On the pretext of a child sexual abuse crisis in Australia’s Northern Territory the Howard government passed emergency legislation and prepared a land invasion of aboriginal areas by police, doctors and the army. Elizabeth Povinelli locates this latest state of exception in a wider neoliberal project to impose work and austerity. Images and text box by Benedict Seymour

                               Free Software
                         Toni Prug, toni@irational.org
                                August 13, 2007
Contents                                                              1 Introduction                                                          2
2 Hackers and the Protestant ethics                        2
2.1 Talk is cheap, show me the code (sola code) .    5
2.2 Against memory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . .   7
3 Free Software, politics and ideology . .. . . . . . . .  8
3.1 PeerToPeer and Free Drugs democracy . . . .    11
4 Revolutionary justice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
5 Hacking the regime of equal rights . . . . . . . . . .  17
6 Free Software and academia . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  18
7Conclusions                                                       20

An Albanian woman writes about her experience with prostitution and drug dealing in Greece (defending her choices all the way), setting up a grassroots support organisation, and about NGOs in Albania as agents for the interests of centralised elites. This was first published in the Harm Reduction Communication newsletter, Summer 2001, but is still relevant considering the increasing presence of EU/NATO military forces and NGOs in the area given Kosovo's imminent declaration of independence. It also offers a more candid perspective on immigrant sex work than the ongoing compassion campaigns about - and deportation of - the 'victims of sex trafficking'.

Due to some back room bungling at Mute, this article failed to make it online before the Mental Health Bill received royal assent last Thursday to become law. Here mental health activist and editor of Mad Pride: A Celebration of Mad Culture traces the history of this deeply unpopular bill, from the early '90s to the present day. As of 19 July 2007, psychiatric service users can expect to be forcibly medicated even when not institutionalised and importantly when deemed 'untreatable'. The expanded number of health professionals given the powers to section patients will undoubtedly also result in more people being incacerated - predictably amongst the most vulnerable and discriminated against groups

Spiked-online column that describes mass surrender to the health police – or maybe just to middle class aesthetic prejudice – but falls far short of a suitable pitch of outrage.  The discontinued Bio-Power Digest calls on non-smokers everywhere to wear symbols of a Pledge to take the Filthy Habit up from July 1.   

Brazil has long sold its sunny side to holiday makers, but since the blockbuster film City of God a flood of movies and TV shows have capitalised on the narrative potential of the country’s plentiful favelas, adolescent drug soldiers and ultraviolence.

J.J. King reviews Flesh Machine: Cyborgs, Designer Babies, and New Eugenic Consciousness, Critical Art Ensemble (Autonomedia $8)

CAE (over)identify (with) a triad of machines at the dead centre of pancapitalism - sight, war, flesh - around whose operations State constitutes itself. The sight machine manages the home front, promulgating the necessary ideologues on TV, radio and the Net, whilst mapping out frontier territories in order to identify and prepossess the next commodity; it co-opts the social whilst cooperating with the war machine, which it provides with the data required to maintain capitalism's continued existence via the petrifying, pan-global gaze of lethal martial force. The flesh machine extends this stare into the body itself. Our cyborgian worker (mobile phone, laptop, velcro pocket full of acetylcholine: ready for operation 24/7) is just a stand in, and a sign of what's to come: the flesh machine will market eugenics as a consumer choice to parents by interfacing with the substantial work ethic ('Of course, we must give Johnny the best chance in life') propped up by the sight machine - tweaking genes to make humans who sleep less, work harder and don't freak out when the heat's turned up.

Sebastian Hacher discusses the latest phase of the War on Drugs in Bolivia, and explains its connections to the broader political strategies being deployed against the country’s people. Strategies for resistance such as road blocks and striking have produced potent results, portrayed by the liberal regime as a conspiratorial coup

Calls for legal heroin shooting galleries in the UK, writes Peter Carty, are the latest episode in a history of misguided attempts to stamp out global recreational opiate use

The world of drug users is often chaotic and confused. As is drug regulation and law enforcement. Long-term historical patterns, however, are clear. Facing failure in the war against drugs, the UK Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) is supporting the setting up of injecting rooms for legally prescribed heroin, similar to those operating in Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland and Sydney, Australia.