By Brian McQuinn | – Ten years ago, the United Nation’s no-fly zone over Libya marked the beginning of the Libyan revolution and the West’s bombing campaign. I spent much of the war embedded with the fighters in Misrata, Libya’s third-largest city, studying the insurgency. The fighting stopped with the death of Col. Moammar Gadhafi, […]
Archives for March 2021
Trump put the US on a War footing Iran: Biden must Reverse that Immediately
By Manon Dark | – ( Foreign Policy in Focus) – The current controversy over Iran’s nuclear program is one of Trump’s lingering foreign policy legacies that has proved particularly difficult for President Joe Biden to resolve. The U.S. withdrawal in May 2018 from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), or the Iran nuclear […]
Germany sees record greenhouse gas emission fall due to pandemic, renewables
By Kerstine Appunn and Julian Wettengel | – ( Clean Energy Wire) – Germany’s greenhouse gas emissions dropped nearly nine percent in 2020 – the largest annual fall since 1990 – as the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic pushed down the use of fossil fuels and added to the effects of the shift to renewable […]
Why the Suez Canal, now blocked, is so Important to the Global Economy and World History
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The super-super tanker Ever Given is stuck kitty-corner in the Suez Canal, having apparently run up on a sand bar. It is blocking dozens of other ships from going through the canal. The ship, one of the largest in the world, is a quarter of a mile long and can […]
Turkey’s Erdogan abruptly pulled out of Convention on Violence against Women; Women aren’t going Quietly
By Devran Gule and Leïla Choukroune | – In a single-paragraph statement issued at around 2am on March 20, Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan pulled his country out of the Council of Europe’s Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence. Thus, at a stroke – and going completely against Turkey’s constitution […]
How the Big Oil – Dictator Complex Threatens our Planet
( Foreign Policy in Focus) – This March, the leading global consulting firm IHS Markit held its CERAWeek conference, billed as the “world’s premier energy event” bringing together the “Who’s Who list of the global energy industry.” The conference’s keynote speaker and recipient of the Global Energy and Environment Leadership Award was Indian Prime Minister […]
Two Decades on, can Biden End the War on Terror?
( Tomidispatch.com ) – In the first two months of Joe Biden’s presidency, you could feel the country holding its breath. Sheltered in place, hidden behind masks, unsure about whether to trust in a safe-from-pandemic future, we are nonetheless beginning to open our eyes collectively. As part of this reemergence, a wider array of issues […]
It doesn’t have to be this Way: England has 33 gun Homicides per Year (equiv. 182); US has 10,258
Revised We are reeling from back-to-back mass shootings, in Atlanta and Boulder. The main similarities of the two are that the young alleged murderers easily bought firearms just before their horrific killings and that neither of them ought to have been anywhere near a firearm, clearly having severe emotional problems. The US policy of constantly […]
On a Quilt of Oppression and Injustice: From the Vietnam War to the Murder of Asian-American Women
An Thuy Nguyen | – Orono, Maine (Special to Informed Comment) – The deadly mass shooting on March 16 targeting Asian American women working at massage parlors in Atlanta, GA is neither a tragic happenstance, nor an isolated case of a (sexually) frustrated white man having “a really bad day” – as in the words […]