Deadly ethnic clashes in Nigeria and a state of emergency in response to Boko Haram attacks come amid a massive oil spill in the Delta region—and government plans to drop fuel subsidies, leading to calls for a general strike.
Shortly before the ball dropped in Times Square, hundreds of Occupy Wall Street protesters swarmed over police barricades at downtown Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park, retaking the plaza before being evicted in a police charge.
Mexican authorities announced the arrest this month of two more leaders of the Sinaloa Cartel—but the notorious top kingpin Joaquin Guzmán AKA “El Chapo” remains at large, fueling speculation that he is protected by the government and DEA.
The US “withdrawal” from Iraq comes as the Pentagon is set to augment its troop presence in the Persian Gulf region, Iran threatens to blockade the Strait of Hormuz, and the price of oil nears $100 a barrel.
It is a sad day indeed. The “leftist” website CounterPunch gushes enthusiasm for Ron Paul—while it is left to the New York Times to uphold anti-racist principles by calling him out on his hateful outbursts and support from neo-Nazis.
Even as the Israeli government turns more East Jerusalem land over to hardline Jewish settlers, ultra-orthodox Jews clashed with police at Beit Shemesh suburb over a crackdown on their attempts to enforce gender segregation.
The US has sent the Argentine human rights group Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo a fully declassified 1982 memo on the abduction of prisoners’ babies under the 1976-1983 dictatorship.
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has withdrawn a 2010 order for the Guatemalan government to suspend operations at Goldcorp Inc.’s controversial Marlin gold mine.
Mexican environmental activists Eva Alarcón and Marcial Bautista were reportedly still alive two weeks after their Dec. 7 kidnapping from a bus in the southwestern state of Guerrero.
After eight months of mobilizations, strikes and campus occupations, Chilean university and secondary students held their last protest of the 2011 school year.
Despite his lukewarm disavowals of “past” ugly racism, “progressives” continue to plug Ron Paul because of his supposed anti-war creds—oblivious to the fact that he even casts his anti-war message in ugly xenophobic terms.
Bill Weinberg interviews Andrew Kliman of the Marxist-Humanist Initiative, author of The Failure of Capitalist Production: Underlying Causes of the Great Recession.
