Revolutionary Learning: The Zapatistas’ First School

More than a thousand students have enrolled in the leftist indigenous group’s la escuelita de libertad to learn about the Mexican rebels’ life philosophies; a Canadian teenager protests Monsanto by eloquently refuting a bumbling TV host; meanwhile, same-sex marriage is garnering immense support in Latin America. These discoveries and more below.

On a regular basis, Truthdig brings you the news items and odds and ends that have found their way to Larry Gross, director of the USC Annenberg School for Communication. A specialist in media and culture, art and communication, visual communication and media portrayals of minorities, Gross helped found the field of gay and lesbian studies.

The Zapatistas’ First School Opens For Session Last December, tens of thousands of indigenous Zapatistas mobilized, peacefully and in complete silence, to occupy five municipal government office buildings in the state of Chiapas, Mexico.

14-Year Old Activist Destroys TV Host on Monsanto, GMO Labeling This 14-year old Canadian girl, Rachel Parent, is tremendous. Watch her clean the clock [3] of the TV host who bad-mouthed opponents of Monsanto and their GMOs and those who support the “Right to Know” campaign to require genetically modified foods to be labelled as such.

The App That Turns Tourists Into Locals When Paul Brogna and Pete Stam returned to the University of Syracuse from a semester abroad, back in fall 2008, they noticed they’d had a better time than most of their classmates.

Israel Faces Deepening Isolation, Kerry Warns U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s peace mission to the Middle East is semi-quixotic, if not wholly quixotic.

What Camus Understood About the Middle East Albert Camus’ Algerian Chronicles have never been presented, until now, in a full English translation, and this is a pity.

The Lies Aren’t What Makes Obama’s NSA Stance So Awful President Obama’s repeated comments that “there is no spying on Americans” and that “we don’t have a domestic spying program,” as he told Jay Leno, were contradicted by two revelations at the end of last week.

Real Clear Politics, Yahoo News Get White House Briefing Room Seats The White House press briefing room will look a tad different now that some additional news organizations were granted seats.

A Material That Could Make Solar Power ‘Dirt Cheap’ A new type of solar cell, made from a material that is dramatically cheaper to obtain and use than silicon, could generate as much power as today’s commodity solar cells.

Gay Marriage Goes Global Same-sex marriage is sweeping Latin America thanks to the influence of the most revered judicial institution in the Western Hemisphere.

Laura Poitras, the NSA, Snowden and a Rubik’s Cube Long before we had heard of Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald (still writing at Salon at the time) alerted us to Laura Poitras.