9 November 2009

Activists breached a hole in the West Bank wall for the second time in less than a week on Monday in a demonstration to mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Their faces masked, the activists tethered a 2-meter wide section of the cement barrier to a truck which then pulled it over. The crowd of around 50, which had gathered at a section of the barrier near an Israeli checkpoint at Qalandiya, cheered as the 6-meter high section fell.

Israeli soldiers fired tear gas at the crowd, some of whom threw stones over the wall. Several demonstrators passed through the gap they had created, hoisting a Palestinian flag and setting ablaze tires on the other side.

[Read the article | video | h/t]

Mandisi Majavu, ZSpace, 4 November 2009

In writing ‘Black Flame: The revolutionary politics of anarchism and syndicalism‘, Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt set themselves an ambitious task of writing a history of anarchism. I use the word ambitious mainly because, as Guerin (1970) once pointed out, it is difficult to trace the outlines of anarchism.

Its master thinkers rarely condensed their ideas into systematic works. If, on occasion, they tried to do so, it was only in thin pamphlets designed for propaganda and popularization in which only fragments of their ideas can be observed.

[Read the review]

Don McCanne comments: “There is no person more qualified to discuss health system design than William Hsiao.”

The New York Times
November 3, 2009
Health Care Abroad: Taiwan

An interview of William Hsiao, Ph.D., Professor of Economics at the Harvard School of Public Health

Q.  What’s the most important lesson that Americans can learn from the Taiwanese example?

A.  You can have universal coverage and good quality health care while still managing to control costs. But you have to have a single-payer system to do it.

http://prescriptions.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/03/health-care-abroad-taiwan/

William Hsiao, Ph.D.
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/faculty/william-hsiao/

New York Times

Mr. Bloomberg — who persuaded the City Council to amend a law that would have restricted him to two terms and then spent some $90 million of his personal fortune on his campaign — decisively defeated Comptroller William C. Thompson Jr., his Democratic rival.

Had Mr. Bloomberg purchased an equivalent role in a government opposed by DC he’d now be the target of a coup d’état. Ain’t democracy grand?