Global News and Analysis

Source: The Guardian Unlimited

Intelligence agencies will always seek to collect more data. But the courts that oversee them must be as concerned about due process as they are with secrets

The US intelligence community is in a very poor position to be trusted with protecting civil liberties while engaging in intelligence work. When you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail; when you’re a skilled intelligence professional, everything looks like a vital source for collection.

Members of the intelligence community are, it’s true, under immense stress to prevent a devastating national catastrophe. I understand a little of how that feels: while working as an analyst in Iraq, thousands of military personnel, contractors and local civilians were dependent on our ability to effectively understand the threats we were facing, and to explain them to US military commanders, the commanders of Iraqi forces and the civilian leadership of both nations. read more

Source: Truthout

Alberto Villatoro, a farmer in the fertile region of Los Cacaos in Chiapas, Mexico, recalls, with a mixture of sadness and anger, how innocently he used to walk over the area’s silvery blue rocks.

“I can remember those metals in the river ever since I was a child,” he told Truthout. “We would kick them around on the paths, unaware that it was titanium.”

Now those same rocks have become highly sought after, and the Chinese mining company Honour Up Trading is seeking to gain control of large swaths of land in Villatoro’s community to exploit one of the biggest seams of titanium in Mexico. “We’ve already had open-pit titanium mining here [in 2009]. Now they want to build the tunnel and leave us living on land resembling an eggshell,” he said. “That would be the end of our shared land.” read more

Source: Foreign Policy in Focus

The tide may be turning against the Obama administration’s enormous, corporate-friendly investment pact. Is it too politically toxic for an election year?

Despite the best efforts of activists, public scholars, and countless others throughout the world, the U.S. and trade ministers from 11 other Pacific Rim nations announced recently that they’d reached a deal on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP — a massive new trade and investment pact that would set rules governing approximately 40 percent of the global economy. read more

Source: The Guardian Unlimited

Hundreds of full-time New York City workers are homeless and in San Francisco bus drivers sleep in their cars to save money: this is a never-ending crisis

In the United States, disaster has become our most common mode of life. Proof that our daily existence was something other than a simmering, smoldering disaster has been historically held somewhat at bay by the myth that hard work equals some kind of subsistence living. For the more deluded amongst us, this ‘American dream’ even got us to believe we could be something called ‘middle class’. We were deceived. read more

Source: Common Dreams

A famous victory won by the hard struggle of students. We are all humbled.’

Facing the largest student uprisings since South Africans toppled apartheid, President Jacob Zuma pledged Friday to halt tuition fee increases in the year 2016—prompting declarations of victory, as well as calls to continue the mass mobilizations until free education is won for all.

“A famous victory won by the hard struggle of students. We are all humbled,” Salim Vally, associate professor of education and director of the Center for Education Rights and Transformation at the University of Johannesburg, told Common Dreams. “The determination and resoluteness of the students forced the hand of government. This was clear to many even before the sun rose this morning.” read more

Source: Huffington Post

The controversial U.S. drone strike program in the Middle East aims to pinpoint and kill terrorist leaders, but new documents indicate that a staggering number of these “targeted killings” affect far more people than just their targets.

According to a new report from The Intercept, nearly 90 percent of people killed in recent drone strikes in Afghanistan “were not the intended targets” of the attacks.

Documents detailing a special operations campaign in northeastern Afghanistan, Operation Haymaker, show that between January 2012 and February 2013, U.S. special operations airstrikes killed more than 200 people. Of those, only 35 were the intended targets. During one five-month period of the operation, according to the documents, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets. In Yemen and Somalia, where the U.S. has far more limited intelligence capabilities to confirm the people killed are the intended targets, the equivalent ratios may well be much worse.  read more