A curious link to Syria was seen at the white supremacist rallies in Charlottesville: an admiration for dictator Bashar Assad. James Fields—detained after his car rammed counter-protesters, killing one—featured Assad on his Facebook page. Marchers chanted in support of Assad and wore T-shirts celebrating his barrel-bombs that have killed thousands of Syrians.
The man arrested for ploughing his car into anti-racist counter-protesters at the Charlottesville "Unite the Right" rally is identified as a follower of the Vanguard America hate group. We will now be treated to endless debate about whether he is a "terrorist" or just an angry lone nut—with both sides overlooking the critical role of car culture in the attack.
The Rohingya Muslim people of Burma, facing genocide in their homeland, have fled by the thousands to Bangladesh—where they are not being welcomed. Long confined to refugee camps near the border, they now face forcible relocation to an uninhabited offshore island. Shunted from one region to another, they are targeted by the predictable propaganda—stigmatized as Muslim terrorists in Burma, they are now stigmatized by Bangladesh authorities as drug-traffickers.
As Trump and and Kim Jong-un exchange nuclear threats, anti-missile protesters in rural South Korea scored a win, prompting Seoul to delay plans to expand the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) battery that the Pentagon installed in April. The announcement came as villagers and activists were blocking the road to the THAAD base.
On the heels of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson's Manila meeting with Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, NBC News reports that the Pentagon is considering a plan for the US military to conduct air-strikes on ISIS targets in the archipelago nation. The account quotes two unnamed defense officials who told the network that "authority to strike ISIS targets…could be granted as part of an official military operation" likely to be named in the coming days. The strikes would probably be conducted by armed drones.
A thousands-strong defiant youth-led protest was held outside the Philippines' House of Representatives as ultra-hardline President Rodrigo Duterte gave his second State of the Nation Address—in which he pledged to keep pursuing his bloody drug war that has left some 8,000 dead in his first year in office. Duterte offered drug dealers and users a choice of "jail or hell."
The Kurdish-led autonomous administration in northern Syria has set dates for local council and regional assembly elections—a move immediately rejected by the Bashar Assad regime. Deputy foreign minister Faisal Mekdad told reporters from Damascus that the elections “will be a joke. Syria will never ever allow any part of its territory to be separated… Those who will move in those directions know what price they have to pay.”
A new report from Amnesty International accuses the Nicaraguan government of "placing business before the future of the country and its people," with its inter-oceanic canal mega-scheme "that will affect the livelihoods of tens of thousands of people and might leave many homeless." The report also accuses authorities of harassing and persecuting opponents of the project.
The military commander of Libya's unrecognized eastern government, Khalifa Haftar, threatened to bombard any warships entering the country's national waters—an explicit challenge to Italy, which is dispatching vessels to the Libyan coast as part of its effort to intercept migrants seeking to cross the Mediterranean from North Africa. The statement took aim at the Tripoli government, which Haftar accused of entering into agreements with foreign powers that "violate the sovereignty of Libya under the pretext of fighting illegal immigration."
Donald Trump, the buddy of Putin, Erdogan, Sisi and Duterte, now calls Venezuela a “dictatorship” and slaps sanctions on President Nicolás Maduro. All this proves is that Maduro is more useful to Trump as an external demon. Can we oppose Maduro’s power-grab without legitimizing Trump’s hypocrisy?
There is an unseemly tone of gloating to conservative commentary on the crisis in Venezuela, with pundits pointing to the current chaos as evidence that "socialism" doesn't work. But a case can be made that, contrary to conservative and mainstream assumptions, the problem is precisely that the Bolivarian Revolution has been insufficiently revolutionary and socialist.
Washington has now made it official that its enemy in Syria is just ISIS and al-Qaeda—and explicitly not the Bashar Assad dictatorship. A US Army representative told CNN that the Coalition has issued a directive to rebel forces operating out if its base in southern Syria that they must be exclusively focused on fighting ISIS and not the Damascus regime. One rebel faction, Shohada al-Quartyan, has refused to accept this ultimatum, and left the base.
