If some extraterrestrial species were compiling a history of Homo sapiens, they might well break their calendar into two eras: BNW (before nuclear weapons) and NWE (the nuclear weapons era). The latter era, of course, opened on August 6, 1945.
As climate change makes it more difficult to practice agriculture in their ancestral homelands, indigenous communities are exchanging seeds in hopes of finding the hardiest varieties.
Over 65 percent of the world’s nations keep their foreign exchange reserves in the US dollar, the dominant world currency. The creation of the BRICS Bank and other financial interventions will likely weaken the dollar’s dominance and contribute to the creation a new international economic order.
There was a time when our politicians and media had one principal fear when covering Middle East wars: that no one should ever call them anti-Semitic. So corrosive, so vicious was this charge against any honest critic of Israel that merely to bleat the word “disproportionate” – as in any normal wartime exchange rate of Arab-to-Israeli deaths – was to provoke charges of Nazism by Israel’s would-be supporters. Sympathy for Palestinians would earn the sobriquet “pro-Palestinian”, which, of course, means “pro-terrorist”.
Source: New Internationalist
Exactly one hundred years ago, on 28 July 1914, socialist representatives from across Europe gathered in Brussels. Austria-Hungary had declared war on Serbia. Much of the rest of Europe was expected to join in.
French socialist leader Jean Jaures stood with his arm around the co-chair of the German Social Democrats, Hugo Haase. They insisted that whatever governments and capitalists might do, working-class people must refuse to fight each other. Thousands of people marched against war in cities throughout Europe.
Source: TomDispatch.com
Juba, South Sudan — Is this country the first hot battlefield in a new cold war? Is the conflict tearing this new nation apart actually a proxy fight between the world’s two top economic and military powers? That’s the way South Sudan’s Information Minister, Michael Makuei Lueth, tells it. After “midwifing” South Sudan into existence with billions of dollars in assistance, aid, infrastructure projects, and military support, the U.S. has watched China emerge as the major beneficiary of South Sudan’s oil reserves. As a result, Makuei claims, the U.S. and other Western powers have backed former vice president Riek Machar and his rebel forces in an effort to overthrow the country’s president, Salva Kiir. China, for its part, has played a conspicuous double game. Beijing has lined up behind Kiir, even as it publicly pushes both sides to find a diplomatic solution to a simmering civil war. It is sending peacekeepers as part of the U.N. mission even as it also arms Kiir’s forces with tens of millions of dollars worth of new weapons.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019