General secretary of the General Federation of Trade Unions GAWAIN LITTLE calls for support and participation in the national partnership organised to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the 1926 general strike
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The Internet Archive: our online commons are under attack
What was being celebrated as a modern-day Library of Alexandria giving free access to billions of resources, along with the brilliant Wayback machine, is now under attack by corporate publishers, reports JOHN HAWKINS
Internet archive
After brutal police crackdowns on pensioners and the forced approval of secret IMF deals, trade unions are finally responding to grassroots pressure and fighting back against savage neoliberal reforms, reports BERT SCHOUWENBURG
Bizarrely, Trump’s latest attacks now include the National Zoo, but his real and racist agenda is to strip everything black from the country’s cultural institutions, writes LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
The transformation of a stable secular state into a fractured ruin largely ruled by Western-backed fundamentalists exposes the hollow nature of ‘multipolarity’ and the absence of principled anti-imperialism today, writes ZOLTAN ZIGEDY
Facing economic turmoil, Jim Callaghan’s government rejected Tony Benn’s alternative economic strategy in favour of cuts that paved the way for Thatcherism — and the cuts-loving Labour of the present era, writes KEITH FLETT
The economic value of disability benefits far outweighs their cost, argues Dr DYLAN MURPHY
As tensions rise in the Middle East, the role of Iran in the region’s political balance becomes ever more significant. STEVE BISHOP assesses the current situation
IT HAS been said that one of the great losses of the ancient world was the destruction of the Library of Alexandria. It housed some of the literate world’s great documents, estimated to have been around 400,000 scrolls at its height. Then Julius Caesar lit Alexandria on fire in 48 BC and the library burned to the ground.
One of the great treasures of the contemporary world is an online library called the Internet Archive (IA). Established in 1996 by Brewster Kahle, a US digital librarian, computer engineer from MIT, and advocate of universal access to all knowledge.
This makes him a champion of the commons. And the public online library he has built is a wonder of the modern world. As of September 5 2024, the Internet Archive held over 866 billion web pages, more than 42.5 million print materials, 13 million videos, 3 million TV news, 1.2 million software programmes, 14 million audio files, 5 million images, and 272,660 concerts in its Wayback Machine.
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General secretary of the General Federation of Trade Unions GAWAIN LITTLE calls for support and participation in the national partnership organised to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the 1926 general strike
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