Experiments with truth: 9/1/09

The Editors September 1, 2009

On Saturday, a dozen members from the satirical protest group Billionaires for Wealth Care pulled up in their stretch limo and joined the right wing protesters at a Town Hall Meeting hosted by Congresswoman Susan Davis (D-CA) in Spring Valley, California, thanking them for fighting for the profits of the health industry that enriched them.

Argentine cattle auctions and grains markets were almost inactive Monday as farmers refused to sell products on the fourth day of a protest against government agricultural policy.

Canadian filmmaker John Greyson has withdrawn his short film “Covered” – a doc about the 2008 Sarajevo Queer Festival, which was cancelled due to anti-gay violence – from the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival in protest against the festival’s inaugural City-to-City Spotlight on Tel Aviv.

In Australia, more than half the students at Mullumbimby high school on the North Coast of New South Wales walked out over the death of a teenager in a playground fight.

Three inmates were in a critical condition at Dar es Salaam’s Keko Remand Prison on Sunday after a five-day hunger strike.

The pilot’s union Cockpit has called for a 16-hour strike to protest against a move to replace pilots working for LTU with those working for Air Berlin.

In Dubai, thousands of workers for Al Habtoor Engineering did not report to work and protested they be paid overdue salaries on Monday.

Climate camp activists staged a “clean-up” protest outside the Treasury in London yesterday. Wearing boiler suits and brandishing cleaning equipment they said they wanted to expose the Treasury’s “dirty practices”, including the use of taxpayers’ money to fund fossil fuel extraction despite the Government claiming to be a global leader in the fight against climate change.

Five workers from the Indorama textiles factory in Shibeen El-Kom in Egypt launched a hunger strike on Friday after four were fired and one threatened verbally that his employment will be terminated.

In West Virginia, two anti-mining activists were arrested Monday after they ended a week-long tree-sit. The action forced Massey Energy to temporarily halt work at a mountaintop removal site. Nick Stocks and Laura Steepleton have both been charged with trespass, obstruction and littering.

Tags: Australia, Boycotts, Canada, Climate change, Experiments with Truth, Humor, Incarceration, Labor, Oceania and Pacific islands, Protests, Strikes, United States

John Clarke says:

September 10, 2009 at 11:28 am

It is John Greyson who is politicizing TIFF and abusing for his own political ends.

I wonder if John Greyson’s big public hissy fit about TIFF has anything to do with him being on the Advisory Board of the Toronto Palestinian Film Festival and always pushing for a world-wide boycott of anything even remotely related to Israel?

Knowing what TIFF’s plans were, one wonders why he waited to the last moment to withdraw, rather than just in the beginning many months ago withdrawing?

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