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There isn't a Biggest Story for Today, yet.
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| Wednesday, January 24 | | · | World Social Forum: a rolling carnival of resistance in Kenya |
| Tuesday, October 17 | | · | Male Arrogance, Abuse and Intimate Relationships |
| Friday, July 14 | | · | Who feels the Earthquake? |
| Wednesday, February 08 | | · | Why the US REALLY Exports its Ideals |
| Tuesday, January 03 | | · | The Council on Foreign Relations Does AIDS |
| Thursday, July 28 | | · | Where Have All the Good Men Gone? |
| Monday, May 09 | | · | Another Look at Daneil Ortega and the Sandinista Struggle |
| Monday, May 02 | | · | Never-Ending Double Standards |
| Friday, April 15 | | · | One Zimbabwe or Another |
| Tuesday, April 12 | | · | The Origin of AIDS: an Ethical Inquiry |
Older Articles
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World Focus: What North Koreans Think
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"We learned the lesson in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan: be strong."
By Stansfield Smith
April 11, 2013 - counterpunch.org
I recently returned from a late March trip to North Korea [Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea, DPRK], along with 45 others, through Koryo Tours. On that tour I had the opportunity to discuss with the Korean tour guides their views on the current situation. I only recall the DPRK view mentioned here once in the corporate media, when Dennis Rodman returned with a message from new President Kim Jong. The message was “I don't want war, call me.” Nobel Peace Prize winning President Obama refused to accept it, evidently preferring an escalating threat of a regional nuclear war to talking. I asked my Korean tours guides to be interviewed so I could present their views to US people.
Has the DPRK made proposals for peaceful national reunification?
Yes, now we have options: the historic option of a federal republic, and the recent option. In our history we proposed three principles for reunification: that the North and South unite the country independently of foreign forces, that we reunify peacefully, and that we work together over the years to create the unity of the whole nation.
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World Focus: Rupert Murdoch and Media Corruption
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By Margaret Kimberley
July 14, 2011 - blackagendareport.com
“Murdoch felt he had nothing to fear from politicians and that he was probably right to be so unconcerned.”
If it can be said that there is one lord of world wide corporate media, that person is Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch’s News Corporation reigns supreme in television and print media in his native Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom.
Americans are most familiar with News Corporation ownership of the Fox news cable channel, the New York Post, Dow Jones Inc., the Wall Street Journal, and Twentieth Century Fox film studio among others. The Murdoch organization is not just big, but has a distinct political point of view. Despite the claim of being “fair and balanced” Fox news and other Murdoch outlets blatantly promote and protect conservative interests and politics.
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World Focus: Egypt, the American Way
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Model of the Status Quo?
By Gregory Elich
March 23, 2011 - counterpunch.org
In Egypt, a people's uprising has succeeded in removing Hosni Mubarak from power. The main battle, however, lies ahead. Will there be a substantive transformation of Egyptian society, or will the economic and political system remain essentially unchanged, with only a new face occupying the presidential office? There are powerful forces that are determined to steer events in the latter direction.
While many in the Egyptian middle class, fed up with the corrupt rule of Mubarak, may be content to see the establishment of formal electoral democracy, the poor of Egypt hope for genuine economic and political change. Their grievances are many.
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World Focus: The Fall of the West's Little Dictator
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"A Watershed Moment in the History of the Arab World"
By Esam Al-Amin
January 19, 2011 - counterpunch.org
When people choose life (with freedom)
Destiny will respond and take action
Darkness will surely fade away
And the chains will certainly be broken
—Tunisian poet Abul Qasim Al-Shabbi (1909-1934)
On New Year's Eve 1977, former President Jimmy Carter was toasting Shah Reza Pahlavi in Tehran, calling the Western-backed monarchy "an island of stability" in the Middle East. But for the next 13 months, Iran was anything but stable. The Iranian people were daily protesting the brutality of their dictator, holding mass demonstrations from one end of the country to the other.
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World Focus: Liu’s Nobel Prize for Capitalism
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By Stephen Gowans
October 15, 2010 - gowans.wordpress.com
Liu Xiaobo, the Chinese dissident who was recently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, has been hailed as a champion of human rights and democracy. His jailing by Chinese authorities for inciting subversion of the state is widely regarded as an unjust stifling of advocacy rights by a Chinese state intolerant of dissent and hostile to ”universal values”. But what Western accounts have failed to mention is that Charter 08, the manifesto Liu had a hand in writing and whose signing led to his arrest, is more than a demand for political and civil liberties. It is a blueprint for making over China into a replica of US society and eliminating the last vestiges of the country’s socialism. If Liu had his druthers, China would: become a free market, free enterprise paradise; welcome domination by foreign banks; hold taxes to a minimum; and allow the Chinese version of the Democrats and Republicans to keep the country safe for corporations, bankers and wealthy investors. Liu’s problem with the Communist Party isn’t that it has travelled the capitalist road, but that it hasn’t traveled it far enough, and has failed to put in place a politically pluralist republican system to facilitate the smooth and efficient operation of an unrestrained capitalist economy.
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World Focus: When electoral fraud is met by congratulations
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By Stephen Gowans
November 19, 2009 - gowans.wordpress.com
It has become standard practice in many parts of the world for opposition candidates to decry as fraudulent election results that favor the incumbent. Charges of vote fraud are routinely levelled against governing parties that win elections contested by opposition parties backed by Western governments.
For example, after (and even before) Zimbabwe's last set of elections, the governing Zanu-PF party was accused of vote fraud, but the evidence for the opposition's claim was gathered by organizations funded by the United States, a major backer of the opposition movement. Washington makes no secret of its desire to drive the incumbent president, Robert Mugabe, from power, by hook or crook, not because he's corrupt, despotic or a human rights abuser, as Washington alleges, but because he has done what all foreign leaders back to Lenin have done who have fallen astray of Washington – failed to honor contracts and safeguard private property. (That's not to say Mugabe and Lenin are alike in any way other than having committed what in Washington's view is the supreme crime.) A cooked exit poll is not beyond the motivations and capabilities of US and British-backed anti-Mugabe forces, but that's largely beside the point. Mugabe's Zanu-PF did poorly in the election, and Mugabe, himself, failed to win a first round victory in the presidential election. If Zanu-PF rigged the vote, it blundered badly.
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World Focus: Simon Mann’s coup plot: nasty, brutal and posh
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By Simon Basketter
November 10, 2009 - socialistworker.co.uk
There is a tendency to portray the British ruling class as a somewhat buffoonish collection of toffs, removed from the realities of life.
And there is some truth in it. The establishment in Britain is indeed an inbred collection of incompetents. But they are also an incredibly nasty and dangerous bunch of people.
Last week we got an insight into their world.
British former special forces officer Simon Mann was released from Equatorial Guinea, in central Africa, where he had been sentenced in July 2008 to just over 34 years in jail.
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World Focus: Barack Obama, The Nobel Peace Prize and the Wrong discussion
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By Iniko Ujaama
October 10, 2009
I realise the discussion is out of focus and they have us debating about the wrong things. Perhaps the more peripheral issue is whether Obama deserves their prize (assuming it is worth anything). Had we not had so much respect and admiration for such awards we would not be having the same discussion.
Barack Obama has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. I think many factors would influence our response to this occurrence. Many people are debating whether he 'deserves' the award and I for some time today engaged in this debate also. But upon reflection, much is overlooked which forms the bases for even having such a discussion. First, I think this discussion presumes a certain meaning and significance to the award which must be clarified (or at least a common ground established) before the discussion could be engaged productively.
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World Focus: A Wrecking Ball of Imperialism
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By Stephen Gowans
September 07, 2009
gowans.wordpress.com
Brian Martin, a professor of social sciences at Australia's University of Wollongong, has written a reply to my article Overthrow Inc.: Peter Ackerman's quest to do what the CIA used to do and make it seem progressive, and then a reply to my reply. Martin is the author of a number of books and articles on nonviolence, including Nonviolence against Capitalism, Technology for Nonviolent Struggle, and "Nonviolent strategy against capitalism" (in Social Alternatives, Vol. 28, No. 1, 2008, pp. 42-46.)
In the latest exchange, I try to show that the disagreement between Martin and me is rooted, I believe, in a conflict between Marxist and anarchist perspectives on the state, and the question of whether the state is inherently good or bad.
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World Focus: Racism, Obama and the Fall of the American Economy
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By Fidel Castro
October 14, 2008
Trade, within a society and between countries, is the exchange of goods and services produced by human beings. The owners of the means of production appropriate the profits. As a class, they are the leaders of the capitalist state and they boast of fostering development and social wellbeing through market. This they worship as an infallible God.
In every country there is competition between the strongest and the weakest; the ones with more physical energy and better fed, those who learned how to read and write, who attended school and have more experience accumulated; the ones with more extensive social relations and more resources, and those within society who fail to have these advantages.
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World Focus: Global Food Crisis: Hunger Plagues Haiti and the World
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by Stephen Lendman
April 21, 2008
Consumers in rich countries feel it in supermarkets but in the world's poorest ones people are starving. The reason - soaring food prices, and it's triggered riots around the world in places like Mexico, Indonesia, Yemen, the Philippines, Cambodia, Morocco, Senegal, Uzbekistan, Guinea, Mauritania, Egypt, Cameroon, Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Peru, Bolivia and Haiti that was once nearly food self-sufficient but now relies on imports for most of its supply and (like other food-importing countries) is at the mercy of agribusiness.
Wheat shortages in Peru are acute enough to have the military make bread with potato flour (a native crop). In Pakistan, thousands of troops guard trucks carrying wheat and flour. In Thailand, rice farmers take shifts staying awake nights guarding their fields from thieves. The crop's price has about doubled in recent months, it's the staple for half or more of the world's population, but rising prices and fearing scarcity have prompted some of the world's largest producers to export less - Thailand (the world's largest exporter), Vietnam, India, Egypt, Cambodia with others likely to follow as world output lags demand. Producers of other grains are doing the same like Argentina, Kazakhstan and China. The less they export, the higher prices go.
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World Focus: Chávez Emphasizes Global Context of Venezuelan Food Shortages
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by James Suggett
March 27th 2008
Venezuelanalysis.com
In an international press conference Tuesday, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez expressed concern for a potential world food crisis and criticized the diversion of food supplies for biofuel, while Venezuela and other Global South countries struggle with food shortages.
“The important thing is that this theme be explained to the people, that governments be alerted; many might not realize it with the sea of things that occur daily,” Chávez advised.
Since 2004, global cereal production has remained constant at around 1.6 billion tons, while the demand for cereals has escalated to almost 1.7 billion tons, according to research by a group of Spanish agricultural companies published at agroinformacion.com.
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World Focus: Food price rises will kill millions
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socialistworker.co.uk
February 26, 2008
Esme Choonara looks at protests and riots as market madness threatens world’s poor
Millions around the world are facing a future of insecurity, starvation and malnutrition as the price of basic food soars. The price of maize, wheat, soya beans and rice – staples for the majority of the world’s population – have more than doubled in the last few years.
Around 25,000 people currently die every day from hunger and poverty-related causes. This figure is set to rise as food prices drive more into food insecurity.
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World Focus: Holiday Season Hypocrisy
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by Stephen Lendman
December 20, 2007
sjlendman.blogspot.com
Christmas is observed December 25 by Christians and others celebrating the spirit of the season while for those of the Eastern Orthodox faith the holiday falls on January 7. It's to honor the birth of Jesus Christ even though it's widely acknowledged not to be his birthday. Along with its religious significance, the season is also for other celebratory events like winter festivals, parties, family get-togethers and Kwanzaa from December 26 - January 1 for Africans Americans to reconnect to their cultural and historical heritage. Jews as well celebrate the season with the Hanukkah Festival of Lights. It's to commemorate their struggle for survival, but for Jewish children it's their Christmas with gifts from parents like their Christian friends get.
Christmas is also the time when the national obsession to shop and consume reaches its zenith. It traditionally begins the day after Thanksgiving, runs through Christmas eve, and after the holiday continues into January with plenty of extra buying power from holiday gift cards, year-end bonuses and other resources gotten or borrowed. It's for everything people never knew they wanted until creative advertising wizardry made their lives incomplete without them.
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World Focus: What Happy Thanksgiving
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By Netfa Freeman
November 23rd, 2007
blackstarnews.com
There's nothing like one-o-them home cooked meals by Momma.
Just the thought of extended family getting together and partaking in the bonding ritual of a feast, is enough to bring a nostalgic tear to the eye.
And when something becomes a tradition it can be hard to break from, even if its roots prove to be decadent and warped.
Even though many African people in the United States know not to recognize Columbus Day we have yet to renounce Thanksgiving and we neglect its true historical significance. Who can deny that Columbus was nothing more than a colonial pirate who stumbled, lost and starving, onto the shores of this continent? He would have certainly perished if it weren't for his indigenous rescuers, whom he repaid with plunder, pillage and enslavement.
We take comfort in knowing that he wasn't from Africa, and that the likes of him committed in essence the same assault on Africa. But doesn't Thanksgiving have the same decadent origins? How absurd is it for Black people/Africans to recognize Thanksgiving as anything other than a "celebration in the taking."
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