New York Follow

Radio 4, from New York, came to prominence with their second album Gotham in 2002.

FOR MANY natives of the city the opportunity to stroll the car-free streets of New York was a delight.

VETERANS AND serving members of the US armed forces joined this week’s protests at the Republican convention in New York.

Protest will erupt in New York this week on a scale not seen since the great demonstrations on the eve of the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

IN 1968, when the presidential sweepstakes come up again, liberals all over the country are likely to face the California Syndrome. At the risk of sounding like a Californian, I'm referring to the political pattern that was acted out in the recent Brown-Reagan contest in that state-whose denizens have this in common with New Yorkers, that they tend to think that whatever is happening in their state is What's Happening. Sometimes it is.

I CAN'T get out of my mind the photo that appeared on the front page of the New York Times on 30 December. It showed a young man sitting facing a class of sixth graders in Blairsville, Pennsylvania.

"IRAQ: THE New War". That headline in the prestigious New York Review of Books captures the scale of the fighting that continues in Iraq. The word occupation does not adequately describe what is happening. There is a new phase in this war that we were assured was won when Western television stations took carefully choreographed shots of the fall of statues to Saddam Hussein five months ago. It is like the colonial wars conducted in the 1950s by the British army in Kenya, Malaysia, Aden and Cyprus, and by France in Algeria.

THERE IS an escalating war in Iraq. The lying politicians who launched the invasion six months ago won't admit it. But it's the only honest conclusion from the terrible death toll. The director of the Baghdad central mortuary told the New York Times how the number of killings has rocketed under the last five months of occupation. There were 462 in May, 626 in June, 751 in July and 872 in August. Most of them, about 70 percent, were shot dead. That is in just one city.

OVER 100 people packed a meeting to discuss how the media stokes up "fake" fears of so called Islamic terrorism. The meeting was held on the second anniversary of the 11 September attacks on New York at the headquarters of the NUJ journalists' union.

MILLIONS OF people across the US last week glimpsed a small part of what their government and military have inflicted on people in Baghdad. From New York to Detroit and Cleveland, and across the border to Toronto and Ottawa in Canada, the lights went out and the power died.

FAMILIES FROM Nigeria are trying to take drugs giant Pfizer to court for using their children in botched drug trials seven years ago. Last week the 20 families were fighting to have their claim for compensation heard in a New York court.

WHEN AN establishment paper like the New York Times reacts to the anti-war protests on 15 February by commenting that "there may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion", you know things are beginning to move.