Find Out About Past Happenings Through Newspaper Archives

Imagine you are reading a newspaper from the 50's, think of what it was like back then. Newspaper archives are collections of past events, USA Indian news, political news, sports coverage or even long gone obituaries. Many historians and researchers can take help from these archives and even students can learn a lot from them. Suppose, you have a history assignment and you have no place where you can search reliable information. The good news for you is that you can look into paper archives and find out historical news; important and not so important. Today, with improvement in technology, even online archives are available.

Also, newspaper archives are a database of old newspaper editorials, features and study content. An archive is a compilation of historical account like source documents, and manuscripts that have been gathered over the years and carefully indexed for future suggestion. You will not find multiple copies of archives of same records like libraries. Archived articles are distinctive and original that you can't find in any other record. Paper archives are usually a treasure chest containing valuable information right from police notices to classic cars to sports articles, chronological facts and ancestors. One can find out interesting, long forgotten, thrilling piece of writing in such archives with which you can catch up on some fascinating reading. They also add to your knowledge base.

Newspaper archives are a peek into the long forgotten past. At present newspaper archives have a more detailed role to play in the society. Originally, historians and enthusiasts read these archives simply for the fun. By reading old papers, you can get a fine idea of how the times were before and what the society was like. Historians at times can read these carefully and determine our transformation and whether we need to evolve more.

US Indian Newspaper companies themselves use their archives to help get through events to know if they have covered a story already. Lately, however, newspaper companies have digital archives that you can use. Learners and other professionals can use this facility for research. This means that the internet browsers can help readers zoom into the newspaper to get a clearer view.

Web newspaper archives let users to track information and study them thoroughly, by researching topics over time. The information can be followed as far as their first stages to its current stage, by using location names, subject names and local trends. The web is the only place that provides this kind of source. For this reason, lots of websites only allow registered users to access such information.

Desi tribune is a California classified newspaper that provides you the latest international and local news. It is a low-priced newspaper which is available online also.

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Occupying the Commons Through Grassroots Democracy

There is a movement afoot - the WE of humanity has been awoken by the breakdown of its beloved planet. The movement has risen under many names: anti-corporate, anti-capitalist, anti-free-trade, anti-imperialist, anti-neoliberalist. Many say that it started in Seattle. Others maintain it began five hundred years ago. Others again say it began on 1 January 1994 when the Zapatistas launched their uprising on the night NAFTA became law in Mexico.

Thousands of groups today are all working against forces whose common thread is what might broadly be described as the privatisation of every aspect of life, and the transformation of every activity and value into a commodity for private ownership.

The oppositional threads, as different campaigns and movements, share the spirit of a radical reclaiming of the commons. While our communal spaces-town squares, streets, schools, farms, plants are being displaced into the marketplace, a spirit of resistance is taking hold around the world. Activist spaces are being created for people to begin the job of reclaiming bits of nature and restoring rights. In short, activists aren't waiting for the revolution, they are acting right now, where they live, where they study, where they work, where they farm.

Typically these anti-privatisation campaigns get under way on their own. But they also periodically converge-that's what happened in Seattle, Prague, Washington, Davos, Porto Alegre and Quebec. During the battles against NAFTA, there emerged the first signs of a coalition between organised labour, environmentalists, farmers and consumer groups within the countries concerned. They had recognised a common opponent, which has been gradually collectivising its control over the world's resources into an informal empire. These forces of dispossession (FoD) have been able to create a globalitarian world using the debt-based monetary system underlying modern banking.

The fight against globalisation has morphed into a struggle against corporatisation and, for, some, against capitalism itself. It has also become a fight for democracy.

La Via Campesina, a global association of small farmers-has launched a campaign to remove food safety and agricultural products from all trade agreements, under the slogan 'The World is Not for Sale'. They want to draw a line around the commons.

This is a cause that transcends nationality and state borders. The real news out of Seattle is that organisers around the world are beginning to see their local and national struggles-for better funded public schools, against union-busting and casualisation, for family farms, and against the widening gap between rich and poor-through a global lens. That is the most significant shift we have seen in years.

Still, if there is one force we can thank for bringing this front into being, it is the multi-national corporations. Thanks to the sheer imperialist ambition of the corporate project at this moment in history that they have created our coalitions for us. Thanks to Monsanto, farmers in India are working with environmentalists and consumers around the world to develop direct-action strategies that cut off genetically modified foods in the fields and in the supermarkets. The biggest challenge facing us is to distil all of this into a message that is widely accessible.

Rather than forming a pyramid, as most movements do, with leaders up on top and followers down below, the Occupy Movement was more like an elaborate web. In part, this structure is the result of internet-based organising, but it is also a response to the political realities that sparked the protests: the utter failure of traditional party politics.

So it is up to the grassroots to challenge the structures that make democracy toothless, like the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO, and so on. This is the only response at an ideological level to the understanding that globalisation is in essence a crisis in representative democracy.

What has caused this crisis? One of the basic reasons for it is the way power and decision-making have been handed along to points ever further away from citizens: from local to provincial, from provincial to national, from national to international institutions, that lack all transparency or accountability. What is the solution? To articulate an alternative, participatory democracy.

Ross Scholes [BSc; DipNatResMgt((PG); DipDevStud(PG)], presents issues like these in PEASANTS NZ, a New Zealand based website dedicated to the transition to sustainable self provisioning within the globalising context.

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