By Max Blumenthal
Mohammed Merah, the alleged murderer of several Muslim French soldiers and Jews, was killed by a sniper with a shot to the head following a 32-hour standoff with police in Toulouse, France. One of the most salient facts about the killer is that he was a member of an outlawed French Salafist group called Forsanne Alizza, which has expressed sympathy for Al Qaida’s cause
By Mark Ames
A little over a year ago, while researching the Confederacy’s economy, I stumbled across an unnerving graph charting the value of America’s “stock of slaves” in the last decades before the Civil War that helps give form to the brutal crackdown on the Occupy protests — and suggests darker things to come as we try to free ourselves from their vision of civilization, and our place in it.
By Alexander Zaitchik
A.C.A.B. = “All Cops Are Bastards” The central Athenian neighborhood of Exarchia is the hub of Greek anarchist activity and a major node in the European anarchist network. Part NYC’s Lower East Side and part Copenhagen’s Christiana, it is home…
By Alexander Zaitchik
I arrived in Athens only hours after the February 12 anti-austerity riots, the acrid odor of burnt-out banks still lingering downtown. I checked into a familiar haunt, the Hostel Zorbas on Victoria Square. The last time I stayed there, in the summer of 2001, the place still took drachmas and buzzed with backpackers just returned from Piraeus, where the ferries fan out to the pleasure islands of the Aegean. A decade later, those memories felt like the flashback scenes in The Road.
By Mark Ames
In the early 2000’s, the co-chairman of the Cato Institute’s Project on Social Security Privatization, José Piñera, played a key role advising and overseeing Slovakia’s mass pension privatization, which passed in 2003 under the free-market government of Mikulas Dzurinda. Today, Slovakia’s retirees are groaning under the austerity pain administered to them by the Cato Institute.
By Kostas Kallergis
The co-ruling PASOK party had its national conference today. Its goal is to elect the new party leader who will succeed George Papandreou and will lead the Socialists in the coming elections. The candidates are Christos Papoutsis and Evangelos Venizelos. At some point, an old man approached Venizelos, complained about the cuts in his pension and then threw him a yogurt…
By Eileen Jones
If you’re a woman—and if you’re reading eXiled you’re probably not—but let’s say you are for the sake of argument—if you’re a woman, life’s already tough enough without the Rush Limbaugh Slutgate saturation media orgy, and right-wing political threats to…