From AP, July 23: Republican John McCain on Wednesday credited the recent $10-a-barrel drop in the price of oil to President Bush’s lifting of a presidential ban on offshore drilling, an action he has been advocating in his presidential campaign…. Read moreOffshore designs or Iran diplomacy behind falling oil prices?
In Episode 11 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg compares the legacies of revolutionary struggle in Nicaragua and Syria. The Somoza and Assad regimes were both hereditary family dictatorships. The Sandinistas and Syrian revolutionaries alike have roots in anarchism. Yet Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega, again Nicaragua’s president, is today himself facing a militant opposition movement, and has betrayed the Syrian revolutionaries in the interests of playing for Russian support in the Great Power game. In Syria, meanwhile, the secular, pro-democratic civil resistance continues to exist in spite of everything, and still governs areas of the country under a model of council-based popular democracy. The Kurdish autonomous zone in Syria is also informed by an anarchist ethic of direct democracy. Yet the Kurds and Arab-led civil resistance have been pitted against each other by Great Power intrigues. How can activists in New York and the United States move past global divide-and-rule stratagems and build solidarity with Syria’s Arab and Kurdish opposition alike, as well as the campesinos and grassroots-democratic forces in Nicaragua? Listen on SoundCloud, and support our podcast via Patreon. (Photo composition: Today Nicaragua, Waging Nonviolence)
The New York Times’ City Room blog reports a strange spectacle from 6th Ave. July 17: As thousands of people, mostly of Tibetan and Nepalese ancestry, streamed out of Radio City Music Hall on Thursday afternoon, where they had gone… Read moreNYC: dissident Buddhists, idiot leftists protest Dalai Lama
In the most significant sign of de-escalation we’ve yet seen, Iranian diplomats are to meet in Geneva this weekend to discuss the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program with representatives of six world powers—including US Undersecretary of State William Burns. The establishment… Read moreBenny Morris predicts nuclear war —again
Michael I. Niman, writing for ArtVoice of Buffalo, NY, July 16, reports on repression by federal law enforcement at this year’s Rainbow Gathering in Wyoming’s Bridger-Teton National Forest. The annual back-to-nature gathering—held in a different state each year, with a… Read moreFederal police brutalize peaceniks in Wyoming
The US Interior Department July 16 opened 2.6 million acres of potentially oil-rich territory in northern Alaska to exploration, but deferred for ten years a decision on opening 600,000 acres north of Teshekpuk Lake that is the summer home of… Read moreInterior Department opens Alaska North Slope to oil biz; enviros applaud
The insidious thing about Al Gore is that he superficially sounds pretty good to environmentalists—so much so, that his ideas are even blasted as extremism by right-wing idiots. But if you scratch them, there is always less there than meets… Read moreAl Gore’s pseudo-ecology strikes again
It is axiomatic that the closer Obama gets to the White House, the more beholden to oil interests and imperial designs he will become—and therefore the more equivocal his opposition to the Iraq occupation. Watch this process in action. Andrew… Read moreObama website deletes criticism of Iraq surge
With all eyes on the Tribal Areas, the insurgency in Pakistan’s bordering Baluchistan province continues. A roadside bomb wounded seven security personnel and two passers-by in Mastung district July 15. (AP, July 15) On July 4, an eight-year-old beggar was… Read morePakistan: who is behind Baluchistan terror?
Belgian Prime Minister Yves Leterme submitted his resignation July 14, citing the inability of his coalition government to successfully divide powers between the Flemish and French-speaking communities. Leterme had set a deadline of July 15 for the four-month-old coalition to… Read moreSplitsville for Belgium?
The Chinese Railway Engineering Company is rebuilding 2,050 miles of roads in the Democratic Republic of Congo, abandoned in the jungle after the Belgian colonialists pulled out 48 years ago and further shattered by years of war. The vast project,… Read moreChina biggest player in Congo mineral rush
Is this satire? Please tell us this is satire. From AsiaOne News, July 12:
