Overview of the maoist victory in the Nepalese Constitutent Assembly election by long-term observer and sympathiser Gary Leupp, a US academic and regular Counterpunch (www.counterpunch.org) contributor.  It's not necessary to agree with Leupp that the maoists stand for 'communism' to recognize that the election result represents a major strategic success for the provisionally demilitarized 'people's war' and a geopolitical upheaval at the borders of India (where the Naxalite maoists continue to wage war) and China.  More open to question, perhaps, is Leupp's claim that the event is overlooked or unreportable in Western media.  The FT ran a remarkably positive full-page feature the day before yesterday, followed up yesterday with renewed emphasis on Party assurances the immediate agenda is not 'socialism' but the replacement of 'feudalism' with 'capitalist development'.  (This is what Leupp says too, and it's the only part of his article to be criticised on the Kasama maoist website, where the article is reproduced (http://mikeely.wordpress.com/).)  Incidentally, the article is tagged 'site-specific' (as in 'art') here because the maoists say they want to put a red flag on Mt. Everest that's big enough to see from the moon.  

In this recent archival opus, the fragile legacy of Newcastle based curatorial project – variously incarnated as The Basement Group, Projects UK and, finally, Locus+ – is imaginatively and rowdily conserved. Review of This Will Not Happen Without You by Minnie Scott

An all-too-believeable first-hand account from Spiked (http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/3730/) of the heroic Civil Obedience at the pro-Behaviour Modification protest camp outside Heathrow.  (Although Spiked's habit of labelling this lot 'Puritans' seems a bit unfair on 17th century Calvinists, given the latter group's social-levelling tendencies, hatred of superstition and insistence on independent thought.)  There are particularly telling moments when protest spokesman John Jordan says the muddy austerity of the camp exemplifies the kind of 'simple life' that everyone should live, and when another camper says all 'mainstream media' are the enemy, with two noble exceptions: Indymedia and The Independent.