August 2019

Dear Radio Friend,     This week's show features stories from Spanish National Radio, Radio Havana Cuba, and Radio Deutsche-Welle.   http://www.outfarpress.com/swr190830.mp3        From SPAIN- Alison Hughes reports on the G7 meeting in France last weekend, beginning with some history of the gathering of the wealthiest capitalist nations. There was a strong division between all the leaders and Donald Trump.

On the 26th of August, Extinction Rebellion's DC chapter staged a noisy protest at the Embassy of Brazil in response to the suddent wave of fires in the Amazon Rainforest. Brazil's fascist, Trump-like president Bolsonaro has fired the scientists who revealed the wave of fires, and his supporters in land-hungry agrobusinessnesses are suspected of setting many of the fires.

HD Video highlights of the protest against Bolsonaro's fires in the Amazon 2 min 14 sec

For months Georgetown's Mono Diner has had a problem: owner Mohammad Esfahnani had discovered he could save money by withholding employee's last paychecks outright and paying for only some of the hours employees had been clocked in on others. This is flat-out wage theft. Now he has shut the restaurant down, and apparently nobody there will get their last paycheck. Mohammad Esfahnani now owes at least $6,602 in back wages and has refused to pay even in the face of months of pressure and complaints to the DC government.

For decades Malcolm X Park has been a popular cruising area for Gay men, mostly men of color. Since August 2018, US Park Police have been entrapping and arresting Gay men there, using 1950's style tactics including directly propositioning their targets. This and police raids on Gay bars were the factors that led to the Stonewall Riot, a three day uprising in which NYC's police were soundly defeated. It has the potential to lead at any time to violent confrontations beyond what police expect, as they found to their sorrow on June 28, 1969. The GLBTQ community has refused to tolerate this kind of assault since Stonewall.

On the 14th of August, opponents of Trump's racist pogrom against migrants set up a mock Statue of Liberty outside the Mass Ave offices of the US Citizenship and Immigration "Service." The statue bore an inscription welcoming migrants in many languages at the base. Security removed the statue after USCIS acting director Ken Cuccinelli took a selfie with it, carefully cropping out the inscription at the base welcoming migrants

Video originally published by CommonDreams.org of security removing statue after Cuccinelli's cropped selfie