Month: February 2024

At the request of the Algerian government, the United Nations Security Council held an emergency session on Jan. 31 to discuss giving “enforceable effect” to the provisional measures the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to take. The draft resolution prepared by Algeria was not made public, but reportedly called for an immediate ceasefire, which the United States ambassador indicated […]

In December 2023, it was announced that the U.S.-based Stanton Foundation had granted another “generous endowment” to the project titled, “Understanding Assurance, Deterrence, and Potential Nuclear Escalation in Europe”, based at the Hertie School’s Centre for International Security in Germany, and co-sponsored by the Munich Security Conference. In fact, the founder and former head of the Centre is Wolfgang Ischinger, […]

Two events in the first weeks of 2024 reminded the world that the 2007-2008 financial crisis has never ended, and that we are sitting on a volcano waiting to erupt in a pyroclastic flow: the resurgence of the crisis of community banks in the United States and the bankruptcy of Chinese conglomerate Evergrande. Both events have a common underlying feature: […]

Besieged by 1,399 tractors that had rolled into Brussels on the morning of Feb. 1, the European Commission indicated its intention to grant a few concessions. Farmers will be allowed to cultivate the 4% of their farmland that the EU had previously ordered must remain fallow, and to sell their production off this land, without losing the planned agricultural support. […]

Just as in Europe and in the Global South, independent family farms in the United States have been increasingly pushed out of business by the major food multinationals and industrial farms. According to the figures cited just a few months ago by U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, 39,700 farms closed down in the five-year period between 2017 and 2023. During […]

Eagle Pass, Texas, a town of 30,000 residents living along the U.S.-Mexico border, has become the focal point of a showdown over immigration policy between Texas Governor Greg Abbott and the Biden Administration. The governor, a Republican, launched “Operation Lone Star”, deploying Texas National Guard troops to Eagle Pass to string razor wire and install a wall of shipping containers […]

Latvian authorities and the European Parliament have opened an investigation into Tatjana Zdanoka, a Latvian member of the European Parliament, accused of being a Russian agent. The investigation was prompted by an article published Jan. 29 on The Insider, an anti-Putin website connected to Bellingcat,  and has been characterized by Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov as a “witch-hunt”, reminiscent of McCarthysm […]