Global

America is currently experiencing a historic surge of protests igniting a cultural awakening and racial reckoning. Shorts, documentaries, animation and features by and about the Pacific Islands’ indigenous peoples are being highlighted at the 36th annual Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival (https://festival.vcmedia.org/2020/). Since 1983 Visual Communications, a nonprofit organization, has presented LAAPFF, dedicated to its mission “to develop and support the voices of Asian American and Pacific Islander filmmakers and media artists who empower communities and challenge perspectives.” This year due to the pandemic the Festival is online.

‘International law’ remains one of the most discussed terms in the context of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. It is almost always present, whether the discussion pertains to the Israeli wars and siege on Gaza, the expansion of illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank or the encroaching apartheid throughout Israel and the Occupied Territories. 

A Zionist-led war on a Palestinian cultural festival in Rome has exposed the fragility of the Italian political system when it comes to the conversation on Palestine and Israel. The sad truth is that, although Italy is not often associated with a ‘powerful’ pro-Israel lobby as is the case in Washington, the pro-Israel influence in Italy is just as dangerous. 

“We’re number one!” The United States famously fails to actually lead the world in anything desirable, but it does lead the world in many things, and one of them turns out to be the poisoning of the Pacific and its islands. And by the United States, I mean the United States military.

A new book by Jon Mitchell, called Poisoning the Pacific: The US Military’s Secret Dumping of Plutonium, Chemical Weapons, and Agent Orange, tells this story. Like all such catastrophes, this one escalated dramatically at the time of World War II and has continued ever since.

Mitchell starts with the island of Okunashima where Japan produced chemical weapons during World War II. After the war, the United States and Japan dumped the stuff into the ocean, stuck it in caves and sealed them shut, and buried it in the ground — on this island, near it, and throughout various parts of Japan. Putting something out of sight was apparently going to make it disappear, or at least burden future generations and other species with it — which was apparently just as satisfactory.

BANGKOK, Thailand -- Thousands of pro-democracy demonstrators are
ignoring the U.S.-backed government's declaration of harsh "emergency
situation" laws, which banned public gatherings, censored the media,
and increased its powers of imprisonment after crowds confronted the
royal family with a three-finger gesture of defiance.

Despite the crackdown, thousands of protesters gathered at a strategic
intersection -- paralyzing the heart of Bangkok near the U.S. embassy
-- flanked by five-star hotels and glitzy shopping malls.

They demanded the immediate release of their arrested protest leaders.

Watched by police on October 15, they also reiterated demands for coup
leader Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha to resign, a new constitution
be written, and fresh elections be held.

In the evening, the crowd swelled, lit by neon signs from surrounding buildings.

"Like dogs cornered, we are fighting until our deaths," protest leader
Panupong "Mike Rayong" Jadnok told the cheering demonstrators,
according to Reuters.

How can you prepare for the US Presidential election resulting in a disaster?

O’odham sacred land and water protectors held  ceremony this morning at a border patrol checkpoint on unceded O’odham homelands to pray for sacred sites and graves demolished by the racist border wall. Border Patrol and Arizona State Troopers and Department  of Public Safety attacked them with tear gas and rubber bullets, hitting at least one O’odham in prayer in the chest with rubber bullets and arresting at least eight Native Americans on Indigenous Peoples’ Day. 

Indigenous Peoples’ Day 2020; Highway 85, Hia Ced O’odham lands (Arizona) - 

s Donald Trump descends into COVID/drug-induced madness, there must be no illusions about what we face.

Trump is using White Supremacism to incite violent fascist cadres. These assaults on the 2020 election parallel Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 Germany.

Throughout the US, right-wing thugs are escalating the terror at voting centers. They have blocked voter access at Alexandria, Virginia, and will certainly be seen elsewhere.

They are making their presence felt in the most critical juncture of the election — where an election board decides whether to disallow mailed-in ballots.

The cutting edge nonfiction film Totally Under Control co-directed by Oscar-winner Alex Gibney, Ophelia Harutyunyan and Suzanne Hillinger documents the Trump regime’s tragedy of errors and terrors in its catastrophic reactionary reaction to the coronavirus. Indeed, Control is a veritable cinematic Nuremberg trial convicting Trump and the psychopath’s sycophants of crimes against humanity and mass murder of 215,000-plus Americans by systematically undermining science to enable Covid-19 to wreak havoc across the land they were sworn to protect.

Control takes its ironic title from one of Trump’s invariably wrong plague pronouncements and predictions. Instead of Nostradamus, the buffoon who keeps prognosticating that the virus will just “go away,” when it gets warm (hey’ how’d that work out for you this summer?), etc., and other fantasy flights of fancy should be called “Nostra-Dumb-Ass.” As this doc shows, Trump is to prophecy what Casanova was to monogamy, Pinocchio to honesty and Louis XVI to good governance (and hopefully he’ll meet the same fate).