( Human Rights Watch) – Houthi authorities in Yemen should immediately permit United Nations experts access to a supertanker moored off Yemen’s coast that risks spilling over a million barrels of crude oil into the Red Sea, Human Rights Watch said today. The UN says a spill would have catastrophic environmental and humanitarian consequences, including […]
Archives for July 2020
“Defendant Shall Not Attend Protests”: In Portland, Getting Out of Jail Requires Relinquishing Constitutional Rights
By Dara Lind | – ( ProPublica ) – Federal authorities are using a new tactic in their battle against protesters in Portland, Oregon: arrest them on offenses as minor as “failing to obey” an order to get off a sidewalk on federal property — and then tell them they can’t protest anymore as a […]
The New Isolationism and the Distrustful Citizen: Covid-19 and the end of Geopolitics
( Tomdispatch.com) – I don’t trust you. Don’t take it personally. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a friend or a stranger. I don’t care about your identity or your politics, where you work or if you work, whether you wear a mask or carry a gun. I don’t trust you because you are, for the […]
Is Netanyahu Wagging the Dog with Claims of Hezbollah Clashes (Which Hezbollah doesn’t Know about)?
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu has been virtually besieged in his prime ministerial mansion on Balfour Street in Jerusalem by protesters for weeks, as the rallies against his mismanagement of the economy and the pandemic have grown ever larger, spreading to Tel Aviv and other cities. It is the largest […]
Israel-Palestine between Hi-Tech Dystopian Apartheid and a State for all its Peoples
( Al-Shabakah) – Palestinian futures have long been discussed without Palestinian input or within an imposed and limited framework. Indeed, most ideas of the future in mainstream political spaces rather consistently establish the containment of the Indigenous Palestinians and security for the Israeli settler state as their primary concern. The most recent manifestation of this […]
Colonizing Portland: How Trump’s tactics Recall Worst Excesses of British Empire in places like Hong Kong
Ann Arbor (Special to Informed Comment) – When Hong Kong returned to Chinese sovereignty in1997, the Western press loudly bemoaned the death of Democracy, but those of us who had lived there knew better. In times of stress colonial rule more closely resembled Trump’s Portland than a citadel of law, with the use of militarized […]
John Lewis knew that Democrats must build a Cross-Race Coalition against Plutocrats that Honors the Victimization of Minorities
Southwest Harbor, Maine (Special to Informed Comment) – Rep. John Lewis lay in state at the Capitol on Monday, after a lifetime devoted to racial justice issues. With racial injustice now more obvious than ever, steps both by business and government to redress the systemic failings may be possible. Nonetheless some of the best current […]
Coronavirus Protests against “Corrupt” Netanyahu Rock Israel, as cases per capita outstrip Brazil
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, in office continuously since 2009, is facing a perfect storm. His trial on corruption charges is ongoing. The unemployment rate is 20 percent, and Israel has slightly more cases of the novel coronavirus per capita than Brazil (one of the countries with the worst record […]
The Beginning of the U.S.-Iran Hot War?
Washington, DC (Special to Informed Comment) – “Americans should not blame others in vain,” Iranian general Esmail Gha’ani has declared, “this is a fire they have lit and today has engulfed them.” Gha’ani, a veteran military commander who heads the Quds Force, the branch of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) responsible for extraterritorial operations, […]
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