Month: December 2017

Source: Foreign Policy in Focus

By roping India and Japan into its standoff with China, the U.S. is raising the nuclear stakes in Asia — including, dangerously, between India and Pakistan.

With the world focused on the scary possibility of war on the Korean Peninsula, not many people paid much attention to a series of naval exercises this past July in the Malacca Strait, a 550-mile long passage between Sumatra and Malaysia through which pass over 50,000 ships a year.

With President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un exchanging threats and insults, why would the media bother with something innocuously labeled “Malabar 17”? read more

Source: In These Times

A conflict between indigenous communities and capitalist plunderers has long been simmering. The case of Santiago Maldonado brought tensions to a boiling point.

For the past three months, an unsettling question has riled Argentina: Where is Santiago Maldonado, the indigenous rights activist disappeared under murky circumstances after a protest? The tragic answer took 78 days to establish.

Santiago Maldonado, 28, was last seen on August 1 at the Pu-Lof indigenous community in Chubut, Patagonia. An artisan and organizer from El Bolsón, he traveled to support the Mapuche’s struggle. Dwellers of the Patagonia region, which abuts Argentina and Chile, the Mapuche people have been demanding the restitution of their ancestral land and protection from the encroachment of multinational corporations, such as the clothing manufacturer Benetton. read more

Source: The Nation

Almost a year into the Trump presidency and the threats to the free press are rising on all fronts—physical, financial, legal, technological, and, not least of all, political. Their convergence may not form a perfect storm, but it’s laying waste to much of journalism as we’ve known it.

Killing net neutrality, which the Republican-controlled FCC voted to do yesterday, is only the most recent gut punch to a free press. The commission also moved closer yesterday to repealing a TV-ownership rule, in order to allow Sinclair Broadcast Group, a Trumpist mouthpiece and already the nation’s largest network of local TV stations, to nearly double its reach, to 72 percent of American households. Straight out of Bizarro World: The Koch brothers will soon own a big piece of Time Inc., and the publisher of the National Enquirer could take over Time magazine itself. The future of CNN is up for grabs. Journalists are getting locked up and body-slammed for doing their jobs. Armed with secret algorithms and the overwhelming bulk of US digital-ad revenue, Google and Facebook can determine what news is amplified or sidelined. And, whoa, hold on for the coming “digital-news media crash.” read more

Source: TomDispatch.com

“We don’t know exactly where we’re at in the world, militarily, and what we’re doing,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, in October. That was in the wake of the combat deaths of four members of the Special Operations forces in the West African nation of Niger. Graham and other senators expressed shock about the deployment, but the global sweep of America’s most elite forces is, at best, an open secret.

Earlier this year before that same Senate committee—though Graham was not in attendance—General Raymond Thomas, the chief of US Special Operations Command (SOCOM), offered some clues about the planetwide reach of America’s most elite troops. “We operate and fight in every corner of the world,” he boasted. “Rather than a mere ‘break-glass-in-case-of-war’ force, we are now proactively engaged across the ‘battle space’ of the Geographic Combatant Commands… providing key integrating and enabling capabilities to support their campaigns and operations.” read more

Source: The Guardian

When Rick Perry was interrupted by climate-change protesters during his address to the National Petroleum Council in late September, the energy secretary was ready with a retort.

“You want to talk about something that saves lives? It’s the access to energy around the globe,” Perry said, countering a woman worried about deadly hurricanes and a man whose hometown is being submerged by the rising Philippine Sea. “I am proud to be a part of this industry. I am proud to be an American.” read more

Source: Alternet

The vultures have already begun to circle around Syria for the contracts to reconstruct the country.

For the past six years, ‘Syria’ had come to refer to war and the refugee crisis. News about Syria rushed onto the front pages. The devastation of the country seized the imagination of people across the world. What was this war about? How could a country – seemingly stable – fall so quickly into the vortex of chaos? What about the millions of Syrians who were so hastily removed from their homes, hiding with family members inside Syria or rushing outside to refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey? read more