Journalism

The world’s most famous artist has a new piece, exhibited here for the first time — it consists of six large scale-model dioramas illustrating different elements of his eighty-one-day imprisonment.
Read more: http://www.thenation.com/blog/174711/ai-weiwei-political-art-venice-biennale#ixzz2VdHCmkeP

Alarmed about “the number of companies recruiting young people to work for nothing,” British tax officials are forcing nine companies to pay more than $300,000 in back wages to unpaid interns. . . .
…continued at TheNation.com, HERE and at The Nation HERE

Dartmouth College students who filed a federal complaint against the school for failing to report sexual assaults are themselves being charged by the school with violating the student code of conduct.  Their crime: “failing to follow college officials’ instructions” about participating at a protest. . . .
. . . . continued at TheNation.com, HERE

It’s a classic David and Goliath story: one man with a computer against the world’s most powerful nation.  But the real David in the Wikileaks story, according to filmmaker Alex Gibney, is not Julian Assange — it’s Bradley Manning.  Q&A at TheNation.com, HERE.
Alex Gibney’s film “We Steal Secrets” The Story of Wikileaks” opens in LA and NYC on Friday May 24.

From the Center for the Study of Dirty Wars: my Q&A with JEREMY SCAHILL – he wrote about Obama’s secret wars in Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere in his new book DIRTY WARS: The World is a Battlefield. It entered the New York Times bestseller list at #5 last week.
At the LA Review of Books, HERE.

He’s probably the first person ever to lose his job because of his Harvard Ph.D. dissertation–but why did Harvard give him a Ph.D. in the first place?
“The Harvard PhD and the Hispanics’ IQ: How Jason Richwine’s Dissertation Got Him Fired by the Heritage Foundation.”  TheNation.com, May 11, 2013.
http://www.thenation.com/blog/174291/harvard-phd-and-hispanics-iq-how-jason-richwines-dissertation-got-him-fired-heritage-fou

WHEN GEORGE BUSH saw pictures of Auschwitz at Yad Vashem, Israel’s museum of the Holocaust, he said — with “tears in his eyes” — “we should have bombed it.”  Could he have read The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941–1945 by David Wyman? That’s the 1984 book that made the refusal to bomb Auschwitz the lasting symbol of FDR’s failure to help Jews in World War II Europe. . . .
Review of FDR and the Jews, at LA Review of Books, HERE.

Fox News featured the story: The Independent Oil & Gas Association, our friendly frackers, filed a formal complaint against Yoko Ono and her organization, Artists Against Fracking, claiming the group is violating New York state law by failing to register as lobbyists. They seem to have forgotten that “the right of the people” to “petition their government for a redress of grievances” is protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution…
. . . continued at TheNation.com  http://tinyurl.com/dyru6mk

Greg Valentini is a homeless vet in Los Angeles who participated in the assault on Tora Bora that sought Osama bin Laden. He’s also a plaintiff in the class action suit brought by the ACLU of Southern California (ACLU-SC) arguing that the VA has “misused large portions of its West Los Angeles campus and failed to provide adequate housing and treatment for the people it was intended to serve.” . . .  continued at TheNation.com,  http://www.thenation.com/blog/173498/homeless-vets-vs-va-la-story-continues.

The VA has almost 400 acres of land in Brentwood, part of which it has leased for rent-a-car storage and a commercial laundry.  Meanwhile, homeless vets sleep on the street outside the locked gates.
Why is that?
“LA’s Homeless Vets” in The Nation: http://www.thenation.com/article/173459/las-homeless-vets