MRS EXECUTIONER Bush decided to give her husband a break from organising mass murder by having a nice poetry reading at the White House two weeks ago. Sadly for her, every single one of the poets she invited refused to attend in protest at Bush's war madness.
ONE IMPORTANT product of the worldwide anti-capitalist movement is that information is available as never before about events thousands of miles away. A new video, Un altro modo e' posibile...in Venezuela (Venezuela, another way is possible), is an excellent example of this.
ON SATURDAY 15 February democracy came onto the streets to demonstrate against war and barbarism. The demos are part of a process where politics has become so generalised that a casual conversation about the weather becomes a full blown discussion about the lies and deceits of George Bush. Old-timers start to look for comparable events, to explain, in the words of Marvin Gaye, "What's Going On".
THE NEW film Frida explores the life of Frida Kahlo, the Mexican artist and socialist. Frida was an artist of startling power, and was married to the artist Diego Rivera.
AN INSPIRATIONAL evening of poetry took place on the eve of the great London demonstration against the war. Adrian Mitchell and Michael Rosen performed the poems we print here at the packed event which took place in London.
BUSH AND Blair's plans to attack Iraq will create devastation and kill thousands of civilians. We are unlikely to be shown the full extent of the horror while the war goes on. But there have been many films, books and songs that have shown the true face of war and protested against it.
ADF have been out of the spotlight for the last few years-what have you been doing? We've been all over the world and what we've seen influenced us enormously. We've played in the former Yugoslavia to 28,000 Bosnians and Serbs. We went to Brazil and took an idea for a track called "19 Rebellions" with us. We worked with young Brazilian musicians to create the track as it appears on the album.
BETWEEN 1987 and 1992 Palestinian youth undertook a heroic uprising-the first intifada-against their Israeli oppressors. Towards the end of this period the journalist and artist Joe Sacco took himself to the West Bank and Gaza to try to understand what was happening.
IN THE film 8 Mile, Rabbit is a young white rapper attempting to deal with his anger and alienation through music. The part is played by the US rapper Eminem.
THIS NEW edition of Our House in the Last World, the first novel by Cuban-American writer Oscar Hijuelos, tells the story of the Santinio family, who leave Cuba to emigrate to New York in the 1940s. The novel begins with the story of Mercedes and Alejo, young lovers who will become the mother and father of two children, Hector and Horacio.
THE PIANIST is based on the account by Wladyslaw Szpilman, an accomplished pianist, of his survival of the Warsaw Ghetto. When the Nazis invaded Warsaw in September 1939, 360,000 of the city's one million population were Jewish.
CITY OF God is a powerful film that every reader of Socialist Worker should make an effort to see. It is a Brazilian film with subtitles, but don't let that put you off. The "City of God" is the name of a run-down slum, called a favela, on the edges of the giant Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro.
