E-News Bulletin Friday, 6 July 2012

Shafted: Reflecting on Miners, Media and Margaret Thatcher
BY KARI LYDERSEN

Many coal-fired power plants in the United States are closing because of cheap natural gas prices, and while the closings are cheered for environmental and health reasons,  some unions lament the loss of jobs.

Read More: http://www.inthesetimes.com

Big Brother is watching Facebook and Twitter [New Scientist]

The US government wants to monitor activity on social networks to get hints of political unrest
SATIRICAL newspaper The Onion recently described Facebook as a project of the Central Intelligence Agency…

Read More: http://sweetandsoursocialism.wordpress.com

Celebrating the Alternative Media Movement in Venezuela
by Luis Rivero Donalle

Today we celebrate the national day of journalists in Venezuela. Because of this day, it’s worth remembering a phrase that was written in the streets of Argentina during the December 2001 crisis: “They
piss on us and the press says it’s raining”.

Read More: http://venezuelanalysis.com

Can Evolution Make the Next Generation of Computer Chips?
By Joseph Stromberg

In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore made a prediction about computing that has held true to this day. Moore's law, as it came to be known, forecasted that the number of transistors we'd be able to cram onto a
circuit-and thereby, the effective processing speed of our computers-would double roughly every two years.

Read More: http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com

The Easter Rising: how 1,558 Irish defied the British Empire
By Robert Wilbur

Would the Coalition government pound London's most holy place with artillery in Hyde Park, barrage it from a gunboat on the Thames and set the cathedral's upper reaches afire from howitzers pitching incendiary shells from surrounding rooftops, until there was little left of Westminster Abbey but a steaming shell?

Read More: http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/9782-the-easter-rising-how-1558-irish-defied-the-british-empire

Don't Outsource Local News

Dear Paul,
Is there any job that can’t be outsourced?
Millions of American workers have been put out of work as employers move operations overseas. It’s true in manufacturing, data processing and customer service.

Read More: http://act.freepress.net

Creative Workers or Servants? Apple's American Workforce and the Service Economy
by MATT VIDAL

The New York Times recently published an in-depth article on “Apple’s Retail Army, Long on Loyalty but Short on Pay,” as part of its excellent series on “The iEconomy.” The new article notes that the majority of Apple’s US workforce (30,000 of its 43,000 domestic employees) are not engineers – part of the hailed “creative class” typically associated with the likes of Apple – but hourly retail sales employees.

Read More: http://www.counterpunch.org

Police lock down Chinese factory town to suppress protests
By John Chan

A determined protest by rural migrant workers in Guangdong Province that began on June 26 has underscored the rising tensions between the region’s multi-millioned workforce and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime.

Read More: http://www.wsws.org

Trade union activists are in jail in Turkey, but why?

On 25 June 2012, the offices of the Confederation of Public Employees' Trade Unions (KESK) and KESK-affiliated unions were raided and 71 trade union members and leaders were arrested.

Read More: http://column.global-labour-university.org

Journatic worker takes 'This American Life' inside outsourced journalism
by Anna Tarkov

Not long after he started working for Journatic, Ryan Smith felt there was something not quite right about what the company was doing. The Chicago freelance journalist started working for Journatic, which provides outsourced journalism work for newspapers, in January of 2011, and he was glad to have steady work, even if it paid $10 an hour with no benefits.

Read More: http://www.poynter.org

Can You Be Fired for What You Post on Facebook?
By Josh Eidelson

On a Saturday morning in October 2010, Mariana Cole-Rivera, a domestic violence advocate at the group Hispanics United of Buffalo, began the Facebook thread that would get her fired. She wrote, “Lydia Cruz, a coworker feels that we don’t help our clients enough at HUB. I about had it! My fellow coworkers how do you feel?”

Read More: http://www.slate.com