Blogs

I'm reposting here some reports on a current police raid on the Villa Amalias squat in central Athens. The raid began early this morning and event are still on going. This is the latest in a series of raids and attacks by the state against autonomous spaces.

On Sunday, December 16, a group of migrants fleeing Libya demonstrated in the streets of Reggio Emilia, the city where they are currently living. Several associations called for the rally, including Associations Città Migrante, GA3, Emergency Reggio Emilia and Laboratorio Aq16.

If there is one thing that has marked the libertarian tradition, at least in the classical sense, it has been the focus on transformative organizing. This may simply appear as rhetoric to some people, and in many cases it is.

The drilling company ‘Cuadrilla’ had to stop ‘Fracking’ at several areas along the Fylde coast 18 months ago, due to concerns that it had caused minor earthquakes around the Blackpool area.

Dimitris Stratoulis, of the radical left coalition (Syriza), claimed that three men approached him and said - "Stratoulis, we are members of Golden Dawn and we will kill you,'" before punching him several times to the head. Several other spectators intervened, before his assailants disappeared into the crowd. Stratoulis required first aid, before visiting the local hospital.

It has now been over seven months since the last coordinated industrial action over public sector pensions. In the interim, the issue has died and for most of the union members involved in the dispute the consensus is that we lost.

As an anarchist, it should go without saying that I don't subscribe to the position that if only the state bans more things the problem will go away. Whether it's a social right like abortion, recreational products like drugs and alcohol or something as problematic as guns, it's generally true that prohibition doesn't work.

The union FIOM (the metalworkers’ federation affiated to CGIL) held an eight-hour general strike on December 5 (in Lombardy, Marche and Tuscany) and on December 6 (in all other regions of Italy) to protest against the separate agreement signed by the sector’s right-wing unions, FIM and UILM.

Many other are strongly opposed to any return to standing at 1st and 2nd tier football stadiums, not least the Hillsborough families. The disaster of 1989 was not the first occasion that fans had been crushed at Hillsborough. In a 1981 FA Cup semi-final 38 Spurs fans were injured after being crushed - and similar events took place in 1987 and again in 1988.

Finucane was executed by loyalist gunmen in-front of his wife and children. The report concludes that the RUC ‘proposed’ that Finucane be murdered, and passed information onto his killers, failed to prevent the attack from taking place, and then deliberately sabotaged the subsequent murder investigation.

This month there has been news from Burma/Myanmar, Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, North Korea, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam.

Remember, remember the 6th of December. Four years on the police murder of 15 year-old Alexis Girgoropoulos was remembered on the streets of Greece. Almost every major city or town across Greece held a demonstration against police and state violence on the 6th December. Some of the demonstrations led to clashes with police forces and arrests.

There were plenty of things wrong with last weekend’s Up the Anti conference.

This year has seen similar stories come to light in Brazil during preparations for the next world cup in 2014 and also the Olympics in 2016. In the last few months 19,000 families have been forcibly evicted from their homes by the police and armed forces.

Ahead of the October 20 “Future That Works” demonstration in London, it was revealed that the multi-million dollar coffee chain Starbucks has paid no tax in Britain for three years.

Although there can be little doubt that class struggle in on the uptick, the past month has seen two remarkable events.  The first was the UFCW-backed Walmart strikes on Black Friday.  The second was the series of SEIU-backed [url=http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2012/11/30/video_on_strike_fast_food_workers_in_nyc_ca

The 'housing shortage' has become something of a received wisdom amongst the political mainstream. From the right, we get the endless moans from property developers about 'bureaucratic planning red tape'. From the left, the nostalgic call for a new wave of council housing.

There were no casualties reported, but a huge hole was ripped through a wall, causing significant damage to both floors of the building.

A police officer who declined to be named has said that:

On Wednesday 28th November members of the London General Membership Branch of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) [1] organised a lobby of the British Medical Association (BMA) Council to demand a London Living Wage [2] for the IWW unionised cleaning staff of BMA House, London. (The attached press release can be downloaded from the bottom right of this page).

The entire plant lost all power and lightning struck a tower, causing the crash of several big blocks of cement inside the hot metalworking area. Large fires broke out, some areas of the plant had to be evacuated and workers immediately left all other areas. A tower, a chimneystack and a warehouse collapsed and 20 workers were injured.