Tag Archives | Independent Media Institute

Venezuela’s rate of infection remains low, despite the U.S. unilateral sanctions that have denied the country the right to import drugs and tests for the population.

Taking “movement moments” to change, from the Red Summer to Black Lives Matter.

The U.S. military’s budget, like so many police department budgets, is bloated, and diverts our tax dollars into forces of domination and violence. Now is the time to question our spending priorities at the local and federal level.

A few weeks ago, I was talking to Noam Chomsky about the state of the world. At one point, Noam smiled and said that he is not aware of any German doctors in Italy, even though both countries are in the European Union; instead, Cuban and Chinese doctors went to Italy to help the Italians fight the global pandemic.

The series of debilitating military setbacks that Libya’s renegade general Khalifa Haftar suffered in recent months have spurred diplomatic activities over the conflict in the country. But the war is far from over.

Bring down the statues, surely. But more than that: cancel the debt and provide reparations to the formerly colonized for the centuries of theft and brutality.

There is no need to wonder why George Floyd (age 46) was murdered in broad daylight in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on May 25, 2020. The script of his death is written deep in the ugly drama of U.S. history.

The great game in Libya has begun surging with the United States shedding its strategic ambivalence and resorting to a proactive role. At the end of May, the Pentagon marked a dramatic escalation by accusing Moscow of bolstering “Kremlin-linked mercenaries” who are allegedly helping Khalifa Haftar, the eastern warlord in Libya.

Donald Trump launched a new vaccine war in May, but not against the virus. It was against the world.

On March 20, just after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a global pandemic on March 11, the U.S. National Security Council (NSC) sent a cable to U.S. State Department instructing officials how they should speak about China and the novel coronavirus, according to the Daily Beast, which obtained the cable.

Russia’s relationships with its client states have never been easy. Of course, managing client states is always a complicated exercise. The Kremlin’s cupboard is full of skeletons—Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968), Cuba (1962), Afghanistan (1980), Ukraine (2014) and so on.

The absence of a strong world peace movement with the capacity to prevent this buildup by the United States is of considerable concern for the planet. The need for such a movement could not be greater.

As school districts reported huge problems with converting classroom learning into online instruction delivered to students’ homes, often due to lack of funding for internet-capable devices and Wi-Fi hotspots, charter school proponents spread the news of how their industry could take advantage of emergency aid.

As information about coronavirus emerged, the Chinese government and Chinese society began to organize an immense campaign against its spread.

This overlooked region of India is a beacon to the world for taking on the coronavirus, with the leftist government setting the bar for testing, tracing and treatment standards.

The principal deputy assistant secretary at the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs (SCA) in the U.S. State Department, Alice Wells, dropped a bombshell on the Afghan government and the country’s political elites on April 4—and caught the international donors by surprise, too—by linking all aid to Afghanistan to the formation of an inclusive government in Kabul.

In the early weeks when the virus emerged in Wuhan, the Chinese government neither suppressed evidence nor did their warning systems fail.

Violent attacks against Asians in the United States has spiked as a consequence of the stigma driven by the Trump administration.

In an extraordinary statement titled “On the Political Impasse in Afghanistan,” Washington has admitted to the failure of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s mission to Kabul on March 23, which was taken up to heal the political rift among Afghan politicians and to urge them to form an inclusive government so as to implement the peace agreement signed in Doha on February 29.

In a press conference on March 26, it was almost comical how little evidence the U.S. Department of Justice provided when it accused Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro and several of the leaders of his government of narco-trafficking. The U.S. offered $15 million for the arrest of Maduro and $10 million for the others. Maduro, U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman said dramatically, “very deliberately deployed cocaine as a weapon.” Evidence for this? Not presented at all.