Global News and Analysis

Source: The Washington Post

In an alley in Denver, police gunned down a 17-year-old girl joyriding in a stolen car. In the backwoods of North Carolina, police opened fire on a gun-wielding moonshiner. And in a high-rise apartment in Birmingham, Ala., police shot an elderly man after his son asked them to make sure he was okay. Douglas Harris, 77, answered the door with a gun.

The three are among at least 385 people shot and killed by police nationwide during the first five months of this year, more than two a day, according to a Washington Post analysis. That is more than twice the rate of fatal police shootings tallied by the federal government over the past decade, a count that officials concede is incomplete. read more

Source: TeleSUR English

On Sunday, people across Spain took to the polls for this year’s highly anticipated municipal and regional elections. The outcome of the vote has ended up shaking the status quo, catapulting a host of social activists and citizens’ organizations onto the political scene, and exploding a whole new set of opportunities for the country’s grassroots movements as they explore innovative new ways to negotiate the precarious balance between resisting austerity and reclaiming the commons while retaining a commitment to direct democracy. read more

Source: The Guardian Unlimited

It can be difficult, sometimes, to make sense of all the things that have happened to me in the last five years

Today marks five years since I was ordered into military confinement while deployed to Iraq in 2010. I find it difficult to believe, at times, just how long I have been in prison. Throughout this time, there have been so many ups and downs – it often feels like a physical and emotional roller coaster.

It all began in the first few weeks of 2010, when I made the life-changing decision to release to the public a repository of classified (and unclassified but “sensitive” ) documents that provided a simultaneously horrific and beautiful outlook on the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. After spending months preparing to deploy to Afghanistan in 2008, switching to Iraq in 2009 and actually staying in Iraq from 2009-10, I quickly and fully recognized the importance of these documents to the world at large. read more

Source: Jacobin Magazine

The US is trying to win “hearts and minds” in Africa. It’s not going well.

Today, as the US military increasingly sees Africa as a “battlefield” against Islamist extremism, a significant number of its operations there have taken on the form of a textbook hearts-and-minds campaign that harkens back to failed US efforts in Southeast Asia during the 1960s and 1970s and more recently in the greater Middle East.

In Vietnam, the so-called civilian half of the war — building schools, handing out soap, and offering rudimentary medical care — was obliterated by American heavy firepower that wiped out homes, whole hamlets, and whatever goodwill had been gained. As a result, US counterinsurgency doctrine was tossed into the military’s dustbin — only to be resurrected decades later, as the Iraq War raged, by then-Gen. and later CIA Director David Petraeus. read more

Source: TeleSUR English

History has shown that countries that refuse to pay their debts fall harder but recover faster than those that do not. So why does Greece’s left-led government not simply get it over with?

As the Greek debt drama finally comes to a head these weeks, with the Syriza-led government quietly warning the U.S. Treasury Secretary and the chief of the International Monetary Fund that its last-remaining cash reserves are now all but depleted and the government will not be paying the Fund if it does not receive an infusion of new cash before early June, a critical question arises: why do the radical leftists not simply get it over with and declare a default on the outstanding debt? What do they care about their creditors? read more

Source: Foreign Policy in Focus

A growing movement among Roma activists looks to celebrate their ancestors’ resistance to persecution — and to pick up where they left off.

On May 16, 1944, the Nazis scheduled the extermination of the Roma in the Auschwitz II-Birkenau’s Zigeunerlager. But the transfer of the Roma to the gas chamber met with vigorous resistance. Approximately 6,000, Roma alerted to the Nazis’ extermination plans, barricaded themselves in the Zigeunerlager buildings and prepared to fight back against the German SS. The guards withdrew in the face of this uprising. read more