Red Pepper News

Telefónica: what’s at the other end of the line?

With today's news that Telefónica has bid to take over British mobile phone operator O2, readers in the UK might be interested to find out more about the dodgy labour practices and anti-union strategies of the Spanish phone giant. You could do far worse, then, that read this article on the company by Gemma Galdon, first published in Eurotopia (a collective project involving Red Pepper and seven partner magazines from across Europe):
http://www.eurotopiamag.org/article.php3?id_article=8

Deaths in the desert: call for action

A migrants’ collective based in Spain and no borders groups across Europe are calling for a European Action Day on Friday 29 October 2005:

The collective attempts by more than four thousand migrants to cross the borders between Africa and Europe have shown the brutality of the European border regime. In the last two weeks ten people were shot dead by border police. Since then, Moroccan authorities have rounded up and ‘deported’ more than 2,500 people, and abandoned them without food and water in the Sahara Desert. More than 36 people have died there so far.

Crime and New Orleans

Jordan Flaherty writes: People from New Orleans were not surprised to see video of police beating a 64 year old man in the French Quarter. The only surprise is the increased attention the incident received due to the continued media focus on New Orleans, although news reports I saw took pains to point out the “high levels of stress” New Orleans police are under.

Despite the attempts to explain away the officer’s behavior, the incident fits into a well-defined pattern of police conduct in New Orleans. In the last year, seven young Black men have been killed by New Orleans police, and none of the officers involved have been punished. 

Refugees again - Palestinians flee Iraq

Justin Alexander, Baghdad: Before sunrise on Tuesday, 20 Palestinians (including 8 children, a 77 grandmother and two disabled men) piled into a delapitated bus in Baghdad and travelled the perilous Anbar road past Ramadi and Rutba (risking attack from Americans, terrorists, Iraqi security forces and criminal gangs) to the Syrian border town of Al-Waleed. They were accompanied by 3 friends from Christian Peacemaker Teams and an Iraqi peace activist from Najaf, part of the sister group Muslim Peacemaker Teams.

Everyone in Iraq is suffering these days, but the Palestinian community, most of whom have been born here (their families having fled Palestine in 1948), are among the lowest of the low. They do not have Iraqi citizenship and have to extend their residency permits (a complex process) every single month. Because Saddam exploited the Palestinian cause to try and gain prominence in the Arab world, Palestinians are often (incorrectly) viewed as having supported and benefited from his regime and as a result are persecuted.

Fairtrade Nestle: a call to action

The Fairtrade Foundation has just announced that it has given a fairtrade label to a new line of Nestle coffee (Nescafe Partners Blend). This is a betrayal of the principles of fairtrade principles, set up over the last 20 years to stop the marginalisation of small-scale farmers, to guarantee fair prices for products, and to support democratic control by producers over their products.

For Nestle this is a cheap public relations trip to undermine the Nestle boycott – the biggest consumer boycott of any single product in the UK. For the Fairtrade Foundation, it undermines its reputation and will undoubtedly damage the success of fairtrade.

Rossport 5 released

The Rossport 5, arrested (some say at the behest of Shell) for their campaign against the company’s Corrib pipeline in Ireland, have been released. In a statement, they said: "We remind Shell and their Irish government partner that imprisonments have historically and will always fail as a method to secure the agreement of Irish people.” The 5 now promise to step up their campaign.

The New Orleans prisoner abuse scandal

Jordan Flaherty: If you’re in the USA you have probably seen the reporting in the New York Times, LA Times, and elsewhere, on the continuing revelations about prisoner abuse and torture in the aftermath of Katrina.

Here are a couple quotes from yesterday's NYTimes article, which, according to a friend who has been working tirelessly on this issue, understates the case:

"(Inmate's lawyers) estimate that as many as 2,000 people arrested for minor crimes just before the hurricane are still in prison five weeks later. They said that under normal circumstances, such low-level offenders would have seen a judge and been released within days. "