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Future Still Uncertain for Kurdish Iraq

by Michael Busch

Chris­tians and other minor­ity groups have also been the tar­gets of choice in Kirkuk of late. While the vio­lence there has not exhib­ited the same char­ac­ter­is­tics of sys­tem­atized exe­cu­tion as in Mosul, the results have been no less hor­rific. Most recently, insur­gent groups have car­ried out attacks on Chris­t­ian busi­ness­men, and have con­tin­ued their prac­tice of assas­si­nat­ing munic­i­pal secu­rity forces, rou­tine vio­lence which has claimed the lives of hun­dreds of police offi­cers over the past few years.”

The Militarization of Crowd Control

by Justin Rogers-Cooper

The Group of 20 (G-20) Sum­mit protests in Pitts­burgh this past Sep­tem­ber were a thresh­old event. Not only were pro­tes­tors detained and beaten by the police, but they were also sub­jected to new military-grade tech­nolo­gies that have pushed the bound­aries of what kinds of actions are per­mis­si­ble for con­trol­ling large crowds of pro­tes­tors, unruly or not. […]

Defending the UN

by Andrew Bast

Like beauty, the value of the United Nations lies in the eye of the beholder. Case in point, David Rothkopf’s recent screed on For­eign Policy.com (“You Can’t Spell Unpro­duc­tive With­out the Let­ters U and N”) against the world’s largest mul­ti­lat­eral orga­ni­za­tion, the lat­est in a long line of vit­ri­olic — and largely mis­in­formed — attacks on the insti­tu­tion.
Only a few years ago, […]

Battle over CAFTA Rages in El Salvador

by Michael Busch

As El Sal­vador tran­si­tions from decades of conser– vative rule to the admin­is­tra­tion of left­ist Pres­i­dent Mauri­cio Funes, the coun­try faces an inter­na­tional show­down trig­gered by a restric­tive free-trade agree– ment between the United States and Cen­tral Ameri– ca. Canada’s Pacific Rim Min­ing Cor­po­ra­tion is suing the gov­ern­ment for its refusal to allow it to mine […]

Letter from Dakar

by MBusch

Beneath a half-completed sec­tion of high­way over­pass on the dusty out­skirts of Dakar, Moussa spreads his arms widely to the con­crete slab above his head. “This is what the tycoon classes want for Sene­gal!” he announces with the­atri­cal tri­umph. “New roads for their new cars!” Then, low­er­ing his arms, he says in a deadly seri­ous tone, “But […]

Supply, Demand, and the Mexican Drug War

by Andrew Bast

Polit­i­cal analy­sis
ANDREW BAST
The war looks eerily famil­iar: behead­ings, assas­si­na­tions of police and pub­lic offi­cials, ter­ror­ized busi­ness­peo­ple, extorted school­teach­ers, and in five years more than 230 Amer­i­can civil­ians dead in the cross­fire. All this could eas­ily describe the bat­tle in Afghanistan or Iraq, but the real­ity is closer to home, where an increas­ingly grue­some war is […]

In Midnight’s Shadow

by DNassre

DANNY NASSRE
Those con­cerned about the fate of human­ity might want to take a look at the Bul­letin of the Atomic Sci­en­tists’ Dooms­day Clock, the publication’s sym­bolic warn­ing of how close we are to destroy­ing our­selves.
Your con­cern might grow when you dis­cover that the clock is cur­rently set at five min­utes to mid­night (the closer to midnight, […]

Three Days in the West Bank

by NBen-Ari

One Sat­ur­day morn­ing in August, eight human rights activists were on their way to visit vil­lagers attacked by para­mil­i­taries. Ear­lier that morn­ing armed para­mil­i­taries attacked a young man while graz­ing his flocks out­side of his vil­lage, and beat him up. The activists had decided to travel to the vil­lage to col­lect tes­ti­mony. Upon dri­ving toward the […]