What makes the horrible fate of the Rohingya in Burma particularity pressing is that the west is now fully on the side of the very government that is carrying out these atrocious acts. And there is a reason for that: Oil. Massive deposits of oil that have remained untapped due to decades of western boycott of the junta government are now available to the highest bidder.
Source: In These Times
The Okinawan people’s movement against U.S. militarism provides a roadmap for a radical, transnational resistance to war.
Amid escalating fighting words between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-Un, the world has become increasingly fixated on North Korea’s military power. The North Korean regime’s string of long-range missile tests, paired with reports of miniaturized nuclear warheads, have brought debate over how the United States and its allies should, as The New York Times put it, “defang” Pyongyang’s missile programs. North Korea recently conducted the country’s sixth and largest nuclear test, prompting U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis to warn that any threat could be met with a “massive military response.” What’s rarely mentioned amid the sensationalism of “breaking news,” however, is the presence of the region’s most powerful military power: the United States.
Source: The Guardian
Hurricane Harvey, Hurricane Irma, flash fires, droughts: all of them tell us one thing – we need to stand up to the fossil fuel industry and fast
For the sake of keeping things manageable, let’s confine the discussion to a single continent and a single week: North America over the last seven days.
In Houston they got down to the hard and unromantic work of recovery from what economists announced was probably the most expensive storm in US history, and which weather analysts confirmed was certainly the greatest rainfall event ever measured in the country – across much of its spread it was a once-in-25,000-years storm, meaning 12 times past the birth of Christ; in isolated spots it was a once-in-500,000-years storm, which means back when we lived in trees. Meanwhile, San Francisco not only beat its all-time high temperature record, it crushed it by 3F, which should be pretty much statistically impossible in a place with 150 years (that’s 55,000 days) of record-keeping.
Source: The Nation
The country is now a tinderbox, in which supporters of the rival factions believe they can lose only if the other side rigs the results.
Nairobi—The celebrations are over, and the cold reality is dawning that the historic Supreme Court nullification of President Uhuru Kenyatta’s August 8 election victory presented only a temporary respite from Kenya’s toxic ethnic politics.
The repeat elections ordered by the Supreme Court have been scheduled for October 17, but already, familiar battle lines have been drawn. Veteran opposition campaigner Raila Odinga’s National Super Alliance, or NASA, vows that it will not take part in polls overseen by the same Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) indicted by the Supreme Court ruling.
Thousands gathered in Boise, Idaho last Saturday to voice their support for DACA and protest Trump's plans to end the program. “There are so many injustices currently happening and DACA is not one of them,” Cristina, in attendance at the Boise rally, told Toward Freedom. “DACA students and DACA recipients are not criminals. They are students going to college, trying to be someone in life.”
The expanding wars in Afghanistan, conflict with North Korea, the U.S. African Command (AFRICOM), U.S. intervention in Venezuela, proposals to increase the military budget by $75 billion, and the war on African/Black people are all interrelated expressions of the systemic violence that the US state is waging and prepared to wage to salvage its rapidly declining power.
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