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Why Trump’s New Strategy for Afghanistan Is the Disaster You’d Expect It to Be

Vijay Prashad August 25, 2017 Vijay Prashad

Source: Alternet

On August 21, President Donald Trump announced that he plans to send more thousands of U.S. troops to Afghanistan to extend the American war that began in 2001. The speech Trump gave has no details, only a tweetable line: ‘We are not nation-building again. We are killing terrorists.’

Three days later, Trump’s senior general in Afghanistan, John Nicholson, said that the United States military would crush ISIS in Afghanistan. The Taliban, General Nicholson said, should come to the negotiation table, while the U.S. would expand its attack on ISIS and al-Qaeda. It is therefore reasonable to assume that when Trump said he wants the U.S. military to kill terrorists, he meant ISIS and al-Qaeda, not the Taliban. read more

Shannon Rivers protested Trump at the Phoenix rally on Tuesday. For Rivers, a tribal citizen of the Akimel O’odham of the Gila River Indian Community, the alliance between indigenous people and Latinos is personal. “Many [Latinos] are our family,” he said. Photo by Jenni Monet.

“This Is Our Land”: Indigenous Rights Activists Respond to White Supremacist Rhetoric

Jenni Monet August 25, 2017 Jenni Monet

“The historical trauma is still happening today. We’re still suffering but in different ways,” said Anthony Thosh Collins, a citizen of the Onk Akimel O’odham with the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community. For Collins and dozens of other indigenous rights activists, their message in response to recent white supremacist rhetoric was simple: “This is our land.”

The aftermath of a previous demolition of the Bedouin village of Al-Araqeeb (Getty Images)

The Resistance of Al-Araqeeb Village: How Palestinian Bedouins Refused to Surrender 116 Times

Ramzy Baroud August 21, 2017 Ramzy Baroud

On August 1, the Palestinian Bedouin village of Al-Araqeeb was destroyed for the 116th time. As soon as Israeli bulldozers finished their ugly deed and soldiers began evacuating the premises, the village resident immediately began rebuilding their homes. If the repeated destruction of the village is an indication of Israel's stubborn insistence to uproot Palestine's Bedouins, the rebuilding is indicative of the tenacity of the Bedouin community in Palestine.

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The Air We Breathe: A Conversation With Arundhati Roy

Ratik Asokan August 21, 2017 Ratik Asokan

Source: The Nation

The writer discusses her new novel, love, justice, and Indian politics.

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is a formal departure for you. Your previous novel, The God of Small Things, was essentially about a family. By contrast, Ministry is a sprawling political novel: It addresses impunity, caste, institutional violence, the rise of Hindutva, the troubles in Kashmir. You allude to this through a funny in-joke: In “The Reader’s Digest Book of English Grammar and Comprehension for Very Young Children,” which your protagonist Tilo is composing, she confesses that she “would like to write one of those sophisticated stories in which, even though nothing much happens, there’s a lot to write about.” But then she admits that this “can’t be done in Kashmir. It’s not sophisticated what happens here. There’s too much blood for good literature.” What are the challenges of dealing with this sort of subject matter? read more

Onay Martínez holds a sugar-apple on his farm, Tierra Brava, in western Cuba, where he practices conservation agriculture and has turned this sustainable system that minimally disturbs the soil into a model in his country. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

Conservation Agriculture Sprouts in Cuban Fields

Ivet González August 21, 2017 Ivet González

At the entrance, the Tierra Brava farm looks like any other family farm in the rural municipality of Los Palacios, in the westernmost province of Cuba. But as you drive in, you see that the traditional furrows are not there, and that freshly cut grass covers the soil. “For more than five years we’ve been practicing conservation agriculture (CA),” said Onay Martínez, who works 22 hectares of state-owned land. He was referring to a specific kind of agroecology which, besides not using chemicals, diversifies species on farms and preserves the soil using plant coverage and no plowing.