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A Brief History of Seven Killings

Kei Miller The Guardian
The Man Booker prize, given annually for best English language novel published in the United Kingdom, was awarded this week to Marlon James, for his novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings. He is the first writer from Jamaica to win the prize. The novel is a tale of 1970s-1980s Jamaica, CIA plots, and violence. It is "a story about Jamaica that doesn’t only take place in Jamaica," says Kei Miller, who reviewed the novel late last year.

Film Review: Sicario -- The War on Drugs Meets the War on Terror

Laura Durkay Socialist Worker
Sicario proceeds from one nail-biting scene to the next making it increasingly clear that this is a story about the merger of the tactics of the war on terror with the war on drugs, and it makes that merger look frankly terrifying -- a grisly bomb blast, bodies hung from a bridge in Juarez that seem intended to remind us of U.S. contractors in Fallujah and a secret mission to Mexico that is essentially an extraordinary rendition, with all the imagery to match.

Kunduz Massacre Is a Brutal Reminder of US Militarism's Civilian Victims, Past and Present

Maura Stephens Truthout
Attacks on civilians - like the ongoing drone attacks on the people of Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia about which we hear next to nothing in mainstream media - are being perpetrated in our name, with our tax dollars and often with our blood, sweat and tears. Thus the buck has to stop with us. Let's hold US officials' feet to the fire.

HDP: Call to the International Community Following the Ankara Massacre

Selahattin Demirtas & Figen Yüksekdag, HDP Co-chairs The Kurdistan Tribune
In making this call, we wish to underscore that the Ankara massacre and the previous attacks are international in scope, and to make clear that we see the potential for such events to open the way to regional insecurity. AKP’s policy of relying on radical groups as proxies, . . . such groups as ISIS, Al-Nusra, and Ahrar Al-Sha, used particularly against Kurds in Rojava—is at the heart of today’s tragedy.

As Cities Give Columbus the Boot, Indigenous Peoples Day Spreads Across US

Lauren McCauley Common Dreams
The movement dates back to 1990 when South Dakota became the first state to address the controversy over Columbus Day when they renamed the holiday Native American Day. Two years later, Berkeley, California introduced the first Indigenous Peoples Day. And while workers in 23 U.S. states enjoyed a paid day off in his honor, people across the country rallied online under the banner of #IndigenousPeoplesDay to call attention to the atrocities committed by Columbus.

 The Presidential Debate Question No One Is Asking: ‘Are You a Capitalist?’

John Nichols The Nation
 Despite the best efforts of political and media elites to dismiss and diminish socialist ideas, polls show that Americans are increasingly open to the ideology. Polls of millennials in recent years have found slightly higher levels of approval for socialism than capitalism. Although Bernie Sanders is asked "Are you a socialist?" The other contenders are not asked "Are you a capitalist?"