It was amusing to see Peter Baker refer to the Democratic Party legislators’ threat to President Obama’s possible “legacy” of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), often described in the media as a “free trade” agreement, although Baker here makes it only a “trade: deal” (“A Trade Deal And a Legacy,” New York Times, June 15, 2015).
I don’t really know, I don’t understand how it feels: to live in a rich European country, which is rich mainly because it has been directly plundering many poor nations around the world. Or it has been plundering by association, through its membership in some extremist organization like NATO. To live there, refusing to acknowledge why it is rich, how it became rich.
Palaces, theatres, railroads, hospitals and parks in that rich country are built on broken skeletons and restless specters, on lakes of blood and shameless theft.
An African Union increasingly coming under the influence of China is fighting NATO sponsored destabilization in the form of Wahhabi terrorism such as Al Shabaab and Boko Haram.
The spate of terrorist attacks in France, Tunisia and Kuwait on June 26th brought condemnation from most of the world’s leaders, especially the terrorist attack against the US Air Products plant in Isere, France, which received most of the media attention.
In 2009, after years of bloody insurrection in Congo, General Laurent Nkunda was ‘arrested’ with great fanfare in Rwanda. Wanted for war crimes and crimes against humanity, not a word about his situation has been reported for years. Are the regimes in Rwanda and Uganda using Laurent Nkunda and comrades in a new thrust to destabilize eastern Congo?
I believe that there will be ultimately be a clash between the oppressed and those who do the oppressing. I believe that there will be a clash between those who want freedom, justice and equality for everyone and those who want to continue the system of exploitation. I believe that there will be that kind of clash, but I don’t think it will be based on the color of the skin…
— Malcolm X, One Month Before His Murder
2015’s opening offers an appropriate time to examine high technology and its development of weapons of mass destruction and other threats to the Earth. My own background to write about these issues includes being raised in the Southern military family that gave its name to Ft. Bliss, Texas. I served briefly as an officer in the U.S. Army, resigned my commission to protest the American War on Vietnam, and have engaged in an extensive study of the military.
On October 1, 2014, a remarkable event occurred in Britain. The British Broadcasting Corporation’s BBC 2’s This World telecast Rwanda’s Untold Story, a documentary produced by Jane Corbin and John Conroy that offered a critical view of Rwandan President Paul Kagame and of his and the British and U.S.
Ebola! Ebola! Ebola! The word is everywhere—the name of the deadly virus from West Africa with a seventy percent fatality rate. A sense of dread and dismay is beginning to spread through our country. Asking vital questions will shed light on how to stop the spread of the current outbreak as well as prevent future outbreaks. Policies impacting both infectious diseases and those institutions that focus on treating, curing and stemming outbreaks need to be reworked to offer stronger support for nations with almost no public health facilities.
On 17 July 1998, the international community reached an historic milestone — that has so far proved of little useful purpose — when 120 States adopted the Rome Statute, the legal basis for establishing a permanent International Criminal Court (ICC).
He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision – he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath, ‘The horror! The horror!’”
— Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
