This year marks the 10th anniversary of President Xi Jinping’s launch of China’s flagship, One Belt One Road (OBOR), later referred to as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Echoing the historic Silk Road, the ancient trade network of Eurasia that connected the East and West, BRI is the most ambitious and expensive infrastructure plan in world history. Writing about BRI’s future, the British Economist once worried that “All roads lead to Beijing.”
In September 2013, on a visit to Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan, President Xi advocated the establishment of a “Silk Road Economic Belt.” A month later, addressing the Indonesian parliament, …
A kid that already has handfuls of candies wants to take another whack at the piñata before others have had their first turn. That about sums up the foreign minister’s position on Canadian power in international affairs.
Canada needs greater international influence, according to Melanie Joly. While the Foreign Affairs Minister’s recent comment elicited some commentary, no one has mentioned the inegalitarian, even supremacist, nature of her position.
In “‘We need to increase our influence’: Joly wants to increase Canada’s impact on the world stage”, CTV quoted the minister saying, “What we’re seeing is that the world’s power structures are …
On March 28, 2022, the Biden administration sent to Congress a revised version of its classified National Defense Strategy. The new version removed the longstanding doctrine of “no first use” of nuclear weapons, and opened the door to a nuclear response to a non-nuclear threat. Within months of the new U.S. policy, but without referring to it, the Putin administration responded that it might consider first use in case of an existential threat to Russia, including a non-nuclear one. More recently, Sergei Karaganov, head of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, a non-governmental Russian think tank, …
• Alibaba Cloud will broadcast 2024 Olympics
• Taiwanese leader’s popularity slumps
• World’s largest hydro-solar power plant
• Village basketball and football championships
by Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East / July 1st, 2023
Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) welcomes the renewal of Canada’s funding to Palestinian refugees for the next four years, but is disappointed that the latest pledge represents a cut of $5 million annually. CJPME urges Canada to increase its funding to meet the needs of the current humanitarian and human rights crisis, and to complement its financial support with political support for UNRWA and Palestinian refugees on the international stage.
“75 years after the Nakba and the creation of the world’s longest-running refugee crisis, it is time for Canada to finally commit to supporting Palestinian refugees,” …
David Ignatius, a long-time Washington Post columnist on military intelligence topics, probably never dreamed his newspaper would fill over three full pages serializing his latest work of thrilling fiction, “The Tao of Deception.” On June 28, 2023, the “Breaking news and latest headlines” in the A section of the paper featured the first installment. Part II appeared today, Friday, June 30th.
What’s occurring at the WashingtonPost, the New York Times and big regional daily newspapers is a flight toward stupefying their material in a desperate plunge to retain readers – print and online. Maybe surveys show a tsunami of aliteracy from the rising iPhone generations.
The need for unified mass demonstrations in the streets calling for urgent action on the climate emergency, with a central demand that the race and class issues involved be a top priority, is off-the-charts needed now. Fortunately, a worldwide mobilization doing just this is coming together for actions September 15-17 in New York City and around the world.
Why those dates? Because on September 20 there will be a Climate Ambition Summit at the United Nations convened by the UN’s Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres. The purpose of this summit, in his words, is to generate “credible, serious and new climate action and …
Samia Halaby (Palestine), Palestine, from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, 2003.
On 24 June 2023, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) Herzl Halevi, Chief of Shin Bet (Intelligence) Ronen Bar, and Police Commissioner Kobi Shabtai released a joint statement. They pointed to ‘violent attacks… by Israeli citizens against innocent Palestinians’, which they characterised as ‘nationalist terror in every sense’. Such a statement is rare, particularly the description of the violence as ‘nationalist terror’ and the rendering of Palestinian victims as …
Why is eyewitness testimony been proven so fallible in courts? How do we account for emotional outbursts which, at their worst, cost us relationships?
Why are we so inept at gauging probabilities? Why do we have to be taught methods for developing an unbiased sample in research projects? Supposedly, in the scientifically evolved West, many people in Mordor can still believe in ghosts and millions sincerely believe that they’ve been abducted by space aliens. If we know that superstitions are silly why do modern architects systematically avoid calling the 13th floor …
Amidst this week’s strange attempt to instigate a military coup from the head of Russia’s Wagner Group, President Putin took a loud stand calling out the operation as a foreign directed insurgency with parallels drawn from the chaotic revolution of 1917.
Just as in 1917, the nation was at war with an enemy on the verge of defeat, and just as 1917, foreign manipulations using fifth columnists resulted in sucking the nation into Civil War. Putin stated:
Exactly this strike was dealt in 1917 when the country was in WW1, …
Oceans of the world are in a dangerous red zone that exceeds safe limits for marine and terrestrial life because of excessive heat. Several statements by climate scientists show heightened concerns about how this plays out, as 2023 could be a major inflection point with global warming suddenly turning much worse. For example, the recent work of Annalisa Bracco, Ph.D., Professor School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Georgia Tech, Ocean Heat Is Off The Charts – Here’s What That Means for Humans and Ecosystems Around the World, Phys.org, June 21, 2023.
The backgrounder for ocean heat taking center stage includes major …
Since the start of the conflict in February 2022, billions of dollars’ worth of military hardware has been sent to Ukraine by the EU. By late February 2023, it had forwarded €3.6 billion worth of military assistance to the Zelensky regime via the European Peace Fund. However, even at that time, the total cost for EU countries could have been closer to €6.9 billion.
It all began with baseball. I was growing up in the 1940s in Rochester, N.Y., a farm team for the St. Louis Cardinals. I couldn’t get enough of them in the first newspaper I ever read, the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle. The instant it came I grabbed the sports pages, flopped myself down on the living room floor, and lost myself at the ballpark.
Eight decades later the Cardinals are still my favorite team, but my heart has moved on. These days I’m clinging to a deeper love: print newspapers.
We’ve lost more than 2,500 since 2005. They’re currently dying …
Nonstop disinformation from charter school promoters that charter schools are amazing and successful is belied by the failure and closure of charter schools every week.
Not a week goes by that we do not hear of yet another charter school failing, closing, and abandoning hundreds of parents, teachers, students, and principals. Below are many examples.
These closures are often sudden and abrupt, which is why parents, teachers, students, and principals always say they are shocked by the closure announcement. They didn’t see it coming, they often say. They always feel blind-sided and like …
Sometimes you wake up from a dream to realize it is telling you to pay close attention to the depth of its message, especially when it is linked to what you have been thinking about for days. I have just come up from a dream in which I went down to the cellar of the house I grew up in because the basement light was on and the back cellar door had been opened by a mysterious man who stood outside.
I will spare you additional details or an interpretation, except to say that my daytime thoughts concerned the media …
The last refugee, for now, has left the small, guano-producing state of Nauru. For a decade, the Pacific Island state served as one of Australia’s offshore prisons for refugees and asylum seekers, a cruel deterrent to those daring to exercise their right to seek asylum via the sea.
Since July 2013, 3,127 people making the naval journey to Australia to seek sanctuary found themselves in carceral facilities in Nauru and Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island, told that they would never resettle on the Australian mainland. Such persons were duly euphemised as “transitory persons” to be hurried on to third country …
by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / June 27th, 2023
What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?
—Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, December 20, 1787, in Papers of Jefferson, ed.
The government is goosestepping all over our freedoms.
Case in point: America’s founders did not want a military government ruled by force. Rather, they opted for a republic bound by the rule of law: the U.S. Constitution.
Yet sometime over the course of the past 240-plus years that constitutional republic has been transformed into a military dictatorship disguised as a democracy.
Our descent into City Airport was like the drop-ship scene in the movie Aliens. The BA CityFlyer Embraer 190, a narrow-body twin-engine airliner, rolled over into a 40-degree bank and started bucking like a mechanical bull. Simulated “chimes” began chiming frantically. Flight attendants bolted for their seats. The German businessman in the seat beside me, obviously a nervous flyer, immediately adopted the “brace” position. I gripped his shoulder reassuringly and shouted into his ear like a drunken redneck, “WE’RE ON AN EXPRESS ELEVATOR TO HELL! GOING DOWN!”
And so began my latest trip to London. This time, …
National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan is one of the key people driving US foreign policy. He was mentored by Hillary Clinton with regime changes in Honduras, Libya and Syria. He was the link between Nuland and Biden during the 2014 coup in Ukraine. As reported by Seymour Hersh, Sullivan led the planning of the Nord Stream pipelines destruction in September 2022. Sullivan guides or makes many large and small foreign policy decisions. This article will describe Jake Sullivan’s background, what he says, what he has been doing, where the US is headed and why this should be debated.
After instigating a series of diplomatic disputes and displaying “toughness” toward China, Seoul’s attitude seems to have suddenly changed in the past couple of days, with a high-profile emphasis on “China-South Korean friendship.” On June 25, South Korean Foreign Minister Park Jin stated in a news program that the basic stance of the Yoon Suk-yeol government is to advance South Korea-China relations into that of a mature and healthy one based on mutual respect, reciprocity and common interest, and the Yoon government sees “no reason to antagonize China and has no will to do so.” He further expressed that Seoul …
It’s been a long time since I last edited submissions. Having suffered what was described as “a major heart attack” on December 12, followed by several weeks in hospital, and recuperation at home, I feel confident that I can put my cardiac adventure behind me and carry on — a little more cautious, perhaps, but carry on nonetheless.
As some of you already know, I saw my cardiologist on June 12. He beamed upon me and proclaimed “I fixed your heart.” I could only beam back and utter a fervent “thank you”. I floated home following the clinic visit. “I …
A lot of nonsense is being spouted by a bevy of spontaneous “Russian experts” in light of the Prigozhin spray, a mutiny (no one quite knows what to call it), stillborn in the Russian Federation. It all fell to the theatrical sponsor, promoter and rabble rouser Yevgeny Prigozhin, a convict who rose through the ranks of the deceased Soviet state to find fortune and security via catering, arms and Vladimir Putin’s support.
In the service of the Kremlin, Prigozhin proved his mettle. He did his level best to neutralise protest movements. He created the Internet Research Agency, an outfit employing hundreds …
Industry figures and scientists claim pesticide use and GMOs are necessary in ‘modern agriculture’. But this is not the case: there is now sufficient evidence to suggest otherwise. It is simply not necessary to have our bodies contaminated with toxic agrochemicals, regardless of how much global agribusiness firms try to reassure us that they are present in ‘safe’ levels.
There is also the industry-promoted narrative that if you question the need for synthetic pesticides or GMOs in ‘modern agriculture’, you are somehow ignorant or even ‘anti-science’. This is again not true. What does ‘modern agriculture’ even mean? It means a system adapted to …
In his bestselling book of 1987, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, historian Paul Kennedy chronicles the rise of western power and its world dominance from 1500 to the present. He reports that the rise was not due to any particular event, nor even an unusual series of events. It was, in fact, neither foreseen nor even recognized until it was already well under way, although it may be accurately ascribed to multiple factors, which Kennedy discusses. The same may be said of the ongoing fall of western power.
Although the decline of the West is rapidly becoming more evident …
This article was written by a physician who writes using the pseudonym “A Midwestern Doctor”. Both Dr. Pierre Kory and I are fans of this work and insights, I subscribe to his substack, and you may also wish to consider subscribing to his substack (“The Forgotten Side of Medicine”), which can be found here. He requested it be published in this substack (“Who is Robert …
