June 5, 2011 - CBC News

Michael Moore, the high-profile American activist and filmmaker, has offered a job to the Senate page who was fired Friday for her stunning protest against Prime Minister Stephen Harper..."I think that Canada and Canadians probably need to put aside the full respect thing and bring out their inner hockey stick and get to work on preventing their government from turning into a version of ours..."

28 May 2011 - Al Jazeera

US poet and songwriter Gil Scott-Heron, credited with helping to inspire the development of rap, has died at the age of 62...Scott-Heron - best known for his spoken word piece 'The Revolution Will Not Be Televised', which critiqued mass media - used poetry as his vehicle for activism committed to the human rights of people around the world.

By Julianne Hing - AlterNet

How much of Oprah’s appeal comes from the fact that she embodies women’s worst insecurities about themselves even as she exhorts women to get over it already? Does that make her human, or does it make her cynically depraved?

By Dave Zirin - May 16, 2011

The reason Atlanta was such a brutally awkward setting for a Sunday Civil Rights setting, was because Friday saw the Governor of Georgia...sign HR 87, a law that shreds the Civil Rights of the state’s Latino population. Modeled after Arizona’s horrific and unconstitutional SB 1070, HR 87 authorizes state and local police the federal powers to demand immigration papers from people they suspect to be undocumented.

April 28, 2011 - Halifax Media Co-op

As the British Royal Wedding draws close, many observers believe that the UK taxpayers rather than the royal family will actually pay for the lavish USD 48 million ceremony in London...Britons already pay some GBP 40 million a year to maintain the British royal family.

By Enzo Di Matteo - April 26, 2011

As election controversies go, the one about to be spooled out here might just end up winning the Conservatives more votes among its anti-gay base, but it’s telling about the lengths the party of Stephen Harper will go to troll for votes among the more fringe elements in this country...[C]itizenship and immigration minister Jason Kenney has...been hard at work cultivating votes among the supporters of one comedian dragged before the BC Human Rights Tribunal for his anti-gay comments.

By Nima Shirazi - Dissident Voice

By ignoring the call to boycott and by performing in Israel this summer, Dylan is solidifying his reputation as one who – when it counted most – didn’t stand for morality and humanity. Dylan once asked, “how many years can some people exist, before they’re allowed to be free?” It seems that Dylan’s own answer to the Palestinians would be, “A while longer and don’t ask me to help.” He has become his own rhetorical character: the man who turns his head, pretending he just doesn’t see.

US Actress and Comedian Janeane Garafolo does stand-up on Stephen.

Activist, writer, and actress Linda Carmichael explains that she "first wrote the play Soul On Fire about seven years ago, and has had several staged readings performed since, including one Off Broadway. I had been corresponding with Herman and he knew I was an actress and suggested I write a play.

By David Sirota - March 25, 2011

The late 1970s and early 1980s marked the birth of an entire industry organized around idealized nostalgia, and particularly mid-century, pre-1965 schmaltz...Like all sales pitches, fifties hawking employed subjectivity, oversimplification, and stereotypes.

By DAVID MACARAY - Counterpunch Weekend Edition

When you know very little about a subject, it’s not hard for someone professing to be an “expert” to snow you with misleading or downright false information...That’s what 60 Minutes has been doing for over forty years...broadcasting slick, misleading, quasi-informative entertainment pieces disguised as “hard news.”

Toban Black on the Media Co-op

This audio recording captures some of what members of an arts and storytelling group called the Beehive Design Collective had to say about their work, during one of their events in London, Ontario. Reactions and thoughts from a few locals who attended that Beehive workshop also are part of the recording.

By CLANCY SIGAL - Counterpunch

We Americans do love our bad showbiz boys...running amok. It’s a tradition that goes from Mel Gibson, Dennis Hopper, Robert Downey Jr. all the way back to Robert Mitchum, Charlie Chaplin and Fatty Arbuckle. Sex, dope, a slug of violence (preferably against women) and most recently a soupçon of anti-Semitism will magnetically snag the electronic gatekeepers of TV’s celebrity-hungry audiences.

By Lauren Kelley - AlterNet

"...CBS executives, not to mention the millions of viewers of his 'family' sitcom Two and a Half Men, have consistently turned a blind eye toward Mr. Sheen’s history of abusing women"...What's more, Sheen's awful treatment of women...is being treated as something mildly amusing, bordering on "cool"...

By DANIEL LINDVALL - February 28, 2011

In a Better World is the latest...film by [Danish director Susanne] Bier & [co-scriptwriter Anders Thomas] Jensen to serve up a world of brave white men facing up to the irrational evil of the dark-skinned other...Denmark, a small nation of less than six million inhabitants, has produced an impressive list of first-rate films over the last couple of decades. Unfortunately In a Better World is not one of them.