Jonathan Cook
Nothing I am about to write should be read as diminishing in any way my sympathy for Salman Rushdie, or my outrage at the appalling attack on him. Those who more than 30 years ago put a fatwa on his head after he wrote the novel, “The Satanic Verses,” made this assault possible. They deserve contempt. I wish him a speedy recovery.
Author Salman Rushdie, an ‘X’ factor in JCPOA (File photo)In an interview on The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro Show, the former prime minister of Israel — and the likely next PM — Benjamin Netanyahu claimed on Sunday that he had an ingenuous Plan B for forcing regime change in Iran. Netanyahu said, “With low-flying satellites” and other miniature devices, “you might break their (regime’s) hold—their monopoly on information. That begins to challenge them.”
Sunday, 14 August 2022 — Global Times
Washington has only itself to blame for growing de-dollarization trend
By Wen Sheng
Illustration: Chen Xia/Global TimesAfter the breakout of the Russia-Ukraine conflict early this year, US-led Western governments imposed a raft of sweeping financial sanctions on Moscow including freezing its foreign exchange reserves. The thought the US may move to grab anybody’s assets who refuses to obey Washington’s dictates is truly unnerving, which is now inducing more countries to diversify their reserve assets away from US dollars.
There may be some duplication due to cross-posting and may be updated throughout the day, so please check back. If it gets updated, I usually insert the time on the line above. A lot of cross-posting usually indicates that the article is popular and some links may not work, depending on your location but I’ve kept them anyway, so at least the reader has some idea of the scale of censorship now operating in the ‘democratic’ West.
‘The Canary in the Coal Mine’: Sri Lanka’s Crisis is a Chronicle Foretold
https://socialistproject.ca/2022/08/canary-in-the-coal-mine-sri-lanka/
Eco-Socialism, Democratic Communism: Common Sense
https://dissidentvoice.org/2022/08/eco-socialism-democratic-communism-common-sense
Oh, No! Not That!;)) Not Sinking.
https://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/2022/08/oh-no-not-that-not-sinking.html
The UN doesn’t want IAEA monitors to confirm Kiev was shelling the power plant, says local administration
Members of the UN are blocking a visit by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant (ZNPP) so they can avoid confirming Kiev shelled the Russian-controlled facility, local official Vladimir Rogov told RT in an interview on Monday.
Éric Toussaint and B. Skanthakumar
Sri Lanka’s acute economic crisis and sovereign debt default, along with its people’s uprising in 2022, has drawn attention across the world. It is described as the ‘canary in the coal mine’, that is, a harbinger of the likely future for other global south countries. Eric Toussaint, spokesperson for the Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt (CADTM) interviewed via email Colombo-based Balasingham Skanthakumar of the Social Scientists’ Association of Sri Lanka and the CADTM’s South Asia network. The responses in draft were improved by Amali Wedagedera’s review and finalized on 5th August.
The only possible explanation for this shocking stance is that the West has become so desperate to stop Russia’s slow but steady advance throughout the latest phase of the Ukrainian Conflict that its ideologically driven elite are literally willing to sacrifice their own people’s lives and that of future generations in a last-ditch gamble to bring that about. Their citizens, meanwhile, obviously don’t approve of this but are powerless to shape the course of events.
“Are present ecological stresses so strong that if not relieved they will sufficiently degrade the ecosystem to make the earth uninhabitable by humans? Obviously no serious discussion of the environmental crisis can get very far without confronting this question.”
Barry Commoner in The Closing Circle: 1971
More than fifty years after Commoner wrote those words, the environmental problem is almost infinitely worse and what is presently called climate change once thought to affect future generations is engulfing the entire planet right now. While warnings from a scientific community not on corporate payrolls grow more desperate the global political power of capitalism, the primary cause of nature’s breakdown under stress, especially at its fading but still essential center in the USA, is making things worse not just by the hour or minute but every second.
The New Dark Age 