Global News and Analysis

Source: The Nation

Syrians fleeing the fighting at home have found themselves targeted amid Egypt’s political upheaval.

Abu Shihab recalls when armed police officers in full riot gear barged into his cramped apartment and led him away in handcuffs, along with a dozen other Syrian refugees. “They were dressed like they were ready for a war,” he says. He stands in the sun-washed courtyard of Masaken Othman, a cluster of cracked reddish-brown residential buildings rising from the dust in Cairo’s desert outskirts. Trash and car tires float in fetid green water seeping from a drainpipe onto the sand. read more

Source: The Guardian Unlimited

The story of Aaron Alexis is still obscure. But effects of an over-taxed US military are painfully visible among 2 million veterans.

While details are gradually emerging, there is much we don’t know about the navy yard shooter Aaron Alexis. Yet, the shooting rampage of the navy veteran who retained a contractor’s pass to the navy yard in Washington DC has a context: a stressed and over-extended US military, exhausted by more than a decade of “war on terror” tours of duty, and a huge population of veterans who bear the mental and physical scars of their service and often struggle to reintegrate. read more

Source: Earth Island Journal

Canadian author Naomi Klein is so well known for her blade-sharp commentary that it’s easy to forget that she is, above all, a first-rate reporter. I got a glimpse into her priorities as I was working on this interview. Klein told me she was worried that some of the things she had said would make it hard for her to land an interview with a president of the one of the Big Green groups (read below and you’ll see why). She was more interested in nabbing the story than being the story; her reporting trumped any opinion-making. read more

Source: Yes Magazine

Just two weeks ago, the United States stood at the brink of yet another war. President Obama was announcing plans to order U.S. military strikes on Syria, with consequences that no one could predict.

Then things shifted. In an extraordinarily short time, the people petitioned, called their representatives in Congress, held rallies, and used social media to demand a nonviolent approach to the crisis. The march toward war slowed.

During Tuesday night’s address to the nation, President Obama said his administration will work with close allies, and with Russia and Syria, toward a diplomatic solution: pushing a resolution through the United Nations Security Council requiring the Syrian government to give up its chemical weapons. He also said the United States will give U.N. weapons inspectors a chance to report their findings on the chemical weapons attack of August 21. read more

Source: The Nation

Sandy Nurse seemed to have lost what tolerance she once had for long meetings. Even though the basement of the DeKalb Library in Brooklyn was air-conditioned on an especially sticky July day, and even though the meeting’s agenda was only partly finished, she told the handful of other eco-activists there that she was sorry, but she had to go build some compost bins, and she left.

Nurse never really looked all that happy in meetings. As one of the earliest members of Occupy Wall Street’s Direct Action Working Group—as well as one of the last—she attended a lot of them, including a lot of quite horrible ones. She could often be seen sitting at the far end of the oblong circle, away from the fray but guiding it nonetheless with her formidable evil eye. Where she would come alive was in the streets, leading marches through the winding canyons of the Financial District or tricking the cops with an unexpected reversal of course to get the march to where it wasn’t supposed to go: Wall Street. read more

Source: Tom Dispatch

They’re involved in Algeria and Angola, Benin and Botswana, Burkina Faso and Burundi, Cameroon and the Cape Verde Islands. And that’s just the ABCs of the situation. Skip to the end of the alphabet and the story remains the same: Senegal and the Seychelles, Togo and Tunisia, Uganda and Zambia. From north to south, east to west, the Horn of Africa to the Sahel, the heart of the continent to the islands off its coasts, the US military is at work. Base construction, security cooperation engagements, training exercises, advisory deployments, special operations missions, and a growing logistics network, all undeniable evidence of expansion—except at US Africa Command. read more