Bashir Mohamed is, to many people, "just" a university student. However, inside him brews the power and spirit of politics and social change. His previous actions involve starting and contributing to numerous charitable projects, including an initiative to send 1500 water filters to Haiti earlier this year. He hopes in the future to become a Member of Parliament with the hope of instituting true and effective change.
Hossam el-Hamalawy is a leading Egyptian journalist, photographer, and socialist activist from Cairo who maintains the widely followed blog 3arabawy. He is also actively involved in the Revolutionary Socialists, the Center for Socialist Studies, and the Workers Democratic Party. Canadian journalist Ali Mustafa had the fortunate opportunity to sit down and talk with him about his views on the current state of the Egyptian revolution following the latest revolt in Tahrir Square this past November, arguably the fiercest and most important display of popular resistance to the ruling military regime to take place since the January 25 uprising that toppled former president Hosni Mubarak some ten months ago.
During its eight years of operation, Insite has been proven to save lives with no discernible negative impact on the public safety and health objectives of Canada. The effect of denying the services of Insite to the population it serves and the correlative increase in the risk of death and disease to injection drug users is grossly disproportionate to any benefit that Canada might derive from presenting a uniform stance on the possession of narcotics.
- The Supreme Court of Canada, Sept. 30, 2011
Canadian activist Dylan Penner describes what has happened to The Tahrir, its crew, and international activists since it made a dash to leave Greece early Monday.
Cathryn Atkinson: Where are you?
Dylan Penner: At port. I am below deck. The Tahrir has been damaged by the Greek coastguard when they forced us into port. [Editor's Note: The Tahrir was slammed into a concrete wall -- with the boat taking on water and its diesel tank having been damaged, though it is not sinking.] We're still on board, but essentially what we've seen is the very clear expansion of the illegal Israeli blockade of Gaza to Greece.
CA: What is happening currently?
For 20 years, Mexican activist Lydia Cacho has been waging war on human trafficking in Mexico. In 1999 she launched CIAM Cancun (the Comprehensive Care Centre for Women), a shelter for battered women and children that has been threatened with closure due to lack of funding.
The organisation was created in response to the sexual violence against women and children that is rife in Mexican culture. It's a refuge in a country where trafficking is seldom punished.
Nathalie Des Rosiers, general counsel for the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, and James Clancy, the National Union of Public and General Employees's national president, spoke to rabble.ca about the release of a report by the CCLA and the NUPGE based on public hearings on the G20 mass arrests. The hearings were held in Toronto and Montreal last November.
Canada is quickly slipping from its status as an equal and fair society, according to Richard Wilkinson, a British social epidemiologist and Emeritus Professor at the University of Nottingham in England.
Mike Skinner, co-founder of the Afghanistan-Canadian Research Group and a researcher at the York Centre for International and Security Studies in Toronto, believes a simple question is being left out the debate about Canada's continued military involvement in Afghanistan.
"Why are we there?" It is a no-brainer to ask this but there are no easy answers it appears.
Nazareth, Haneen Zoabi's home city in northern Israel, is a chaotic mess of streets and nondescript buildings that has seen better days from an architectural and planning perspective.
It is a kind of metaphor for the member of the Knesset's major constituency, the little over a million Palestinian-Arabs or Arab-Israelis living inside the state of Israel today.
The childhood home of Jesus was actually a small, beautiful historical town in 1948 that never really recovered from an overwhelming flood of refugees that had managed to escape the ethnic cleansing of 700,000 Palestinians in what is called the Nakba or catastrophe by the armed forces of the then new state of Israel.
![David Diamon of Headlines Theatre with a Vancouver audience devising Us and Them [The Inquiry]. Photo Tim Matheson.](http://rabble.ca/sites/rabble/files/imagecache/issue-sidebar-180/node-images/Nov%2026%20US%20and%20THEM%201%20huge%20audience%20photo%20credit%20Tim%20Matheson.JPG "David Diamon of Headlines Theatre with a Vancouver audience devising Us and Them [The Inquiry]. Photo Tim Matheson.")
Headlines Theatre Company was founded in Vancouver in 1981 by a group of writers, actors and theatre directors who were "disgruntled by the kind of theatre work we were asked to do," according to its artistic director David Diamond. The Jessie award-winning company is about to enter its 30th year with its most ambitious project yet. Us and Them [The Inquiry] brings ordinary people to the stage to tell stories of conflict and explores reasons and resolutions. Diamond explains the company and the process involved in devising theatre this way.