Photo Credit: Aaron Lakoff

The opening day of the largest NATO gathering in history a brutal mass arrest of activists took place in Bucharest, Romania.

This afternoon hundreds of police made a sudden attack on the legally rented convergence center that local activists had set up to house demonstrators from abroad, as well as serve as a space to organize actions. Wearing ski masks and carrying sub machine guns a team of 80 special forces moved into the space where people were in the process of cooking and talking. Albert, one of the 60 activists who were arrested spoke to me from the police station:

“Yeah the place, over the space was taken by the police. There is nobody inside. Everybody who was inside was taken by the police. They beat everybody inside, and everbody got arrested. "

A police spokesperson stated that nothing illegal had been found within the center, but that the police intervention was provided for in the national constitution. One protester was rushed to the hospital due to the severity of the violence strikes by the police. The Romanian government has taken a zero tolerance towards any actions against NATO.

It is being billed as the largest NATO summit in history and officially opened this morning in Bucharest, Romania. In addition to the thousands of official delegates, military figures and journalists covering the event, Bucharest has seen a huge influx of
security personnel, numbering approximately 26,000.
All 26 members of the alliance as well as th2 23-member states of the 23 members of the Partnership for Peace are attending.

City residents have been encouraged to leave town, with schools and workplaces closed for the duration of the summit. Bucharest's Police Chief publicly warned that protests against the summit would not be tolerated. All protest permits have been denied, making anti-NATO. Demonstrations illegal. Activists attempting to enter Romania from other European Union countries say they have been denied entry with no cause given. Many local activists have been followed by the secret services, had visits to their homes, with family members receiving threats and intimidation. On Monday the 1st, at least 8 activists were detained for 8 hours with no charges laid against them.
Meanwhile, local media 'Realitatea' is reporting that activists are
coming to destroy Bucharest and encouraging residents to meet them with force or alert police to anyone who may appear to fit the
description. NATO maintains a military force in Afghanistan, a police force in Kosovo, and a training mission for security forces in Iraq.

By: Wadner Pierre - HaitiAnalysis.com

Amongst the poor in Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti, the lack of affordable food is becoming a mounting problem. On tap-taps, colorfully decorated automobiles used for transportation by the poor, one can hear this discussion daily. Conversations on the tap-taps are referred to as "Radio thirty two".

Many poor Haitians have taken to referring meanwhile to hunger as "Klorox", a reference to a bleach which can kill people if enough of it is swallowed. Riding the tap-tap one hears references to "Klorox" when people mean hunger, a code word to mask the daily misery.

Recently, international headlines have paid attention to hunger in Haiti, where people resort to eating mud pies.

During the 1980s, due to pressure from the United States government, the dictatorship of Jean-Claude Duvalier wiped out the creole pigs (porca) that were indigenous to Haiti. After that catastrophic policy, peasants struggled more than ever to feed their children and to take them to school. The pigs were crucial to the rural economy, the "bank account" of the peasants. The problems were compounded by neo-liberal policies first implemented by the military government of Henry Namphy and continually pressured upon the country over the following decades. Trade liberalization meant that food imports undercut farmers who were also denied the means to invest in their production.

[Irving-owned media version here.]

[From an email:]

Engineers Without Borders hosted a lecture by former PM Paul Martin last night at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton. The title of the lecture was called: "How business and government can help Africa." The auditorium spilled into 2 other full rooms. The rooms were filled with many Liberals but also several people completely offended by the lecture. We had a great flyer done up, which mocked the event and had information about Paul Martin's track record.

When Paul Martin began his speech. Two UNB students unfurled a banner that read "Canada Out of Haiti and Afghanistan". They were told by a student organizer to move to the side, which actually made them closer to Martin. The students were surprised when they were not told to leave. Another couple of students unfurled another banner that read "Neo-Liberalism=Neo-Colonialism" on the other side of Martin. They stood there during his entire talk with Martin acknowledging their presence a couple of times.

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Bell Canada - Canada's largest internet provider - is going ahead with its plan to undermine net neutrality. They call it “traffic shaping” and “traffic management”, but what it adds up to is the end of net neutrality for anyone on the Bell system. This includes Bell customers and non-Bell customers who contract with third party ISPs who use the Bell system.

Bell and other Canadian ISPs such as Rogers have been “traffic managing” for over a year, slowing some kinds of traffic down while privileging others. The data that Bell tends to target for slow down is peer-to-peer and torrent traffic. Last week, Bell applied the same “traffic shaping” controls to its third party ISPs, service providers who use the Bell system but who are independent companies with their own clients. What this means is that Bell is screwing, not only with its own customers' data, but with the accounts of third party Internet users.

Do you know whose system your ISP is using?

April 7 is the date Bell has set to have the “traffic shaping” procedures implemented across its entire network.

Check out the Bell the Throttler video -- helps to explain the warp and waft of the Bell attack on net neutrality.

For more information, check out Michael Geist's blog . To get involved in the campaign to save the internet from telecommunications robber Barons, contact Campaign for Democratic Media.

Koumbit, which hosts the Dominion and many other sites, including CMAQ, was threatened with seizure of their servers if they didn't turn over their access logs. Full story here. Unofficial translation below.

From Kim Stanley Robinson:

Dystopian science fiction has its place, as a warning sign, saying "Don't go this way." So it can be important. But the dystopian cliche of our times is just too easy, it no longer says "Don't go this way" but rather "This is the only way no matter what you do, so don't try to fight it." That kind of dystopia is reinforcing of the status quo, it's a capitulation. I'd say most dystopias today are of the latter type: people don't really suffer (not the book's protagonist anyway, they're too "street smart"), and the reader is told that no alternative world is possible, the dystopia being the most likely of all possible worlds.

Okay, say that we're in trouble at the end of the 20th century. We are. Resources are depleted, populations are rising, we're in a race to invent a kind of living that will work before our problems overwhelm us. That being the case (and who but the rich think tank experts can deny it?), what kind of political art do we create? The utopia is the only choice. And for a novelist, the problem then becomes the utopian novel; which is a kind of bastard genre, from two very different kinds of parents, because the novel is about what IS, while the utopia is about what should be; so what then is the utopian novel? No one knows.

The Own Your Media tour has started to get some modest coverage in other media.

Scott Harris wrote a rather decent article for Vue Magazine, Edmonton's independent weekly.

Chris Cook interviewed me on this week's Gorilla radio.

And I was also interviewed for Canadian Dimension's next episode of Alert Radio.

We arrived in Windsor just in time for the Windsor Peace Coalition's antiwar march. Stuart was interviewed by the local TV station after he made some remarks about corporate media coverage of Afghanistan.

A decent crowd made it out, and folks expressed a lot of concern about the ongoing collapse of the manufacturing sector.

We were honored to have Jean Candio attend the talk. We also chatted with James Winters, author of Mediathink and the editor of Flipside, an online magazine of sorts that ran from 1995 to 2000, and Margaret Villamizar, a local organizer who contributes to the TML Daily. We also saw a few copies of the Scoop, a local paper that does some alternative coverage.

In Hamilton, a lively crowd packed into Sylvia Nickerson's little studio.

Hamilton is a fascinating little city, with a strong history of working-class labour organizing, but a rather depressed economic situation at present.

Local radio show The Other Side showed up, and there seemed to be a fair bit of interest in organizing a local media coop. A number of folks signed up as sustainers, and a decent discussion was had.

We stuck around for the art crawl the following day, before leaving early in the morning for Windsor.

Waterloo saw a decent turnout of students and young community members, mostly thanks to the organizing of Evan at WPIRG and Laird of New University.

We heard the sad story of how frat-boy student politician types managed to sneak through a referendum to defund CKMS, the local community station.

I also got to chat very briefly with Taarini Chopra of Alternatives Journal, a venerable subscriber-driven independent publication that has managed to stick around for the last 35 years.

Guelph saw two events, back to back. The first was a quick gathering at the Bookshelf's eBar, and the second was more of a student crowd at the University. We chatted with Mary Skerrett of CHAN, Karen Houle, and fielded a lot of thoughtful questions from a great many others.

It was good to see something of a nascent movement towards awareness of native sovereignty issues and a possible tilt towards decolonization among some of the student organizers.

From Ottawa, we moved quickly to our nation's capital in order to miss the massive snowstorm that was... oh wait. Anyway, we went to Toronto quickly, and were able to avoid the monster snow dump last weekend. Other than an interlude involving a fever and stumbling around in a haze for one and a half days, things went well.

We picked up the rest of our tshirts from the excellent and supportive Punchclock Printing, and did a quick little presentation at OISE.

David from Canadians for Democratic Media and Reg McQuaid from Kairos were there, among others. John David took a bunch of photos during the presentation.

David told us about how he used to teach journalism in BC, but how there was very little point, it seemed, in teaching students how to practice journalism ethically, because there was really nowhere that would actually let them use those kinds of skills.

Greg Palast has an interesting article about the connection between former NY governor Eliot Spitzer's public shaming and the sub-prime crisis.

Reposted from an OCAP email

(Please see Robert Maurice's ex-wife's response at bottom)

On March 4, OCAP held a protest in city council around the freezing death of a homeless Native man named Robert Maurice which had been reported in various media. Twelve days earlier OCAP, and a number of agencies attended a committee meeting to express our concerns about the closing of over 300 shelters beds, which has led to serious overcrowding in Toronto hostels. We expressed our anger at Mayor David Miller and city politicians who had remained silent around Robert’s death.

It was later discovered that although Robert had been homeless on and off for many years, he did have housing at the time of his death. Robert had been living in a private Habitat boarding home for psychiatric survivors since late summer 2006. He was forced to share a small room. We were told that up to thirty people lived in the house. Robert would have had very little privacy in that boarding home. Most of Robert’s income would have gone to pay for his room and board leaving him very little money.