Monday, May 18, 2020

Can We Simultaneously Oppose Bayer/Monsanto’s Biotechnology and Support Cuba’s Interferon Alpha 2B?

by DON FITZ COUNTERPUNCH MAY 15, 2020

GREEN REVOLUTION 2.0Genetically engineered crops are a form of food imperialism. This technology allows mega-corporations like Bayer/Monsanto to patent seeds, lure farmers into buying them with visions of high yields, and then destroy the ability of small farmers to survive.

Genetic engineering produces an artificial combination of plant traits which often results in foods with less nutritional value while introducing health problems to animals and humans who eat them. It increases costs of food production, pushing millions of farmers throughout the world into poverty and driving them off their land.

Agricultural corporations get control of enormous quantities of land in Africa, Latin America and Asia which they use to control the world’s food supply and reap super-profits from the cheap labor of those who work for them, sometimes people who once owned the same land. These crops can be developed in open-field testing which allows the novel pollen to contaminate wild relatives of the engineered crops.

Agro-industries which dominate this process have the resources to lobby two sections of governments. They tell one government agency that their plants do not need to pass safety tests because they are “substantively equivalent” to already existing plants. Yet, out of the other side of their mouths, corporate lawyers argue that, far from being equivalent to existing plants, their engineered ones are so novel as to deserve patents, patents which allow companies to sue farmers who save seeds for planting during the next season.

As a resident of St. Louis, a veritable plantation of Monsanto (now Bayer), I have participated in and organized dozens of demonstrations at the company’s world headquarters, as well as forums and conferences. It is necessary to compare the use of biotechnology by food corporations with that of Cuba to decide if they are the same or fundamentally different.

Medicine in Cuba

John Kirk’s Health Care without Borders: Understanding Cuban Medical Internationalism (2015) provides a wealth of information regarding Cuba’s early use of biotechnology in medicine. It is a poor country suffering effects of a blockade by the US which interferes with its access to materials, equipment, technologies, finance, and even exchange of information. This makes it remarkable that Cuba’s research institutes have produced so many important medications. Even a partial list is impressive. The use of Heberprot B to treat diabetes has reduced amputations by 80 percent. Cuba is the only country to create an effective vaccine against type-B bacterial meningitis, and it developed the first synthetic vaccine for Haemophilus influenza type B (Hib), which causes almost half of pediatric meningitis infections. It has also produced the vaccine Racotumomab against advanced lung cancer and has begun clinical tests for Itolizumab to fight severe psoriasis.

By far, the best known efforts of Cuban biotechnology followed an outbreak of dengue fever in 1981 when its researchers found that it could combat the disease with Interferon Alpha 2B. The same drug became vitally important decades later as a potential cure for COVID-19. Interferons are signaling proteins which can respond to infections by strengthening anti-viral defenses. In this way, they decrease complications which could cause death. Cuba’s interferons have also shown their usefulness and safety in treating viral diseases including Hepatitis B and C, shingles and HIV-AIDS.

A Tale of Two Technologies

There are marked differences between corporate biotechnology for food and Cuba’s medications for health. First, corporations produce food that fails to be healthier than non-engineered food which it replaces. Cuba’s biotechnology improves human health to such a degree that dozens of nations have requested Interferon Alpha 2B.

Second, corporate food production drives people off of their land while making a few investors very rich. No one loses their home due to Cuban medical advances.

Third, food imperialism fosters dependency but Cuba promotes medical independence. While corporate biotechnology drains money from poor counties by monopolizing genetically modified organisms (GMOs), Cuba strives to produce drugs as cheaply as possible.

Patents for its many medical innovations are held by the Cuban government. There is no impetus to increase profits by charging outrageously high prices for new drugs – these medications become available to Cubans at much lower cost than they would in a market-based health care system like that of the United States. This has a profound impact on Cuban medical internationalism. The country provides drugs, including vaccines, at a cost low enough to make humanitarian campaign goals abroad more achievable. Its use of synthetic vaccines for meningitis and pneumonia has resulted in the immunization of millions of Latin American children.

Cuba’s other phase of medical biotechnology is also unknown in the corporate world. This is the transfer of new technology to poor countries so that they can produce drugs themselves and do not have to rely on purchasing them from rich countries. Collaboration with Brazil has resulted in meningitis vaccines at a cost of 95¢ rather than $15 to $20 per dose. Cuba and Brazil worked together on several other biotechnology projects, including Interferon Alpha 2B, for hepatitis C, and recombinant human erythropoletin (rHuEPO), for anemia caused by chronic kidney problems.

In Perspective

The bigger picture is that technology of all types is not “value free” – it reflects social factors in its development and use. Nuclear plants require military forces for protection from attack, making them attractive in any society dominated by those who employ a high degree of violence to suppress dissent.

Market forces within capitalism select technologies that are profitable, even if they are destructive to human welfare. Of course, medicine such as antibiotics benefit humanity even if their original goal was profits for pharmaceutical giants.

At other times, products that damage society as a whole are pursued because they augment corporate profits by weakening labor unions. Planting and harvesting equipment have been used to undermine organizing efforts of agricultural workers. In the mid-1880s Chicago McCormick adopted new molding machines which could be run by unskilled workers. The company used them to replace skilled workers of the National Union of Iron Molders.

Expensive technologies can destroy small competitors so that large companies with more capital can better control the market. No case is clearer than the use of GMOs in agriculture. By use of market control (making non-GMO seeds unavailable), financial terrorism (such as lawsuits against resistant farmers), and the pesticide addiction treadmill, GMO giants such as Bayer/Monsanto have increased the cost of food production. This destroys the livelihood of small farmers across the globe while transforming the large farmers who remain into semi-vassals of these multinational lords of seeds and pesticides.

Though a century separated them and they affected different types of labor, actions by McCormick and Bayer/Monsanto had something in common. They both utilized novel technology which resulted in less desirable products but increased profits.

Because they were an invaluable weapon against the union, McCormick used molding machines that produced inferior castings and cost consumers more. GMOs in agriculture result in lower-quality food. Since two-thirds of GMOs are designed to create plants that can tolerate poisonous pesticides such as Roundup, pesticide residues increase with GMO usage.

GMOs are also used to increase the production of corn syrup which sweetens a growing quantity of processed foods, and thereby contributes to the obesity crisis. At the same time, food engineered to be uniform, survive transportation, and have a longer shelf life contains less nutritional value. The use of GMOs in corporate agriculture is one of the largest contributing factors to the phenomenon of people simultaneously being overweight and undernourished.

Cuba’s use of biotechnology to create medications is in sharp contrast to both McCormick and Bayer/Monsanto. Its drugs, especially Interferon Alfpha 2B, are used to help people overcome illnesses. They are created to share throughout the world rather drive people into worse poverty. Making a distinction between the biotechnology of Bayer/Monsanto and Cuba requires understanding the difference between bioimperialism and biosolidarity. Imperialism subdues. Biosolidarity empowers.

Why Capitalism Can’t Cure Global Pandemics

by PRABIR PURKAYASTHA COUNTERPUNCH MAY 15, 2020

We frequently hear that COVID-19 is the worst pandemic since the influenza of 1918. It is forgotten that another pandemic known as “the third plague” (because it was “the third major bubonic plague outbreak to affect European society”) killed millions from the 1890s to the 1950s in Asia’s southern, southeastern, and eastern regions, continuing well after the 1918 flu was over. It killed an estimated 10 million in India alone.

So why is this forgotten when we talk about pandemics today? The answer is the same reason behind the collective amnesia in wealthy nations on a whole host of diseases that still plague the world—diseases that Peter Hotez, a molecular biologist, wrote about in his book Forgotten People, Forgotten Diseases. (The World Health Organization [WHO] gives them the neutral term “neglected tropical diseases.”)

The question is who has forgotten such diseases. Certainly not the 65 percent of people who are threatened by tuberculosis, malaria, dengue, yellow fever, and the other “forgotten” diseases Hotez lists.

It is the well-off countries who believed that infectious diseases did not concern them anymore. They were “forgotten” by the rich, as they believed they could keep such diseases outside their borders. The third plague was almost entirely restricted to the colonized world, leaving the colonialists in the comfortable belief that they had now conquered the infectious diseases that only affected dirty, flea-ridden, rat-infested parts of the world.

The COVID-19 pandemic proves that diseases can strike back, and we are always only one mutation away from a new infectious disease emerging.

One of the consequences of the belief that infectious disease is no longer a concern of the rich is the drying up of research funds needed for developing new medicines for such diseases. Annually, tuberculosis kills 1.5 million people and infects 10 million (according to the WHO’s 2019 Global Tuberculosis Report), with Indiaalone counting for nearly half a million deaths and about 2.7 million infected. Yet, it took four decades for new tuberculosis drugs to enter the market.

The last three new medicines (mefloquine, halofantrine and

artemisinin) for malaria, which annually infects more than 200 million, were developed 50 years ago. Two out of three (mefloquine and halofantrine) were developed by the U.S. Army for its soldiers fighting the U.S. colonial war against Vietnamese liberation forces.

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan (Nobel Prize winner for chemistry in 2009) pointed out that the current model of developing medicine will not work for infectious diseases for two reasons. One is that drug companies do not see an incentive for developing a drug that cures patients in a few days. The other is that infectious diseases are far more prevalent in poorer countries, and the poor cannot pay the prices that multinational drug companies want. Whether it is medicines for infectious drugs or vaccines, both of which address public health issues, multinational companies and big pharma have very little interest. That is why infectious diseases have been forgotten—by rich countries, who think it is only a problem of the third world; and by big pharma, which does not see any profits from such drugs.

The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the other contradiction in the capitalist world: ill health produces profits; a healthy population does not. Money is to be made from disease when people buy pills or have to go to hospitals.

Public health was important as long as infectious diseases were perceived to be threats. As they became “forgotten,” so did public health in rich countries. In the case of hospitals, what drove the system was private profits for private hospitals. The same capitalist criteria were introduced as “efficiency” for public hospitals. The capitalist principle of maximizing efficiency was maximizing bed occupancy, a twisted form of “just-in-time manufacturing” introduced by capitalism that reduces inventories and therefore costs. Reducing beds, equipment, and medical staff is, in capitalism’s terms, “rationalizing” production and increasing “efficiency.”

When the COVID-19 epidemic hit advanced capitalist countries, particularly in the flu season when there is already a peaking of patient loads, they ran into a huge shortage of intensive care beds, equipment, doctors and nurses. This is what has led to such high death rates as the hospitals simply collapsed. That is not to mention other problems caused by the collapse of global supply chains, such as the lack of personal protective equipment (PPEs) and medicines.

What has surprised most observers is the collapse of the health systems in the advanced capitalist countries. Forbes magazine in late January cited a Global Health Security (GHS) Index (a project of the Nuclear Threat Initiative and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security) “ranking” of countries that are “best and worst prepared” to handle the epidemic. In these rankings, the two countries that were on top were the U.S. and the UK. The U.S. today has the highest number of infections and deaths in the world; the UK has registered the highest number of deaths in Europe already. Almost all the countries that the GHS Index had ranked as best prepared—the U.S. and the core EU countries—now have the worst numbers. These countries may have been prepared to handle normal health issues, and annual flu cases, but were completely unprepared for a novel infectious disease.

While East and Southeast Asia adopted masks, particularly with their brush with SARS (now renamed as SARS-CoV-1) in 2003 and the dangerous H5N1 version of avian flu, the advanced countries have no such experience. In the less affluent countries, there is still a collective memory of infectious diseases—plague, cholera, small pox, polio—and the public health measures that are needed during epidemics. There are even some surveillance and monitoring systems, however weak, that address such issues. For the people in the U.S., the threat of a new infectious disease is not even a part of their collective psyche. That is why, with an imminent lockdown, guns and ammunition were in as high a demand as medicines and food. The threat many Americans saw was clearly other people, and not the virus itself.

Amit Sengupta, one of the founding members of the global People’s Health Movement, wrote extensively about the contradiction between capitalists and the rest of the world, between their greed for profits (and profiteering) and people dying for lack of medicine. He wrote, “Unethical behavior of health care providers is directly linked with the fact that if care is linked to profit, more ill health means more profit!… Governments, not markets, can ensure that health systems address the needs of the poorest and the most marginalized.”

It is not an accident that COVID-19 deaths are concentrated in the advanced countries among immigrant communities, the poor, and the socially excluded. It is the African American and Hispanic populations in the U.S. who are seeing disproportionately larger numbers of deaths and infected. It is the immigrant areas in the EU and UK who are again seeing higher rates of infection and death. But diseases are also levelers; the poor and the excluded may suffer more, but COVID-19 will not spare the rich either. And this time, the rich countries who thought they had left their infectious past behind are beginning to understand that in a globalized world, they are also at risk from pandemics.

This is the question that Amit had posed in the last People’s Health Assembly in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 2018. What happens when the hunger of capitalism enters the belly of the beast? When this hunger enters those countries that the GHS Index thought were best prepared to face the pandemic?

The novel virus—SARS-CoV-2—has brought out the older challenge of disease back to the list of existential challenges that humanity faces. We know that the race between microbes and us is a continual battle. As we evolve our defense, they also develop their offense. We know that we upset the global ecological balance—climate change—at our peril. What is not understood widely—except by those on the left—is that the biggest obstacle to charting a path for humanity that lets us address these challenges is capitalists and their greed.

Pandemics have not only spread death and destruction, but they have also changed societies in fundamental ways. No, the world will not look the same once the COVID-19 pandemic is over with herd immunity: either through vaccination or infections. But will it lead to society confronting capitalism’s greed against people’s lives? That is the challenge before all of us; this is how history will judge us.

This article was produced in partnership by Newsclick and Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

CORONAVIRUS ORISHA BABALU AYE ST. LAZARUS

IT JES GREW ORISHIA

NOAM CHOMSKY REQUIEM FOR THE AMERICAN DREAM
YAHOO TV NOV 2019 FREE TO VIEW
This is the definitive discourse with Noam Chomsky, widely regarded as the most important intellectual alive, on the defining characteristic of our time - the deliberate concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a select few. Through interviews filmed over four years, Chomsky unpacks the principles that have brought us to the crossroads of historically unprecedented inequality - tracing a half-century of policies designed to favor the most wealthy at the expense of the majority - while also looking back on his own life of activism and political participation. Profoundly personal and thought provoking, Chomsky provides penetrating insight into what may well be the lasting legacy of our time - the death of the middle class and swan song of functioning democracy. A potent reminder that power ultimately rests in the hands of the governed, REQUIEM is required viewing for all who maintain hope in a shared stake in the future.

ON THIS DAY A CENTURY AGO MATEWAN MASSACRE THE COAL WARS
In this Tuesday, May 12, 2020, photo a historical sign stands outside a former post office in Matewan, W.Va. On May 19, 1920, a group of miners, who were led by a local police chief, and detectives hired by a coal company to evict unionizing miners from their homes were involved in a gun battle on the street. Ten people died in the Matewan Massacre. (AP Photo/John Raby)

Coal Massacre

In this Tuesday, May 12, 2020, photo a historical sign stands outside a former post office in Matewan, W.Va. On May 19, 1920, a group of miners, who were led by a local police chief, and detectives hired by a coal company to evict unionizing miners from their homes were involved in a gun battle on the street. Ten people died in the Matewan Massacre. (AP Photo/John Raby)

Coal Massacre

In this Tuesday, May 12, 2020, photo, West Virginia Mine Wars Museum tour guide Kim McCoy points to bullet holes still visible from a gunfight between miners and detectives hired by a coal company in Matewan, W.Va. Ten people died in the Matewan Massacre on May 19, 1920. McCoy is a great niece of Sid Hatfield, the Matewan police chief who sided with the miners and was involved in the shootings. Hatfield was shot to death a year later by coal company detectives. (AP Photo/John Raby)

Coal Massacre

In this Tuesday, May 12, 2020, is a former corner post office in Matewan, W.Va. On May 19, 1920, coal miners, led by a local police chief, and detectives hired by a coal company to evict unionizing miners from their homes were involved in a gun battle on the street. Ten people died in the Matewan Massacre. (AP Photo/John Raby)

In this Tuesday, May 12, 2020, photo the town of Matewan, W.Va, is shown through a river floodwall gate. A gunfight between miners and detectives hired by a coal company on a Matewan street left 10 people dead on May 19, 1920. It became known as the Matewan Massacre. (AP Photo/John Raby)

In this Tuesday, May 12, 2020, photo is a floodwall protecting the town of Matewan, W.Va, from the Tug Fork of the Big Sandy River. (AP Photo/John Raby)

In this Tuesday, May 12, 2020, photo is the gravestone of Sid Hatfield, in Buskirk, Ky. Hatfield was the police chief in nearby Matewan, W.Va He was involved in a gunfight between miners and detectives hired by a coal company. Hatfield survived the May 19, 1920, gunfight that left 10 people dead but he was fatally shot a year later. (AP Photo/John Raby)

In this Tuesday, May 12, 2020, photo is a mural depicting miners working in coal mines in Matewan, W.Va. On May 19, 1920, a group of miners, who were led by a local police chief, and detectives hired by a coal company to evict unionizing miners from their homes were involved in a gun battle on the street. Ten people died in the Matewan Massacre. (AP Photo/John Raby)

https://news.yahoo.com/matewan-massacre-century-ago-embodied-134945624.html

MATEWAN, W.Va. (AP) — The bullet holes in the brick wall of a former post office serve as a reminder of how Appalachian coal miners fought to improve the lives of workers a century ago.

Ten people were killed in a gun battle between miners, who were led by a local police chief, and a group of private security guards hired to evict them for joining a union in Matewan, a small “company town” in West Virginia.

Plans to publicly commemorate what became known as the Matewan Massacre have been delayed by the coronavirus pandemic until September at least. But historians consider the bloodshed on May 19, 1920, memorialized in the 1987 film “Matewan,” to be a landmark moment in the battles for workers’ rights that raged across the Appalachian coalfields in the early 20th century.

“The company town system was extremely oppressive," said Lou Martin, a history professor at Chatham University in Pittsburgh and a board member of the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum in Matewan. "The company owned the houses, the only store in town, ran the church and controlled every aspect of the miners’ lives.”

Company towns were particularly prevalent in remote areas like southern West Virginia, which had the nation’s largest concentration of nonunion minors in 1920. And when the United Mine Workers came to town, coal companies retaliated.

The Stone Mountain Coal Co. hired Baldwin-Felts Agency detectives to evict union families from company-owned homes. Executive Albert Felts brought a dozen men to Matewan, including two who had been involved in violent strike-breaking efforts six years earlier in Ludlow, Colorado.

The detectives removed the families and were headed out when they were confronted by a group led by Matewan Police Chief Sid Hatfield. Killed in the gunfire were Albert Felts, his brother, Lee, five other Baldwin-Felts detectives, Matewan Mayor Cabell Testerman and two bystanders.

Fifteen months later, Hatfield was gone, too, gunned down by Baldwin-Felts detectives on the McDowell County courthouse steps. He was 28.

MOTHER JONES IS IN FRONT

More determined than ever to organize, miners marched by the thousands, leading to the 12-day Battle of Blair Mountain in the summer of 1921. Sixteen men died before they surrendered to federal troops.

The UMW's campaign in southern West Virginia then stalled, along with labor setbacks in steel, meat packing and railroads following World War I. Appalachian coal operators felt they needed to remain nonunion in order to survive, Martin said.

“They believed everything else was against them — the terrain, freight rates,” he said. “But paying lower wages, they could stay in business and remain profitable.”

But “miners would long remember the lengths that the companies went to to prevent them from having basic rights that would help them organize and get a standard of living,” Martin said.

In her 1925 autobiography, union organizer Mary Harris “Mother" Jones said she witnessed multiple conflicts between “the industrial slaves and their masters” during visits to West Virginia.

State officials were reluctant to challenge the coal operators.

“There is never peace in West Virginia because there is never justice,” Jones wrote. “'Medieval West Virginia!' With its tent colonies on the bleak hills! With its grim men and women! When I get to the other side, I shall tell God Almighty about West Virginia!”

When workers were finally guaranteed the right to collectively bargain in 1933 as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, West Virginia coal miners joined the UMW in droves, Martin said.

The UMW also bankrolled the organization that would become the United Steelworkers, and with John L. Lewis leading the UMW from 1920 to 1960, national membership peaked at about 500,000 during World War II.

The union helped push through major improvements to health, safety and pensions, across the U.S. workforce. But over the next half century, mechanization, fierce industry opposition and the rise of competing fuel sources severely reduced coal jobs and union membership.

The Stone Mountain Coal Co. is long gone, but Matewan still stands, as does its union hall. The town has lost half of its population since 1980, but it has survived the shootings, three dozen floods from the Tug Fork of the Big Sandy River before a floodwall was built, a 1992 fire that destroyed several downtown businesses and the opioid crisis that has ravaged the state.

Feelings about unions are mixed, but locals say the movie helped lift a shroud of silence that kept people from even mentioning the shootings. Resident Wilma Steele, whose husband is a retired union miner, said she didn't read about the battles of Matewan and Blair Mountain until she went to college.

UMWA SILENT FILM ABOUT MATEWAN ENTITLED SMILIN SID!

Now the Kentucky border town of about 430 residents leans on tourism about the massacre, as well as the famous feud between the Hatfields of West Virginia and the McCoys of Kentucky. A vast network of ATV trails draws also draws recreational tourists.

Museum tour guide Kim McCoy, whose maiden name is Hatfield, married a great-grandson of the McCoy family. She grew up in Matewan's coal camps and is a great niece both of family patriarch William Anderson “Devil Anse” Hatfield and Sid Hatfield, who resisted when hired guns evicted his neighbors a century ago.

“The Hatfield name is very distinctive in our area,” McCoy said. “Sid being part of the Matewan Massacre and really standing up for the miners and the miners' basic human rights, there's a lot of honor in that."

In this Tuesday, May 12, 2020, photo is David Hatfield at the bed and breakfast he owns in Matewan, W.Va. Hatfield is a great nephew of Sid Hatfield, a Matewan police chief who was in a gun battle involving miners and coal company detectives on May 19, 1920. The Matewan Massacre left 10 people dead. (AP Photo/John Raby)

David Hatfield, who operates a Matewan bed-and-breakfast and is Sid Hatfield's great nephew, said Americans today benefit from what the miners strived for, including better working conditions.

"It's important to me because my family helped bring that about in some part," he said.

Online:

http://www.historicmatewan.com

Izaak Weiss

A documentary about the Battle of Blair Mountain in West Virginia. The credits at the end are incomplete, and only represent sources that provided great amounts of footage or information. Made as a 2012 NHD submission from Fairview High School, Boulder CO, in 10th grade.

This is a rough draft version of a longer documentary on Blair Mountain. For more info on the Battle of Blair Mountain, visit our website www.blairmountainmuseum.org, or pick up a copy of the new edition of When Miners March, the most authoritative book on the miner's rebellion, by William C. Blizzard..

Benjamin Maruggi

John Sayles Talks About Battle of Blair Mountain, Film Matewan & GOP's Union Busting Efforts

•Jun 17, 2011

Democracy Now!

DemocracyNow.org -

In a Democracy Now! special interview, legendary independent filmmaker John Sayles discusses his film "Matewan," which chronicles an efforts of Appalachia coal miners to organize a union. He talks about the Battle of Blair Mountain, which more than 10,000 coal miners confronted an army of police and strikebreakers, backed by the coal companies, who were attempting to disrupt efforts to unionize the West Virginia coal fields. Sayles also talked about the "second battle for Blair Mountain," which is the effort to stop mountaintop-removal coal mining from destroying the mountain range. Sayles also talks about the ongoing efforts by the Republicans to dismantle unions across the United States.

This is an excerpt of an 45-minute interview with John Sayles. To watch the uninterrupted interview, download the podcast, read the transcript, and for more information about Democracy Now!, visit http://www.democracynow.org/2011/6/17

6 years ago

John Sayles speaks truth to power.

"Matewan" speaks to today.

Let us celebrate Labor Day- a holiday for all who work

Rajnoma

I've been reading a great book about the Coal Miners strikes of the early 1900's at a time when the coal company operators kept the miners in virtual slavery in the most appalling and repressive conditions. Mother Jones played a large role in coming to the aid of miners trying to unionize. It is an important story in American history that is not often featured in most American History texts in schools. The book is called "The Devil in These Mountains" by James Grren.

Borbo Rygmi

1 year ago

IWW forever

pipedreams57

1 year ago

My Great grandparents were some of the first settlers of the town of Blair [Ellis]. 4 or 5 generations of us grew up there in Blair. My grandmother remembers the miners march and the Army camped on part of our land in 1921 when they were still running old steam engine trains. Thank you for the fine Matewan film.

Steve McBain

8 years ago

Blair mountain ? Is that where Tony Blair originate from ?

Seriously , John Sayles should create his own channel here on You Tube and promote his great work by taking questions from people and answer them .More young people must know about his work .

mike kemp

2 years ago

magnificent movie sayles had very little money but it looks like a multi million dollar picture guy is a genius

Egyptian journalist arrested as crackdown on independent media continues

James Rothwell, The Telegraph•May 18, 2020

Lina Attalah, a leading journalist in Egypt, was arrested - AP

Egypt briefly detained and fined one of the country's dwindling number of independent journalists on Sunday as the nation mounts a crackdown on the media and political dissent.

Lina Attalah, the editor of the investigative news website Mada Masr, was arrested outside of Tora prison in Cairo, where she was interviewing the mother of a jailed activist.

Ms Attalah's lawyer says she was accused of filming a "military complex" - referring to the prison - without permission.

She was fined 2,000 Egyptian pounds (£104) and eventually released from custody late on Sunday.

It was unclear on Monday whether she faces further charges, as the Egyptian authorities have not elaborated further on the reasons behind her arrest.

The government of Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sissi's has repeatedly targeted Mada Masr and its journalists.

In November, security forces raided its offices, briefly detaining Ms Attalah and two other journalists.

The raid came just a day after security forces arrested one of its editors, Shady Zalat, from his home in Cairo. Mr Zalat was later released.

Amnesty International, which recently published a report warning that journalism has in effect been outlawed by Egypt, called Ms Attalah's detention a "shocking development."

AL JAZZERA REPORTER REMAINS JAILED IN EGYPT ON TRUMPED UP CHARGES OF AIDING TERRORISTS FOR INTERVIEWING THE FORMER MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD LEADER WHO WAS ELECTED PRESIDENT OF EGYPT.

Jorge Armenta: Mexican journalist killed in 'armed attack'

BBC•May 17, 2020

Mexico has been described as one of the deadliest countries for reporters outside a war zone
MEXICO IS A WAR ZONE FOR JOURNALISTS

A journalist has been killed in an armed attack in northern Mexico, local authorities say - the third reporter to be killed in the country this year.

Jorge Armenta, the director of media outlet Medios Obson in Ciudad Obregon, was under government protection after receiving death threats.

A police officer was also killed in the attack and another officer was wounded, the local prosecutor's office said.

More than 140 journalists have been killed in Mexico since the year 2000.

Mexico has been described as the deadliest country for reporters outside a war zone by the journalism advocacy group Reporters Without Borders (RSF).

Mexico still deadly turf for journalists

Can Mexico save its journalists?

RSF said that Mr Armenta was under protection, adding that it was investigating the type of protection he had. Local authorities are also investigating the killing.

Sonora state governor Claudia Pavlovich Arellano said she had ordered the prosecutor to "immediately begin an investigation to establish and find those responsible for the reprehensible attack".

Mr Armenta is the third journalist to be killed in Mexico this year. The body of Victor Fernando Alvarez was found on April 11 in Acapulco, after he disappeared on 2 April. Maria Elena Ferral was shot dead by two people on motorbikes when getting into her car in the eastern state of Veracruz in March.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who took office in December 2018, vowed to put an end to the murders. But activists say the measures taken by his government have so far been merely symbolic.

Mexico ranked 143 out of 180 countries in the 2020 world press freedom index.

STATES THAT REOPENED HAVEN'T SEEN ANY SPIKE IN NEW CORONAVIRUS CASES, HHS SECRETARY AZAR SAYS

BY BENJAMIN FEARNOW ON 5/17/20

https://www.newsweek.com/states-that-reopened-havent-seen-any-spike-new-coronavirus-cases-hhs-secretary-azar-says-1504652

Texas reported its highest single-day increase in new COVID-19 cases as restaurants, salons, and cinemas open to the public

Connor Perrett

23 hours ago 5/17/2020

Texas reported 1,801 new COVID-19 infections on Saturday — the highest single-day increase in COVID-19 cases in the state so far.
https://www.businessinsider.com/texas-highest-single-day-increase-after-relaxing-stay-at-home-2020-5

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment

Monday, May 18, 2020

Can We Simultaneously Oppose Bayer/Monsanto’s Biotechnology and Support Cuba’s Interferon Alpha 2B?

Why Capitalism Can’t Cure Global Pandemics

CORONAVIRUS ORISHA BABALU AYE ST. LAZARUS

Coal Massacre

Coal Massacre

Coal Massacre

About Me