English Club

The current investigations of Argentine courts into the crimes of the Franco dictatorship has brought the issue of European political memory to the fore. Guatemala and Argentina are examples of how democratic engagement with past violations of human rights can lead to justice, write the historian Federico Finchelstein and the Argentine editor Fabian Bosoer. 

As you can see, Mediapart has changed! A new style and structure was put in place on the night of July 2nd. The overall aim is to provide a layout is cleaner, highlights stories more clearly and makes more use of multimedia.

We deplore the recent crackdown of the Turkish government on its own citizens, the clearly unjustified use of tear gas, acts of force, gas canisters and smoke bombs that have resulted in a vast number of injuries, imperiling the lives of those who seek to exercise their basic freedoms of assembly and protest.  

Argentina's former dictator General Jorge Rafael Videla passed away in his prison cell on May 17th. For most Argentines, he represented the ultimate icon of evil, writes Federico Finchelstein, an Argentine historian and associate professor of history at The New School in New York.

Mediapart Editor-in-Chief Edwy Plenel was the guest speaker at a New York University conference earlier this month on the potential of the digital revolution.  During his 25 minute-speech in English, he spoke about the challenges and opportunities for the new media in bringing greater accountability and democracy to society, the history of Mediapart in exposing corruption under governments of the Right and Left, and in particular the lessons to be learnt from this website’s role – and the lack of almost any played by other French media – in revealing budget minister Jérôme Cahuzac’s secret foreign bank accounts, a scandal that continues to rock the French political establishment.

"The imam said that the Americans were like the lion who had stepped on a thorn, and then went about making a great noise, roaring at the world from his pain. But it would soon pass, he said, when the thorn dried up and fell out, when the pain ebbed, and then tranquility would be restored" (The Book of Jonas). For Mediapart, the novelist Stephen Dau talks about his first novel.

In this lengthy interview with Mediapart’s Christine Marcandier and Sophie Dufau, the novelist and essayist Salman Rushdie talks about his latest work, Joseph Anton: A Memoir, a biographical account of his life in hiding when a fatwa was issued against him in 1989 following publication of his novel The Satanic Verses.

Land grabbing, the name given to large-scale land acquisitions practiced by companies, governements and individuals in developing countries, deprives local and mostly poor people of their homes and their access to natural resources they normally use, while there is little accountability and no global regime or standards controlling it at all, says Alexios Antypas, an associate professor at the Department of Environmental Sciences and Policy of Central European University in Budapest in this interview with freelance journalist Gabriella Horn.