2021-12-24: News Headlines

Luigino Bracci (2021-12-24). Trains with Flawed Electrical Systems Caused Caracas Subway Explosions. orinocotribune.com Wednesday, December 22, the President of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, and the Minister of Transportation, Hipólito Abreu, reported that investigations by engineers from the Caracas Metro found the cause of explosions that affected several trains of the public company in previous weeks. They also responded to threats of a lawsuit from by the Spanish Export Credit Insurance Company (CESCE), which is claiming compensation for ‚Ǩ138 million. | "A fault was discovered that caused explosions as a result of the electrical overload," explained President Nicolás Maduro at a ceremony at the Teresa Carreño T…

_____ (2021-12-23). American Civil War: Of Roman Plagues, Handmaid's Tales & the Real Geopolitics of Fiction. strategic-culture.org Biden's foreign policy and his attitude to the EU seems to be a clone of Trump's. Which oddly and incredibly, lends more to the Handmaid scenario than it does Black Mirror. | How can we explain how Australia, Britain, Austria, Italy, and more have gone the path of arbitrary and capricious detention and exclusion from society? The Austrian government mobilized perhaps 500 people into the streets in support of lockdown and apartheid measures, colluding with media to inflate that number by a massive factor of sixty. | The reactions to this certainly represent an extreme polarization of society. Yet in politics, ther…

_____ (2021-12-23). 300 Doctors Implore Australia To Bring Assange Home. popularresistance.org The letter begins by commending Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce for his recent statements calling for the U.S. extradition request against Julian Assange to be dropped. It continues: | "We are concerned that Mr. Assange's apparent mini stroke [reported in the Daily Mail on 11 December] may be the tip of a medical iceberg. Indeed his symptoms suggest as much. It is therefore imperative that Mr. Assange be released from prison, where his health will otherwise continue to deteriorate and where his complex medical needs cannot be met." Continued incarceration, the doctors warn, will place Julian Assange's life at…

teleSUR (2021-12-23). Acteal Massacre Victims Demand Justice from The Mexican State. telesurenglish.net Twenty-four years after the killing of 45 Tzotziles Indigenous people carried out by paramilitaries, relatives and survivors of the attack marched to demand jail time for the intellectual and material authors of this tragedy. | RELATED: | With songs, prayers, crosses, incense, and candles, the Acteal Bees (Las Abejas de Acteal), a Christian and anti-neoliberal organization, remembered the dead in a collective tomb where the bodie…

_____ (2021-12-23). New Anti-Protest Laws Cast A Long Shadow On First Amendment Rights. popularresistance.org Tiffany Crutcher was worried. | Oklahoma lawmakers had passed a new measure stiffening penalties for protesters who block roadways and granting immunity to drivers who unintentionally hit them. The state NAACP, saying the law was passed in response to racial justice demonstrations and could chill the exercising of First Amendment rights, filed a federal lawsuit challenging portions of it. But the new law was only weeks from taking effect. | Crutcher, an advocate for police reform and racial justice, was moderating a virtual town hall about it, featuring panelists who brought the lawsuit. At the end, she asked a q…

Isheka N. Harrison (2021-12-23). NAACP President Sends Message To Biden: If You Can Afford To Pause Student Loan Payments Over And Over, You Can Cancel Them. moguldom.com Some rejoiced when President Joe Biden announced that he was extending the pause on making student loan payments for three additional months while others urged Biden to go further and cancel student loan debt altogether. Among the latter group are NAACP president Derrick Johnson and renowned wealth inequality expert and economist William "Sandy" Darity. Biden …

Editor2 (2021-12-23). àÅlvaro García Linera: The Central Command of the Latin American Right is the US, not Spain. orinocotribune.com The conservative command of the Latin American right is in the United States, not in Spain. Vox is small and clumsy. On the other hand, Washington promotes a series of basic values: market, individuality, institutionality against social convulsions and wealth as the goal of life, affirms àÅlvaro García Linera. | The vice president of the Plurinational State of Bolivia between 2006 and 2019 is one of the most prominent contemporary leftist intellectuals. His extensive and provocative intellectual production is the result of a political commitment that led him to imprisonment for seven years and of a solid th…

Victoria Law (2021-12-23). All They Want for the Holidays Is for Their Loved Ones to Come Home From Prison. truthout.org When she was 8 years old, Bryanna Rose had one item on her Christmas wish list — for her father, Jose Colon, to come home. | Ten years later, 18-year-old Bryanna is still waiting. "What would it mean for him to come home now? It would mean the wish I had asked for would come true. It would make me happy now, it would make my younger self really happy, and it would make us whole as a family," she told Truthout. | On December 14, Bryanna watched as her mother, Janette Colon, emceed a r…

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