The goal of anarchistnews.org is to provide a non-sectarian source for news about and of concern to anarchists. It is also to provide a location for discussion about such news.
From Occupied London

Resist, strike, occupy! (or, some notes on the unwillingness of the social antagonist movement to support some resisting parts of society)

What has been happening in Greece in the past few months (and in a way, extending from December 2008 to present) is simply phenomenal: deep changes, one after the other, in the social backbone come at breakneck speed. This fluid landscape has found us, the wider social antagonist movement (anarchists, anti-authoritarians, the libertarian left) numb – and worse even stuck with our conceptualisations, our beliefs and readings of social reality as it stood only a little while ago.

But so much has changed, so fast.

One of the hardest experiences parents can face is when their child is arrested, goes to trial, or goes to prison. Arrest and prison are highly stigmatized in our society, and few parents are prepared to face this situation. Yet as the prison system grows, as more and more activities are criminalized, and as the so-called War on Terror is used increasingly to persecute political activities, an ever greater number of parents will have to deal with the police knocking on their door, with the emotional and financial stress of trial, with visits through a glass wall.

For people who are themselves facing trial and imprisonment, dealing with anxiety, fear, disapproval, or misunderstandings on the part of their parents makes a difficult situation even more stressful. To have their parents' understanding and support, if not their agreement and sympathy on the issues, means facing the entire legal and judicial process with more strength and peace of mind.

Tags:
From April 2009 until July 2010, two undercover police officers infiltrated activist groups in Guelph, Kitchener and Toronto, Ontario. They are members of the “Joint Intelligence Group (JIG)” that focuses on extremism and terrorism. Its specific mandate has been for the Vancouver Olympics and Torch Relay, and the G8/G20 summits. It is an RCMP (National Police) led group that includes police forces collaborating from across Southern Ontario including Guelph, Hamilton, Toronto, Ottawa, Barrie, Kitchener/Waterloo and the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP).
The names the two undercover intelligence police officers used were “Brenda Dougherty” and “Khalid Mohammad”*.

Brenda Dougherty = Filthy Rat Goof Pig

“Brenda” is in her early 40’s, white, 5’3” tall, with short white and blonde hair, glasses, and an English accent and a Canadian flag tattoo (on her back?). Her story was that she had a job with flexible hours as a home caretaker. She said she was born in Victoria, Canada and lived in England for most of her childhood and adult life. She said that she moved back because she was in an abusive relationship/marriage. She said she moved to Guelph because she had a friend who could get her a job here. She also said that she got accepted to the university of Guelph and began doing part time courses. She said she didn’t talk to her family. Her apartment appeared pre-furnished, and didn’t really look lived-in. She occasionally appeared at events with her “boyfriend”, “John”, a 5’7 or 5’8 beefy native dude with brown hair who wore sunglasses and a hat. He had a US Marine Corps tattoo on one of his biceps that read USMC and had numbers under it.

Request For Protests British Embassies, High Commissions, British Trade Offices and any other British interests globally.

12noon Friday 30th July 2010.

Ian Tomlinson died on April 1st 2009 after being attacked by a policeman during the G20 protests in London.

He was walking home from work and had nothing to do with the demonstrations.

A few short moments later he collapsed and died of his injuries.

The police immediately attempted a cover-up which fell apart after footage of the death leaked to the media a week later, as well as thousands of other images of police violence against the British public.

To the Editors, East Bay Express,

It wasn’t enough to be faced with your cover editorial of July 7-13 implicitly equating (as “errors”) the killing of an unarmed and prone African-American man at the hands of a white BART cop who “lost his cool” with the breaking of business and automobile windows by protesters who “reacted in anger” to what has recently been deemed involuntary manslaughter. Let’s leave aside how precisely you believe people on the receiving end of routine police harassment are supposed to express their outrage at yet another in a seemingly endless series of extrajudicial—of course we mean accidental—murders.

No, that wasn’t bad enough. Now readers are treated to Robert Gammon’s “Seven Days” column of July 14-20, in which he repeats—almost verbatim from the discourse of OPD and the future bureaucrats of Youth Uprising—contemptuous red herrings as part of a wider de rigueur anti-anarchist frenzy being aided and promoted by mainstream and so-called alternative media. Perhaps anarchists should be grateful that at least you have finally dispensed with the cumbersome and paternalistic qualifier “self-described,” as if journalists who are thoroughly ignorant of the history and philosophy of anarchism could possibly be the arbiters of who authentic anarchists are and what we do.

Tags:
From Journal of Aesthetics and Protest - by Sue Bell Yank

Horizontalism in New Social Practices: Revolutionary Autonomous Communities and Artist's For Social Justice

Links
Revolutionary Autonomous Communities
Artists for Social Justice

From a small 10-foot plot of truly public space between MacArthur Park and the street, the smell of slightly overripe fruit sweating in the sun emerges every Sunday morning. Young and old residents of the community stand together in the piercing midday Los Angeles sun, beads of sweat pricking their temples and children scrambling underfoot. Each person sets two squash, four potatoes, four cucumbers, a bunch of grapes, and so on into a succession of nearly 200 overstuffed cardboard boxes. Around 2pm, a line of people of every age and color, begins to form. They wait patiently to receive their boxes of donated excess fruits and vegetables, bag of rice and beans, whole wheat bread, and a fruit pie. The volunteers and the needy are often one and the same. After the flurry of activity from handing out food, everyone finds a place on the shady hill near the sidewalk. They examine the bounty and swap amongst themselves, a second redistribution among neighbors.

This food program is the soul of an anarchist organization known as the Revolutionary Autonomous Communities. It has been occurring for nearly two years around MacArthur Park. Self-sustainability is the watchword for this organization. Enabling poor or underserved communities of color to support themselves through simple acts of mutual aid, like food redistribution (rather than relying on charity) is its primary motivation.

Tags:
On the day that the Italian canning factory started up, many of the locals in the North African fishing village were overjoyed. Now they could preserve and trade their seasonal tuna catch. The Italians that were showing up on the south side of the Mediterranean were coming from a culture which had accumulated a wondrous array of technical knowledge, who prided themselves also in their administrative and commercial efficaciousness Now they were sharing it with Bedouins, Berbers, Tuaregs and Tebus and all of the diverse peoples of the North African coastal margin.

The ‘old-timers’, while they could appreciate the conservation and trade advantages that the new factory provided, were struck by how their relations with one another were being transformed by the presence of the factory. Fishermen up and down the coast were now bringing their catch to their village and much of the processed fish was being shipped north across the Mediterranean, creating a local shortage. Youth was aspiring to the many new jobs that were emerging and after a while, many fishermen’s sons, if they were to get into a boat at all, were unable to tie a hook onto a line and would become so seasick that they begged to return immediately to shore.

From Prison Justice

This is a call out for solidarity on August 10th International Prisoner Justice Day.

This date has become a marking point for prison struggle across the world. Often times with anarchists specifically it is seen a point of recuperation within the North American context due to it’s focus on setting demands and requesting reforms. However, some anarchist living within Southern Ontario have taken some time to reassess the origins of this date and the context of our situation and are calling out all prisoners, anarchists and disposed persyns to act in tandem with their desires and further our struggles in solidarity.

August 10th became a memorable date for prisoners across the world beginning in 1974 when inmate Edward Nolan bled to death at Millhaven* Maximum Security Prison in Bath, Ontario. He allegedly slit his veins from elbow to wrist after not being transferred from isolation into general population despite his approval for transfer. The following year inmates at Millhaven organized a day-long work strike in memory of Edward which ended with almost all of them facing solitary, some of which were still in the hole a year after the strike.

From NYU Journalism

"In media history up to now, the press is free to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the laws of a given nation protect it. But Wikileaks is able to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the logic of the Internet permits it. This is new."

Wikileaks.org: Afghan War Diary, 2004-2010

Der Spiegel: Explosive Leaks Provide Image of War from Those Fighting It

New York Times: The War Logs

The Guardian: The Afghanistan War Logs

From my internal notebook and Twitter feed, a few notes on this development:

1. Ask yourself: Why didn’t Wikileaks just publish the Afghanistan war logs and let journalists ‘round the world have at them? Why hand them over to The New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel first? Because as Julien Assange, founder of Wikileaks, explained last October, if a big story is available to everyone equally, journalists will pass on it.

From Powells - Posted by Chris FaatZ

Ramsey Kanaan is the co-founder of PM Press, one of the most interesting small publishers in the business today. Powell's Chris Faatz caught up with him this past month and asked him a few questions.

Chris Faatz: Ramsey, what are the origins of PM Press? I understand you were one of the founders of AK Press. Could you speak a little about that experience, and how it influenced the founding of PM?

Ramsey Kanaan: For my sins, I am/was indeed the founder of AK. AK is actually named after my mother — Ann Kanaan — though I often used to tell folks me mother was named Kalashnikov. I spent the best part of three decades (I started young — 13) with AK, and when it became more than just me, we set it up as a workers' co-op in the U.K. So pretty much everything I've learned about publishing, distribution, propaganda, writing, editing, co-operative work, running a business, etc., etc., was all done through the rubric of AK.