A. Loewenstein Online Newsletter

Via the Electronic Intifada:

In a first ever musical collaboration between South Africa and Palestine, South African band, The Mavrix and Palestinian Oud player, Mohammed Omar, have released a music video called “The New Black.” The song is taken from The Mavrix’s upcoming album, Pura Vida, set for release in June.

The release of the song and video was marked on 12 March with a Skype link up between the Soweto Palestine Solidarity Alliance with activists in Palestine to launch Israeli Apartheid Week in Gaza.

“This was a momentous moment as it not only signalled a growing impatience with apartheid Israel but also asserted a common bond of struggle against oppression and for a just peace between South Africans and Palestinians,” Naazim Adam of South Africa’s Palestine Solidarity Alliance wrote in an emailed statement.

“Despite being over 1000km apart, Palestinians and Sowetans were able to feel the common brotherhood and sisterhood that unites people against racial intolerance,” Adam added.

Michael Hastings:

They say [the shooter] has a traumatic brain injury. But what we see on a weekly basis is…Afghans being killed. It happens because we have 100,000 troops in Khandahar who know that we’re leaving… If he’s insane, he’s a symptom of an insane policy.

Since the release of my book The Blogging Revolution (latest edition just out in India) the use by China of Western and local security firms to monitor citizens has only grown. This piece in the New York Times signals the depth of the problem:

Chinese cities are rushing to construct their own surveillance systems. Chongqing, in Sichuan Province, is spending $4.2 billion on a network of 500,000 cameras, according to the state news media. Guangdong Province, the manufacturing powerhouse adjacent to Hong Kong, is mounting one million cameras. In Beijing, the municipal government is seeking to place cameras in all entertainment venues, adding to the skein of 300,000 cameras that were installed here for the 2008 Olympics.

By marrying Internet, cellphone and video surveillance, the government is seeking to create an omniscient monitoring system, said Nicholas Bequelin, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch in Hong Kong. “When it comes to surveillance, China is pretty upfront about its totalitarian ambitions,” he said.

For the legion of Chinese intellectuals, democracy advocates and religious figures who have tangled with the government, surveillance cameras have become inescapable.

Yang Weidong, a politically active filmmaker, said a phalanx of 13 cameras were installed in and around his apartment building last year after he submitted an interview request to President Hu Jintao, drawing the ire of domestic security agents. In January, Ai Weiwei, the artist and public critic, was questioned by the police after he threw stones at cameras trained on his front gate.

Li Tiantian, 45, a human rights lawyer in Shanghai, said the police used footage recorded outside a hotel in an effort to manipulate her during the three months she was illegally detained last year. The video, she said, showed her entering the hotel in the company of men other than her boyfriend.

During interrogations, Ms. Li said, the police taunted her about her sex life and threatened to show the video to her boyfriend. The boyfriend, however, refused to watch, she said.

“The scale of intrusion into people’s private lives is unprecedented,” she said in a phone interview. “Now when I walk on the street, I feel so vulnerable, like the police are watching me all the time.”

Popular Struggle Coordination Committee writes:

Soon after the demonstration began, clashes between Israeli Border Police officers who shot tear-gas projectiles and rubber-coated bullets and local youth who threw stones at the forces developed. Roughly 15 minutes later – in a scene that seemed as if it was taking place in the American South of the 1960s – Border Police officers decided to sic an army dog at a group of the demonstrators, standing several dozens of meters away. The dog chased after the protesters, biting and locking his jaws into the arm of one of them – Ahmad Shtawi.