UNITED KINGDOM

Liam Fox, right, British Secretary of State for International Trade, and Damien Green, the Work and Pensions Secretary smile as they leave 10 Downing Street following the weekly cabinet meeting in London, Tuesday, March 21, 2017. (AP/Alastair Grant)
The UK government has provided fossil fuel companies with £6.9 billion in financial support since 2000, according to a joint investigation by Energydesk and Private Eye.

21st Century Wire says…
To echo Shakespeare’s ‘As You Like It’, Act 2, Scene 7…
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts…

One of the longstanding functions of the ‘mainstream’ media is to channel government ideology about who are ‘the Good Guys’ – that’s ‘us’ and our allies – and who are the ‘Bad Guys’ – ‘Putin’s Russia’, ‘Saddam’s Iraq’, ‘Chavez’s Venezuela’, ‘Gaddafi’s Libya’ (until rehabilitated for a while by Blair) and North Korea.

British Prime Minister Theresa May has surprised many by calling for a general election to be held on the 8 of June.
After the Brexit vote in June of last year, many immediately called for a general election in order for Parliament to better reflect the mood of the country in respect of the largely unexpected victory for those favouring Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union.

21st Century Wire says…
British Prime Minister Theresa May has announced that a General Election will take place on June 8th.

I recently returned from a holiday in Costa Rica, a country I’d wanted to visit for some years. I bought two T-shirts there. One has an image of an automatic rifle with a flower sticking out its barrel and the words “NO ARMY” written across it in the colour of blood. The other T-shirt has an image of an artillery piece, with the words “No army since 1948” on it.

• Read Part One here
The United States (US) government, only 23 years old, had declared war on the British Empire, beginning Mr. Madison’s War. This article continues the series about this war, showing that the largely agrarian US engaged in an imperialist war, lasting from June 18, 1812 until February 18, 1815, with an economically and commercially superior foe, the Royal Crown.

For Palestinians, 2017 is a year of significant anniversaries.
While historians mark May 15th as the anniversary of the date on which Palestinians were expelled from their historic homeland in 1948, the fact is the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians began in earnest in 1947.
In strict historical terms 1947 and ‘48 were the years in which Palestine was conquered and depopulated.

Why is the reparations movement in the Anglophone Caribbean not putting capitalism on trial in its campaign to force British imperialism to provide financial compensation for its industrial and agricultural capitalists’ enslavement of Africans? To what extent is capitalism such a sacred spirit or god whose name should not be publicly called in order to avoid attracting its vindictive and punishing rebuke?

21st Century Wire says…
The ‘Doomsday Clock‘ celebrates its 70th anniversary this year where it rests at two and a half minutes to midnight. ‘Celebrate’ and ‘anniversary’ are most juxtaposing here in this context as one would hope we never ever reach midnight.