.org
   and the splinter group Freeshare (also includes Foodshare, which encourages backyard gardeners to put their excess harvest up for grabs): http://freesharing.org



8. Not a Pretty Picture
   Looking this war in the face proves difficult when the press itself won't even put in an appearance. Sydney Schanberg argues: "There will always be differences of view, about war photographs and stories, over matters of taste and "shock" issues. But, while the reporter or photographer must consider these impact and shock issues his primary mission has to be one of getting the story right. And getting it right means not omitting anything important out of timidity or squeamishness."

   Sydney H. Schanberg | Village Voice/Information Clearinghouse
   http://www.informationcleari nghouse.info/article8895.htm



9. Rainforest Loss Shocks Brazil
   This year was the second worst in Brazilian history for deforestation. Some blame the new popularity of soy farming.

   John Vidal | The Guardian
   http://www.guardian.co .uk/brazil/story/0,12462,1488468,00.html



10. The Scourge of Nationalism
    Is not nationalism—that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder—one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred? These ways of thinking—cultivated, nurtured, indoctrinated from childhood on—have been useful to those in power, and deadly for those out of power.

    Howard Zinn | The Progressive
    http://www.progressive.org/june05/zinn 0605.php



11. Houston, We Still Have A Problem
    An alternative annual report on Halliburton.

    Andrea Buffa and Pratap Chatterjee | CorpWatch
    http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id =12259



12. Virginity or Death!
    Imagine a vaccine that would protect women from a serious gynecological cancer. Wouldn't that be great? Well, both Merck and GlaxoSmithKline recently announced that they have conducted successful trials of vaccines that protect against the human papilloma virus. HPV is not only an incredibly widespread sexually transmitted infection but is responsible for at least 70 percent of cases of cervical cancer, which is diagnosed in 10,000 American women a year and kills 4,000. Wonderful, you are probably thinking, all we need to do is vaccinate girls (and boys too for good measure) before they become sexually active, around puberty, and HPV—and, in thirty or forty years, seven in ten cases of cervical cancer—goes poof. Not so fast: We're living in God's country now.

    Katha Pollit | The Nation
    http://www.thenation.com/doc. mhtml?i=20050530&s=pollitt



13. Landless Peasants March in Brazil, Build a New Road by Walking
    On May 17th, Brazilian news media reported that 50 people were injured as landless peasants clashed with police. Like our corporate media in the U.S., this focus overshadowed the real story; that 12,000 poor landless peasants had recently completed a Herculean 150 mile, 17 day-long march across the country to raise awareness about the crucial need for land reform in Brazil.

    Deborah James | Common Dreams
    http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0 520-20.htm



14. Is "Craigsnews" Coming Soon?
    Collaborative citizen journalism (CCJ) may be the next step up from the world of blogging—unlike blogging, CCJ incorporates collaborative journalism, editing, and fact-checking to make posted stories as complete as possible.

    Eric Hellweg | Technology Review
    http://technologyr eview.com/articles/05/05/wo/wo_052005hellweg.asp
    
    Check out WikiNews, a great example of CCJ in action: http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page



15. Revealed: Health Fears Over Secret Study into GM Food
    Rats fed on a diet rich in genetically modified corn developed abnormalities to internal organs and changes to their blood, raising fears that human health could be affected by eating GM food.

    Geoffrey Lean | UK Independent
    http:// news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/story.jsp?story=640430



16. Cuba, the US, and the Farce of Geneva
    As the US continues the decade long political assault on Cuba, allies are increasingly hard to come by. Now the American government has resorted to strongarm tactics to bring other nations in line. The only thing more dismaying than the American tactics is the list of countries who have capitulated, including France and the Ukraine.

    Salim Lamrani | ZNet
    http://www.zmag. org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=60&ItemID=7904

- Media Picks Contributing Editors: Rebecca Onion, Adam Barker, and Erica Wetter
- Media Picks compiled and edited by Erin Wiegand and Brian Awehali

Posted by erin at May 27, 2005 05:13 PM

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