The new international media for a changing world – The new international media for a changing world
ZOE ALEXANDRA AND VIJAY PRASHAD
On September 16, the governments of Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger created the Alliance of Sahel States (AES) in Bamako, the Malian capital.
It is clear that it is not a simple military or security pact. It remains to be seen whether these countries will be able to create an economic agenda that benefits their people and thereby ensure that France has no means to exert its authority over the region.
Read moreJAYRO SANCHEZ
Shaun Burnie has been the nuclear specialist at the NGO Greenpeace since 1991. He has worked in East Asia for more than 30 years, and has been well acquainted with the Fukushima facilities since the 1990s. We spoke to him about the Tokyo Government's decision to dumping contaminated water from the plant into the Pacific.
PATRICK LAWRENCE
What are we doing to train the doctors and scientists needed to find our way in the XNUMXst century? What are we doing to bring the dispossessed into the economy, to address drug addiction and the rest of our social ills? What are we doing (I mean seriously) to repair and build the infrastructure we need?
The Chinese challenge could and should be understood as an opportunity to reinvent the US through a Great Mobilization on the magnitude of the New Deal. Of course, this idea is nothing more than hot air. Instead, we are sacrificing this historic opportunity in favor of military-industrial development.
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KHOLOUD FAQAWI
2023 marks the 75th anniversary of the forced displacement and exile of more than 700.000 Palestinians from their homes, towns and cities during the 1948 war that culminated in the creation of the State of Israel. Since then, the *Nakba*, as Palestinians refer to it, has remained a persistent story of deprivation in the collective consciousness of Palestinians.
Palestinians who were forcibly displaced or expelled from their homes in what is now “Israel” and their descendants, who retain their essential ties to the region, have a legal right to return under international law. However, it seems unlikely that Palestinians will be able to return.
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XULIO RIOS
The Belt and Road Initiative (IFR) celebrates its first decade of implementation in 2023. The time elapsed supports it as a long-term project. Two attitudes have marked the global reaction to it. On the one hand, developing countries have celebrated being able to have an alternative proposal that focuses on their most pressing needs, especially in terms of infrastructure.
China's plan provides specific support in areas poorly served by traditional available financing, filling a gap of singular importance. On the other hand, developed countries have evolved from initial ambiguity and reservation to a certain competitive hostility.
Read moreAMANDA YEE
On August 22, the US State Department renewed the ban preventing US passport holders from traveling to North Korea. This measure prevents 100.000 Korean residents in the US from visiting their relatives in North Korea. It was first launched by the Trump Administration in 2017, and—despite repeated calls from Korean activists to lift it—it has been renewed every year since.
EUGENIO GARCIA GASCON
On other occasions in history, tyrants have violently put an end to democracy, supported by a more or less considerable part of the people. But now the common people support the tyrants from the ballot box. The people seem tired of traditional democracy and lean towards tyranny. The fatigue may come from living in extraordinarily complex societies that are not easy to manage, so that people prefer the simplifications that tyranny promises over the increasing complexity of democracy. The result is booming “majority democracies”—a euphemism for tyranny.
SERGIO NAVAS
Today, the world is burning more oil than ever before. Although the green agenda and renewable energies are advancing, the reality is that the pandemic and the war in Ukraine have delayed the energy transition. The peak of fossil fuel consumption is now expected for 2032. In addition to Covid and Ukraine, the trade war against China has further contributed to the 'deglobalizing' scenario, pushing for a geopolitical realignment.
CECILIA VALDEZ
Green colonialism or green capitalism is what critical environmentalism calls the exploitation of natural resources from the global North over the global South, and which will make it possible to guarantee the energy transition that industrialized countries boast so much about, that is, those that more pollute. But the energy transition requires natural resources that the north does not have, such as lithium or green hydrogen.
While the socio-environmentalist denounces the serious consequences of plundering practices, governments and corporations close agreements. Even countries that show irreconcilable differences in world geopolitics shake hands in their territories and seal commitments. On the side of Latin American progressives, the more or less critical position regarding extractivism depends on whether they are a government or not, and on the pressing economic needs that make them dependent on foreign currency.
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VIJAY PRASHAD
On 26 July 2023, Niger’s presidential guard mobilised against the incumbent president, Mohamed Bazoum, and staged a coup. A brief stand-off between the country’s various armed forces ended with all branches agreeing to remove Bazoum and create a military junta led by General Abdourahamane “Omar” Tchiani, commander of the Presidential Guard.
This is the fourth country in the Sahel region of Africa to have suffered a coup: the other three are Burkina Faso, Guinea and Mali. The new government announced that it would stop allowing France to extract uranium from Niger (one in three French light bulbs is powered by uranium from the Arlit deposit in northern Niger).
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PASCUAL SERRANO
Last June, the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, stated that, according to the intelligence information available to them, China was strengthening its infrastructure for data collection in foreign countries, and added more specifically that "the People's Republic China had carried out an upgrade of its intelligence gathering facilities in Cuba in 2019."
The news was reported by The Wall Street Journal, adding that while Secretary of State Antony Blinken was meeting with President Xi Jinping, China was negotiating to establish a military training center in Cuba, which would put thousands of soldiers 90 miles away. off the coast of Florida.
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CECILIA VALDEZ
The memory of December 2001 in Argentina refers, almost automatically, to the corralito. However, at the same time that the banks were leaking massive sums of money; the former president, Fernando de la Rúa, was leaving the government house by helicopter in the midst of an unprecedented economic crisis; and there was atrocious repression against a people that had taken to the streets to demonstrate; some of the most important experiences of popular organization that can be accounted for in Argentine history were also cooked up.
Neighborhood assemblies, barter, unemployed movements, cartoneros, or companies recovered by their workers, began to form part of the daily landscape and managed to insert dynamics of massive and unprecedented grassroots organization until then.
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