“State security services in North Dakota have used tear gas and water hoses against hundreds of activists protesting against the Dakota Access Pipeline.
Protesters also reported being hit with rubber bullets and percussion grenades on a bridge just north of the encampments established by indigenous and environmental activists in opposition to the controversial pipeline.
“They were attacked with water cannons,” said LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, a Standing Rock Sioux tribe member and founder of the Sacred Stone camp. “It is 23 degrees [-5 °C] out there with mace, rubber bullets, pepper spray, etc. They are being trapped and attacked. Pray for my people.”
The Morton County Sheriffs Department described the incident as an “ongoing riot” and described the protesters as “very aggressive”. A spokesman for the sheriffs department said that law enforcement was spraying water because protesters were lighting fires on and around the bridge.
One hundred sixty-seven people were injured and seven were taken to the hospital, according to Jade Begay, a spokeswoman for the Indigenous Environmental Network.”(The Guardian 21/11/2016)
Fidel Castro and the fetishism of power
Talking to us of homeland and freedom is a waste of time unless they start by guaranteeing our independence as individuals; we are not about to redeem the homeland while we are all left slaves.
The measure of the homeland’s independence can be gauged by the amount of independence enjoyed by her children, and, as we have already said, there can be no free homeland while her children are slaves.
Enrique Roig de San Martin
El Productor, (Havana) 12 May 1889
The day following Fidel Castro’s death on the 25th of November, graffiti appeared in Lisbon reading, “Obrigado Fidel/Thank you Fidel”, accompanied by a hammer and sickle. Ignoring the intentions of the author, and leaving aside delusional nostalgia for “revolutionary pasts”, there is a perhaps strange and modest echo of moral-political truth in these words, for the Portuguese and for others.
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