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Music Is My Ammunition | Playing For Change. What Republicans Hear When Bernie Speaks. Documentary: India's Daughter. Medea Benjamin on System Change. Could We Actually Live on Mars?

In the last 10 days, five black churches have been set on fire in the St. Louis area. And unlike the last wave of black church fires this summer in which weather played a role in some of the fires, these all appear to be the work of arsonists. The lack of media coverage about these fires is highly-noticeable, given the media’s hyper-intensive coverage of rioters in Baltimore setting fire to a CVS earlier this year.

To this day, it remains difficult to take in the degree to which the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq destabilized the Greater Middle East from the Chinese border to Libya. Though you’ll seldom find it mentioned in one place, five countries in the region -- Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen -- have all disintegrated as nation states. Three were the focus of direct American interventions, the fourth (Yemen) was turned into a drone hunting ground.

The United States keeps nuclear weapons in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy and Turkey, in violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which bans the transfer of nuclear weapons from a nuclear weapon state to a non-nuclear weapon state. Now, the U.S. wants to upgrade its nukes in Europe, to make them "precision" and "guided," and therefore more likely to be used, even as tensions build between the United States and Russia.

Thanks to a sophisticated strategy and tenacious rank-and-file leadership from City College of San Francisco faculty, students and staff as well as their allies, the accreditation system is being challenged to protect public education, teachers, students and workers in California.

Dialogue is essential. It is the only way to put an end to situations of conflict. Otherwise there will be particular interests that will push conflict. There are governments, which claim that they want democracy but at the same time they encourage and assist terrorist bodies. To bring peace to the world is not an easy task because this depends on social justice.

Legendary rock star Patti Smith's look back expresses supremely well the tentativeness of every movement forward, the sense of following a path so risky, so sketchily perceptible, that at any moment one might go astray and never be heard from again, never perhaps even hear from the deepest part of oneself again. For a book that ends in success, it is acutely sensitive to that abyss of failure that haunts the attempt to become any kind of artist.

Reader Comments: Sanders forces question - Are You a Capitalist; Media and Country Debate Socialism like no time in a hundred years; Clinton; GOP Crackup; Afghanistan; Puerto Rico; Palestine; Leonard Peltier; Readers Debate Tipping; Rosalyn Baxandall Announcements: Marxist classes and book talks in New York; Paul Robeson play in Peekskill; Palestine Solidarity and Paid Family Leave events in New York

With zero African-American managers and only one Latino manager, baseball needs an affirmative-action policy with actual teeth. And now we are all the way back to where we started. It's time for change: a change many thought had already been achieved. Rob Manfred: You're up.