The Common Good
May-June 2001

News Bites

by Rose Marie Berger, Susannah Hunter | May-June 2001

  • During the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, the Swiss border patrol prevented
    Naomi Klein's anti-corporate bestseller No Logo from entering the country.
    Apparently those ...
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  • During the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, the Swiss border patrol prevented Naomi Klein's anti-corporate bestseller No Logo from entering the country. Apparently those little cantons are not big enough to hold opposing world views.

  • One thousand child soldiers in Colombia have laid down their weapons and asked Catholic and Protestant churches to help re-integrate them into Colombian society.

  • Evangelical churches in Vietnam's central highlands are organizing against government attempts to usurp the hill tribes' ancestral lands. The government wants to clear-cut sacred forests and put in coffee plantations.

  • Jay Bakker, son of Jim and Tammy Faye, has started a youth ministry in Atlanta to the body- pierced, tattooed, punk, skater, and street kid set, distributing his drug of choice—radical grace. Jay Bakker recently released his autobiography, Son of a Preacher Man: My Search for Grace in the Shadows.

  • The Army and Air Force Exchange Service (which supplies the Pentagon and PXs around the world) has been caught buying uniforms from Nicaraguan and Burmese sweatshops. Rep. Cynthia McKinney, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, criticized the practice as a violation of the Corporate Code of Conduct Act.

  • By 2030, according to World Watch magazine, scientists will be able to wean Iceland off smoggy coal and oil and convert to clean green hydrogen fuel cells powered by volcanic vents and waterfalls.

  • Mennonite Mutual Aid's Praxis mutual funds recently filed a shareholder resolution challenging AT&T's decision to partner with The Hot Network, which delivers explicit pornographic content through the world's largest cable system. The challenge has the support of a coalition that represents 3 million AT&T shares.

  • A preservationist group is in heated battle with a Staten Island developer over his demolition of three of the modest cottages that once served as a summer retreat for Catholic Worker co-founder Dorothy Day. Day, who died in 1980, is under consideration for sainthood by the Catholic Church for her work on behalf of the poor.

  • The Religious Labor Division of the AFL-CIO is joining forces with the Muslim Public Affairs Council to seek fair working conditions for Muslim taxi drivers in Washington, D.C. MPAC adviser Mahdi Bray called it "an excellent opportunity to affirm a vital component of our [Islamic] faith—social justice."

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