Global
Pssst . . . here’s a little secret. Don’t tell anyone, OK? It might cause trouble.
In recent years, there have been more than a thousand lawsuits filed around the world — including a few in the United States — challenging corporate or governmental negligence about climate change and ecosystem damage.
That’s not the secret. This is the secret: These lawsuits, especially as they continue and grow in number, come with consequences beyond comprehension. They are infinitely larger than “the law” they are humbly summoning in order to address specific issues — a construction company dumping rubble in Ecuador’s Vilcabamba River, loggers and farmers destroying the Amazon rainforest, the state of Montana promoting the fossil fuel industry — and are pushing the social and legal status quo well beyond the abstractly linear world it presumes to control.
A scheme is underway to withhold or to reduce payments made by the Palestinian Authority to the families of Palestinian prisoners. According to Israeli media, the Biden Administration has requested that the PA entirely overhauls its support system of Palestinian prisoners. The Palestinian leadership had already expressed willingness to engage the US in a ‘discussion’.
Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, is leading his country’s anti-Palestinian propaganda, this time engaging in pre-emptive hasbara in anticipation of a Palestinian response to the ongoing evictions in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah.
“Would you consider it a terror attack if a rock like this was thrown at your car while driving with your children?” Erdan asked the United Nations Security Council members, while holding the rock in his hands. “Would you, at the very least, condemn these brutal terror attacks carried out against Israeli civilians by Palestinians?”
Somewhere out there in the geopolitical wilderness of Eastern Europe, two powerful beasts stalk each other. One of them is good. One of them is evil. The future of all life on this planet is at stake.
We’ll be back after these messages . . . (or maybe not).
This seems to be the context in which the spectator public gets the details about the re-emerging Cold War, suddenly back from the dead, and the nuclear brinkmanship that comes with it.
Will Russia invade Ukraine? Such an act, according to President Biden, would be “the most consequential thing that’s happened in the world in terms of war and peace since World War II.”
Wow. Only we get to invade countries, apparently.
It should matter little to the Chinese that American diplomats and a handful of their western allies will not be attending the Beijing Winter Olympics in February. What truly matters is that the Russians are coming.
NONG KHAI, Thailand -- You can see China's inexorable southern thrust along the Mekong River where tall, fanciful, Chinese buildings sprout nearby on the Laos side of this sleepy northern border, sparking hopes and fears about Beijing's influence and intent in Thailand.
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) chief's recent visit to Bangkok amid a flurry of lucrative U.S. military and business deals, may lure Thailand to favor the U.S. and not China in the future, but the rivalry is heating up.
"Thailand has been leaning toward China, and away from the U.S., for two decades," said Benjamin Zawacki, Bangkok-based American author of "Thailand: Shifting Ground Between the U.S. and a Rising China."
"In the military sphere, relations with the U.S. are arguably still deeper, but the gap is closing swiftly," Mr. Zawacki said in an interview.
Many Thais celebrate Chinese ancestry which dates back more than 700 years, in contrast to the persecution they suffered in Thailand during U.S.-led anti-communist purges in the mid-20th century.
The diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games may go down in history as the official start of the cold war between the US, a handful of its allies and China. The American strategy, however, of using boycotts to pressure Beijing in the name of ‘human rights’, may prove costly in the future.
Do our “Defence Departments” really defend us? Absolutely not! Their very title is a lie. The military-industrial complex sells itself by claiming to defend civilians. It justifies vast and crippling budgets by this claim; but it is a fraud. For the military-industrial complex, the only goal is money and power. Civilians like ourselves are just hostages. We are expendable. We are pawns in the power game, the money game.
Nations possessing nuclear weapons threaten each other with “Mutually Assured Destruction”, which has the very appropriate acronym MAD. What does this mean? Does it mean that civilians are being protected? Not at all. Instead they are threatened with complete destruction. Civilians here play the role of hostages in the power games of their leaders.
A thermonuclear war today would be not only genocidal but also omnicidal. It would kill people of all ages, babies, children, young people, mothers, fathers and grandparents, without any regard whatever for guilt or innocence. Such a war would be the ultimate ecological catastrophe, destroying not only human civilization but also much of the biosphere.