Global
BANGKOK, Thailand -- More than 30 years after a Thai janitor stole a blue diamond from Saudi royals and the murder of four Saudi diplomats, Riyadh has agreed to stop punishing Bangkok with financial sanctions which cost billions of dollars in lost trade, tourism, and jobs.
Greed, sleaze, betrayal and bloodshed over the still-missing blue diamond and the four unsolved murder cases, resulted in Saudi Arabia's expulsion of more than 200,000 Thai workers, a ban on Saudi tourists traveling to Thailand, and a drop in imports and exports between the two countries.
Thai Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha's surprisingly successful meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman at Al Yamamah Palace in Riyadh on Jan. 25 suddenly changed all that.
Relations now "must be better than the last 32 years," Prime Minister Prayuth said.
"Both countries have agreed to fully restore diplomatic ties, including the appointment of ambassadors."
A joint Saudi-Thai statement said Mr. Prayuth "expressed his sincere regrets for the tragic cases that took place in Thailand between 1989-1990."
Can Israel be pressured? Or is Tel Aviv the only exception to the global political order in which every country, big or small, is subjected to pressures and subsequent change in attitude and behavior?
he “Peaceful Atom” has transformed Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine into a nuclear war.
Like all nukes anywhere, Ukraine’s 15 operating atomic reactors are pre-deployed weapons of radioactive mass destruction. As a global threat to the future of human life on this planet, they have escalated this crisis to a danger level that parallels the apocalyptic US/USSR madness of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
As Putin’s troops penetrate the Ukrainian countryside, even a relatively minuscule attack on any of those power plants could blow out radiation far in excess of a nuclear weapon attack. They could (again) blanket Ukraine, Belarus and much of Europe with lethal radioactive fallout arriving in the United States within ten days. Their downwind death toll could dwarf Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Fittingly, the Russian assault quickly focussed on Chernobyl, whose April 26,1986 Unit 4 explosion blew out apocalyptic clouds that have since killed more than a million people worldwide.
Hal Ginsberg 14.3 https://freespeechforpeople.org/the-14point3-campaign/
Carol Kuniholm from Fairdistrictspa.com Pennsylvania, where citizen action has won a massive victory over some of the worst excesses of gerrymandering.
We then hear from Ohio where Chief Justice Maureen O’Hara has single-handedly stopped a GOP hijacking of the districting process. Black Voters Matter with Cliff Albright Solar power discussion with Joe Demare And Tatanka Bricca.
Discussion on Ukraine.
Hollywood is popularly perceived as a realm of romance and glamor. But over the decades the entertainment industry has also been the site of intense labor organizing and struggles between craft and trade employees against management and owners, in the form of studio executives, producers and movie moguls. In this article we take a look back at a teachable moment for organized labor: The 2007-2008 strike that rocked Tinseltown and how the workers organized to win one of the rare union triumphs during the Bush era.
Podcast here: https://kpfa.org/episode/flashpoints-february-23-2022
With Special Guests: Linda Pentz Gunter, Joseph Mangano, Myla Reson
Also see Harvey's Article: Nuke Power at the Brink of Bankruptcy, War, Apocalypse
When Nelson Mandela was freed from his Robben Island prison on February 11, 1991, my family, friends and neighbors followed the event with keen interest as they gathered in the living room of my old home in the Nuseirat Refugee Camp in the Gaza Strip.
Fifty-nine years ago, Bob Dylan recorded “With God on Our Side.” You probably haven’t heard it on the radio for a very long time, if ever, but right now you could listen to it as his most evergreen of topical songs:
I've learned to hate the Russians
All through my whole life
If another war comes
It's them we must fight
To hate them and fear them
To run and to hide
And accept it all bravely
With God on my side
In recent days, media coverage of a possible summit between Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin has taken on almost wistful qualities, as though the horsemen of the apocalypse are already out of the barn.
Fatalism is easy for the laptop warriors and blow-dried studio pundits who keep insisting on the need to get tough with “the Russians,” by which they mean the Russian government. Actual people who suffer and die in war easily become faraway abstractions. “And you never ask questions / When God’s on your side.”