Undercurrents News Network launched

Last night Earth-Info.Net attended the Oxford launch of the Undercurrents News Network, an alternative media group, which plans to help distribute videos highlighting the work of activists from around the world.

Undercurrents have been producing videos, featuring their own alternative news stories, for the past 10 years, and discovered that on average it takes 4 years for these stories to be covered by documentaries on the mainstream media.

Stories featured in the latest video include a demonstration outside a Premier Oil AGM, (protesting at the company's investment in Burma inspite of the ruling regime's appalling human rights record), a mass break-out from the Woomera detention centre in the South Australian desert (where asylum seekers were often detained for months, until UN pressure finally led to the site's closure in April 2003) and a student occupation of the President's office at Harvard University in protest at the university's policy of offering poverty pay to 1000 workers, despite the institutions's own immense wealth ($20 billion) and profits (approx. $150 million per annum).