‘WikiRebels’ offers some insight to Wikileaks and Julian Assange. Inexplicably, I can’t find any information on this documentary other than its Youtube description:
Rough-cut of first in-depth documentary on WikiLeaks and the people behind it! From summer 2010 until now, Swedish Television has been following the secretive media network WikiLeaks and its enigmatic Editor-in-Chief Julian Assange.
Reporters Jesper Huor and Bosse Lindquist have traveled to key countries where WikiLeaks operates, interviewing top members, such as Assange, new Spokesperson Kristinn Hrafnsson, as well as people like Daniel Domscheit-Berg who now is starting his own version - Openleaks.org.”
The student riot is a great British tradition. From Oxford’s St Scholastica Day, on February 10 1355, when a couple of undergraduates complained about the quality of beer served in their local hostelry, leading to an all out battle that left sixty-three students and thirty locals dead. Through to 1968, when plucky youngsters attacked the American Embassy over the Vietnam War, with eighty-six people injured and over two-hundred arrested. To the Poll Tax Riots with its famous Battle of Trafalgar in 1990, which left 113 injured, and 339 arrested.
Today in London, Britain’s great students have been protesting against the triple hike in tuition fees, leading to running battles with the police, vandalism of property and an attack on a car containing HRH Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall, as the Daily Telegraph reports:
Demonstrators kicked the Rolls-Royce as it travelled to the Royal Variety Performance in central London. White paint and bottles were thrown over the car and a window shattered.
The Prince and Duchess were “unharmed” and continued with their engagement at the London Palladium, a Clarence House spokesman said.
The attack occurred on Regent Street at the end of a day of protest that turned into a riot and left 10 police officers injured, six of them seriously.
Matthew Maclachlan, who witnessed the attack on the Prince’s car, said: “The police cars at the front of the convoy drove straight into crowds at the top of Regent Street. They got trapped in that mob and it meant that Charles and Camilla were on their own further down the road except for a Jaguar travelling behind them.
“Charles and Camilla’s car ran into such a concentration of people that it had to stop. It was stationary for a lot of the time, then would squeeze forward an inch. They had just one bodyguard in the car with them and a chauffeur.
“We couldn’t believe it. The car had really big windows so Charles was very much on display. People were trying to talk to him about tuition fees at first but when more people realised what was happening, the crowds swelled and people were throwing glass bottles and picking up litter bins and throwing them at the car. You could hear all this smashing.
“There was one protection officer in the Jaguar behind, dressed in a tuxedo, and he was opening the car doors and using them to bash people away. His car took a real pummelling.”
No, not quite anarchy in the UK, but good to see students carrying on a great tradition, which gives me an excuse to blast this olde favorite.
Striking a blow straight to the heart of celebrity vanity, the newest edition of the Popbitch newsletter contained the following item:
Neatly proving just how ineffective social media actually is, 18 celebrities (and Jay Sean) sacrificed their “digital lives” for charity last week, vowing to stop updating their Twitter and Facebook feeds. Social network silence from Lady Gaga, Alicia Keys, Justin Timberlake and others until their fans donated a million dollars to [Keys’] Keep A Child Alive campaign to help fight AIDS.
With six days gone, donations were still under $300k. The celebs got restive - Usher just plain gave up and started tweeting - so a billionaire patsy, and longtime AIDS funder Stewart Bahr, was drafted in to pay it off.
It would have cost the celebs’ 35 million combined followers less than 3 cents each to buy back their lives and get them tweeting again, so it appears their fans are staunchly pro-AIDS, or no-one really cared very much about what they had to say in the first place.
Laying down that kind of bread, couldn’t Bahr have pushed his weight around even a little bit and negotiated a way to still keep Kim Kardashian off Twitter?
Hey, what’s a little bait and switch during a presidential election, huh?
I have never voted for a Republican in my entire life, but it sure feels like I have with Obama… The tax cut deal for millionaires and billionaires is a moral outrage and it’s going to be wrapped around his neck come next year when the GOP refuse to raise the debt ceiling.
Follow this link to donate a couple of bucks to ActBlue. For every $3000 they raise, they can show this ad one time on local TV stations in the Washington DC metro area. Obama’s base can only erode so much until it’s gone for good…
Nick Cave smashes into a speed camera with his Jaguar and walks away.
The grinderman’s latest hit.
British paper The Telegraph reports:
Cave, 53, was travelling along Hove seafront in Sussex with his two boys, Arthur and Earl,10, when he crashed through a metal barrier and collided with the camera. Nobody was injured in the accident, which happened on Tuesday evening.
Police were called to the crash, which left the camera bent at a 45 degree angle, but Cave was not arrested.
British Prime Minister David Cameron is a Smith’s fanboy, much to the chagrin of Morrissey and Johnny Marr who can’t stand the PM. Morrissey, a vocal animal rights activist, is particularly disturbed by the fact that Cameron wants to “repeal the Hunting Act, which would mean the brutal killing of foxes, hares, deer, badgers, otters – just about anything that moves.”
Today Labour MP challenged Cameron over Morrissey and Johnny Marr’s comments.
Ahead of tomorrow’s controversial vote on raising tuition fees, Cameron was challenged by Labour MP Kerry McCarthy, who mentioned The Smiths in her argument.
“As someone who claims to be an avid fan of The Smiths, the Prime Minister will no doubt be rather upset this week to hear that both Morrissey and Johnny Marr have banned him from liking them,” McCarthy said.
She added: “The Smiths are, of course, the archetypal student band. If he wins tomorrow night’s vote, what songs does he think students will be listening to? ‘Miserable Lie’, ‘I Don’t Owe You Anything’ or ‘Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now’?”
Cameron’s response included several Smiths song titles, too.
He said: “I expect that if I turned up I probably wouldn’t get ‘This Charming Man’ and if I went with the Foreign Secretary [William Hague] it would probably be ‘William It Was Really Nothing’.”
Senator Bernie Sanders (VT), the only socialist (not a “top Democrat” as the clip indicates) member of the US Senate tells it like it is. A must see-clip. I agree with him 2000%. About time someone said this. What the fuck is wrong with this country?
“Millionaires and billionaires do not need huge tax deductions, that’s the simple truth. If we’re serious about creating jobs in this country, which should be our main priority, that’s one worst way to do it. Much better to take that money, invest in our roads, bridges, railroad systems, infrastructure—you create jobs doing that.”
“Our Republican friends have got to be held accountable. The issue is the insult, the outrage that they want tax breaks for billionaires but they can’t in their heart come up with extending unemployment compensation so millions of families in this country can have a modicum of security. I believe, politically, we can rally the American people around that cause.”
Let’s hope he’s right. And fuck Obama and the Democrats, this deal is LAME. And furthermore, while they held the MAJORITY, why didn’t they CEMENT unemployment benefits into law to continue indefinitely in states where the rate of unemployment is over a certain threshold? Instead we’re being offered two more years of the Bush tax cuts on millionaires and billionaires in exchange for 13 months?? Is Obama bending over backwards—or merely bending over—to assure the Teabaggers that he doesn’t hold an anti-American, “Kenyian” viewpoint (as retardedly espoused by Newt Gingrich)?
We’re truly getting to well past the point where other countries (you know, the ones with universal healthcare and paid maternity leave and stuff like that) are just going to feel sorry for how fucking stupid we Americans are.
