Global News and Analysis

Source: The New Internationalist

The restoration of diplomatic relations between the US and Cuba announced on Wednesday is welcome – and long overdue.

Cubans have been celebrating in Havana. And – not that you’d guess from some of the news reporting from Miami – it’s been welcomed by Cubans living in the US too.  

The fiercely anti-Castro lobby that reporters go to when wanting ‘the Cuban exile view’ is now in a minority. This is partly due to demographic change as the hardliners grow old or die and a new generation of Cubans living in the US want relations between the two countries to be ‘normalized’. read more

Source: The Nation

The slick, oily underside of Correa’s “citizens’ revolution.”

At the point where the lazy, black-water Cuyabeno runs into the faster currents of the Aguarico, carrying a chill from their Andean source, sandbars stretch out from the verdant banks. These are the Playas de Cuyabeno, and the name has attached itself to the indigenous Cofan community in this region, deep inside Ecuador’s portion of the Amazon Basin. Until very recently, an assortment of thatched, wooden dwellings sat above the river. Today it has been replaced by an orderly hamlet of evenly spaced, two-story, prefab houses, all steel and white plaster, connected by improbably clean roads, and sprinkled with basketball courts and childrens’ playgrounds. This is Ecuador’s first Comunidad de Milenio (Millenium Community), a $21 million benefit from the proceeds of the Pañacocha oil field that borders the community. Under the terms of the country’s 2010 Hydrocarbon Law, a portion of the royalties from oil production must be ploughed back into the communities affected by drilling and extraction. read more

Source: Tom Dispatch

It was the most thrilling bureaucratic document I’ve ever seen for just one reason: it was dated the 21st day of the month of Thermidor in the Year Six. Written in sepia ink on heavy paper, it recorded an ordinary land auction in France in what we would call the late summer of 1798. But the extraordinary date signaled that it was created when the French Revolution was still the overarching reality of everyday life and such fundamentals as the distribution of power and the nature of government had been reborn in astonishing ways. The new calendar that renamed 1792 as Year One had, after all, been created to start society all over again. read more

Source: ZNet

The establishment of diplomatic ties between the US and Cuba has been widely hailed as an event of historic importance. Correspondent John Lee Anderson, who has written perceptively about the region, sums up a general reaction among liberal intellectuals when he writes, in the New Yorker, that:

Barack Obama has shown that he can act as a statesman of historic heft. And so, at this moment, has Raúl Castro. For Cubans, this moment will be emotionally cathartic as well as historically transformational. Their relationship with their wealthy, powerful northern American neighbor has remained frozen in the nineteen-sixties for fifty years. To a surreal degree, their destinies have been frozen as well. For Americans, this is important, too. Peace with Cuba takes us momentarily back to that golden time when the United States was a beloved nation throughout the world, when a young and handsome J.F.K. was in office—before Vietnam, before Allende, before Iraq and all the other miseries—and allows us to feel proud about ourselves for finally doing the right thing.” read more

Source: ABC News

The U.S. military has used high value targeting of insurgent leaders in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the CIA also uses drone strikes to target high value al Qaeda targets in Pakistan and Yemen.

The 18 page secret document is dated July 7, 2009 and is entitled “Best Practices in Counterinsurgency: Making High Value Targeting Operations an Effective Counterinsurgency Tool”.

The anti-secrecy Wikileaks posted the report on its website Thursday. A press release accompanying the release said the report was compiled by the CIA’s Office of Transnational Issues and “weighs the pros and cons of killing “insurgent” leaders in assassination plots.” read more

Source: The Guardian Unlimited

There’s red on the ceiling and red on the floor, red dripping from the window sills and red globules splattered across the walls. It looks like the artist Anish Kapoor has been let loose with his wax cannon again. But this, in fact, is what the making of Christmas looks like; this is the very heart of the real Santa’s workshop – thousands of miles from the North Pole, in the Chinese city of Yiwu.

Our yuletide myth-making might like to imagine that Christmas is made by rosy-cheeked elves hammering away in a snow-bound log cabin somewhere in the Arctic Circle. But it’s not. The likelihood is that most of those baubles, tinsel and flashing LED lights you’ve draped liberally around your house came from Yiwu, 300km south of Shanghai – where there’s not a (real) pine tree nor (natural) snowflake in sight. read more