US Uses Food as a Political Weapon: From North Korea to Gaza
In the realm of US foreign policy, the necessities of life are often taken away from a population if they fail to follow the desired political line.
The Middle East: Allies in Disarray
For the last fifty years, United States policy in the Middle East has been built around its very close links with three countries: Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. In 2011, it is at odds with all three, and in very fundamental ways. It is also in public discord with Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China, and Brazil over its current policies in the region. It seems almost no one agrees with or follows the lead of the United States. One can hear the agonizing frustration of the president, the State Department, the Pentagon, and the CIA, all of whom see a situation careening out of control.
The War on Africa’s Family Farmers
Proposing grandiose solutions without first diagnosing the causes of what ails Africa and her people has never stopped the World Bank, corporations and the odd billionaire from prescribing the wrong medicine for the continent.
Foreclosure Crisis… and Opportunity
Source: In These Times
Two thousand and eleven is destined to become the Year of Foreclosures. The recession officially ended in June 2009, but the housing market’s implosion continues: Banks set a record by seizing more than 1 million homes in 2010, according to RealtyTrac Inc., and housing experts agree that foreclosures will soar higher this year.
Bank seizures would have been even more numerous last year if not for the “robo-signing” scandal that revealed widespread fraud and caused the country’s biggest banks to halt foreclosure proceedings in the fall. Loan servicers’ illegal habit of rapidly signing off on huge numbers of faulty mortgage documents also inspired something unprecedented: Attorneys general from all 50 states began investigating a system that had wrongfully pushed thousands of families out of their homes.
Indian Roads Endanger Ways of Life
Olive ridley sea turtles are amazing creatures. Every year between December and March, hundreds of them swim home to lay their eggs on the beaches of the coastal metropolis of Chennai, aka Madras, in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu.
Once shunned, Al-Jazeera has fans in Obama W.H.
Source: Politico
In the halls of American power, the Arab Spring has brought Al-Jazeera in from the cold.
Seven years after then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called the broadcaster’s reporting “vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable” and President George W. Bush joked about bombing it, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton praised it as “real news” in her recent Senate testimony.
Not only that, her staffers, as well as those of the CIA and the Obama White House, were attending the Congressional Correspondents’ Dinner as Al-Jazeera’s guests.