On 26 July 1953 an angry young lawyer, Fidel Castro, led a small band of armed men in an attempt to seize the Moncada barracks in Santiago de Cuba, in Oriente province. Most of the guerrillas were killed. Castro was tried and defended himself with a masterly speech replete with classical references and quotations from Balzac and Rousseau, that ended with the words: 'Condemn me. It does not matter. History will absolve me.' It won him both notoriety and popularity. More

The struggle at Standing Rock, North Dakota, between the Sioux people and their supporters and the oil corporations and banks trying to run a dangerous pipeline for filthy Bakkan crude oil through their sacred lands and underneath the Missouri River was cranked up to a new level of violence Sunday and in ensuing days as National Guard troops and the Morton County Sheriff’s Department, bolstered by volunteers from various other police departments conducted an all-night attack using maximum violence, including flash-bang concussion grenades, rubber bullets, mace, teargas and three water cannons -- this at a time the temperature on the prairie had fallen to a low of 22 degrees fahrenheit.

The casualties of this one-sided battle against peaceful protesters on a bridge were enormous, with some 300 of the estimated 400 protesting water protectors, both native people and non-native supporters, injured, 26 of them seriously. There was evidence that police were aiming rubber bullets at protesters’ heads and groins to inflict maximum pain and damage, with eight of the injured hospitalized, including a 13-year-old girl shot in the face, whose eye was reportedly damaged. More

A malign darkness has descended on the land and I'm not talking only about Trump. Look toward North Dakota, where petro-cops are committing atrocities daily with impunity, far removed from the cameras of the cable networks, beyond the salons of Washington now filled with frenzied chatter about how to adapt to the new dispensation, unnoticed by the remote-control protests outside Trump Tower.

Early this week, mercenaries armed with water cannons pulverized tribal protesters in the freezing night. There's an arrogant symbolism to the image of rent-a-goons terrorizing tribal protectors of water with violent blasts of water. Across the decades, the targets of this kind of brutality don't change much: Indians, blacks, Hispanics, the homeless, striking workers. And neither do the vicious tactics of repression: attack dogs, cages, numbered tattoos, mace, water cannons, rubber bullets. All these and more are being inflicted at Standing Rock. More