20 August 2019 — The Electronic Intifada
Asa Winstanley
Britain’s opposition Labour Party is offering excuses for its arbitrary revocation of the press pass approved for The Electronic Intifada’s Asa Winstanley to cover its upcoming annual conference.
Its explanations fail to justify a blatantly undemocratic act.
20 August 2019 — Indian Punchline
Militants from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham fire anti-aircraft gun mounted on pickup truck in Syria’s Idlib province last week
The three-year old Russian-Turkish tango in Syria has been incisive, exciting and provocative, but the inability of the two partners to trust each other or surrender to the care and needs of the other has deprived the relationship of the energies to work symbiotically.
18 August 2019 — Asia Times
By Pepe Escobar, Cambodia
There must be some kind of way outta here
Said the joker to the thief
There’s too much confusion
I can’t get no relief
Business men, they drink my wine
Plowmen dig my earth
None were level on the mind
Nobody up at his word
-Bob Dylan, All Along the Watchtower (immortalized by Jimi Hendrix)
Nothing beats the beguiling, stony smiles at the Bayon temple near Angkor Wat in Cambodia’s Siem Reap to plunge us back into history’s vortex, re-imagining how empires, in their endless pursuit of power, rise and fall, usually because they eventually get the very war they had sought to avoid.
21 August 2019 — WSWS
Twitter revealed on Monday that it had shut down 200,000 accounts that it claimed “originated in China,” over posts relating to the ongoing mass protests of workers and youth in Hong Kong. The purge is one of the largest in the history of the platform.
21 August 2019 — The Canary
New evidence shows that a £51m contract between the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and Citizens Advice (CA) contains a gagging clause. As Universal Credit rolls out across the UK, this agreement means the UK’s leading advisory charity now can’t speak out or take “any actions” which might harm the DWP’s reputation.
Continue reading
21 August 2019 — WSWS
Prime Minister Boris Johnson arrives in Germany today for talks with Chancellor Angela Merkel. Tomorrow he will meet French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris.
Johnson has pledged to take the UK out of the European Union on October 31, with or without a trade and customs deal with the EU. The flare-up of tensions ahead of his trip shows that no deal is increasingly likely. Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, and Irish Premier Leo Varadkar rejected out of hand Johnson’s demand that the “backstop” aimed at preventing a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic must be abandoned or there would be no deal. Johnson has described the backstop as “anti-democratic and inconsistent with the sovereignty of the UK.”
The New Dark Age 