A rare protest is reported from Beijing following the mass eviction of a squatter camp for migrant workers. The protest comes just as the US and EU condemned China on the occasion of International Human Rights Day—and China held its own "South-South Human Rights Forum" in Beijing, in a bid to deflect Western criticism and redefine human rights as a "right to development."
We've been told for the past several years now that the depressed oil prices were permanent, thanks to fracking and the surge in US domestic production. Now prices are rising again, due to a convergence of crises in major producers: escalating tensions among the Gulf states, labor unrest in Nigeria, deepening instability in Venezuela. The US was able to contain the price spike after the ISIS irruption in 2014 by boosting its own production. This trick isn't going to work forever.
An estimated 5,000 Tzotzil Maya peasants have been forced to flee their homes in the municipality of Chalchihuitán, in Mexico's southern Chiapas state, facing threats by armed men in a land dispute with the neighboring municipality of Chenalhó. The local Catholic diocese said that an "atmosphere of terror" prevails in the area, and warned of a repeat of the 1997 Acteal massacre, when 45 were killed by paramilitary gunmen in a hamlet of Chenalhó.
Propagandists of the isolationist right and anti-war “left” alike are exploiting the chilling emergence of a slave trade in abducted Black African migrants in Libya’s remote desert south as evidence that the NATO intervention of 2011 only led to nightmares. The popular uprising that ousted Qaddafi is invisible to them—as is the dictator’s own culpability in the social collapse that followed his rule.
Just weeks after the Philippines' Rodrigo Duterte won rare favorable headlines by pledging to pull the National Police out of his ultra-deadly "drug war," he's already threatening to send them back if the "drug problem becomes worse again." Not coincidentally, the threat comes just as Trump green-lighted Duterte's campaign of mass murder, meeting with him at the Manila ASEAN summit and issuing only praise—with not a peep about human rights.
The US "certifies" Honduras for continued military aid exactly as the government declares a state of emergency and unleashes the armed forces on protesters. The crisis was sparked by President Juan Orlando Hernández's apparently fraudulent election to a second term. Yet Hernández and his conservative National Party supported the 2009 coup d'etat that ousted Manuel Zelaya from the presidency for merely broaching a second term in supposed violation of the constitution.
Ngäbe activists standing in front of the Barro Blanco dam site in June 2015. Three Ngäbe indigenous leaders are on trial in Panama, facing years in prison for blockading a dam construction site. The Barro Blanco Dam on the Tabasará River… Read morePanama: criminalization of the Ngäbe
China is preparing to deploy elite troops to Syria in support of dictator Bashar al-Assad’s forces, fearing the presence of Islamist militants in its far western territory of Xinjiang, according to media reports in the region. China’s Defense Ministry intends to send two units known as the “Night Tigers” and the “Tigers of Siberia” from the People’s Liberation Army Special Operations Forces to aid the Assad regime. Damascus claims up to 5,000 ethnic Uighurs from Xinjiang are fighting in Syria.
The Trump administration plans to ask Syrian Kurdish fighters to return weapons “loaned” for the fight against ISIS, an official told Al-Monitor. This was revealed the same day the White House made its first comment on claims by the Turkish foreign minister that US support for the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces would be coming to an end. White House mouthpiece Sarah Huckabee Sanders said “the plan…is to…wind down support for certain groups.”
A Chinese court sentenced Taiwanese democracy activist Lee Ming-cheh to five years in prison on charges of attempting to "subvert state power." Taiwan's Mainland Affairs Council immediately denounced the sentence as "unacceptable" and "politically motivated." Lee was incriminated on the basis of social media content he posted on platforms including WeChat, QQ and Facebook.
The protests that paralyzed Islamabad and other Pakistani cities were ostensibly sparked by changes to the oath of office, eliminating text recognizing Mohammed as God's final prophet. But behind this was orthodox Sunni fear of the Ahmadiyya Muslim sect, which holds that 19th century founder Mirza Gulam Ahmed was the last prophet. As the protests mounted, Ahmadi Muslims faced threats across Pakistan, the Islamic world and the diaspora.
Members of the Gavião, Gamella, Krenyê and Tremembé indigenous peoples blocked the main road through São Luís, capital of Brazil's Maranhão state, to press demands for long-delayed demarcation of their ancestral lands—now being overrun by illegal loggers and their paramilitary enforcers. The action, which halted traffic on the artery for several hours, came as some 100 indigenous activists had been camping for three weeks outside the São Luís headquarters of the National Indian Foundation (FUNAI).
