Global News and Analysis Archives - Page 142 of 294

Lion Forward Teams? Echo Casemate? Juniper Micron?

You could be forgiven if this jumble of words looks like nonsense to you. It isn’t. It’s the language of the U.S. military’s simmering African interventions; the patois that goes with a set of missions carried out in countries most Americans couldn’t locate on a map; the argot of conflicts now primarily fought by proxies and a former colonial power on a continent that the U.S. military views as a hotbed of instability and that hawkish pundits increasingly see as a growth area for future armed interventions. read more

The United States of Coal

Bill Bigelow March 11, 2014 Bill Bigelow

Source: Yes Magazine

“The United States of Energy” was a colorful series of lessons on the advantages of coal, aimed at 4th-graders—and sponsored by Big Coal. Here’s how educators and activists worked together to get it out of classrooms.

While developing activities on coal and the climate crisis in 2011 for Rethinking Schools magazine, I ran across a curriculum, The United States of Energy, from Scholastic, the venerable education publisher.

It was a colorful series of lessons, aimed at fourth-graders, which explored the various sources for energy in the United States. The material on coal discussed its many “advantages.” But when I looked for discussion of the disadvantages … nothing. read more

Saving Our Blue Future: Our Planet Needs a New Water Ethic

Maude Barlow March 11, 2014 Maude Barlow

Source: Foreign Policy in Focus

Have you heard? The world is running out of accessible clean water.

Humanity is polluting, mismanaging, and displacing our finite freshwater sources at an alarming rate. Since 1990, half the rivers in China have disappeared. The Ogallala Aquifer that supplies the U.S. breadbasket will be gone “in our lifetime,” the U.S. Department of Agriculture says.

By 2030, global demand for water will outstrip supply by 40 percent, a surefire recipe for great suffering. Five hundred scientists recently told UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon that our collective abuse of water has caused the planet to enter “a new geologic age” and that the majority of the planet’s population lives within 31 miles of an endangered water source. read more

Turkey in Turmoil

Jenna Krajeski March 11, 2014 Jenna Krajeski

Source: The Nation

Last summer’s protest movement has faded, but now, after eleven years in power, Prime Minister Erdogan faces unprecedented corruption allegations.

Although the Turkish Parliament is frequently the scene of rowdy discussion, it’s not often that a lawmaker leaves with a bloody nose. But these are not ordinary times in Turkey. On February 15, in a debate on a bill that would increase the government’s authority over the judiciary, an opposition speaker called Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan a “dictator” who wants to “control the entire system.” In response, members of Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) asked the speaker, “Are you drunk?” and rushed the podium. A video of the brawl that circulated on the Internet shows a blurry knot of dark suits, lawmakers in a group tantrum. Republican People’s Party (CHP) representative Ali Ihsan Kokturk emerged with a broken nose. The bill passed. read more

The Corporate One Percent Are The Real Welfare Queens

David Sirota March 11, 2014 David Sirota

Source: In These Times

Remember when President Obama was lambasted for saying “you didn’t build that”? Turns out he was right, at least when it comes to lots of stuff built by the world’s wealthiest corporations. That’s the takeaway from this week’s new study of 25,000 major taxpayer subsidy deals over the last two decades.

Entitled “Subsidizing the Corporate One Percent,” the report from the taxpayer watchdog group Good Jobs First shows that the world’s largest companies aren’t models of self-sufficiency and unbridled capitalism. To the contrary, they’re propped up by billions of dollars in welfare payments from state and local governments. read more

Chokwe Lumumba: A Revolutionary to the End

Bhaskar Sunkara March 2, 2014 Bhaskar Sunkara

Source: The Nation

The Jackson mayor had ambitious plans to bring “people power” and a “solidarity economy” to his city and state.

Chokwe Lumumba’s dilemma was simple: how to be a revolutionary in a decidedly non-revolutionary Mississippi.

It was a mission that seemed bound to alienate and polarize, even long before he became mayor of Jackson, home to a state capitol building flying a defiant Confederate battle flag and a city hall built by slave labor.

But when I went to Jackson to profile the newly elected Lumumba last year and in my conversations with Mississippians throughout this year, I was shocked at how hard it was to find someone who didn’t like him. Economic populists like Rickey Cole, chairman of the state Democratic Party, and his staff were keen to show solidarity with Jackson’s new administration. They talked about Lumumba’s honor and integrity, whatever their political differences. After his death, Cole called the mayor “a man by the people, of the people, and for the people.” read more