The ongoing international investigation of Henry Kissinger’s role in the Pinochet’s regime has now led to a Chilean court drawing up a list of questions about his role in the 1973 murder of American journalist Charles Horman by pro-Pinochet forces. The story has been reported in the Guardian (United Kingdom) and in El País (Spain), but is conspicuously absent from the international pages of the Washington Post or the New York Times. What a surprise–a member of the Washington power elite is being shielded by newsmedia censorship. Surely this has never happened before… Oh, wait, it happened about this time last month when US newsmedia refused to report on Kissinger being summoned by a French court [FAIR] for questioning about French nationals who disappeared under Pinochet.

Steve Lohr highlights some interesting parallels between the emerging technological privacy movement and the early days of the environmental movement in the 1960s [NY Times]. A couple of brief notes:

• Who says that there has been no book on privacy with the impact of Silent Spring? After all, there are few political books as well known and as shattering as George Orwell’s 1984, a book which is in large part about the destruction of privacy through State technological surveillance and control.
• It’s worth noting that a deeper parallel between the two movements rests in their mutual fears of technology being turned into an instrument of exploitation and control: for the environmentalists, of nature; for the privacy advocates, of individual people. They both come out of a strong background of populism and autonomous self-government.
• For hands-on information on protecting your privacy online, check out Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Privacy Now! campaign, security.tao.ca — oriented towards leftist / anarchist activists doing political work online, and SafeWeb — an online anonymizer.

Adriene Sere questions who is being silenced and who is doing the silencing in the debate over pro-sex within feminism and leftist media [Said It].

Whew! After half a year of hard work, Southern Girls Convention 2001 finally happened this past weekend in Auburn, Alabama. As you may have noticed from my extended absence, it was absolutely exhausting, long, hard work, but it was totally worth it. Over FIVE HUNDRED totally rad feminist women and boys came from all over the country (and Canada too!) for over 60 information-filled workshops, tables with all kinds of information, four music shows (including an outstanding hardcore show at Olde Auburn Ale House), and an amazing chance for community, networking, and meeting lots of rad kids from the South. Although as organizers we were constantly running around exhausted and dealing with crises, everyone told us that they had an amazing time and the positive feedback was more than enough to keep us going on vicarious great experiences.

Auburn hasn’t seen so much diversity or political consciousness in a long time. Queer punk girls were lounging outside of Foy Union, everyone from PIRG to SURGE to Planned Parenthood were hosting tables, and a group of Radical Cheerleaders coordinated a spontaneous march and took over the downtown Taco Bell in support of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ campaign for tomato pickers.

I can’t write here how challenging, exhausting, uniting, empowering, and wonderful the experience of organizing SGC2001 and carrying it through have been. But it’s been all that and more. I don’t want to organize any more conventions for a long time, but I am super-psyched about going to next year’s SGC and experiencing it from a participant’s-eye-view. I hope, I pray that SGC will be an on-going, transformative presence in the South for a long time to come.

Thanks to the latest issue of Sierra magazine I have discovered a really rad campus program called Dump and Run, where local campus groups establish a program to collect all the perfectly usable items that students throw into the dumpster at the end of the year when they move out of apartments or dorm rooms – furniture, canned food, clothing, etc. They then sell them in a big garage sale as a fundraiser for the local groups running the program. The national Dump and Run nonprofit lends the organizations its nonprofit status and helps in setting up the campus program. The pilot program at University of Richmond has been really successful, reducing the solid waste being hauled away at the end of the year by 50% within two years. Here at Auburn we’re hoping to set up a collaboration between Auburn Women’s Organization and Environmental Awareness Organization for running the program. Woo hoo! </p

The best part of all: the organization was actually created based on its’ founder’s experiences dumpster diving at Syracuse University and University of Richmond!