World oil prices peaked at $147 per barrel one year ago today—but the geological determinism of the “peak oil” theorists ignores the global political struggle for control of oil.
Guatemala’s special anti-corruption Court for High Risk Crimes sentenced former vice president Roxana Baldetti to prison for 15 years and six months for her role in the so-called "Magic Water" scandal. The case concerned the awarding of an $18 million dollar contract to decontaminate Lake Amatitlán, an important water source for peasant communities. The contract went to Israeli firm M. Tarcic Engineering Ltd, which claimed it had a "special formula" that could clean the lake within months. An investigation revealed that the "formula" consisted of water, salt and chlorine. The Authority for the Sustainable Management of Lake Amatitlán (AMSA), establsihed to oversee the clean-up, documented illegal dumping of agricultural and municipal waste into the Río Villalobos, which empties into the lake. The UN-backed International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) supported Guatemalan prosecutors in the conspiracy case against Baldetti. (Photo via EmisorasUnidas)
UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and the environment David Boyd issued an urgent call for accelerated action to combat climate change. The statement comes after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a report on the impacts of global warming of 2°C—the increase permitted under the Paris Accord. Boyd said that climate change is “one of the greatest threats to human rights” and will have devastating effects on the “rights to life, health, food, housing, and water, as well as the right to a healthy environment.” In order to meet human rights obligations, Boyd called on counties to exceed their Paris Agreement obligations. If the temperature increase is allowed to increase to 2.0°C, it would result in “human rights violations upon millions of people.” (Photo via Jurist)
More voices are raised calling for the West to play a Sufi card against Islamist insurgents in Somalia, as well as Pakistan and elsewhere. But will this only destroy the Sufis’ credibility?
Conspiranoids and freedom-haters of the left and right alike are rushing to betray the Iranian protest movement. Bill Weinberg asks: Why is that?
President Obama’s historic speech to the Muslim world at Cairo’s al-Azhar University was a meaningful step forward nonetheless compromised by tactical equivocation…
North Korea’s second nuclear test has won global headlines—while calls by the US State Department earlier this month for Israel to abandon nuclear weapons went unnoticed by the world media.
The (disabled) Stinger missile in the supposed Bronx terror plot of course originated with the FBI infiltrator. We wonder how much more of the plot originated with the FBI infiltrator.
Google appears to have eliminated the foreign country news page links from the bottom of the Google News page—which World War 4 Report depends on intimately for our work.
At the Trinidad summit, Evo Morales accused the US of a “policy of conspiracy” against Bolivia, while Nicaragua’s Danial Ortega reiterated more than a century of imperialist outrages.
The New England Journal of Medicine is releasing a new study by the University of London, finding that sectarian militias were responsible for a full third of killings in Iraq since the 2003 invasion.
