As is patently obvious, the U.S. is in trouble. Climate-driven heat waves and fires grip the nation. An already faltering economy with deep contradictions can only tank given the shock of a pandemic that has necessitated varying degrees of sequestering. In fact, the downturn had already started before COVID-19 hit.
As these words are being written, the foreign ministers of the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain are in Washington DC to sign agreements to normalize relations between their countries and the state of Israel. While the United States and Israel were represented by President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Arab states sent their foreign ministers to represent their countries at the signing ceremony.
On September 2, the Israeli government approved a proposal that allows the military to indefinitely withhold the bodies of Palestinians who have been killed by the Israeli army. The proposal was made by the country’s Defense Minister, Benny Gantz.
Gorgon Stare will be looking at a whole city, so there will be no way for the adversary to know what we’re looking at, and we can see everything. That same persistent eye in the sky may soon be deployed over U.S. cities.
The United States and Turkey have been plundering Syrian infrastructure for years. Beginning in late 2012 and continuing through 2013, some 300 industrial factories were dismantled and taken to Turkey from Aleppo, the industrial capital of Syria. “Machinery and goods were loaded on trucks and carried off to Turkey through the Cilvegozu and Ceylanpinar crossings.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is an alliance in name alone. Recent events notwithstanding, the brewing conflict over territorial waters in the Eastern Mediterranean indicates that the military union between mostly Western countries is faltering.
You can map the nearly 20-year journey from the 9/11 attacks to the COVID-19 pandemic by the freedoms we’ve lost along the way.
The road we have been traveling has been littered with the wreckage of our once-vaunted liberties, especially those enshrined in the Fourth Amendment.
The assaults on our freedoms that began with the post-9/11 passage of the USA Patriot Act laid the groundwork for the eradication of every vital constitutional safeguard against government overreach, corruption and abuse.
Back in the 1970s, the left, and even many liberals, were clear that Nixon’s dropping of napalm on Vietnamese villages was an abomination. By the 1990s, some thought Bill Clinton’s bombing of Yugoslavia was, perhaps, humanitarian.
Election season is a difficult time to develop good policies towards Latin America, since both Democrats and Republicans cater to the small, but organized, conservative factions of the Latinx community in Florida, vying for their votes.
When I first met Julian Assange more than ten years ago, I asked him why he had started WikiLeaks. He replied: “Transparency and accountability are moral issues that must be the essence of public life and journalism.”
I had never heard a publisher or an editor invoke morality in this way. Assange believes that journalists are the agents of people, not power: that we, the people, have a right to know about the darkest secrets of those who claim to act in our name.
