East Asia

East China Sea edging towards war…

Chinese and Japanese aircraft had a near-confrontation over the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands on the very day that China officially commemorated the 1937 Rape of Nanking.

Europe

France: Muslims under attack… and Jews

A right-wing "Identity Group" seized a mosque in Poitiers, issuing a "declaration of war" against the "Islamization" of France—weeks after a bomb attack on a kosher shop in Paris. 

Afghanistan

Give the Nobel Peace Prize to Malala Yousafzai!

The European Union is singularly undeserving of the Nobel Peace Prize. A global call must be raised for this year’s prize to be transferred to the truly heroic Malala Yousafzai.

East Asia

Japan, Taiwan ships clash with water cannon

Japanese and Taiwanese patrol ships blasted each other with water cannon as a fishing fleet from Taiwan mobilized a protest flotilla to the contested East China Sea islands.

Europe

New Franco-Intifada: plus ça change…

The new Socialist president of France, François Hollande, is emulating his reactionary predecessor Sarkozy in his response to a new uprising by immigrant youth.

Watching the Shadows
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In an egregious and all too revealing faux pas, Amy Goodman appears to have put a mouthpiece of the German far right on Democracy Now as a "former UN expert" to discuss Venezuela. This is one Alfred de Zayas, who is given Goodman's typical sycophantic treatment—all softballs, no adversarial questions. We are treated to the accurate enough if not at all surprising line about how the US is attempting a coup with the complicity of the corporate media. Far more interesting than what he says is de Zayas himself. Not noted by Goodman is that he is on the board of the Desiderius-Erasmus-Stiftung, a Berlin-based foundation established last year as the intellectual and policy arm of Alternative für Deutschland, the far-right party that has tapped anti-immigrant sentiment to win an alarming 94 seats in Germany's Bundestag. He has won a neo-Nazi following with his unseemly theories of Aliied "genocide" against Germans in World War II. (Image via Democracy Now)