13 June 2013 — Asia Times
The lunatic is in my head / The lunatic is in my head
You raise the blade / you make the change
You re-arrange me ’til I’m sane.
You lock the door / And throw away the key
There’s someone in my head but it’s not me – Pink Floyd, Brain Damage
9 April 2013 — World Socialist Web Site
Over the weekend, US officials continued to threaten North Korea with war, demanding that China cut off its support to the regime in Pyongyang.
9 April 2013 — WSWS
The aggressive character of the Obama administration’s actions on the Korean Peninsula was further underlined by leaked details in the New York Times on Sunday of a “counter-provocation” plan against North Korea, drawn up by the US and South Korean militaries. Amid sharply rising tensions, Washington is not simply responding to North Korean threats, but is engaged in reckless provocations of its own that risk the outbreak of war.
27 March 2013 — Asia Times
Reports on the premature death of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) have been greatly exaggerated. Western corporate media is flooded with such nonsense, perpetrated in this particular case by the head of Morgan Stanley Investment Management.
17 January 213 — WSWS
013 and the new Scramble for Africa By Chris Marsden
France’s <strong class=’StrictlyAutoTagBold’>military aggression in <strong class=’StrictlyAutoTagBold’>Mali is only the latest expression of a renewed Scramble for Africa being undertaken by all of the continent’s former imperialist overlords. This involves not only those powers that directly ruled Africa from the late nineteenth century through to the 1960s, such as France and Britain, but above all the United States.
13 February, 2012 — Monthly Review
John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney, Editors, Monthly Review
Five years after the Great Financial Crisis of 2007–09 began there is still no sign of a full recovery of the world economy. Consequently, concern has increasingly shifted from financial crisis and recession to slow growth or stagnation, causing some to dub the current era the Great Stagnation.1 Stagnation and financial crisis are now seen as feeding into one another. Thus IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde declared in a speech in China on November 9, 2011, in which she called for the rebalancing of the Chinese economy:
5 February 2012 — Red Scribblings
The veto by Russia and China of a chapter 6 resolution at the United Nations calling for Syrian President Bashar Assad to stand down has produced a loud ghashing of teeth by Hillary Clinton, William Hague and all kinds of other luminaries of the West. Syria seems to be heading for civil war. In fact arguably the civil war has already started with the formation of a rebel army from defectors from the official army and its engaging in sporadic armed conflict with the regime’s forces.
22 October 2011 — Strategic Culture Foundation
Can the US “contain” Pakistan?
21.10.2011 | 00:00 | Melkulangara BHADRAKUMAR
…The US’s expectation would be that the kaleidoscope of US’s ties with Pakistan can always be tilted once the Washington-Kabul strategic agreement and the NATO summit in Chicago in May go through, irrevocably establishing the western military presence in Afghanistan. Precipitating a crisis in the relationship with Pakistan at this juncture becomes a geopolitical necessity for the US despite its apparent madness. It is a dangerous game.
4 June 2011 — Strategic Culture Foundation
A China-Africa summit convened in Sharm el-Sheikh in November, 2009, the two highlights of the forum being Beijing’s pledge to extend $10b in loans to African countries in return for commodity deals and the signing of a host of impressive contracts in the sphere of infrastructure construction by Chinese companies. As a result, China made a big step towards guaranteeing the supply of natural resources to its rapidly growing economy, not to mention the fact that the creation of new jobs in Africa for millions of Chinese certainly counts as a serious accomplishment against the backdrop of the growing unemployment in China.
31 May, 2011 — Global Research – 4th Media Beijing – 2011-05-30
The decommissioning of the Fukushima 1 nuclear plant is delayed by a single problem: Where to dispose of the uranium fuel rods? Many of those rods are extremely radioactive and partially melted, and some contain highly lethal plutonium.
Besides the fissile fuel inside the plant’s six reactors, more than 7 tons of spent rods have to be removed to a permanent storage site before workers can bury the Fukushima facility under concrete. The rods cannot be permanently stored in Japan because the country’s new waste storage centers on the northeast tip of Honshu are built on unsuitable land. The floors of the Rokkasho reprocessing facility and Mutsu storage unit are cracked from uneven sinking into the boggy soil.
MEDIA ALERT: WHEN NEWS IS NOISE – GEORGIA, SOUTH OSSETIA AND THE POLITICAL PIPELINE
MEDIA LENS: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media
September 4, 2008
The Strain Behind The Smile
A Los Angeles Times editorial observed last month that China had persuaded world leaders to attend the Olympic Games “despite their misgivings about Beijing’s horrific human rights record both domestically and abroad”. The horror, the editors noted, could not be entirely suppressed:
Needless to say, no mainstream British or American journalist referred to the host nation’s “horrific human rights record” at the time of the US Games in Atlanta in 1996, or of the Los Angeles Games in 1984. And of course no media outlet has discussed “misgivings” about the awarding of the 2012 Games to Britain. But why on earth would they? Historian Mark Curtis explains:
The New Dark Age 