From the 20-26 November issue of The Guardian Weekly:

UN meets homeless victims of American property dream | Chris McGreal
"Deanne Weakly was among the first to the microphone. The 51-year-old estate agent told how a couple of years ago she was pulling in $80,000 (£48,000) a year from commissions selling homes in LA's booming property market. When the bottom fell out of the business with the foreclosure crisis, she lost her own house and ended up living on the streets in a city with more homeless than any other in America. She was sexually assaulted, harassed by the police and in despair. She turned to the city and California state governments for help. "No one wanted to listen. They blame you for being homeless in the first place," she said. […] Rolnik had waited more than a year to tour cities across the US to prepare a report for the UN's human rights council on America's deepening housing crisis following the subprime mortgage debacle. UN special rapporteurs are more often found investigating human rights in Sudan and Burundi or abuses of the Israeli occupation than exposing the underbelly of the American dream. George Bush's administration blocked her visit, finding itself in the company of Cuba, Burma and North Korea in blocking a special rapporteur.  [emp. mine] "I was asking for almost a year before I  as allowed in," Rolnik said. When Barack Obama came to power she was welcomed to range across America talking to those who have lived on the streets for years and the newly homeless forced out by the foreclosure crisis. Rolnik, a Brazilian urban planner and architect, said administration officials were genuinely interested in what she might find, if not embracing of her raison d'etre that everyone is entitled to a decent home. […] A Spanish-speaking veteran of the Korean war steps up. He is the angriest of the lot. He is not a communist, he says, but in Cuba nobody goes homeless. He fought for America and now he is left to live on the streets.

Furore over Prix Goncourt winner shows French could use more egalite | Lizzy Davies
[Marie Ndiaye moved to Berlin in 2007 "largely because of Sarkozy"…] "…she said that France under the current president was languishing in a 'hateful' atmosphere of tough security and 'vulgarity'. 'I find this France monstrous,' she told culture magazine Les Inrockuptibles. […] Is the president, who was elected after a campaign in which he urged people to 'love or leave' the country, guilty of pursuing an agenda that is “monstrous” to perceived “outsiders”? Or is Ndiaye merely, as Sarkozy’s supporters claim, conforming to a “Pavlovian” form of opposition that has become the norm among leftwing French intellectuals? Ever since his days as interior minister, Sarkozy has made his name through an uncompromising stance on immigration and integration. He provoked uproar in 2005 by referring to youths in the neglected, multiracial suburbs as “scum”, and has zealously imposed a strategy of expulsion quotas.  It is this side of present day France – its sans papiers, or undocumented workers, its forced returns to war-torn Afghanistan, its reluctance to tackle the discrimination endemic in society – that is the basis of many people’s dislike of Sarkozy.

Can Niner generation do the right thing now? | Matthew Ryder
"Those impressionable twentysomethings are today's influential fortysomethings and they carry the legacy with them. No Logo author Naomi Klein credits those years as the period that turned her student interests towards global issues. Current UK politicians, such as David Miliband and David Cameron, fresh out of university, opted not for the yuppie jobs that the 80s had offered, preferring to enter the loftier world of political research. Across the Atlantic, Sergey Brin claims that it was a trip to the dissolving Soviet Union that "awakened his childhood fear of authority" and influenced the culture of the famously informal company he started eight years later – Google. And it was at this time that a half-Kenyan African-American made history by becoming an editor of Harvard Law Reviewand decided to write a book. That summer, he took Michelle Robinson on their first date to see a quintessentially Niner movie – Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing. Last year, Jeff Gordinier published X Saves the World. According to him, the great achievement of the post baby-boomer generation was that it "stopped the world from sucking". Maybe so. But if Niners are really going to make the difference that they believed they would, they will have to do more. And they will be challenged on the very things that once made them different. This is already happening with regard to violence and conflict. At the key moment of their development, Niners witnessed dramatic political change occurring without bloodshed. Television pictures had become a more effective revolutionary tool than an AK-47. That influenced the Niner outlook in a way that was a genuine break from the past. Previously, baby-boomers from George Bush to Osama bin Laden seemed to believe that you had to fight for what you wanted – and kill or be killed if necessary. But Niners questioned the need to pay that price."

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