When anarchists/anti-capitalists participate in social democratic activism for reform without retaining their revolutionary militancy, it dilutes our effectiveness, and our movements become penetrated with ineffective ideas and methods. It creates a theatre of easily policed charades on the street, and weakens our long-term goals of autonomy, free exchange and liberation...If we participate in trying to convince ourselves and an alienated public that anyone will make any difference to ecological collapse and social exploitation with any symbolic, representational appeal to power and finance, the more time we will have to wait before any real change happens.

The US Army tried to kill or capture Muqtada al-Sadr, the widely revered Shia cleric, after luring him to peace negotiations at a house in the holy city of Najaf, which it then attacked, according to a senior Iraqi government official...The attempted assassination or abduction took place two-and-a-half years ago in August 2004 when Mr Sadr and his Mehdi Army militiamen were besieged by US Marines in Najaf...

Santiago is mulling over a new and deep sense of disquiet. A new awareness of the problems of Chile is being expressed aloud in bus stops and in the metro, in working class neighbourhoods such as La Victoria, frontline of resistance against the dictatorship, in the corridors of public hospitals and at college gates, and to those responsible for the "model"...[that] is sending clear signs of fatigue.

...[W]hat was different about the murder of charismatic Chicago [Black] Panther Chairman Fred Hampton, was the determined killing of an idea...Namely, to extinguish the call to the oppressed everywhere in the US - workingclass and people of color - to rise up not simply against injustice, but in positive struggle for revolution and socialism.

Friends of anti-poverty activist David Cunningham said he was arrested yesterday afternoon after arranging to meet a man who claimed to be a journalist for a Vancouver newspaper...Vancouver police...confirmed that Cunningham was arrested at about 3:45 p.m....and faces charges related to uttering threats.
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"We don't have money to lobby. Our power is through disruption and I think we've proven pretty clearly...that these tactics work...Our demonstrations have escalated. Everything has gone according to plan and the police...have been unsuccessful".

--Anti-Poverty Committee Organizer David Cunningham

...FBI Deputy Assistant Director John Lewis has identified the number one domestic terrorist threat to the U.S. and it’s not radical Muslims. Or right-wing paramilitary types. Or gun-toting pro-lifers...It’s animal rights and environmental activists who have never hurt or killed a single person in the U.S. in their 25-year history...What they have done is cause millions of dollars in damages and even more in lost profits to the logging, construction, SUV, pharmaceutical, and fur industries...

Fed up commuters reacted badly last Tuesday when one delay too many from Constituçion station in Buenos Aires to the city's poor southern suburbs was announced...[T]he enraged passengers rioted.

According to mainstream media reports, this past Monday night (April 30, 2007), unknown individuals...re-decorated the exterior of French right-wing Presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy's offices in the upscale Outremont neighborhood of Montreal...[T]he three unknown individuals left spray-painted graffiti and posters denouncing Sarkozy as a fascist and demagogue.

"Do I support Bob [Robideau] in his efforts to get John [Graham] railroaded into prison? Hell No! . . . if the truth be known he did not even know her. . . . You will notice Bob does not go and make these statements on Pine Ridge or anywhere in Indian Country. He would get his ass beat down bad! A dry snitch* is just as bad as a snitch! And that is what he is doing, dry snitching, saying shit he has no proof of."

--Leonard Peltier in correspondence with University of British Columbia Professor Dr. Jennifer Wade, April 18, 2007

*In prison jargon, a 'dry snitch' refers to someone who is misguided, has been duped, or is serving the government's prosecutorial interests out of ignorance.

It's the 73rd anniversary of what's known in labor lore as "The Big Strike" -- a remarkable event that brought open warfare to San Francisco's waterfront, led to one of the very few general strikes in U.S. history and played a key role in spreading unionization nationwide...It began in May of the dark Depression year of 1934 when longshoremen finally rebelled against their wretched working conditions in San Francisco, then one of the world's busiest ports, and in the West Coast's other port cities.

France celebrated the victory of its new right wing president Nicholas Sarkozy with 2 days of solid rioting that left several hundred cars burned, 600 arrested and 30 police injured. Sarkozy...inflamed an already tense situation in France’s ghettos during the last...round of rioting by saying that he would clean the ‘scum’ from the suburbs.

Despite the chosen G8 venue being in the sleepy Baltic Sea resort of Heiligendamm in the far north-east of the country (already surrounded with a shiny new $17m fence), last week saw many hundreds of cops involved in around forty raids right across Germany, with convergence and social centres, squats and anti-G8 group offices all targeted...In the capital, Berlin, at least eight properties were attacked, including a bookshop, flats, two offices, the kanalb radio and media group and the servers of [an] autonomous tech collective...

Since may 6, we know the face of our new enemy. He is not unknown to us, we “practiced” him as a minister the last five years. The policy he will implement will be in all aspects a program of social regression, of freedom restriction and brutality of the state apparatus against the population. Despite those who tied their hands in the “call to vote”, we reject the legitimacy of this power and are calling [for] resistance."