Feature Archives

On July 25th, an estimated 4,000 people across Northern California joined thousands of demonstrators around the world in a global day of action to express solidarity with the Iranian people challenging the results of the country’s controversial June 12th election. Bay Area residents poured into San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza to participate in the demonstration, spearheaded by District 5 Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi, the first Iranian-American to be elected to public office in San Francisco.

In Greece, a period of widespread state repression and brutality has followed the rebellion of December 2008. During and after the rebellion, the extreme right wing political party LAOS (Popular Orthodox Party Alert) and the Greek state investigated the IMCs of Athens and Patras, Greece, on the grounds that they were used as centers for the "coordination of rebellion." Indymedia participants say that rebellions are not conducted via the Internet, and that Indymedia contributed vital counter-information to state- and corporate-controlled media.

Max Blumenthal writes: "On May 27, journalist Jesse Rosenfeld and I set out on the streets of Tel Aviv to probe the political opinions of young local residents. We started the day filming Jewish and Palestinian Israeli students protesting a proposed law that would criminalize public observance of the Nakba, or the mass expulsion and killing of Palestinians by Zionist militias in 1948. There, we interviewed Palestinian Israeli students about the rising climate of repression, then spoke to another group of students who gathered nearby to heckle their Arab classmates and demand their deportation."

G. Hotta writes: "From ethnic turmoil in Urumqi, to the prisoners at Guantanamo, the Uyghur people find themselves in the global spotlight. But what remains in the dark are Uyghur history, issues and viewpoints. To give context to events that are still un-folding, the Uyghur experience is traced through the lives to two Uyghurs in exile: mainly Alim Seytoff and Uyghur rights activist Rebiya Kadeer."

On Saturday, June 27, Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams hosted a forum in San Francisco to address the issue: "A United Ireland, How Do We Get There?" Hundreds packed St. Anne’s Meeting Hall in San Francisco’s Sunset District to discuss how to unite the still divided island nation of Ireland. Gerry Adams said the purpose of the forum was “to kickstart yet another chapter in our struggle — the final chapter.”

Live radio broadcast from Radio Liberada in Honduras
On June 28th, the Honduran military ousted the democratically elected government of Honduras, detaining and then exiling President Manuel Zelaya to Costa Rica. The head of the Honduran Joint Chiefs of Staff, Romeo Orlando Vasquez Velasquez, along with other military leaders in the country, graduated from the United States' infamous School of the Americas (SOA). On June 29, an emergency rally and press conference to denounce the coup in Honduras took place at the Honduran Consulate in San Francisco.

Richard Silverstein writes, "YouTube may have banned Max Blumenthal’s Feel the Hate video, but I guess the hasbara (pro-Israel propaganda) crowd hasn’t yet gotten around to complaining about the multiple YouTube abuse videos documenting verbal and emotional abuse of innocent Palestinian civilians by thuggish Israeli Border Police."