Culture and Media

Thousands of people flocked to a Washington arena Wednesday to celebrate the 76th birthday of Tibet’s spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, who urged followers to mark the occasion by practicing compassion. “Happiness — it is not money, it is not material things, it is not power. It is (inside), full of self-confidence.”

Through authors like Rita Levi, Maturana, Piaget, Vigotsky, Husserl, Freire and, fundamentally, Silo, the Chilean teachers Rebeca Bize and Mario Aguilar have developed a solid theoretical foundation for a new humanist education in “Pedagogy of Intentionality, Educating for an Active consciousness”. The book was presented in Buenos Aires, in the National Library.

While members of the Spanish 15M Democracy Now were attempting to demonstrate at Wimbledon where their beloved tennis hero Rafael Nadal was due to play, in Glastonbury U2’s Bono (“Saint Bono”) was being given a hard time by Art Uncut for dodging taxes by moving part of his huge wealth into a tax haven used by big corporations responsible for much of the poverty he criticises.

Palestinian hip-hop group DAM took the stage at the Ramallah Cultural Palace Saturday night in front of hundreds of fans. DAM, which means blood in both Hebrew and Arabic and is short for “Da Arabian MCs,”. The show meant to bring together artists from the West Bank in the spirit of a growing youth movement, said DAM member Suhell Nafar.

It is generally thought that separation of the powers of Church and State and an independent judiciary are new considerations and the universal humanists too may think that the Law of Political Accountability is quite new – think again – and look to Africa. Bereket Alemayehu, an organiser with Convergence of Cultures on the African Continent, introduces us to the Gada system.

We present a short amazing video of a conference recently held by Julia Bacha regarding the stories that can change the so called “confirmation bias” (or previous believes) that we all have, and help us open our minds and have a new cognitive resonance or comprehension of a fact that usually we tend to look with some prejudice. Such is the case of non-violence in Palestine.

Palestinian and Israeli Nonviolent resistance to the Israeli occupation

The author Maxime Kaufman-Lacusta visited Montreal on May 16th to launch her new book “Refusing to be Enemies”. Kaufman-Lacusta is optimistic regarding the future of Palestinian nonviolence movement. The book is about diverse strategies used by different organizations to struggle against the occupation.

Costa Rican production: The documentary URANIUM 238 – The Pentagon´s Dirty Pool, produced by Pablo Ortega, wins the prize for best short film category of the First International Uranium Film Festival which ended last Saturday night (28th of May 2011) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
URANIO 238 had also won an award as best documentary in Costa Rican Movie and Video Festival in 2009.

The non-violent protests continue, and they are spreading to other Spanish cities. In Madrid’s downtown, in the well-known “Puerta del Sol” about five hundred people were camping. They were vacated this morning. This did not stop them from reconvening this afternoon in the same place. The protest is also reaching into new areas.

It was presented yesterday (on May 12th), at USP (University of São Paulo) at room 08 of the building of the Faculty of Philosophy, the field research “La conciencia inspirada en el chamanismo siberiano-mongol y el budismo tibetano en Buryatia y Mongolia”, by Hugo Novotny, independent researcher of Park of Studies and Reflection Carcana (Argentina).