Obvious
I loved the ending on this piece about the Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist) May Day celebration:
"Next year’s London May Day rally will take place on 1 May 2003."

The French parliamentary elections
My trotskyite friend Bjarke has collected some links to stories on tomorrow's French elections.

With or without me
A collection of bootleg remixes of Eminem's 'Without me'.
philly da kid - this charming booty is very cool: The Smiths vs Eminem

Ann Coulter: Build them back!
Now, I like skyscrapers. And I can't see anything wrong in building up the World Trade Center again. But Coulter is a genocidal maniac:

"A little grassy park where people go to weep does lack something in the way of defiance. Instead of us crying, evidently many Americans feel there should be a lot of Arabs crying."

"Moreover, this argument neglects to consider that by the time a new World Trade Center is built, Arabs will be about as threatening as the Japanese. Who would have imagined after Pearl Harbor that the Japanese were governable? Yet Japan hasn't shown a disposition to fight in 60 years. It is the rare individual who does not succumb to horrendous physical pain. Muslims feel humiliated now? We'll show them humiliated."

British troops could police Kashmir
This can hardly be the New Imperialism that New Labour speaks about. I mean, British troops in India and Pakistan?

British troops in Estonia or Switzerland - that would be new!

England 1 - Argentina 0
Nestor Gorojovsky from Buenos Aires writes:

"Such is life.

England won the Argentine-England match on the World Soccer Cup.

Penalty by Pochettino, 1-0, the whole English team ran back to their field and made access to the goal line impossible. The right thing to do.

England deserved the victory. I send my homage to that great lion Seaman (a goalkeeper of 39 who gallantly became a youthful Gallahad against Argentinean attackers), my warm salute to the British working
class who offered her best children to the team, and another -less warm- one to the former colonial subjects who make their old slaveowning and opium-introducing masters the present of their talents.

But I want to add a domestic, Argentinean, political comment.

During the whole week before the match, the Argentinean media were hammering in our heads the wishy-washy and false idea that this was "just another match". Demalvinisation is still full gear. They were trying to make us forget the obvious symbolism of the situation: "if we can at least be better than them on soccer, then we can expect to be better than them on any field of human life"

The English fans gave them the answer: when they realized (say, around the 35/40 minutes of the second part) that they were winning the match, a brass band that was with them began to play "Rule Britannia".

They don't forget. Neither do we. Only the commercial media in Argentina look elsewhere.
Néstor Miguel Gorojovsky"

My Escape from Maxim
Great story by former editor at the US-edition of Maxim.

I took the bait
A polar bear called NZ asked people to send in lefty and liberal sites. So I did.

Microsoft to charge for e-mail forwarding
Bad news for hormail.com-users, some good news for mailinglist moderators:
"In an e-mail notice to Hotmail users, MSN announced that for $19.95 a year, MSN Extra Storage would allow them to continue to use POP Mail Retrieval. The POP service allows customers to access various e-mail accounts through one Hotmail account.

In addition, the paid service provides 10MB of Hotmail storage, allowing people to send and receive larger attachments, and ensures that unused accounts will not expire. Hotmail requires its free users to log on every 30 days to keep an account active."

Ahh... to get rid of all those dead hotmail-adresses.

Jesus of Siberia
"Sergei Torop was a traffic cop in the small Russian town of Minusinsk until 1989, when he announced that he was the son of God. Now he commands a following of thousands and rules over a large swath of the Siberian mountains."

Antiimperialisme - Palestina - Solidaritet
This is the blog of a comrade of mine, Lars Akerhaug - only in Norwegian, and not updated very often. Still worth a visit, though.

The Long March Goes On
Interesting review of a book on the women who took part in The Long March.

The Royal Sims of Norway
Here you can download playable "The Sims-versions" of the Norwegian royal family and their hang-arounds...

This Is Only a Test...
The 'defense' alluded to in this section of TCS must be 'in defense of racism'. I found this via Remco, who also reminds us of another US test.

The Spanish state moves to ban Batasuna
"The lower house of the Spanish parliament has voted to outlaw the political arm of the Basque separatist organisation ETA.
Deputies voted by 304 to 16 in favour of the bill to ban the Batasuna party, which the Justice Minister, Angel Acebes, described as being part of a terrorist movement. "

G8 murder squad
Dawn from Canada writes: "Brig.-Gen. Ivan Fenton has publically covered his ass for deaths of unarmed civilians and peaceful protesters at the upcoming Greed8 summit in Kananaskis.

In an interview with the calgary herald, Fenton said "terrorists could very easily use the "peaceful" protesters as a cover to slip into Kananaskis" and that "his soldiers might mistake a protester for a terrorist if there's a confrontation in the dark, forested environment of Kananaskis."

This is so frustrating. How many problems today can be attributed to terror or terrorism? How easy is it for the people in power to do so? I fear attending the Greed8 in Kananaskis, I am too scared to excercise my democratic right to protest."

Here in Oslo there has been a lot of fear-inducing statements from the police in the run up to the Worldbank ABCDE-conference in june, but none as bad as this.

I hope the mobilistations are large and defiant, to counter such propaganda of fear.

Australian indigenous languages suffer in budget
"Indigenous languages and the stolen generations were another casualty of the 2002-03 federal budget. The $7.2 million previously allocated to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) for preserving and maintaining Indigenous languages was almost halved under the new federal budget.

ATSIC invests around $4.2 million annually in the preservation and revitalisation of Indigenous languages. During the last three years, it has received an extra $9 million to help reunite members of the stolen generations with their Indigenous languages."

Terror war must target 60 nations, says Bush

"The United States must be prepared to take the War on Terror to up to 60 countries if weapons of mass destruction are to be kept out of terrorists’ hands, President Bush said at the weekend"

The absence of World Cup tickets
Here in Norway no national, public channel show the World Cup. It's available through Danish or Swedish TV, and via pay-per-view.

In South Korea and Japan, tens of thousands of seats are empty but the fans are without tickets...

The game is being taken away from the fans. Just see what Norwegian capitalists are doing to Wimbledon.

Lincoln Brigade Memorial
As my great-grandfather fought in the International Brigades, Thälmann batttalion, I'm very happy to see the Abraham Lincoln Brigade-fighters honoured.