Reported around the world by major news service Reuters, but not reported by CBC, RDI, CTV, Global, Toronto Star, Toronto Sun, Globe and Mail, Ottawa Citizen, National Post, Montreal Gazette, La Presse or any other mainstream media in Canada. Will any Member of Parliament mention this in House of Commons?
My neighbor Warren doesn’t understand high finance. He’s a physician, and they’re usually pretty savvy market-wise, but he’s an exception. Yesterday over the back fence he was expressing alarm over what he thought was a dangerous development in the banking sector.
“It seems that the next big thing on Wall Street,” said Warren, “is banks and other players bundling rental housing into a new product, that is a rent-backed security, similar to the mortgage-backed securities (MBS) that were at the root of the big crisis in ’09.”
The 24-hour visit by German chancellor Angela Merkel to Israel this week came as relations between the two countries hit rock bottom. According to a report in Der Spiegel magazine last week, Merkel and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu have been drawn into shouting matches when discussing by phone the faltering peace process.
Despite their smiles to the cameras during the visit, tension behind the scenes has been heightened by a diplomatic bust-up earlier this month when Martin Schulz, the president of the European parliament and himself German, gave a speech to the Israeli parliament.
Providence College (PC) in Rhode Island is a small Catholic institution perhaps more famous for its prowess in basketball than for graduating former US Senator Chris Dodd (CT-D) and six term Chicago Mayor Richard Daly. Founded by Dominican Friars in 1917, the college lately finds itself split between its Catholic identity and its commitment to academic freedom and inquiry, especially on issues such as LGBTQ rights. The motto of PC is “Veritas” but truth is sometimes difficult to determine when science and society butt up against religion and dogma.
PC found itself in a bit of a kerfuffle last Fall when …
In returning to my dissertation studies on environmental and ecological history, I’ve noticed something peculiar in my research on the Great Migration—the early twentieth century migration of African Americans from the American South to the northern industrial urban centers—that I’ve had trouble wrapping my head around. The issue concerns historical causality and why populations migrate from one place to another. In explaining the issue, I hope to also indicate where this issue might pose problems from those of us who wish to cling to a mechanical view of capitalism as an internally logically consistent system which of course also happens …
When one considers the complexity of climate modelling, the surprise, to me, is that “97% of climate scientists agree that climate-warming trends over the past century are very likely due to human activities”; IPCC defines ‘very likely’ as 95% certainty.
As computing power increases, the predictions will become more accurate. Incorporating climate data and observations as they become available into the model helps refine the results and predictions. An example of this is the failure of the model to explain why global average surface air temperatures did not rise as expected between 2001 and 2013, in spite of enormous …
Rain forests around the world are rapidly disappearing due to illegal logging, the growth of palm oil and other plantations, and clearance for cattle raising and other forms of commercial agriculture. Now scientists warn of another threat to the rain forests of Central America — especially those in Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras and some of their neighbors — this according to a news report in Science Daily for January 30, 2014 (“Drug trafficking leads to deforestation in Central America”).
It seems that the drug war in Mexico, fueled by the misguided anti-drug policies of the United States and the Mexican government (relying …
An epic struggle is currently taking place that will determine the fate, and perhaps the survival, of our species. It is a collision between natural limits and rational awareness of the need to respect those limits, on the one hand, and the forces of blind greed, on the other.
Over the next few years, fundamental questions about who we are as a species really will be answered: Are we fundamentally sane, rational? Or are we a self-destructive failure that will end in the evolutionary dustbin?
As former Conservative energy minister Charles Hendry says, the recent UK floods “have ended political debate …
Bill Moyers of Moyers & Company, on February 21, 2014, interviewed Mike Lofgren, a former GOP congressional staff member, who, during the interview, confirmed what many Americans already suspect: America has become a corporate state, or to use Lofgren’s words, a “Deep State,” which he defines as a hybrid of corporate America and the national security state.
By all appearances, the Deep State that Lofgren references is somewhat similar to the Machtergreifung, aka: seizure of power, in March 1933 in Germany, which meant the government could legislate contrary to the constitution, thereby condemning the constitution to irrelevancy.
by The Real News Network (TRNN) / February 24th, 2014
Keane Bhatt, a Washington, D.C.-based activist and writer, and a contributing editor to the North American Congress on Latin America: Elite forces in Venezuela and the US are determined to undermine the accomplishments of the Bolivarian revolution.
Who’s in charge? Certainly not the bought-and-paid-for-moderates that Washington and the EU hoped to install as the new government of Ukraine. The agreement that the Washington and EU supported opposition concluded with President Yanukovich to end the crisis did not last an hour. Even the former boxing champion, Vitaly Klitschko, who was riding high as an opposition leader until a few hours ago has been booed by the rioters and shoved aside. The newly appointed president by what is perhaps an irrelevant parliament, Oleksandr Turchynov, has no support base among those who overthrew the government. As the BBC reports, “like …
no self-loathing white boy rant here — just a commentary on rats, this weedy species, called Man
Ya gotta love the white race. WASP, Jew, Catholic, Orthodox this, atheist that. Amazing how quickly we can see ourselves as both the escaped rat and the flea on that rodent’s ass. Bubonic plague and fornicating rodent, vicious incisors, an affinity for eating the babies of the world.
Rats, carrier of teeth, appetites, climbers, swimmers, mud-boggers, and flying, burrowing, stripping, eating things. We are the carriers of disease, of the apocalypse. How many things are going the way of the Dodo because …
A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world.
— Albert Camus, 1913-1960
On September 7th 2012, the US Department of State (“Diplomacy in Action”) assured on their website:
The U.S. Mission in Iraq remains dedicated to building a strategic partnership with Iraq and the Iraqi people … Iraq continues to develop as a sovereign, stable … country … a voice of moderation and democracy in the Middle East.
Iraq has functioning government institutions including an active legislature, is playing an increasingly constructive role in the region … US assistance … includes the modernization of Iraqi law.
Recent developments at the University of Vermont (UVM) in Burlington and St. Michael’s College (in neighboring Colchester, VT.) provide prime examples of a fundamental problem in post-secondary schooling in the United States. At UVM, three unionized units of the faculty and non-faculty workforce have contract talks looming. For only the second time since the three units have been unionized, the contracts are up for negotiation at the same time. As they have in the past, the UVM administration is warning of layoffs and other cutbacks as they prepare to negotiate these contracts. Meanwhile, at St. Michael’s, the administration refuses to …
On the 100th Anniversary of World War 1, the Western powers are again sleepwalking into destructive conflict. Hegemonic ambition has Washington interfering in the internal affairs of Ukraine, but developments seem to be moving beyond Washington’s control.
Regime change in Ukraine for a mere $5 billion dollars would be a bargain compared to the massive sums squandered in Iraq ($3,000 billion), Afghanistan ($3,000 billion), Somalia, and Libya, or the money Washington is wasting murdering people with drones in Pakistan and Yemen, or the money Washington has spent supporting al Qaeda in Syria, or the massive sums Washington has wasted surrounding Iran …
Tyrone Hayes on Being Targeted by Herbicide Firm Syngenta
by Democracy Now! / February 22nd, 2014
University of California scientist Tyrone Hayes discovered a widely used herbicide may have harmful effects on the endocrine system. But when he tried to publish the results, the chemical’s manufacturer launched a campaign to discredit his work. Hayes was first hired in 1997 by a company, which later became agribusiness giant Syngenta, to study their product, Atrazine, a pesticide that is applied to more than half the corn crops in the United States, and widely used on golf courses and Christmas tree farms. When Hayes found results Syngenta did not expect — that Atrazine causes sexual abnormalities in frogs, and …
Kanika Mishra’s cartoon looks at India’s khap panchayats, which are unelected all-male bodies opposed for having issued many misogynistic decrees, including ordering so-called honor killings.
Their diktats have ranged from banning women from wearing western clothes and using mobile phones to ordering the killing of young couples. Some councils have demanded that the minimum age of marriage be lowered to 16 from 18 for girls and 21 for boys as a way of coping with an increase in the number of rapes.
IPS — The Barack Obama administration’s insistence that Iran discuss its ballistic missile programme in the negotiations for a comprehensive nuclear agreement brings its position into line with that of Israel and senators who introduced legislation drafted by the pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC aimed at torpedoing the negotiations.
But the history of the issue suggests that the Obama administration knows that Iran will not accept the demand and that it is not necessary to a final agreement guaranteeing that Iran’s nuclear programme is not used for a weapon.
The demand for negotiations on Iran’s missile programme originated with Israel, both directly and …
by The Real News Network (TRNN) / February 21st, 2014
Michael Ratner, president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, the attorney for Julian Assange, and the president of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights: Documents show the US engaged in major attacks against journalists, publishers, and whistleblowers, as a UK court upholds the legality of David Miranda’s detention at Heathrow airport.
Most of the Keystone XL chatter these days is about the U.S. State Department fantasy that tapping the tar sands of Canada will be a benign blessing for America and the world. But almost no one mentions the Texas Supreme Court case that could shut the pipeline down completely – since a court ruling for the appellant could mean that the pipeline was built on property to which the pipeline owner had no rights.
If completed, the 1,700-mile Keystone pipeline is intended to bring highly-polluting tar sands oil from the Canadian tar sands to the Texas Gulf …
Like ravenous beasts of prey attacking a weakened antelope, the forces of subsidized capital and their mercenaries sunk their fangs into the United Auto Workers (UAW) and its organizing drive at the Volkswagen factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The UAW narrowly lost – 712 to 626 – and the baying pack of plutocrats exalted, as if they had just saved western civilization in the anti-union, lower-wage South.
The days preceding the vote were a corporatist frenzy with corporatist predators bellowing ‘the sky is falling.’ VW, which sensibly stayed neutral, but privately supported the UAW’s efforts and its collateral “works councils” (an arrangement …
On February 19, 2014, at a Press Conference by President Obama, President Peña Nieto (Mexico), and Prime Minister Harper (Canada), in Toluca, Mexico, Obama stated:
In Venezuela, rather than trying to distract from its own failings by making up false accusations against diplomats from the United States, the government ought to focus on addressing the legitimate grievances of the Venezuelan people. So, along with the Organization of American States, we call on the Venezuelan government to release protestors that it’s detained and engage in real dialogue. And all parties have an obligation to work together to restrain violence and restore …
On February 29, 2004 the US, France, and Canada overthrew Haiti’s elected government.
As my first two articles in this series outlined, ((Read Part 1 and Part 2.)) Ottawa helped plan the coup and was heavily implicated in the human rights disaster that followed.
But the most shocking aspect of the intervention was the role played by purportedly progressive non-governmental organizations. A slew of NGOs received tens of millions of dollars from the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) to advance Ottawa’s anti-democratic policy in Haiti.
A few months prior to the February 29, 2004 coup that overthrew Aristide for the …
Russian president Vladimir Putin behaves like a groom at his wedding feast in the midst of gang warfare: he tries to attend to his bride and disregard the gunshots, with less and less success. His wedding party is the Olympic games, a sports event that occupies him immensely; meanwhile his house is under attack from all directions. In the Ukraine, a confrontation between a weak government and pro-Western radicals threatens to eliminate his previous achievements. The Ruble is under heavy pressure and losing value, despite stable oil prices. In Syria, the US and France are planning a new offensive and …
The recent two-day first official visit in forty years by an Egyptian defense minister to Russia of Egypt’s strongman Field Marshal Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, accompanied by Foreign Minister Nabil Fahmy, was indeed an historic breakthrough in bilateral relations, but it is still premature to deal with or build on it as a strategic shift away from the country’s more than three-decade strategic alliance with the United States.
The US administration sounds not really concerned with this controversy about an Egyptian strategic shift as much as with the Russian President Vladimir Putin’s welcome of al-Sisi’s expected candidacy for president.
She was holding on to a supporting beam of her timeworn and now badly damaged house. Her name is Ibu Pinarti, and she is most likely over 80 years old, although perhaps she does not even know her real age, as so many women in Indonesian kampungs, villages, do not know.
Her face is wrinkled, and she may look somewhat frail, but then she speaks, she speaks well, and in just a few minutes she tells me more truth than those down below, 20 kilometers down the slope, than I was told by several priests, journalists, top military brass and even …
by East Timor & Indonesia Action Network (ETAN) / February 20th, 2014
The Oscar-nominated documentary The Act of Killing was projected on the World Bank headquarters in Washington, D.C. Thursday in an action by the East Timor and Indonesian Action Network. The group is calling on the World Bank to acknowledge its role in the 1965 military coup in Indonesia that lead to the massacre of an estimated one million civilians. The World Bank helped prop up the corrupt government of Suharto, the general who lead the coup and ordered the mass killings. The Bank sent the Suharto regime $30 billion in development aid over the course of three decades despite …
Here, a few column inches below my preface — the short article, on organizing, tied to, well, the wimpy American broke-back mentality that we have to ask for fairness, beg, negotiate with felons, murderers, the corporate elite and their wannabe followers and side-lined thugs.
You know, even DV publishes articles by fellows who have their say elsewhere, e.g., at Counterpunch, sometimes, and even that weird site, Alternet. The idea that what happened with the Volkswagen plant in Tennessee is tied to the pathetic nature of unions, their messaging flakes, the titillating mess of their big wigs and strategists, mostly white, certainly …
In Venezuela, at least six people have died in recent days during a series of anti-government protests. The latest casualty was a local beauty queen died of a gunshot wound. The protests come less than a year after the death of Hugo Chávez and present the biggest challenge to Venezuela’s new president Nicolás Maduro. Earlier this week, right-wing opposition leader Leopoldo López turned himself in to the National Guard after authorities issued a warrant for his arrest last week, accusing him of inciting deadly clashes. On Monday, Maduro ordered the expulsion of three U.S. consular officials while claiming the United …
A recent report released by the United Nations Development Programme (UNPD) at the end of January offers further confirmation about the role inequality has played in stifling economic recovery and preventing meaningful social reform; and the solutions outlined by the study are no less a deviation from mainstream proposals in calling for redistributive policies, increases in social spending, collective bargaining, and changes in social and cultural norms.
It has long been observed that genuine inequality exists in both low and high income countries. One area of particularly egregious inequality is income, and its implications are notoriously well-studied. The report wastes …
