Since the federal government militarized its counter-narcotics efforts in 2006, more than 200,000 people have been killed on the ever-shifting front lines of Mexico’s drug war. Now the country’s left-leaning President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is proposing a historic overhaul of Mexico’s drug laws, including rolling back decades of prohibition.
In 1948, my grandfather, along with thousands of Badrasawis, was expelled by Israeli military forces from our ancestral village of Beit Daras in Palestine. Like hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from over 500 other villages, my grandfather assumed he would be back home in a few weeks. “Why bother to haul the good blankets on the back of a donkey, exposing them to the dust of the journey, when we know that we will return to Beit Daras in a week or so?” he asked my bewildered grandmother, Zeinab.
Those who feel relieved by thinking that Trump will not engage in an actual war and is merely interested in making threats should realize that the war has already begun. U.S. sanctions are producing a level of suffering comparable to that of wartime.
Source: The Progressive
Winona LaDuke seems like the perfect person to talk with about the myriad and connected threats we face as a democracy and as a people. Over her long career as an environmentalist and political activist, she has, as she puts it, “spent most of my life fighting stupid projects created by white guys in cities, from what I can figure. I’ve fought uranium mining, coal strip-mining projects, mega-dam projects, nuclear waste dumps—how many more stupid ideas can you come up with? Oh wait, they came up with another one!”
Activists are targeting the companies that make ICE run.
Source: Roar Magazine
Eight years after the Arab Spring caused little stir in Algeria, a new generation has since come of age and is taking on the old guard — but the problems run deep.
When in early February Algeria’s ailing octogenarian president Abdelaziz Bouteflika announced his intention to run for the presidency for a fifth term, millions of Algerians took to the streets in response. After weeks of rallies, Bouteflika was forced to resign on April 2, only to be replaced by a triad of government cronies: Abdelkader Bensalah as interim-president, Noureddine Bedoui as prime minister and Major General Ahmed Gaid Salah, who has emerged as the key power broker in the country.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019