Is the Pentagon’s revelation of a mineral bonanza in Afghanistan aimed at driving down the price of lithium and thereby undercutting Bolivia’s efforts to bring on a new global source?
Even as officialdom lectures us about the dangers of using cell phones while driving, the auto industry is about to bring us dashboard web access—with no intervention from the authorities.
The Japanese space agency is embarking on a mammoth $2.2 billion project to put humanoid robots on the moon and create an unmanned robot lunar base by 2020.
Iran's government has unleashed a wave of arrests in western Khuzestan province since the Sept. 22 deadly attack on a military parade in the city of Ahwaz, with sweeps targetting dissidents, journalists, intellectuals, human rights activists and members of the Ahwazi Arab minority generally. Some 1,000 Ahwazis have been detained in the weeks since the attack, with at least 600 still being detained. Many of the detained have been taken to unknown destinations, with their families denied any contact or even information on their whereabouts. Local rights groups report that security forces have raided activists' homes, and the detained include women and the elderly. Karim Dahimi, an Ahwazi human rights worker based in London, said that the Iranian government has been systematically detaining Ahwazi activists in clandestine torture facilities known as "black sites." Ahwazi Arabs in the international diaspora have been holding demonstrations at Iranian consulates demanding an end to the regime's anti-Arab racism and repression (Image: The Herald Report)
At its annual convention in Denver, the National Congress of American Indians spoke strongly against the Trump administration’s decision to halt the restoration of ancestral lands to the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe of Massachusetts, invoking a return to the disastrous policies of the “termination era.” At issue are 321 acres where the Wampanoag sought to build a casino. The US Interior Department issued a decision in 2015 to take the lands into trust for the trib, and ground was broken on the casino the following year. But opponents challenged the land transfer in the courts. In April 2016, a federal judge found the Interior decision had bypassed the Supreme Court’s 2009 ruling in Carcieri v Salazar, concerning a land recovery effort by the Narragansett Indian Nation of Rhode Island. In the Carcieri case, the high court ruled that the federal government had no power to grant land in trust for tribes recognized after passage of the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. In September of this year, the Interior decision was reversed by Tara Sweeney, the new assistant secretary for Indian Affairs. Sweeney determined that the Mashpee Wampanoag-—whose ancestors welcomed some of the first settlers to the Americas more than 300 years ago—could not have their homelands restored because they were only federally recognized in 2007. (Photo: Indianz.com)
The government of Bolivia announced a preliminary study for a program of uranium exploration in PotosĂ department, and broached the possibility of uranium exports to Venezuela.
As Obama pledges to mobilize 1,200 National Guard troops to the Mexican border, Fox News ups the ante with claims of a Somali terrorist threat in Texas.
Mexican President Felipe CalderĂłn, speaking at the US Congress, urged reinstatement of the assault-weapon ban, saying violence in Mexico escalated when it expired six years ago.
Noam Chomsky, once demonized as a crypto-Zionist on this website, has been barred by Israeli authorities from entering the West Bank.
A Detroit area mosque was vandalized twice in a week, in a possible case of backlash following the attempted Times Square terror attack.
New York’s kneejerk jingos, already aghast that the “Freedom Tower” name has been dropped from the skyscraper going up at Ground Zero, are now protesting the building of a nearby mosque.
The oil industry—through its media flacks and bought politicians—is mobilizing to assure that the Gulf of Mexico disaster will not result in an offshore drilling moratorium.
