Politics

The US Air Force is standing down its plan to launch a nuclear-capable missile on the United Nations International Day of Peace. It’s a very small step, but it is a step in the right direction. It’s possible that the Air Force planners didn’t know about the International Day of Peace or even that there is such a day.

Mayors for Peace is proud to announce that its membership has surpassed the 5000 mark, making Mayors for Peace not only the fastest growing association of local governments in the world, but also, by far the largest international, direct-membership association of local governments.

Nonviolence is a beautiful theory but it doesn’t work in the real world, critics have long argued. It is—they maintain—passive, weak, utopian, naïve, unpatriotic, marginal, simplistic, and impractical. In spite of these widely-held assumptions, however, people around the planet go on building one nonviolent people-power movement after another.

There are sufficient indicators to interpret that we have entered a new moment in international matters. What started in Tunisia and Egypt with the “Arab Spring” has extended to numerous countries on different continents: from the Outraged of Spain and Greece, to Chile where students are demanding free and good quality education through massive, non-violent demonstrations.

Every 2 years the Arms Fair comes to London, displaying the latest in technology for killing, maiming, repressing and changing regimes. This ensures that some private corporations in the UK remain at the vanguard of profiting from war and violence. Some of the most actively oppressive regimes are invited. The protesters are always there but the political will to stop it is not.

President Rafael Correa Delgado

Carondelet Palace

Quito, Ecuador

Ecuadorean media minister Alvarado published an open letter to Reporters Without Borders on 9 September in response to the one that its secretary-general, Jean-François Julliard, addressed to President Correa three days before. RWB is posting the minister’s reply on its website. It includes an invitation to international media freedom organizations to take part in a debate.

Article written by Nathan Schneider

It’s a foregone conclusion that revenge ties itself in a logical knot. It’s a cycle that churns until everyone bound up in it is dead. With the 10th anniversary of 9/11 in mind, philosopher Simon Critchley rehearses this fact eloquently in his latest at his New York Times forum, The Stone.

As the ten year anniversary of 9/11 approaches, an intense media blitz is in motion. To be honest, I find most of the coverage offensive in that it imposes and manipulates assumed feelings about the event without the least reflection on the
real meaning and consequences of that day. I get the feeling that a particular response
is expected. But my response is different.

The body bag marked “Victim 0001” on Sept. 11, 2001, contained the corpse of Father Mychal Judge, a Catholic chaplain with the Fire Department of New York. When he heard about the disaster at the World Trade Center, he donned his Catholic collar and firefighter garb and raced downtown. He saw people jump to their deaths to avoid the inferno more than 1,000 feet above.