Vietnam

While some pundits continue to downplay the increasingly strong partnership between Russia and China, the reality is that as Russia’s economy continues to grow and as China’s geo-political pronouncements continue to become more wide reaching, the world is witnessing the final stage of a new geo-political alignment that has been many years in the making.
China and Russia are now, not only on the same side of many global issues but they are speaking in a singular voice with a similarly loud volume.

Vietnam’s economic expansion is set to grow further as Turkey has expressed its commitment to expand economic ties with Hanoi.
Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim has stated,

“Our country will maintain its strategy to increase its trade and economic effectiveness in the Far East, mainly in Asian market.
Cooperating with a country that has high strategic importance like Vietnam and taking this cooperation further are among our priorities… Turkish investors contribute to Vietnam’s economy by investing over $700 million”.

It has been amusing to watch the New York Times and other mainstream media outlets express their dismay over the rise and spread of “fake news.” These publications take it as an obvious truth that what they provide is straightforward, unbiased, fact-based reporting. They do offer such news, but they also provide a steady flow of their own varied forms of fake news, often by disseminating false or misleading information supplied to them by the national security state, other branches of government, and sites of corporate power.

In February 2014, a United States-sponsored coup was initiated in the Ukraine in which President Viktor Yanukovych was illegally ousted from power. Over three years later, the putsch has done nothing but plunge the Ukraine, a tortured country plundered throughout modern history (by the West), into another abyss. In a 2015 interview with CNN, then US president Barack Obama openly confessed that “we had brokered a deal to transition power in Ukraine”.

“Trump has nothing to do with the anti-Russia campaign and the public remains indifferent, while an improbable coalition of the Congress and the jeering media is orchestrating the chorus.” By M.K. Bhadrakumar | Asia Times | July 30, 2017 An instance of such monumental patience is extremely rare, if not unprecedented, in Russian diplomacy: Moscow […]

The Ohio National Guard moves in on protesters at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, May 4, 1970. (AP Photo)
WASHINGTON – A federal judge hastened completion of a documentary decades in the making about the FBI’s role in the Vietnam anti-war movement Thursday by ordering the agency to churn out nearly 3,000 pages of documents a month.
According to an internal policy, the FBI was only releasing requested records in chunks of 500 at a time to Nina Gilden Seavey, a filmmaker and professor at George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs.

Retrieved from the memory hole: British intervention in Greece in the 1940s
by Ian Sinclair
Open Democracy
19 June 2017

Over the years, Russia has fought more wars against Turkey than any other country, even more than Poland. Likewise, between 1904 and 1905 Russia fought a war with Japan whose devastating outcome for Russia lead to a destabilising revolution at home. Russia’s relations with Japan did not get much better as the century rolled on. The Soviet Union was on the opposite side of the Second World War vis-a-vis Japan and territorial disputes over the Kuril Islands remain unresolved into the 21st century.

Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte has responded to the ISIS beheading of two Vietnamese civilian sailors captured off the cost of the Philippine island of Sibago.
The identities of the sailors has been confirmed as Hoang Trung Thong and Hoang Va Hai.

By Fred Donner | CounterPunch | February 10, 2017 After, or rather in spite of, a century of French, Japanese, and American military presence, Vietnam’s independence in 1975 was always inevitable for a number of important reasons. This is not to cast an aspersion on the U.S. military. It is simply an historical fact. Although […]