Новости за 16.10.2018

South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s meeting with North Korean Chairman Kim Jong-un on September 18-20 culminated in the signing of the Pyongyang Declaration, which marked a significantadvance towards peace and heralded a welcome warming in relations. Since that time, however, contradictions within the Trump administration’s North Korea policy threaten to forestall further progress and test More

Gunslinging Our Way to a Terminal Salvation The word “decadence” means extravagance, luxury, and self-indulgence with a sense of moral decline. Most of us living in America live in luxury and extravagance with the opportunity to self-indulge compared to many humans and non humans around the world. I know things are bad now for many Americans and More

In understanding contemporary Mexican politics and society, the careful observer might well draw a line before and after October 2, 1968. That was the day when Mexican soldiers killed, wounded and detained hundreds of students and civilians who had peacefully assembled in the Tlatelolco section of Mexico City to demand a more democratic government and More

Representatives from the nations that, along with the United States, signed on to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JPOA), are still trying desperately to salvage the agreement, which is on life support since the U.S. pulled out of it. The latest attempt concerns SWIFT, and Iranian access to it. SWIFT, officially the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, is a secure messaging service that transmits millions of instructions per day to banks and other financial institutions. Читать дальше...

On Tuesday October 16, award-winning Indigenous investigative journalist and author Tanya Talaga starts her five-city CBC Massey Lectures series focusing on Indigenous suicide in Canada. The accompanying book of the same name, All Our Relations: Finding The Way Forward,  also officially launches that day; the set of lectures then airs on Canada’s public broadcaster’s evening More

I received the Tony Benn Diaries as a gift last Christmas, and have been working my way through them a few pages at a time each day. Tony Benn (1925-2014) was Britain’s most enduring and influential postwar socialist politician. Born into an aristocratic family, he first made his name for his long and ultimately successful More

Senator Elizabeth Warren 317 Hart Senate Office Building Washington, D.C. Dear Senator Warren: As a constituent, I have noted with interest your suggestion that you will “take a hard look” at running for president in 2020, even as you campaign for reelection to the Senate next month. Forgive me for saying that I interpret that More

On October 11, Facebook announced the removal of 559 pages and 251 accounts from its service, accusing the account holders of “spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior.” The purged users stand accused of posting “massive amounts of content … to drive traffic to their websites” with suspicious “timing ahead of US midterm elections.” Facebook admits to More

In the early seventies, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger were torn to distraction by a Greek refugee journalist living in the U.S. named Elias Demetracopoulos. He had been definitively documenting — on an ongoing basis — the ties they had with the corrupt junta ruling the cradle of democracy in unprecedented authoritarian fashion. No matter More

With China and Russia named as the two greatest threats to continuing American hegemony end of last year, the velvet gloves have come off the Washington establishment, baring their knuckles against the Middle Kingdom in plain view of the entire world. In recent weeks, anti-China rhetorics and vitriol emanating from the Oval Office and Capitol More

The Pre- and Post-Game of the Brazilian Presidential Elections: An Introduction to Dunker’s “The Rules of the Game” By Peter Lehman Amidst a polarized electorate, growing disillusionment with democratic politics, and thirteen candidates running for President, the far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro emerged the initial winner of last week’s presidential election in Brazil.  Bolsonaro, an ex-army More

You’d think that the 100th anniversary of the sinking of a Royal Mail ship – torpedoed in the Irish Sea in 1918 with the loss of 569 lives – would cause a few ripples in Brexit Britain. Most of the 771 passengers aboard were British soldiers heading back to the Western Front to fight for More

Canst thou remember a time before we came unto this cell? – Prospero to Miranda Sacred Smokes, an extraordinary anti-memoir by Theodore C. Van Alst, Jr.,is the perfect cure for the current poisonous trade in subprime autobiography – a humorless confessional fad that has snuffed out anything left over from better days in US print, from More

One should not sell bombs to a government that abuses human rights, which means murders a man without using one of the bombs. If Saudi Arabia had murdered a man using a bomb, it would be fine to sell Saudi Arabia more bombs. But Saudi Arabia murdered with a non-bomb weapon, and so shouldn’t have More

There is a popular line in elite DC circles that political figures are not supposed to talk about the Federal Reserve Board’s monetary policy. This was the theme of Catherine Rampell’s Washington Post column in today’s paper. The piece complained about Donald Trump’s criticisms of the Fed’s interest rate hikes and said that countries where More