Tens of thousands of activists gathered yesterday to march through the streets of India's financial capital, shouting anti-war and anti-capitalist slogans to mark the end of the world's biggest anti-globalization gathering.
After six days of colorful protests and intense discussions opposing economic liberalization, the Iraq war, and racial and caste oppression, the World Social Forum was closing with a massive rally in downtown Bombay.
"We can stop [US President George W.] Bush. We can stop war," chanted Choi Mi-jin, an activist with the Seoul-based group Globalize from Below.
"The American war in Iraq has affected everyone in the world," she said as she prepared to join the march. "Too many people -- innocent people -- have been killed. It must be stopped."
Activists carried red and white placards reading, "Another world is possible. Stop the war."
Some 100,000 people from 132 countries attended the forum, held for the first time outside its home base of Porto Alegre, Brazil. Organizers called it a huge success in mobilizing opinion and widening the global network of civil society groups, especially in Asia and Africa.
The forum was planned as a counterpoint to the World Economic Forum, which was opening yesterday in Switzerland.
"There was an identification of common economic struggles," said Kent Klandt of Black Rock City, Nevada. "It is crucially important for First World activists to be in the Third World."
Showcasing phallus-shaped portable shrines and pink penis candies, Japan’s annual fertility festival yesterday teemed with tourists, couples and families elated by its open display of sex. The spring Kanamara Matsuri near Tokyo features colorfully dressed worshipers carrying a trio of giant phallic-shaped objects as they parade through the street with glee. The festival, as legend has it, honors a local blacksmith in the Edo Period (1603-1868) who forged an iron dildo to break the teeth of a sharp-toothed demon inhabiting a woman’s vagina that had been castrating young men on their wedding nights. A 1m black steel phallus sits in the courtyard of
HIGH HOPES: The power source is expected to have a future, as it is not dependent on the weather or light, and could be useful for places with large desalination facilities A Japanese water plant is harnessing the natural process of osmosis to generate renewable energy that could one day become a common power source. The possibility of generating power from osmosis — when water molecules pass from a less salty solution to a more salty one — has long been known. However, actually generating energy from that has proved more complicated, in part due the difficulty of designing the membrane through which the molecules pass. Engineers in Fukuoka, Japan, and their private partners think they might have cracked it, and have opened what is only the world’s second osmotic power plant. It generates
JAN. 1 CLAUSE: As military service is voluntary, applications for permission to stay abroad for over three months for men up to age 45 must, in principle, be granted A little-noticed clause in sweeping changes to Germany’s military service policy has triggered an uproar after it emerged that the law requires men aged up to 45 to get permission from the armed forces before any significant stay abroad, even in peacetime. The legislation, which went into effect on Jan. 1 aims to bolster the military and demands all 18-year-old men fill out a questionnaire to gauge their suitability to serve in the armed forces, but stops short of conscription. If the “modernized” model fails to pull in enough recruits, parliament will be compelled to discuss the reintroduction of compulsory service, German
Hundreds of Filipinos and tourists flocked to a sun-bleached field north of Manila yesterday, on Good Friday, to witness one of the country’s most blood-soaked displays of religious fervor, undeterred by rising fuel prices. Scores of bare-chested flagellants with covered faces walked barefoot through the dusty streets of Pampanga Province’s San Fernando as they flogged their backs with bamboo whips in the scorching heat. Agence France-Presse (AFP) journalists said they saw devotees deliberately puncturing their skin with glass shards attached to a small wooden paddle to ensure their bleeding during the ritual, a way to atone for sins and seek miracles from
RSS