UPDATED MAY 5TH

Looks like Barrick Gold is following up on a previous threat:

On April 30th, Canadian mining giant Barrick Gold announced it is making good on threat of legal action against a small, non-profit Quebec publishing house. The world's largest gold mining company - which took in $1.73 billion last year - is suing Les Éditions Écosociété and the authors of the book Noir Canada: pillage, corruption et criminalité en Afrique for an incredible six million dollars - 25 times the amount the publisher says it makes in a year. The company also wants all copies of the book pulled from shelves.

The books principal author, Alain Denault, and the publishing house immediately denounced the lawsuit as a SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) meant simply to silence the mining company's critics. Both the author and the publisher have pointed out that the book is thoroughly researched and relies heavily on research that is publicly available.

In the suit, Barrick claims it has been defamed by the contents of the book, and that the authors and publisher have undertaken a widespread smear campaign against the company. The book outlines alleged human rights abuses carried out by Barrick Gold in various African countries, including the deaths of more than 50 Tanzanians in 1996 and fuelling the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

A spokesperson for Écosociété has called on the Quebec government to act quickly to instate legislation that would outlaw SLAPP lawsuits. Deneault and Guy Cheyney, coordinator at Éditions Écosociété, will be holding a press conference Monday, presumably to discuss their next step.

UPDATE - MAY 5TH: At their press conference today, Cheyney and Denault made an appeal for financial support from the population and called on the Quebec government to pass legislation against SLAPPs. Full text of their press release and interview with Alain Deneault after the jump (in French).

In the wake of the recent Conservative election spending scandal that has erupted in Canada, author and activist David Bernans sent in a nifty new tune he wrote to commemorate the issue. Enjoy!

The Harper Hokey-Pokey
aka the "in-and-out shuffle"

Tory Verse

You put a million bucks in
You take a million bucks out
You buy some national ads and you spin them all about
You do the hokey-pokey, but don't get caught
That's how an election is bought!

Elections Canada Verse

You see the money go in
You see the money come out
You see a million overspent and think "what's this all about?"
You can't get the docs, so you call the cops
That's how the Tories get caught!

Liberal Verse

You see the Mounties go in
You see the Mounties come out
It looks like a scandal, so its time to scream and shout
You do the hokey-pokey and you shout "shame, shame!"
That's how you play the game!

Voters' Verse

You vote the Liberals in
You vote the Liberals out
You vote the Conservatives in to clean the adscam out
You do the hokey-pokey, watch a new scandal on TV
In our capitalist democracy!

David Bernans is the author of North of 9/11 (Cumulus Press, 2006).

Photo by thivierr.

Stalags, a documentary film about Israeli Nazi porn paperbacks of the same name, is exposing audiences in North America to one of history's most bizarre literary genres. The film asks probing questions about post-Holocaust Jewish identity and sexuality, in an attempt to explain why Israeli teens had an irresistible infatuation with busty blonde Nazis.

Read under the table by a generation of pubescent Israelis, often the children of survivors, the Stalags were named for the World War II prisoner-of-war camps in which they were set. The books told perverse tales of captured American or British pilots being abused by sadistic female SS officers outfitted with whips and boots. The plot usually ended with the male protagonists taking revenge, by raping and killing their tormentors.

After decades in dusty back rooms and closets, the Stalags, a peculiar Hebrew concoction of Nazism, sex and violence, are re-emerging in the public eye. And with them comes a rekindled debate on the cultural representation here of Nazism and the Holocaust, and whether they have been unduly mixed in with a kind of sexual perversion and voyeurism that has permeated even the school curriculum. (New York Times)

Salon.com has an interesting review of the film, which is not surprisingly gathering mixed reviews.

Stalags is screening in New York City until next week.

The members of Collectif Ressources d’Afrique, Édition Écosociété and their editorial board out of Montreal have been served with a SLAPP suit (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) by Canadian mining company Barrick Gold in light of the release of their upcoming publication, Noir Canada: Pillage, corruption et criminalité en Afrique.

The book launch for Noir Canada, edited by Alain Denault and the Collectif Ressources d'Afrique, was cancelled April 11, 2008, when the authors and publishers (Édition Écosociété) received letters from a law firm representing Barrick Gold. The letters alledgedly refer to apparent inaccuracies in the book.

Noir Canada is a synthesis and analysis of national and international documents (reports, books, documentaries…) detailing numerous corporate abuses implicating a number of Canadian companies in Africa, which operate with the “unfailing help of the Canadian government”.

The list of corporate abuses is long: advantageous mining contracts in the DRC, partnerships with arms dealers and mercenaries in the Great Lakes region, miners buried alive in Tanzania, an "involuntary genocide" by poisoning in Mali, brutal expropriations in Ghana, using people from the Ivory Coast for pharmaceutical testing, devastating hydroelectric projects in Senegal, the savage privatization of the railway system in West Africa...

The Banff Centre is offering a program involving off-site manuscript development (April 21 to June 20, 2008) and an on-site residency (July 7 to August 2, 2008).

This program offers eight established non-fiction writers an opportunity to develop a major essay, memoir, or feature article. Writers are encouraged to explore new ideas in journalism, or to work on a culturally relevant piece that might otherwise be difficult to complete.

In addition to a $3,000 commission, successful applicants may also receive financial assistance to cover the program fee, accommodation, meals, and travel costs.

The deadline for application is Friday March 14, 2008.

For more information visit the Banff Centre website.

Since 2004, the annual NYC Grassroots Media Conferences feature workshops, skills-sharing, dialogue, debate and strategizing sessions about media making, media policy and how to use media to forward social justice campaigns.

Hunter College, 68th Street and Lexington Ave | Entrance via West Building | Hours: 9am-6pm

Check out the full day's schedule here.

For information on how to register to attend, click here to visit the main conference website.

Admission:
$20 advance; $30 day of
$15 students/seniors; $25 day of
$5 youth discount (18 & under)

Nearly two years after this incredible, indispensable, 230 page book was released in paperback I have finally got my muckraking hands on it. Milton Glaser and Mirko Ilic's The Design of Dissent is a phenomenal repository of political poster art (and more) that I've now realized is an essential addition to any shelf, coffee table, library, or revolutionary basement on the planet.

The book is visually stunning - a keen eye for layout, mixed with a healthy dose of breathing space and exceptional curatorial decision-making make for 200+ pages of explosive and provocative political art.

Divided into sections that range from "Ex-Yugoslavia" to "Food" to "U.S. Presidential Election" this offering from Rockport Publishers is one of the best books illustrating the collusion/confusion of politics and art that I have seen.

The images are part historical testament, part marginalized voice, and part pop culture intervention. Together they make up a book that is an essential for anyone interested in political art, dissent, democracy, and the spirit of creative visual production to pry open the closed spaces of culture and community.

The school of visual arts in NY has also created a site highlighting some 100 of the political posters curated by Glasher, you can view it here.

Long-time activist and poet Raul Salinas has died at the age of 73 in Austin, Texas.

Salinas was considered among the greats of his generation including Miguel Pinero, Oscar Acosta, John Trudell, and Hose Montoya. He was a life-long human rights and social justice activist. He worked with the American Indian Movement, the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee and held writing clinics for at-risk youth in juvenile detention facilities nationwide.

Salinas spent approximately 12 years in prison, from 1959 to 1971 on drug related charges. In the late 1960s, he became renown for his prison poetry and for his work inside prisons engaging fellow convicts in politics and literature.

At the time of his death, Salinas was an adjunct professor at St. Edwards University, Austin, Texas. In 2002, he received the Louis Reyes Rivera Lifetime Achievement Award, and in March of 2003, he was honored with the Martin Luther, Jr., César Chavez, Rosa Parks Visiting Professorship Award given by the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

How to buy Iron Maiden tapes during a repressive regime, keeping aging breasts round by soaking them in ice water for ten minutes a day, surviving war and tyranny as well as Austrian nihilists, and what to say to get kicked out of a nunnery in the middle of winter in Vienna. Persepolis, the animated feature film based on the bestselling graphic novels by Marjane Satrapi, is the political film currently winning accolades around the world (except Iran) and for good reason: not only can you discover the above secrets and negotiations of life through the poignant and vulnerable writing of Satrapi, but the animation is exquisite. The film also contains possibly the best bit of media-facilitated revenge I have ever seen exacted on an ex-lover. If I was that loser living in Austria, I'd be thinking twice before messing with another cartoonist like the driven, talented and fierce Satrapi.

While ruminating on our present age of computer animation typified by Disney's creatively bankrupt Cars, and sitting in the positively packed Cinema du Parc theatre in Montreal for Persepolis, I had that warm and fuzzy feeling of all is not lost. More than a searing stab at the oppressive fundamentalism that has marked Iran, Satrapi and co-director Vincent Paronnaud's film is a tale of growing up through war, love, transplantation, and ensuing cultural and emotional heartache, wreckage and rediscovery. And of course the Austrian nihilists.

The Canadian government is getting set to pass the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DCMA) into law. But most Canadians have never heard of the DCMA, let alone considered its implications for artists, educators and personal freedoms. Let's face it, copyright law is a confusing nest of fine print about rights and restrictions that give most non-lawyers a giant headache.

The puppet masters at dotboom have produced a somewhat hilarious Rant Puppet video to help Canadians make some sense of the copyright confusion. In a charming froggish way, the video introduces some of the critical issues being addressed in the DCMA.

For more information about getting involved in the campaign to stop the DCMA, check out the Campaign for Democratic Media and Michael Geist's website.