Part I -The Monday meeting

Why did the current president of the UN General Assembly (GA), Ambassador Nassir Abdulaziz al-Nasser of Qatar, call a special meeting of the General Assembly on February 13, a meeting, as several nations noted, outside the regular procedures of the General Assembly?

The notice for the GA meeting was unusually short, as UN members were only notified on the Thursday night before for a meeting the following Monday morning. So it was not surprising that there were a number of complaints that in addition to procedural violations, normal consultation channels for calling a GA meeting had not been followed.

As the meeting unfolded on Monday, several delegations provided explanations of the customary procedures that had been violated, suggesting that the President of the GA was using his office to manipulate a procedure at the UN to further the political goals of his nation. Also, several… weiter lesen

The Special Issue (vol 21 no 1) of the Amateur Computerist on Netizen Journalism and the story of the resistance to the NATO aggression against Libya is now available at the ACN website.The url is:
http://www.ais.org/~jrh/acn/ACn21-1.pdf

This issue is a collection of articles documenting what happened in Libya in 2011. It presents a critique of the inaccurate reports that were used to justify the NATO war against Libya.

The focus in this collection is on the role played by the UN in making possible the aggression against Libya. The actions taken by the Security Council and other United Nations bodies like the Human Rights Council were contrary to the obligations of the UN charter and other principles of international law. The articles in this issue document the process by which the UN became an accomplice in a NATO war against a sovereign nation that is a member of… weiter lesen

This year, February 11, 2012 marks the 75th anniversary of the victory of the Great Flint Sit Down Strike.

It was this 44 day sit down strike in Flint, Michigan from 1936-1937 that won the right to industrial unions in the US. Twenty-five years ago, on February 11, 1987, we celebrated the 50th anniversity with some of the sit down pioneers in Flint, Michigan.

We were privileged then to have met and learned about the sit down and the developments before and after from some of the labor pioneers who had waged the battle to win the right to unions in the large industrial factories in the US.

Some of these pioneers that we met and had the chance to know included Jack Palmer, Roscow Rich, Kenny Malone, Doc Wilson, and Floyd Hoke-Miller. There were of course, many more pioneers that we only met occasionally or learned about,… weiter lesen

Up until the Arab League Observer Mission had been sent to Syria on December 24, 2011, there had been two main narratives describing what was happening in Syria. One was that the violence in Syria was by the government against its people. The other was that the violence was also perpetrated by armed groups attempting to destabilize Syria. There had been no independent way to judge between these two narratives. The Observer Mission Report of January 22 provided such an independent judgment. (1)

The Observer Mission determined that there were armed opposition elements in Syria. (Paragraph 71) The original protocol setting up the Observer Mission did not take into account this aspect of the situation. By detailed observations in the Report, the Observer Mission documented that there were armed opposition elements attacking civilians and government officials, blowing up trains and pipelines, civilian buses and killing not only Syrian civilians but… weiter lesen