| INTERNATIONAL
The record of economic sanctions in forcing political change, from those imposed on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to the current embargo on North Korea, is dismal, but as a way of reducing a country to poverty and misery it is difficult to beat. counterpunch.org/
 As the World Economic Forum convened in Davos, Oxfam released a report revealing that billionaires had been created at a record rate of one every two days over the past 12 months, at a time when the bottom 50% of the world’s population had seen no increase in wealth. 82% of the global wealth generated in 2017 went to the most wealthy 1%. theguardian.com/
The Oxfam report declares Capitalism a ‘crime against humanity’, as if underlining the findings of a 2016 exposé by the National Minimum Wage Research Initiative at Wits University that reveals the widening income inequality between executives and workers’ pay by multinational corporations Shoprite, Naspers and Steinhoff. iol.co.za/
Police stormed into a student reading group at the Guangdong University of Technology and arrested six participants, ultimately charging two of them for “gathering crowds to disrupt social order”—a charge increasingly leveled by Chinese authorities against feminists, labour activists, striking workers and bloggers over the past five years. chuangcn.org/
A book by Michelle Alexander that explores the phenomenon of mass incarceration, has sold well over a million copies, but for the more than 130,000 adults in prison in North Carolina and Florida, the book is strictly off-limits. nytimes.com/
Indigenous Community Telecommunications, the first and only such service provider that facilitates affordable mobile phone and Internet services to rural areas of Mexico, might be forced to stop operating after the national regulator demanded the network pay one million pesos (more than US$50,000) for the radio frequencies it uses. globalvoices.org/
A public library that is full of books that were originally destined to be put into a landfill has been opened by Turkish garbage collectors in the country’s capital city of Ankara. News of the library has spread and now people have begun donating books directly to the library, rather than throwing them away. forreadingaddicts.co.uk/
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On Wednesday, 24 January 2017, the Western Cape High Court withdrew the criminal convictions of the ‘SJC 10’ protesters, who staged a peaceful protest outside the City of Cape Town in 2013. The court declared section 12(1)(a) of the Regulation of Gatherings Act unconstitutional: this is the provision that makes it a criminal offense to convene a gathering without giving notice to the authorities. 
A just solution to the dilemma of Palestine will, Pappe argues in his new book, only be achieved if we stop treating the mythologies he sets forth as truths: “Palestine was not empty and the Jewish people had homelands; Palestine was colonized, not ‘redeemed’; and its people were dispossessed in 1948, rather than leaving voluntarily. 
in my young alternative media career I’ve been handed many clear-cut and undeniable cues that if I want to make it big and start pulling in the big bucks, I’ve got to ride the wave of mainstream politics. 
