LA mayor elect Villaraigosa helped broker an agreement between the hotel unions and hotels. The workers got about everything they asked for! 

The proposed contract would expire Nov. 30, 2006, a key victory for union leaders who have insisted that their pact should expire about the same time as union contracts with hotel operators in other major cities.

When the current contract expires, it will now expire on the same day across the nation, something which gives the union much more clout and leverage, as any future strike will now be nationwide, not just local.

“The workers who have heard about it this morning are ecstatic,” Walsh said in a phone interview from union headquarters, with loud cheers ringing in the background.

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Burma has perhaps the most thuggish, repressive government on the planet. Dissidents are routinely raped, tortured, and imprisoned. Secret police and informants are everywhere.

Even more scandalous is how little fuss is made by the G7, the EU and the UN about Burma’s further slide into a vicious, sweatshop nightmare.

Why do western imperialist countries ignore the repression in Burma while they cheerfully made up reasons to invade Iraq, a country with a government under Saddam that granted its citizens substantially more rights and freedoms than currently exist in Burma?

Well, of course you know the answer.

France, whose main oil company Total has extensive interests in the country, has opposed moves to tighten lightweight European economic sanctions. The world’s biggest banks have acted to help the junta circumvent US laws stopping it trading in dollars by enabling the regime to open euro accounts.

Here in the US, the major oil companies happily do business with this noxious brutal government. Think about Burma the next time George Bush whinnies about creating democracies. The US and Europe have ignored the brutality in Burma for decades, and the primary reason is because Burma has always opened the door for the big oil companies and banks.

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Memo: U.S. lacked full postwar Iraq plan. 

A briefing paper prepared for British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his top advisers eight months before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq concluded that the U.S. military was not preparing adequately for what the British memo predicted would be a “protracted and costly” postwar occupation of that country.

But I guess it’s too much to expect that the ‘Senator from England’ would have actually criticized Dubya publicly.

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From Smart Mobs comes news of  a way cool new use of podcasting and mobile radio;,homegrown mobile networks that transmit and receive from any node. If you’re stuck in a traffic jam, just chill out and surf the mobile nets around you, listening to whatever’s happening in that area. No telling what you might hear. Maybe someone might even broadcast why the traffic is slow and a good alternate route to use.

Roadcasting: a potential mesh network killer app.

Roadcasting is collaborative, mobile radio. The concept was created by a team of five students at Carnegie Mellon University.

It is a system that allows anyone to have their own radio station, broadcasted among wirelessly capable devices, some in cars, in an ad-hoc wireless network. The system can become aware of individual preferences and is able to choose songs and podcasts that people want to hear, on their own devices and car stereos and in devices and car stereos around them.

Roadcasting provides a set of methods to transform radio into a community-driven interactive medium. Using collaborative filtering technologies, it enables rich passive and interactive experiences for ‘DJs’ and listeners in a way that has not previously been possible.

The roadcasting software has been released into the open source community, which means anyone — even GM’s competitors — can try to find commercial uses for roadcasting.

Roadcasting Rules

Read in MIT Technology Review: Roadcasting: A Potential Mesh Network Killer App

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