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In the days following this weekend’s action by Occupy Oakland that resulted in the arrest of 400 people and during which Oakland City Hall was vandalized, the bay area group maintains police initiated violence and created chaos. Occupy Oakland police are seen in videos using batons, tear gas, rubber bullets, and flash-bang grenades protesters. Occupy Oakland is also calling the mass arrests illegal as protesters describe being kettled in by police at two different locations and denied the ability to disperse without resistance. Overshadowing the arrests, at least in media coverage, is the damage wrought to Oakland City Hall by a group of breakaway protesters. A small group broke into the building where they smashed display cases and, provocatively, burned an American flag. Oakland city officials ratcheted up their rhetoric regarding …

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In his annual newsletter for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, billionaire Bill Gates took a public position in favor of Genetically Modified Organisms or GMOs, as a solution for world hunger. His explanation for world hunger used the following logic: “The problem is that …farms…don’t produce enough food for a family to live on.” GMOs have been used as a magic bullet for global hunger for years now, and the world’s leading GMO producing giant, Monsanto, has been leading the charge to promote GMOs despite reluctance on the part of many nations, and general public distaste for the technology. Six nations in the European Union have banned GMOs, and Monsanto recently gave up on its efforts to sell insect resistant genetically modified maize to France. Increasingly cited by activists online is a …

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Civic Circus with Ankur Patel breaks down local politics, with a weekly report on city, county, and state bureaucracies. This week on Uprising I’ll cover last weeks LA County Board of Supervisors meeting where item number 19 dealt with many issues surrounding our current prison system.

The initial tone of the meeting was about implementing alternatives to incarceration, in light of AB 109 and the Prison Realignment issue. But the final result was a vote by the board to ask for a workplan from prison building corporation, AECOM, showing how it would spend $5.7 million on a report, if it were to get that contract. AECOM is a major player in the global prison industrial complex as it has recently built prisons in Delano, California, Belmarsh, London, a 2 million square foot …

“The human brain now holds the key to our future. We have to recall the image of the planet from outer space: a single entity in which air, water, and continents are interconnected. That is our home.” — David Suzuki

We’ll get a report on the weekend’s violence in Oakland as activists confronted Oakland Police, four hundred people were arrested, and City Hall vandalized. And, US-Egypt relations continue to be strained in the face of a crackdown on American NGOs. Plus, an update on the fight against Genetically Modified Organisms – a story of petitions, court cases, national bans, and calls for labeling. And this week’s Civic Circus.

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William Gregory Ock, a US citizen working in Nigeria was released last Friday after a week in captivity. He was held hostage by gunmen demanding a ransom of $333,000 in the country’s volatile, but oil rich, Niger Delta. The January 20th kidnapping came on the same day as a wave of coordinated bombings and shootings racked the northern city of Kano, killing over 180 people. The Islamist group, Boko Haram, claimed responsibility for the attack, which was meant as retribution for the alleged torture of its members by the government. Boko Haram has been active since 2003 in Northern Nigeria, an impoverished predominantly Muslim region that is far less developed than the South. The growing instability of Nigeria’s north prompted President Goodluck Jonathan to announce the possibility of …

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A proposed mass boycott of the website, Twitter.com by users on Saturday did not gain steam despite 48 hours of outrage expressed throughout the social media site over a policy change announced on Thursday. Through a blog post on Twitter.com the company informed users that individual tweets may be blocked if content violates the laws of the user’s country. This is not a complete reversal of policy for the microblogging site but Twitter came under fire from users who accuse it of cow-towing to oppressive regimes in order to expand its global presence for profit. Twitter explained how blocking Tweets will work, saying, “Until now, the only way we could take account of a countries’ limits was to remove content globally. Starting today we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold …

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Republican Presidential candidate Rick Santorum was asked at a campaign event in New Hampshire earlier this month, if he would abort a gay baby. The Christian evangelical candidate avoided the question but has been dogged at campaign events on his controversial views on gender, reproductive rights, and gay rights. He is not alone in his views. On Sunday, another GOP candidate, Newt Gingrich, called for an investigation of in vitro fertilization clinics where couples struggling with infertility, attempt to conceive. Gingrich has accused front runner Mitt Romney of being pro-abortion. However, Romney has maintain his solid anti-abortion credentials. In a new book entitled Delirium: How the Sexual Counterrevolution is Polarizing America, historian, author, and Huffington Post writer Nancy L Cohen investigates what she calls “a shadow movement deep within both parties that …

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Mumia Abu Jamal is an award winning journalist and political prisoner. Today’s commentary is on the announcement that North Carolina will compensate women forcibly sterilized in the state.

From Prison Radio:
1/29/12
“Mumia was able to make his first phone calls over the weekend and on Sunday he recorded his first essays from SCI Mahanoy “Of Idiots and Sages”, and a lecture for Princeton Theological Union class of Professor Mark Taylor “Incarceration Nation”.

Mumia Abu-Jamal’s death sentence was overturned by the courts, and the DA elected not to seek to reimpose a death sentence before jury in Philadelphia. Resentencing in the Philadelphia courts, unless challenged, will be life in prison without parole. Following the overturning of his sentence of death and his release from death row, Mumia Abu-Jamal was thrown in the hole …

“It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union… Men, their rights and nothing more; women, their rights and nothing less.” — Susan B Anthony