Global
We start GREEGREE #124 with the National Football League’s debacle as the SF 49ers lost FOUR (4) quarterbacks to injury, turning its 1/29 playoff game into an unwatchable disaster. TATANKA BRICCA, JOHN STEINER, DENNIS BERNSTEIN, ELISSA MATROSS, MARY STONEWALL AND DOROTHY REIK all pile on with their comments.
We then go to JOHN BRAKEY who updates us on extremely important pro-democracy legislation now brewing in Arizona.
Reports from Florida are less optimistic, as WENDI LEDERMAN, CAROLINA AMPUDIA and JOE BONASIA update us on the march of DeSantis fascism through the Sunshine State.
PEASANT PROSECUTION IN PERU, NUKE MADNESS IN MI/CA/OH and GREAT NEW BREAKTHROUGHS IN RENEWABLES
In our second hour, we hear from LORENZO CANIZARES reporting on the horrifying fascist murders going on in Peru.
KEVIN KAMPS of Beyond Nuclear reports on the corrupt licensing reversals being perpetrated by the nuclear industry at Palisades, Michigan and Diablo Canyon, California.
The latest Arab Opinion Index 2022 is yet more proof that Arab societies are diverse in every possible way, from their assessment of their economic situation and living conditions to their take on immigration, state institutions and democracy. With one single exception: Palestine.
76 percent of all respondents to the poll, which is carried out annually by the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies in Doha, said that Palestine is a cause for all Arabs, not Palestinians alone.
America, America . . . God kicks thee in the head.
The twisted irony here — the irony of the brutal murder of Tyre Nichols in Memphis, Tennessee last month — is that his killers were the ones hired and trained to keep the city safe. Instead, they created half an hour of hell for the young man, kicking and beating and tasing him to death a short distance away from his mother’s house, after a random, and perhaps unjustified, traffic stop.
One of the last words he uttered, as recorded on a pole-mounted police surveillance video of the incident, was a desperate cry: “Mom-m-m-m-m!”
Should we outlaw hell? Or maybe at least defund it?
On January 19, during one of its raids in the Occupied West Bank, the Israeli military arrested a Palestinian journalist, Abdul Muhsen Shalaldeh, near the town of Al-Khalil (Hebron). This is just the latest of a staggering number of violations against Palestinian journalists, and against freedom of expression.
A few days earlier, the head of the Palestinian Journalist Syndicate (PJS), Naser Abu Baker, shared some tragic numbers during a press conference in Ramallah. “Fifty-five reporters have been killed, either by Israeli fire or bombardment since 2000,” he said. Hundreds more were wounded, arrested or detained. Although shocking, much of this reality is censored in mainstream media.
“For how long will I be in captivity? After so many years, where are the state and the people of Israel?” These were the words, uttered in Hebrew, of a person believed to be Avera Mengistu, an Israeli soldier of Ethiopian origin who was captured and held in Gaza in 2014.
Footage of Mengistu, looking nervous but also somewhat defiant, calling on his countrymen to end his 9-year incarceration, mostly ended speculation in Israel on whether the soldier was alive or dead.
Neil Young rocked America with his anthem “Southern Man” on his 1970 album “After the Gold Rush.” Similarly, the Black and white bards Sheri Bailey and Dura Temple struck gold with their outstanding Southern Girls drama, which was first mounted during the Reagan era and is, happily, being revived at the Hudson Backstage Theatre with an all-female cast and a woman director, Zadia Ife.
Set like To Kill a Mockingbird in smalltown Alabama, three of the eponymous females are white, two are Black and one is biracial. The play’s trajectory follows them from small kid days, when they played girlish games in the Jim Crow South, through the Civil Rights era, the Black Power movement and beyond. Southern Girls is exemplary in how it rather perfectly dramatizes how world historical events – from American apartheid to assassinations, et al – deeply impact individuals in their daily lives and the choices they do – and cannot – make.