Last weekend American politics reached a bizarre point: in order to justify their existence, government leaders decided to do something about what human beings have always agreed you can't do anything about: the weather. So we had their frenetic reactions to Hurricane Irene.
natural disaster
Making the connection between extreme weather and climate change
"The troubled sky reveals
The grief it feels."
These two lines were written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his poem Snow-Flakes, published in a volume in 1863 alongside his epic and better-known The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere. Much of the news chatter this week has been about Sarah Palin's flubbing of the history of Revere's famous ride in April 1775. Revere was on a late-night, clandestine mission to alert American revolutionaries of an impending British attack. Palin's incorrect version had Revere loudly ringing a bell and shooting a gun on horseback as a warning to the British to back off.
Not Rex: Apocalypse soon!
Bummed at another delayed rapture? Cheer up. With earthquakes, tornadoes and climate change...there are plenty of other apocalypses just waiting to happen....
Nine months after the disaster: Aid, human rights and elections - a Haitian perspective
Oct 29 2010 - 7:30pm
Oct 29 2010 - 9:30pm
Location
Ryerson University Student Campus Centre (Room SC115)
55 Gould Street
Toronto, ON Canada
Phone:
416-731-2325
43° 39' 28.6092" N, 79° 22' 44.148" W
See map: Google Maps
The Toronto Haiti Action Committee and Students in Solidarity with Haiti invites you to a free Public Forum with Haitian attorney Mario Joseph of the Bureau Des Avocats Internationaux and Berthony Dupont, Editor of Haiti Liberté to discuss the current political and human rights situation in Haiti
Contact name:
Niraj
Contact email:
New Orleans: Community resistance before and after Katrina
Floodlines: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six
(Haymarket Books,
2010;
$19.50)
In this excerpt from his new book Floodlines, Jordan Flaherty, provides a firsthand account of grassroots organizing, culture and resistance in New Orleans.
I didn't really understand community until I moved to New Orleans. It is a city of kindness and hospitality, where walking down the block can take two hours because you stop and talk to people on every porch. Extended families and social networks fill the gaps left by city, state, and federal governments that have abdicated their responsibility for the public welfare. Folks you walk past on the street not only ask how you are, they also wait for an answer. New Orleans is a place where someone always wants to feed you.
Let the Haitians in
Jean Montrevil was shackled, imprisoned, about to be sent to Haiti. It was Jan. 6, days before the earthquake that would devastate Haiti, the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere. Montrevil came to the U.S. with a green card in 1986 at the age of 17. Twenty years ago, still a teenager, he was convicted of possession of cocaine and sent to prison for 11 years. Upon release, he married a U.S. citizen; he has four U.S.-citizen children, owns a business, pays taxes and is a legal, permanent resident. He is a well-respected Haitian New York community activist. But because of his earlier conviction, he was on an immigration supervision program, requiring him to check in with an immigration official every two weeks. On Dec.
Our role in Haiti's plight
Any large city in the world would have suffered extensive damage from an earthquake on the scale of the one that ravaged Haiti's capital city on Tuesday afternoon, but it's no accident that so much of Port-au-Prince now looks like a war zone. Much of the devastation wreaked by this latest and most calamitous disaster to befall Haiti is best understood as another thoroughly manmade outcome of a long and ugly historical sequence.