For what regards the London riots, who could not see this coming? This is about youths who went beyond what we could ever imagine because of how they grew up. Their family failed them, school failed them, social workers failed them, society failed them. Only the police and jail had something to teach them. Lives spent in crews or gangs fighting each other and the police, going in and out of jail, it needed a member of the community to be shot dead by the police for no reason to enflame all this.

Mark Duggan was killed in Tottenham by a CO19 officer, the special branch that also massacred an innocent Brazilian in the tube sometime back. The published story is he got shot in the chest, the reality seems to be that he was hit in the face, to a level that his mother could not recognise him. When a march was organised by the family to demonstrate against the police lies and worse, their disregard for any inquest, a crowd of about 150 reached the Tottenham Police station in a peaceful demonstration. Police in riot gear came to protect the building, and hit and wounded to the head a young woman. This was the match that put fire to everything. Gangs of youths ready for anything just went for it,  all the way as they have been taught to, spreading rapidly to gangs all across the UK. This is what I was able to reconstruct. Lastly the police were really a soft touch managing the riots, compared to the brutality used on political marches in the last couple of years, and I think they really wanted this to get them all, in a sense.

Now they are passing prison sentences to minor aged disaffected kids which will become an army of gangsters a few years from now. Instead of putting them in a school and teaching them love and education. On top of it, we hear a lot of them are losing their housing benefit, pushing them even more outside the boundary of society, and making them even more frustrated and angry. Surely there should be a differentiation in the crimes committed and punishments inflicted, attacking a private flat Mogadishu style is not the same as looting Currys, but the majority should be put on special re-education courses aimed at reconstructing a role in society and hope for the future. Not certainly in closed cages in contact with hardened criminals….

Kathy Ryan, photo editor of New York Times magazine and Lesley Martin, publisher of Aperture,  give a tour of the exhibition they both curated of 30 years of the New York Times magazine.

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Title: Viva Las Luchadoras!
Where: Bolivian Embassy, 106 Eaton Square, SW1W 9AD London
When: Public viewing  15 – 18th July, 2011, 10am-5pm

Sheila Blanco talks to Victoria Derbyshire about the ongoing case of her son Mark Blanco’s death after an evening with Pete Doherty in east London four years ago. Interview begins at 46.20 until 1.00.

LISTEN HERE

SEE SLIDESHOW ON FIRECRACKER HERE

If one were to guess what would come next after female freedom fighters in the Kurdistan region, and stunt horse riders, also female, in Somerset, then it might come as no surprise that the Cossacks, and in particular the female students at a military college in south Caucasus, is where photographer Anastasia Taylor-Lind would find herself next.

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