2020

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – This week, Russia is deploying 80,000 personnel, including 12,000 troops, alongside 1,000 troops from friendly countries in its region, in its Caucasus 2020 (Kavkaz 2020) military drills. Its partners include Iran, China, Belarus, Armenia, Pakistan, and Myanmar. The choice of Iran was deliberate. The Trump administration has threatened the most […]

Climate Crisis

Live fast, die small: how global heating is simplifying the world’s ecosystems

The Conversation

By Miguel Lurgi | – Global warming is one of the biggest threats to biodiversity worldwide. As temperatures increase, many species are forced to move to new habitats, like fish fleeing warming waters. While the fish have to adapt to new conditions elsewhere, it’s the effect that their departure has on other species that unpicks […]

Donald Trump

Trump’s Nuclear Threats reveal the long arm of the Enola Gay and Hiroshima

Nick Turse

( Tomdispatch.com) – Whether you’re reading this with your morning coffee, just after lunch, or on the late shift in the wee small hours of the morning, it’s 100 seconds to midnight. That’s just over a minute and a half. And that should be completely unnerving. It’s the closest to that witching hour we’ve ever […]

Feminism

Can Turkey’s Feminists prevent withdrawal in name of “Family Values” from Treaty banning Violence against Women?

Global Voices

By Arzu Geybullayeva | – (GlobalVoices.org ) – A website called Anit Sayac (Turkish for “monument tracker”) indicates the number “276” on its home page at the time of writing this story. It represents the number of women who were murdered in domestic violence attacks in Turkey—just in 2020. The counter is updated every day. […]

American Jews

After praising Nordic “genes,” Trump slams Jewish Americans and Muslim Americans

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Trump can’t keep himself from sounding like a Nazi. Campaigning in Minnesota, he told the almost all-white crowd, most of Scandinavian descent, “You have good genes.” Human beings are a very young species, perhaps 300,000 years old, and have not had time to differentiate much. There is no significant genetic […]

US Foreign Policy

U.S. War Crimes in Yemen: Stop Looking the Other Way

Foreign Policy in Focus

By Andrea Prasow | – ( Foreign Policy in Focus) – The longstanding involvement of the United States in the conflict in Yemen is facing renewed scrutiny. On September 16, State Department officials testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee about whether the State Department misled Congress — and the American people — by circumventing […]

Democratic Party

Top 8 ways to Restructure the Supreme Court so it Looks more Like America

Ted Becker

Auburn, AL (Special to Informed Comment) – The Republican Party’s rush to appoint of a “social conservative” to replace Ruth Bader Ginsberg on the U.S. Supreme Court (hereafter referred to as SCOTUS), should make it abundantly clear that SCOTUS justices are highly political creatures and must be treated accordingly. Since we may as well admit […]

Democratic Party

The case of Biden versus Trump – Could a judge could decide the presidential election?

The Conversation

By John E. Finn | – Imagine the morning of Wednesday, Nov. 4, 2020. Given the unprecedented number of mail-in votes this election, Americans may wake up and still not know who won the presidential contest between Republican President Donald J. Trump and Democratic challenger Joseph Biden. The contest could be so close that a […]

China

France’s Macron declares Europe’s independence of Trump, stands by Iran Nuclear Deal