This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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This content originally appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and was authored by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin accused Western countries of “containing” the potential of Russia and China, saying that the duo should jointly defend their shared interests and uphold the principles of a multipolar world order amidst increasing pressure from the West, state-run media reported.
Mishustin made the remarks when co-chairing the 29th regular meeting between Chinese and Russian heads of government with Chinese Premier Li Qiang on Wednesday in Moscow.
“Western countries are trying to maintain their global dominance and contain the economic and technological potential of Russia and China,” Mishustin said, cited by the TASS news agency.
“That is why it is important to concentrate efforts on protecting our common interests, building a multipolar world order and strengthening coordination on international platforms,” he added.
Mishustin said Russia will join China in strengthening communication and coordination in international affairs, better safeguarding the legitimate rights and interests of the two sides, without elaborating.
Li said China was ready to work with Russia to strengthen “all-round practical cooperation” between the two countries.
As the divide between Russia and the West grows, the Kremlin is increasingly focusing its attention on China, with ties between the two states growing ever stronger. In particular, strategic cooperation between Moscow and Beijing has visibly intensified in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
On May 29, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell spoke to NATO representatives in Brussels on the seriousness of Chinese-Russian relations.
In July, 32 NATO members also stated during the NATO summit in Washington that China played a crucial role in enabling Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by supporting its defense industry.
In the same week of the summit, the Chinese and Russian militaries conducted joint exercises in western Belarus near the border with NATO member Poland, though Beijing publicly denied that the exercises were aimed at the summit.
In a joint statement, the 32 NATO member states urged Beijing to cease its support for Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, which has provided Russia with the resources needed to produce weapons and military hardware despite strict U.S.-led trade sanctions.
While China has repeatedly denied sending weapons or military equipment to aid Russia’s war effort, Ukrainian forces on the ground have reported finding a growing number of components from China in Russian weapons.
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After his meeting with Mishustin, the Chinese Premier met with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin where Li reiterated China’s willingness to work with Russia on a global stage.
“Against the backdrop of accelerating changes in the world unseen in a century, China is ready to work with Russia to further strengthen multilateral coordination, deepen mutual trust and cooperation with developing countries, firmly promote a multi-polar world and economic globalization, and better safeguard its legitimate rights and interests and basic norms governing international relations,” Li said as cited by China’s Xinhua News Agency.
Li added that the steady development of China-Russia relations not only served the fundamental interests of the two countries and two peoples, but also contributed to regional and world peace, stability and prosperity.
Li also stressed that China was willing to work with Russia in “emerging areas” such as scientific, technological and industrial innovation as well as cultural, tourism, education, youth and sub-national exchanges and cooperation to promote mutual understanding between the two peoples.
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and China’s Premier Li Qiang shake hands during a meeting in Moscow, Russia, Aug. 21, 2024. (Sputnik/Alexei Filippov/Pool via Reuters) An important part of bilateral cooperation has been seen in skyrocketing Chinese exports to Russia, with a recent analysis of Chinese customs data by Nathaniel Sher, a senior research analyst at Carnegie China, revealing that in 2023, some 90% of “”high priority” dual-use use goods used to produce Russian weapons were imported from China.
In May Putin visited China for the first time since beginning a new term, and he and Chinese President Xi Jinping underlined their “long and strong” friendship, and a strategic partnership that has been described as having “no upper limits.”
At that time Xi described the China-Russia relationship today as “hard-earned,” saying “the two sides need to cherish and nurture it” in a joint statement.
“China is willing to … jointly achieve the development and rejuvenation of our respective countries, and work together to uphold fairness and justice in the world,” Xi said in May.
Edited by Mike Firn.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Taejun Kang for RFA.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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DNC delegates unfurl banner during Biden’s speech at the DNC. Photo credit: Esam BoraeyAn Orwellian disconnect haunts the 2024 Democratic National Convention. In the isolation of the convention hall, shielded from the outside world behind thousands of armed police, few of the delegates seem to realize that their country is on the brink of direct involvement in major wars with Russia and Iran, either of which could escalate into World War III.
Inside the hall, the mass slaughter in the Middle East and Ukraine are treated only as troublesome “issues,” which “the greatest military in the history of the world” can surely deal with. Delegates who unfurled a banner that read “Stop Arming Israel” during Biden’s speech on Monday night were quickly accosted by DNC officials, who instructed other delegates to use “We
Joe” signs to hide the banner from view.In the real world, the most explosive flashpoint right now is the Middle East, where U.S. weapons and Israeli troops are slaughtering tens of thousands of Palestinians, mostly children and families, at the bidding of Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu. And yet, in July, Democrats and Republicans leapt to their feet in 23 standing ovations to applaud Netanyahu’s warmongering speech to a joint session of Congress.
In the week before the DNC started, the Biden administration announced its approval for the sale of $20 billion in weapons to Israel, which would lock the US into a relationship with the Israeli military for years to come.
Netanyahu’s determination to keep killing without restraint in Gaza, and Biden and Congress’s willingness to keep supplying him with weapons to do so, always risked exploding into a wider war, but the crisis has reached a new climax. Since Israel has failed to kill or expel the Palestinians from Gaza, it is now trying to draw the United States into a war with Iran, a war to degrade Israel’s enemies and restore the illusion of military superiority that it has squandered in Gaza.
To achieve its goal of triggering a wider war, Israel assassinated Fuad Shukr, a Hezbollah commander, in Beirut, and Hamas’s political leader and chief ceasefire negotiator, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran. Iran has vowed to respond militarily to the assassinations, but Iran’s leaders are in a difficult position. They do not want a war with Israel and the United States, and they have acted with restraint throughout the massacre in Gaza. But failing to respond strongly to these assassinations would encourage Israel to conduct further attacks on Iran and its allies.
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The assassinations in Beirut and Tehran were clearly designed to elicit a response from Iran and Hezbollah that would draw the U.S. into the war. Could Iran find a way to strike Israel that would not provoke a U.S. response? Or, if Iran’s leaders believe that is impossible, will they decide that this is the moment to actually fight a seemingly unavoidable war with the U.S. and Israel?This is an incredibly dangerous moment, but a ceasefire in Gaza would resolve the crisis. The U.S. has dispatched CIA Director William Burns, the only professional diplomat in Biden’s cabinet, to the Middle East for renewed ceasefire talks, and Iran is waiting to see the result of the talks before responding to the assassinations.
Burns is working with Qatari and Egyptian officials to come up with a revised ceasefire proposal that Israel and Hamas can both agree to. But Israel has always rejected any proposal for more than a temporary pause in its assault on Gaza, while Hamas will only agree to a real, permanent ceasefire. Could Biden have sent Burns just to stall, so that a new war wouldn’t spoil the Dems’ party in Chicago?
The United States has always had the option of halting weapons shipments to Israel to force it to agree to a permanent ceasefire. But it has refused to use that leverage, except for the suspension of a single shipment of 2,000 lb bombs in May, after it had already sent Israel 14,000 of those horrific weapons, which it uses to systematically smash living children and families into unidentifiable pieces of flesh and bone.
Meanwhile the war with Russia has also taken a new and dangerous turn, with Ukraine invading Russia’s Kursk region. Some analysts believe this is only a diversion before an even riskier Ukrainian assault on the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. Ukraine’s leaders see the writing on the wall, and are increasingly ready to take any risk to improve their negotiating position before they are forced to sue for peace.
But Ukraine’s recent incursion into Russia, while applauded by much of the west, has actually made negotiations less likely. In fact, talks between Russia and Ukraine on energy issues were supposed to start in the coming weeks. The idea was that each side would agree not to target the other’s energy infrastructure, with the hope that this could lead to more comprehensive talks. But after Ukraine’s invasion toward Kursk, the Russians pulled out of what would have been the first direct talks since the early weeks of the Russian invasion.
President Zelenskyy remains in power three months after his term of office expired, and he is a great admirer of Israel. Will he take a page from Netanyahu’s playbook and do something so provocative that it will draw U.S. and NATO forces into the potentially nuclear war with Russia that Biden has promised to avoid?
A 2023 U.S. Army War College study found that even a non-nuclear war with Russia could result in as many U.S. casualties every two weeks as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq did in two decades, and it concluded that such a war would require a return to conscription in the United States.
While Gaza and Eastern Ukraine burn in firestorms of American and Russian bombs and missiles, and the war in Sudan rages on unchecked, the whole planet is rocketing toward catastrophic temperature increases, ecosystem breakdown and mass extinctions. But the delegates in Chicago are in la-la land about U.S. responsibility for that crisis too.
Under the slick climate plan Obama sold to the world in Copenhagen and Paris, Americans’ per capita CO2 emissions are still double those of our Chinese, British and European neighbors, while U.S. oil and gas production have soared to all-time record highs.
The combined dangers of nuclear war and climate catastrophe have pushed the hands of the Doomsday Clock all the way to 90 seconds to midnight. But the leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties are in the pockets of the fossil fuel industry and the military-industrial complex. Behind the election-year focus on what the two parties disagree about, the corrupt policies they both agree on are the most dangerous of all.
President Biden recently claimed that he is “running the world.” No oligarchic American politician will confess to “running the world” to the brink of nuclear war and mass extinction, but tens of thousands of Americans marching in the streets of Chicago and millions more Americans who support them understand that that is what Biden, Trump and their cronies are doing.
The people inside the convention hall should shake themselves out of their complacency and start listening to the people in the streets. Therein lies the real hope, maybe the only hope, for America’s future.
The post The DNC Fiddles While the World Burns first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Berlin, August 19, 2024 – The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns a decision by Russian authorities to open a criminal case against Italian journalists Stefania Battistini and Simone Traini for alleged illegal border crossing from Ukraine into Russia.
“Trying to put Italian journalists Stefania Battistini and Simone Traini on trial seems to be a desperate attempt by Russian authorities to intimidate and silence international journalists covering the Russian-Ukraine war,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia Program Coordinator, in New York. “Russian officials must stop their harassment of journalists and respect the essential role of the press in conflict zones.”
The decision to launch a criminal probe follows the two journalists’ reporting on a Ukrainian military offensive into Russian’s southern Kursk region that began August 6. Reporting from the town of Sudzha, Battistini, a correspondent for Italian public broadcaster RAI and Traini, RAI’s camera operator, were shown in a Ukrainian military vehicle as they spoke with residents and looked at damaged houses and cars. The report marked the first foreign media report from the affected area.
In remarks to the state broadcaster Rossiya-24, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova alleged that facts were “entirely rewritten” in Battistini and Traini’s reporting. “Turning everything upside down – black was called white, and white was called black,” Zakharova said and added that law enforcement agencies would further investigate the matter.
If found guilty, the journalists could face up to five years in prison.
After the Russian Foreign Ministry summoned Italy’s ambassador on August 16 over the border crossing, Battistini and Traini left Russia on August 18 to temporarily return to Italy, according to reports and their employer RAI who said the reason was “exclusively to guarantee safety and personal protection” of the two journalists.
CPJ sent emails to Battistini, and Russia’s Foreign Ministry requesting comment but has not received a response.
Editor’s note: The date of this Ukrainian military offensive has been updated.
This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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Sport: Ambassador of peace (Soviet Union 1970s)Rumi: Come out of the circle of time into the circle of love.
I have taken up ping pong as my sole viable remaining sport in my 70s. It really was made for frustrated sedentary has-beens. I played real tennis till tennis elbow set in, but even the thought of lurching, run around asphalt (let alone falling) makes it easy to shift into a scaled-down version. The paddle weighs almost nothing, the ball nothing. You play for an hour without noticing the time. Unless you have bodily aches and pains making anything unpleasant. But even then, if they’re not too serious, you don’t notice the pain (e.g., sciatica) so much, you don’t suffer.
From the start, I told Marty, ‘let’s not bother scoring. Let’s just make every rally the best.’
It was rocky at the beginning. Cheap paddles. But never boring. Boring is doing something you don’t want to do, prostituting your time, or worse, when you prefer your tech virtual reality to real life. As low tech retirees, we didn’t have to worry on that count. We did improve. Indeed, I look forward to each journey out of my low tech virtual reality.
Ping pong praxis
We’re taught we must ‘keep score’, the goal is to ‘win’. But why must your other be your opponent? Our two rules: keep the ball in play, and keep the play interesting. Balance challenge vs stability, a controlled disequilibrium. After playing for four years, tactics and strategy have become apparent. Without the worry of being ‘out’, your range of shots increases dramatically. I love to hit deep, as if defying gravity, going to the limit. We volley for a change of pace and keep a collective score for fun. When the fire alarm went off one day, we transferred the game to a spot of green outside and volleyed. It turned out to be a delight to play on the grass and we had lots of friendly cheerleading.
Our hits are slower, looking for elegance, style. It’s beautiful to watch a ball bounce high and deep, it rises and rushes to greet your friendly paddle. Hitting wide or too deep is fine if it’s still returnable. It’s fun to rush around to hit a deep lob 20′ away to the distant table. Like launching a rocket to planet Earth from the asteroid belt. Landing smartly on a corner is like docking your craft to the space station.
Shots are often funny, crazy, flying away into the distance. We cause some consternation and more delight from passing residents in the common room. A good rally is like a game in itself. Both players win. The outsider shots are just more cardiovascular workout, and on soft vinyl, not hateful cement.
How to end a rally? Usually from a really bad shot into the ‘jungle’ (stacked chairs) or the Bermuda Triangle (meeting tables pushed together). If the rally has gone on for a while, I like to lob it and end with a volley at the net, a flourish, hoping to keep the volley going 3-4 times and even returning to rally mode. Volleys are fun and not so strenuous as in real tennis. I continue to be amazed at the strange things gravity and movement do.
Courtesy and laughter are the basic mode, the high you get from synergy, the 1 + 1 > 2, the connection, cooperation. The only competition is with yourself to push you to excel. All rallies are win-win.
So ping pong is praxis. Practical politics, skills enacted, embodied, realized, put into practice, in a nonalienated world, where you consciously build your life/ universe based on mutual agreement. ‘No force in ping pong.’
Boundaries?
Why artificially create boundaries? If I’m polite and not a nuisance, I can retrieve the ball from across the room between the feet of the mahjong players. (Very, very serious. They rarely crack a smile even as I reach in among their feet.) No need to put up a wall. It’s nice to visit and say hello, excuse myself if the ball lands on someone’s lap or head. An apology is like a free gift. No need for arms (except the real ones, to delicately retrieve an errant ball). You can go abroad, the ‘near abroad’ to play. The Soviet Union was a model that way. Ukrainians and Russians, Armenians and Azeris, Georgians and Abkhazians, lived in peaceful coexistence until the West finally succeeded in bring it down, proudly boasting of freedom and democracy.
It was a kind of planned (forced) gift economy (Spartan mass consumerism), and foundered on the impossibility of forcing people to be nice and not to compare apples (capitalism) and oranges (communism). There was no private property, infrastructure was public, and sport and games were central to Soviet life. It will be remembered for the thousands of top athletes, artists, and scientists it produced.
My translation: Russian and Ukrainian living in harmony before capitalism poisoned everything (1950s)A hint of how a gift economy differs from our private property/ scarcity-based society. But force in general is a bad idea and the internally peaceful, borderless Soviet Union collapsed. Its story was better than ours (at least for socialists) but it wasn’t enough to undermine our very old, very powerful story of separation and scarcity.
Vita ludens
We play for fun and to bond. All life is (or should be) ludens, playful, leisurely, fun. Our cosmic motivation is curiosity, exploring limits, loosening inhibitions to creativity, creative dialogue with environment, reimagining the world, not enslaved to a preset end. The end emerges through process itself. Pause for a moment. That’s exactly what a new born infant is/ does. Is it still the way you live?
The value of play (of life!) is not so much the motor skills or problem-solving techniques it develops; what is learned is the ability to concentrate and focus attention unsparingly on the task at hand, without regard for limitations—no tiredness, no rushing, no need to abandon a hot idea in the middle to go on to something else. Untrammeled creativity that comes from within. Experience the unsparing focus of play as a feeling of timelessness. Entrainment. It undoes the artificial self/ other, mind/ body, in our Age of Separation. The task absorbs us, organic agents of the universe’s own creative process. Through us, the universe creates itself. Sacred ping pong.
No need for willpower to stay focused and overcome natural desires. In play we are natural desire manifest (if we get out of the automaton syndrome). There’s no useful goal. It’s not ‘youth is the time for play’, but ‘play keeps us youthful‘. When you impose arbitrary rules, limits, then our bodies/ minds suffer, harden (think: arteries hardening). Qualities of childhood play are the same as for creativity of the adult. We are the universe’s channel for play. Language, art, math, technology originated in play. Abstract language allows us to imagine, create, play with our inner reality. What might be.
But adult play is a pale imitation of children’s play. We play but in a game gone wrong, and can’t extricate ourselves. Our separation from nature, our puny Cartesian self-and-other is not how the real world works. Think: Play, a dance of energy and information. After a near-death experience, a person develops an unhurried, playful attitude to life, cherishing each moment.1
Nature ‘grew’ animals/ us. How can we conceive of the bizarre, the beautiful, all unrepeatable, millions of species as random? What an insult! But not pre-designed. The idea of a blueprint for the human eye (any eye) is ridiculous. The peacock (man) is a marvel of creativity. It is clearly not random but there is no invoker. It emerged spontaneously out of the creativity of Earth, nature, the universe, if you like, God’s creative inspiration. And that goes doubly for Man. The conscious self-aware human is the emergent whole mind-soul-body. No blueprint. Just trust mother nature.
I was born with my gifts latent. They emerged as I interacted with my environment and activated them to serve the purpose I have here, also an emergent property, something between me, God and nature. No central command dictating, just as there is no central command in the cell, where the ‘brain’ is the membrane, the interphase with the outside, the other. There is no central command in our brains.2 i.e., you are what others make of you, what ‘nature calls’ for, through life’s opportunities and the world’s needs. Darwin’s survival. Lamarck’s higher purpose which we must seek out, i.e., through humility, curiosity, not control. We think we are the master engineers, but you engineer nature at great peril. Nature is wondrously nonlinear. We are helplessly linear, and anything we do will have nonlinear, chaos-producing effects. When we try to impose our linear thinking, rigid rules, we defy nature’s laws and changeability. Natives intuit nature and only obey a law they can break.3
Quantum ping pong
Newton defined our enlightenment world as an impersonal one of force and time-space; his laws of motion – the laws of everything (until they weren’t). Ping pong thumbs its nose at this worldview. The virtually weightless ball defies gravity. My puny forehand can catapult the missile into deep outer-space. Time disappears when you are ‘in the flow’. Table tennis was invented in 1870s by colonial officers, then adopted by nouveau riche at home in imperial Britannia, as a post-prandial diversion. Not skipping a beat, in 1883, Slazenger filed a patent for a net for table tennis. ‘Ping pong’ was trademarked in 1901. Sigh. Greed, private property moved in on the backs of imperial playtime.
The problem was the ball. Clunky cricket or golf balls were too heavy. Technology to the rescue. Celluloid was used to make light, sturdy balls in the US, also in 1901, and ping pong never looked back. There are 300 million players around the world today. It is the sixth most popular game, and recognized as an Olympic sport in 1988. It is not so popular in the US. People are too spread out. Driving a car to play ping pong is, well, silly. Americans and globally, those who are part of our Newtonian worldview, like sports, but professional sports, like everything in capitalism, specialized, superstars, money-making. There’s no money in the masses playing ping pong for free. So we have spectator versions of all sports. Thank God ping pong doesn’t have much sex appeal, glamor, danger, so it is more or less forgotten, not coopted, poisoned.
Newton was stuck in separation mode: we are isolated automatons moving around independently in a random world. Along came Einstein and quantum physics and we find we are in an indeterminate world all connected. Our subduing of nature is a deception. Our tamed version of things makes them smaller, even dead, and disposable. We intuit this lack, but instead of rejecting the deception, we pile it on higher and deeper. More tech. Better TV to get the best experience. Lol. No longer do we sense the mystery of the unknown, but rather are left with a catalogue of the known, everything private property.
Ping pong is radical, revolutionary, anarchistic, animistic. We know deep down that private property is theft, and enjoy the sense of freedom when we enter the tireless, property-less primordial realm. Escape into the timeless, when no rules interrupt the flow, where the play creates beauty as it proceeds, like the Mandelbrot set, nonlinear evolutionary beauty which just is, unprovably beautiful.4
Rules ruin the flow except at the highest level of play when competition acts to heighten the beauty, mutual control (you have to hit brilliantly to stay alive, every moment a life/ death moment, martialing all skills at once). The only property, reality, is bat-ball-table. You are your partner merged with the ball in a dance. All are ‘commons’. We use our gifts and leave nature in the same primal state. The gift economy. The perfect sport. No infrastructure (you can volley anywhere, outdoors), almost no space, so no built-in physical limits that constrict, make expensive, tied to scarcity culture.
Left/ right hemispheres
Ping pong is a constant reminder that left-hemisphere rationality is just a superficial rationalization of real decision-making in the unconscious sympathetic (fight or flight) system. As my ace partner, Jason, prepares for a smash, I notice my paddle is already in position before I have a chance to think. To my surprise, I often scoop a deep shot to my backhand with my physical ‘back hand’ without any left brain instruction. Glimpses of another Eric. We are ruled by cold hard reason (but secretly function ‘without rhyme or reason’, marching to a different tune). Newtonian mass determined by forces acting on us (but constantly undermined by our irrational right hemisphere).
This is agriculture thinking. Nature is violent, stingy, we must extract as much as possible, save some, pay the master, lord for the privilege of being alive. The left hemisphere is the wrong place for vita ludens. That requires the heart for knowing and deciding. A beautiful rally you feel in the heart, not so much head, but the head respects, admires. It grudgingly admits the right hemisphere is, well, right, at least occasionally. It’s good to have a goal, especially if it’s creating beauty. Save the rational stuff for later.
No scoring, no force. Just skill, perfecting your skills, your goal – to create beauty. Force never works in ping pong (or in any social relation). A gentle tap at the right time and place is exquisite, a smash … boring. Smashes all look the same. Like Tolstoy’s bad marriages. The ball is very sensitive. You hear it scream in pain if you whack it too hard. ‘Good’ easily turns into ‘bad’, so pay attention! It is a loving relationship with the ball.
The universe you share with your partner has its dangers – the ‘jungle’ (of stacked chairs), the caves in the cliff face (shelves of library books, where the ball often retreats for a quick read up on organic chemistry or a kidney flush. Yew!). It plays hide&seek, launches into the sky, falling chicken-little style with a spectacular crash, scales peaks (ceiling speaker, piano). Saturnalia. An inverted parody of ‘out there’ ‘reality’. Overcome defeat with a string of beautiful, crazy shots. Collapse in laughter, the ‘high’ point of a good session.
In our post-Newtonian world, the observer is inseparable from the observed, so ‘is’ (I am isolated observer) is a lie. You are the ball, rushing over the net into the arms of your partner’s bat. Flying back in a ‘deadly’ beeline for your head. BAM! You’re dead!
Each hit unique. Experiments not repeatable. The scientific method doesn’t work. The flash-bulb snapshot of the ball heading for your eyeballs, imprinted for every on your mind. The left hemisphere mostly taking a break, letting your ball return without any conscious willing. Time as a succession of infinitely brief instants, process (motion, acceleration), but NOT reduced to dead numbers. You, the ball and your partner are timeless.The flash bulbs are rare moments, when a well aimed drive comes straight at you, you see the inner workings of your brain. Our rational brain automatically takes snapshots, objectifies, measures, compares, competes. The how is analyzed ‘post mortem’, but you’ll never fully understand the trajectory, the action, as it is nonlinear, full of feedback upon feedback. But that’s ok. It’s all a game. You can objectify, analyze, but the best players don’t need that. You can’t analyze joy, freedom.
The norm is a smooth left hemisphere film following a right hemisphere film script, where the real decisions are made to maintain the complex, balanced disequilibrium of life, always adjusting, hopefully alerting us to any runaway linear process undermining the whole and leading to collapse.
Child’s play
Do our adult games help there? It seems not. They are pushing all the wrong buttons: everyone isolated, dead automatons, half of whom are losers, taking Earth hostage as private property, with usury to accelerate the theft and destroy us all in war, famine and environmental collapse.
Time for a new game, a new story.
We need to leave behind this worldview of nature as cruel, of competition, zero-sum, as our way of life. We come into a world where everything, in the first place, your life, is a gift. How do you respond to a gift? Gratitude. And when it’s a really big gift, say your life, you are awed, humbled. How did those first good feelings become selfishness and arrogance? We all agree childhood should be a time of joy and play. Play is how we practice being adults.
So how did adults manage to bury play, turn it into passive spectator sports, competitive, dangerous, full of rich winners and poor losers? It must have something to do with this agriculture thinking, life as a zero-sum game which, if we include nature, becomes a negative sum game, where we ‘game’ nature, steal from nature and others and destroy both in the pursuit of lifeless gold.
This is a false view. The child knows the world is one of abundance. It is only as rules pile up, and his range of play limited and channeled into competitive simulations of our scarcity-obsessed world, that he forgets. The timeless magic of ping pong takes away these deadening limits and reminds me that nature is my generous, playful friend, not an enemy to be fought, resisted. When I lose balance, I’m relaxed as I fall and pick myself up and have a laugh at my declining abilities.
I would go a step farther and get rid of all professional sports. Have your competitions locally and friendly, making sure there is always a consolation prize. There are millions of excellent players to watch without the cult adulation of artificial heroes, earning obscene amounts of money, providing ‘copy’ for journalists to wax about, whose private lives we snoop on instead of cultivating our own. And why all the mindless travel of big, expensive teams constantly filling the sky with CO2 in endless pursuit of their Rosebud? Sorry, there is no Rosebud, meaning, to a trumped-up distraction. Corona should have been a wake-up call. We can celebrate our local community and perhaps know the ‘stars’ personally. By eliminating highly paid millionaire superstars, we can have dozens of local professional ‘stars’, be one yourself.
Ping pong living
Technology is definitely not Darwin’s random but rather adaptive. It is achieved through awareness of purpose, guided by trial-and-error and narrowing your search. Nonlinear so we automatically rely on intuition. For scientists, evolution is random, for creationists, it is the work of God. Both think only man has intentionality. But what if evolution has intentionality in some sleight-of-hand way?
Darwin famously pointed out the uniqueness of the peacock, where its beauty is through ‘sexual selection’. Rather than taking his example to the logical conclusion, that ALL females ‘fall in love’, creating beauty. That we all, every atom and toad, operate on love. That it literally makes the world go round. Lynn Margulis and many other scientists now see cooperation as the driving force of evolution in both human society and nature. Nature’s ‘law of everything’ operates on the same principles as human social evolution. We are emergent beings part of a complex, very nonlinear web of life.
Bottom-up emergent evolution, not random imposed top-down hierarchical evolution.5 We don’t need to separate the human realm. We are part of nature. No need to build a tower to the sky. Sky is everywhere. What we do need is a miracle, i.e., a new sense of what is possible, born from surrender from the attempt to control, manage life. A miracle happens when life overwhelms you and you do the unimaginable (an alcoholic humbly surrenders and turns around his life). Let go of old ways of being (isolated, owning, having). Withdraw from the apparatus of the machine. See the love that bathes the world. Love of being alive, love of living beings. Stop thinking in terms of how much x is ‘worth’. Comparing. Competing. Think Rumi or McCartney, ‘All you need is love’.
Your goal is beauty, service, fun, self-expression. The collapse of the Newtonian world-machine reunites us with the world. We fall in love with it again, our first impressions coming back to us. Love biological life and our personal lives. Love the world and our time in it. We have been frightened into rejecting both, accepting as a result their plunder: the reduction of the living world to resources, things, money and reduction of our time to commodified hours, jobs, the grim necessity of making a living and turning nature, all of our commons, into dead private property.
Ping pong diplomacy
Hearing the steady stream of jingoism now, vilifying Putin and Russia, it ‘hit’ me how this Cold War political system is like competitive ping pong. Defeat your opponent by all ‘legal’ means, be ruthless, hostile. Intimidate him. Better yet, trick him, lie. We’re all fair ‘game’ (i.e., game = victim). War is merely politics by other means. War is good. It makes profits and should kill somewhere far away, ‘creates’ jobs. You see how we distort these words. To game someone is to make a fool of him. Profit originally did not mean exploiting others. We create jobs with no concern about how the things we make will be used. Our thinking is reductionist, reducing everything to money.
The logic of imperialism is the same Etonian cricket competitiveness which pervades all our games. At least in the 19th century variety among the elite, there were principles of modesty and fair play. The era of superstardom, superpowers, had to wait till our civilization had reached its limits of destructive force in the 20th century, when diplomacy collapsed and we were in capitalism’s death grip, in an increasingly totalitarian world.
This war mentality pervades our ‘civilization’. Life is war and Britannia rules the waves, i.e., waves the rules. Ha! The rulers can change the rules as they like. What kind of a game is that? How can a jingoistic, one-sided war mentality ever lead to peace? Peace is impossible if the ‘law of the jungle’6 reigns, where everyone is a slave to the system, where the rules are stacked to ‘keep order’. People are actually happier during real wartime than during peacetime under capitalism.
All nations need friendly contact, especially with neighbours. Before the rise of capitalism, that was done through ceremonial exchange of gifts. Sports are a great way to do that too, but why automatically compete? Gift giving wasn’t about winning-losing. The point is friendship, fun and health.
In ping pong, without the worry of being ‘out’ (i.e., not fitting in, poor, wrong colour), your range of shots increases dramatically as does your partner. Hey! It’s DEI.7 Ditto foreign relations and life in general. You trust your partner without complicated rules or a referee. And not everything can or should be legislated. The circumstances change and the way to deal with problems is courtesy and mutual understanding. Sometimes it’s okay to break the rule. We never walk away frustrated or a ‘loser’ from our ping pong, and, after four years, it just gets better. The end? You play till you’ve run out of inspiration, generally about an hour. End on a high point of enjoyment, go home and do your exercises for good measure.
In my books, ping pong is superior to all other racket sports, especially pickleball, which is a fitting metaphor for imperialism. Noisy, aggressive, takes over tennis courts, false sense of superiority, shortcut on aging. It presses all the wrong buttons. Ping pong praxis has economic, political, environmental, health benefits. #1 is demonetizing. Screw capitalism. #2. Eliminating scoring opens the competition to alternatives: paintball-style ‘killing’ the opponent, most bizarre shots, volleys, crazy rebounds off pillars, hitting the inadvertently musical railings, funny shots. Another is Jason’s ‘double clutch’.8 The goal is to keep the ball in play, i.e., cooperative. If boring, then push the bounds, throw in a wild card. No stasis. Homeostasis, i.e., controlled disequilibrium, an ever-changing balance between stability and creativity.
New story time
Of course, we grow up, leave behind ‘childish things’, we suddenly shoot up, grow into adults, but don’t keep growing. The teen years are difficult, challenging, full of competition, striving, jockeying for a place in the adult hierarchy, but thankfully they come to an end and we go back into an equilibrium relationship with the environment, our neocortex continuing to mature (hopefully) towards wisdom. Our new position is more like our infancy than our teen years. We find a huge complex world that we can explore with our newly refined mind-body.
Similarly, our society has followed such a trajectory, growing frantically for 500 years as our societies mature, but that dangerous exponential growth is coming to an end, as we monetize every inch of the globe in search of profit. Which makes ping pong all the more vital to our vita ludens. It thumbs its nose at our obsession with growth, property, money.
Old people, like children, are not concerned with this anymore. We naturally return to gift economy thinking, aware of how dependent and vulnerable we are, not isolated individuals in control, grateful to have these last moments of awe at what we must leave behind. People that make this transition back to gift thinking are the happiest. ‘You can’t take it with you’ govern us again, as it did before all the adult stories messed things up.
Our story of scarcity and private property (they are one and the same) is well past its due date. We can start with ping pong, reminding us that life is for play, that we need to reconceive work as play, that if we maximize anything, it should be laughter and joy, not dead property. Eisenstein calls for a technology of love in the Age of Reunion. P2P, LETS, Freecycle.9 End your game with a mutual flourish, like a full cadence at the end of dazzling scherzo. Create beauty or at the very least, comic relief. The law of sacred ping pong: better him <=> better me.
* See Harnessing human nature to save the world.
ENDNOTES:
The post Sacred Ping Pong first appeared on Dissident Voice.1 Some people recovering from a lightning strike find they have sudden new artistic abilities, such as playing the piano, as if dormant genes are switched on.2 Descartes confidently (and wrongly) identified the pineal gland as the home of the self, lost as he was in the new paradigm of the isolated, ethereal soul in the world of matter.3 David Graeber, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity,2021. Breaking rules and making new rules are a child’s earliest activities.4 A two-dimensional set with a relatively simple definition that exhibits great complexity, especially as it is magnified.5 My inspiration is Charles Eisenstein, The Ascent of Humanity: Civilization and the Human Sense of Self, 2007.6 Our perverse characterization of nature as a scary jungle. We create our scary capitalism, the real ‘law of the jungle’.7 When you pop the ball and it’s still in reach, hit it back without a bounce.8 Diversity, equality, inclusive. Without the school marm pretense.9 Peer to Peer, e.g., OpenOffice free software, i.e., for the love of it. Local Exchange Trading System. Freecycle.org ‘pay forward’ barter website.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Noam Chomsky (95) famous dissident and father of modern linguistics, considered one of the world’s leading intellectuals, is recovering from a stroke he suffered at age 94 and now living with his wife in Brazil. According to a report in Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now d/d July 2, 2024, this past June Brazilian President Lula personally visited Chomsky, holding his hand, saying: “You are one of the most influential people of my life” personally witnessed by Vijay Prashad, co-author with Noam Chomsky, The Withdrawal (The New Press).
Indeed, Noam Chomsky is established as one of the most influential intellectuals of the 21st century.
A pre-stroke video interview with Chomsky conducted at the University of Arizona is extraordinarily contemporary and insightful with a powerful message: What Does the Future Hold Q&A With Noam Chomsky hosted by Lori Poloni-Staudinger, Dean of School of Behavioral Sciences and Professor, School of Government and Public Policy, University of Arizona.
Chomsky joined the School of Behavioral Sciences in 2017 and taught “Consequences of Capitalism.”
This article is a synopsis of some of Chomsky’s responses to questions, and it includes third-party supporting facts surrounding his statements about the two biggest risks to humanity’s continual existence.
What Does the Future Hold?
Question: geopolitics, unipolar versus multipolar
Chomsky: First there are two crises that determine whether it is even appropriate to consider how geopolitics will look in the future: (1) threat of nuclear war (2) the climate crisis.
“If the climate crisis is not dealt with in the next few years, human society is essentially finished. Everything else is moot unless these two crises are dealt with.”
(This paragraph is not part of Chomsky’s answer) Regarding Chomsky’s warning, several key indicators of the climate crisis are flashing red, not green. For example, nine years ago 195 nations at the UN climate conference Paris ‘15 agreed to take measures to mitigate CO2 emissions to hold global warming to under 1.5°C pre-industrial. Yet, within only nine years of that agreement amongst 195 nations, according to Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), global temperatures exceeded 1.5°C (2.7°F) above preindustrial for the first time in human history for a 12-month period from February 2023 to January 2024 and now fast approaching danger zones. Obviously, nations of the world did not follow their own dictates, and if not them, who will?
Paleoclimatology has evidence of what to expect if the “climate crisis,” as labeled by Chomsky, is not dealt with (The following paragraph is also not part of Chomsky’s answer): “While today’s CO2-driven climate change scenario is unprecedented in human history, similar circumstances existed in the geological record that give us an idea of what to expect in the way of global sea level rise, and the process that will get us there. About 3.2 million years ago, during the Pliocene epoch, CO2 levels were about 400 ppm (427 ppm today) and temperatures were 2-3°C above the “pre-industrial” temperatures of 1850-1880. At the same time, proxy data indicate global sea level was about 52 feet (within a 39-foot to 66-foot range) higher than today.” (Source: The Sleeping Giant Awakens, Climate Adaptation Center, May 21, 2024)
Maybe that is why the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) strongly suggests keeping temperatures ideally below 1.5°C and certainly not above 2.0°C pre-industrial.
Chomsky on World Power: Currently the center of world power, whether unipolar or multipolar is very much in the news. This issue has roots going back to the end of WWII when the US established overwhelming worldwide power. But now the Ukraine war has the world very much divided with most of world outside of the EU, US and its allies calling for diplomatic settlement. But the US position is that the war must continue to severely weaken Russia.
Consequently, Ukraine is dividing the world, and it shows up in the framework of unipolar versus multipolar. For example, the war has driven the EU away from independent status to firm control by the US. In turn the EU is headed towards industrial decline because of disruption of its natural trading partners, e.g., Russia is full of natural resources that the EU is lacking, which economist have always referred to as a “marriage made in heaven,” a natural trading relationship that has now been broken. (footnote: EU industrial production down 3.9% past 12 months)
And the Ukrainian imbroglio is cutting off EU access to markets in China e.g., China has been an enormous market for German industrial products. Meanwhile, the US is insisting upon a unipolar framework of world order that wants not only the EU but the world to be incorporated within something like the NATO system. Under US pressure NATO has expanded its reach to the Indo-Pacific region, meaning NATO is now obligated to take part in the US conflict with China.
Meantime, the rest of the world is trying to develop a multipolar world with several independent sectors of power. The BRICS countries Brazil, Russia, India, China, Indonesia, South Africa, want an independent source of power of their own. They are 40% of world economy that’s independent of US sanctions and of the US dollar.
These are developing conflicts over one raging issue and one developing issue. Ukraine is the raging issue; the developing issue is US conflict with China, which is developing its own projects in Eurasia, Africa, Middle East, South Africa, S9uth Asia, and Latin America.
The US is determined to prevent China’s economic development throughout the world. The Biden administration has “virtually declared a kind of war with China” by demanding that Western allies refuse to permit China to carry out technological development.
For example, the US insist others do not all0w China access to any technology that has any US parts in it. This includes everything, as for example, Netherlands has a world-class lithographic industry which produces critical parts for semi-conductors for the modern high-tech economy. Now, Netherlands must determine whether it’ll move to an independent course to sell to China, or not… the same is true for Samsung, South Korea, and Japan.
The world is splintered along those lines as the framework for the foreseeable future.
Question: Will multinational corporations gain too much power and influence?
Chomsky suggests looking at them right now… US based multinationals control about one-half of the world’s wealth. They are first or second in every domain like manufacturing and retail; no one else is close. It’s extraordinary power. Based upon GDP, the US has 20% of world GDP, but if you look at US multinationals it’s more like 50%. Multinationals have extraordinary power over domestic policy in both the US and in other capitalistic countries. So, how will multinationals react when told they cannot deal with a major market, like China?
How does this develop over future years? The EU is going into a period of decline because of breaking relationships in trade and commercial business with the East. Yet, it’s not sure that the EU will stay subordinate to the US and willingly go into decline, or will the EU join the rest of the world and move into a more complex multipolar world and integrate with countries in the East? This is yet to be determined. For example, France’s President Emmanuel Macron (2017-) has been vilified and condemned for saying that after Russia is driven out of Ukraine, a way must be found to accommodate Russia within an international system, an initial crack in the US/EU relationship.
Threat of nuclear war question: Russia suspended the START Nuclear Arms Treaty with the US and how important is this to the threat of nuclear war?
Chomsky: It is very significant. It is the last remaining arms control treaty, the new START Treaty, Trump almost cancelled it. The treaty was due to expire in February when Biden took over in time to extend it, which he did.
Keep in mind that the US was instrumental in creating a regime which somewhat mitigates the threat of nuclear war, which means “terminal war.” We talk much too casually about nuclear war. There can’t be a nuclear war. If there is, we’re finished. It’s why the Doomsday Clock is set at 90 seconds to midnight, the closest it’s been.
Starting with George W. Bush the US began dismantling arms control. Bush dismantled the ABM Treaty, a missile treaty very significantly part of the arms control system and an enormous threat to Russia. So, the dismantling allowed the US to set up installations right at the border of Russia. It’s a severe threat to Russia. And Russia has reacted.
The Trump administration got rid of the INF Treaty, the Reagan-Gorbachev treaty of 1987 which ended short-range missiles in Europe. Those missiles are now back in place on the borders of Russia. Trump, to make it clear that we meant business, arranged missile launches right away upon breaking of the treaty.
Trump destroyed the Open Skies Treaty which originated with Eisenhower stating that each side should share information about what the other side was doing to reduce the threat of misunderstanding.
Only the new START Treaty remains. And Russia suspended it. START restricts the number of strategic weapons for each side. The treaty terminates in 2026, but it’s suspended by Russia anyway. So, in effect there are no agreed upon restraints to increasing nuclear weapons.
Both sides already have way more nuclear weapons than necessary; One Trident nuclear submarine could destroy a couple hundred cities all over the world. And land based nuclear missile locations are known by both sides. So, if there is a threat, those would be hit immediately. Which means if there’s a threat, “you’d better send’em off, use’em or lose’em.” This obviously is a very touchy, extraordinarily risky situation because one mistake could amplify very quickly.
The new START Treaty that’s been suspended by Russia did restrict the enormous excessive number of strategic weapons. So, we should be in negotiations right now to expand it, restore it, and reinstitute the treaties the US has dismantled, the INF Treaty, Reagan-Gorbachev treaty, ABM Treaty, Open Stars Treaty should all be brought back.
Question: Will society muster the will for change for equity, prosperity, and sustainability?
Chomsky: There is no answer. It’s up to the population to come to grips with issues and say we are not going to march to the precipice and fall over it. But it’s exactly what our leaders are telling us to do. Look at the environmental crisis. It is well understood that we may have enough time to control heating of the environment, destruction of habitat, destruction of the oceans which is going to lead to total catastrophe. It’s not like everybody will die all at once, but we’re going to reach irreversible tipping points that becomes just a steady decline. To know how serious it is, look at particular areas of the world.
The Middle East region is one of the most rapidly heating regions of the world at rates twice as fast as the rest of the world. Projections by the end of the century at current trajectories show sea level in Mediterranean will rise about 10 feet.
Look at a map where people live, it is indescribable. Around Southeast Asia and peasants in India are trying to survive temperatures in the 120s where less than 10% of population has air conditioning. This will cause huge migrations from areas of the world where life will become unlivable.
Fossil fuel companies are so profitable that they’ve decided to quit any sustainable efforts in favor of letting profits run as fast and as far as possible. They’re opening new oil and gas fields that can produce another 30-40 years but at that point we’ll all be finished.
We have the same issue with nuclear weapons as with the environment. If these two issues are not dealt with, in the not-too-distant future, it’ll be all over. The population needs to “have the will” to stop it.
Question: How do we muster that will?
Chomsky: Talk to neighbors, join community organizations, join activist’s groups, press Congress, get out into the streets if necessary. How have things happened in the past? For example, back in the 1960s small groups of women got together, forming consciousness-raising groups and it was 1975 (Sex Discrimination Act) that women were granted the right of persons peers under US domestic law, prior to that we’re still back in the age of the founding fathers when women were property Look at the Civil Rights movement. Go back to the 1950s, Rosa Parks refused to move from her seat on a bus that was planned by an organized group of activists that led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott, big change… in 1960 a couple of black students in No. Carolina decided to sit in at a lunch counter segregated. Immediately arrested, and the next day another group came… later they became organized as SNCC, Student Nonviolent Coordinated Committee. Young people from the North started to join. Next freedom buses started running to Alabama to convince black farmers to cast a vote. It went on this way, building, until you got civil rights legislation in Washington.
What’s happening right now as an example of what people can do? The Biden administration passed the Inflation Reduction Act, IRA. It’s mostly a climate change act. The only way you can get banks and fossil fuel companies to stop destroying the world is to bribe them. That’s basically our system. But IRA is not the substantial program that Biden presented. It is watered down. The original came out of Bernie Sander’s office. As for the background for that, young people, from the Sunrise Movement, were active and organizing and sat in on Congressional offices. AOC joined them. A bill came out of this, but Republican opposition cut back the original bill by nearly 100% They are a denialist party. They want to destroy the world in the interest of private profit. The final IRA bill is nowhere near enough.
Summation: Chomsky sees a world of turmoil trying to sort out whether unipolar or multipolar wins the day with the Ukrainian war serving as a catalyst to change. Meanwhile, the EU carries the brunt of its impact. Meantime, nuclear arms treaties have literally dissolved in the face of a tenuous situation along the Russia/EU borders with newly armed missiles pointed at Russia’s heartland. In the face of this touch-and-go Russia vs. the West potentially explosive scenario, the global climate system is under attack via excessive fossil fuel emissions cranking up global temperatures beyond what 195 countries agreed was a danger zone.
Chomsky sees a nervous nuclear weapons-rattling high-risk world flanked by unmitigated deterioration of ecosystems that global warming steadily, assuredly takes down for the count, as global temperatures set new records. He calls for individuals to take action, do whatever necessary to change the trajectory of nuclear weaponry and climate change to save society. Chomsky offered several examples of small groups of people acting together, over time, turning into serious protests and ultimately positive legislation.
AmThis article covers the first 34 minutes of a 52-minute video: Noam Chomsky: About the Future of Our World.
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed individuals can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” (Margaret Mead, Anthropologist)
The post The Future of Our World by Noam Chomsky first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Ekecheiria, also known as the “Olympic Truce,” is a quaint notion dating to Ancient Greece, when three kings prone to warring against each other – Iphitos of Elis, Cleosthenes of Pisa and Lycurgus of Sparta – concluded a treaty permitting the safe passage of all athletes and spectators from the relevant city-states for the duration of the Olympic Games. The truce had a certain logic to it, given that many of those granted safe passage would have been serving soldiers or soldiers in waiting.
In 1894, the founder of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), Pierre de Coubertin, fantasised about the Games as a peace promoting endeavour which, when read closely, suggests the sublimation of humanity’s warring instincts. Instead of killing each other, humans could compete in stadia and on the sporting tracks, adoring and admiring physical prowess. “Wars break out because nations misunderstand each other. We shall have no peace until the prejudices which now separate the different races shall have been outlived. To attain this end, what better means than to bring the youth of all countries periodically together for amicable trials of muscular strength and agility.”
Panting over torsos, sinews and muscles, de Coubertin gushingly wrote his “Ode to Sport” in 1912. Sport was peace, forging “happy bonds between the peoples by drawing them together in reverence for strength which is controlled, organised and self-disciplined.” It was through the young that respect would be learned for “one another,” thereby ensuring that “the diversity of national traits becomes a source of generous and peaceful emulation.” Sport was also other things: justice, daring, honour, joy and, in the true spirit of eugenic inspiration, the means to achieve “a more perfect race, blasting the seeds of sickness”. Athletes would, accordingly, “wish to see growing about him brisk and sturdy sons to follow him in the arena and [in] turn bear off joyous laurels.”
The Olympic Charter also states that Olympism’s central goal “is to place at the service of the harmonious development of humankind, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity.”
In the 1990s, the IOC thought it prudent to revive the concept of such a truce. As the organisation explains, this was done “with a view to protecting, as far as possible, the interests of the athletes and sport in general, and to harness the power of sport to promote peace, dialogue and reconciliation more broadly.” In 2000, the IOC founded the International Olympic Truce Foundation, adopting the dove as a signature symbol of the Games. By the London Olympics of 2012, the 193 nations present had signed onto an Olympic Truce.
From such lofty summits, hypocrisy and inconsistency will follow. The IOC, hardly the finest practitioner of fine principle, has been prone to injudicious standards, rampant corruption and tyrannical stupidity. The IOC recommendation to ban Russian athletes took all but four days after the attack on Ukraine in February 2022 on the premise that Russia had breached the sacred compact of sporting peace. In the mix, Belarus, designated as arch collaborator with Russian war aims, was also added.
During the 11th Olympic Summit held on December 9, 2022, the IOC Executive Board noted that the Olympic Games would not “address all the political and social challenges in the world. This is the realm of politics.” Having advocated that platitudinous, false distinction, the Executive Board could still claim that the Games “can set an example for a world where everyone respects the same rules as one another.”
The IOC did make one grudging concession: Russian and Belarusian athletes could compete as Individual Neutral Athletes (AINs) subject to meeting eligibility requirements determined by the Individual Neutral Athlete Eligibility Review Panel. Each athlete’s participation was subject to respecting the Olympic Charter, with special reference to “the peace mission of the Olympic Movement”.
These statements and qualifications, intentionally or otherwise, are resoundingly delusional. The Games are events of pompous political significance, with athletes often being administrative and symbolic extensions of the nation stage they represent. Authoritarian regimes have gloatingly celebrated hosting them. They have been staging grounds for violence, notably in the killing of 12 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Games by the Palestinian terrorist group Black September.
They have also been boycotted for very political reasons. The United States did so in 1980 for the Moscow Games, along with 64 other nations, in response to the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. The Soviet Union returned the favour at the Los Angeles Olympics held in 1984, giving President Ronald Reagan a chance, in an election year, to speak of the “winning” American ideal and “a new patriotism spreading across our country.”
In keeping with the erratic nature of such a spirit, it was appropriately hypocritical and distasteful of IOC practice to permit the Israeli athletic contingent numbering 88 athletes to compete at the Paris Games. All this, as slaughter and starvation continued to take place in Gaza (at the time, the Palestinian death toll lay somewhere in the order of 39,000).
Permitting Israel’s participation prompted Jules Boykoff, an academic of keen interest in the Games, to suggest that “the situation is more and more resembling the situation that led the IOC forcing Russia to participate as neutral athletes.” The body’s “approach to ignore the situation places its selective morality on full display and throws into question the group’s commitment to the high-minded ideals it claims to abide.”
These ideals remain just that, a cover that otherwise permits political realities to flourish. Predictably, the Paris spectacle, both before and after, was always going to feature the tang and sting of resentment. Far from being apolitical exponents of their craft, various members of the Israeli Olympic team have been more than forthcoming in defending the warring cause. Judokas Timna Nelson-Levy and Maya Goshen have been vocal in their defence of the Israeli Defense Forces.
Palestinian participants have also done their bit. During the opening ceremony, boxer Wasim Abusal wore a shirt showing children being bombed, telling Agence France-Presse that these were “children who are martyred and die under the rubble, children whose parents are martyred and are left alone without food and water.” Such views are not permitted for Russian or Belarusian athletes, who must compete under the deceptive flag of neutrality.
The organisers of the Paris Games also found it difficult to keep a lid on an occasion supposedly free of political attributes. The Israel-Paraguay football march was marked by scornful boos as the Israeli national anthem was performed. Reports also note that at least one banner featured “GENOCIDE OLYMPICS”. Three Israeli athletes also received death threats, according to a statement from the Paris prosecutor’s office.
It’s such instances of political oddities that permit the following suggestion: make all athletes truly amateurish by abolishing their associations with countries. Most nation states, soldered and cemented compacts of hatred, based upon territory often pinched from previous occupants, are such a nuisance in this regard. If Olympism is to make sense, and if the ravings of the physique obsessed de Coubertin are to be given shape, why not get rid of the State altogether, thereby making all participants neutral, if only for a few weeks?
The post The Distasteful Nonsense of Olympism first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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North Korean leader Kim Jong Un hailed his country’s deepening relations with Russia in a message to President Vladimir Putin, telling the Russian leader victory was assured in his “sacred war,” the North’s state-run media reported.
Kim’s comments followed a message from Putin on the anniversary of Korea’s independence from Japan’s colonial rule. The Russian leader told Kim that the bond forged as Soviet soldiers fought against Japan served as the basis of their ties.
In response, Kim thanked Putin, stressing the “invincible comradeship” of their countries.
“The friendly feelings of the armies and peoples of the two countries forged and deepened in the bloody struggle against the common enemy serve as a strong driving force for developing the traditional DPRK-Russia relations of friendship and cooperation into comprehensive strategic partnership,” said Kim, as cited by the Korean Central News Agency on Friday.
The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, or DPRK, is North Korea’s official name.
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Putin visited North Korea for talks with Kim in June when they announced a partnership treaty, agreeing to offer each other military assistance “without delay” if either were attacked. They also underscored their shared defiance of Western sanctions and expanded cooperation in various sectors.
During the June summit, Kim assured Putin of full support for Russia’s war in Ukraine. In his latest message, though not referring to Ukraine by name, Kim told Putin he was sure of Russia’s victory.
“I express the firm belief that the strong and brave Russian people will firmly defend the sovereign right and security interests of the state and surely win victory in the sacred war for regional peace and international justice under your energetic leadership,” Kim said.
Russia has been cozying up to North Korea since Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
The United States says that North Korea has supplied Russia with large amounts of weapons for the war in Ukraine, in particular artillery rounds and ballistic missiles, although both Russia and North Korea deny that.
In exchange for its weapons, North Korea is suspected of getting Russian technological assistance for its space program.
Edited by Mike Firn.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Taejun Kang for RFA.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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With a click, with a shock
Phone’ll jingle, door’ll knock, open the latch
Something’s coming, don’t know when but it’s soon . . .— “Something’s Coming,” West Side Story, lyrics by S. Sondheim, music by L. Bernstein.
Shock should not be the word, but when World War III breaks fully loose many who are now sleeping will be shocked. The war has already started, but its full fury and devastation are just around the corner. When it does, Tony’s singular fate in West Side Story will be the fate of untold millions.
It is a Greek tragedy brought on by the terrible hubris of the United States, its NATO accomplices, and the genocidal state of Israel and the Zionist terrorists who run it.
Tony felt a miracle was due, but it didn’t come true for him except to briefly love Maria and then get killed as result of a false report, and only a miracle will now save the world from the cataclysm that is on the way, whether it is initiated by intent, a false report, an accident, or the game of nuclear chicken played once too often.
Let us hope but not be naïve. The signs all point in one direction. The gun on the wall in the first act of this tragic play is primed to go off in the final one. Every effort to avoid this terrible fate by seeking peace and not war has been rejected by the U.S. and its equally insane allies. Every so-called red line laid down by Russia, Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Palestinians, and their allies has been violated with impunity and blatant arrogance. But impunity has its limits and the dark Furies of vengeance will have their day.
“It is the dead, not the living,” said Antigone, “who make the longest demands.” Their ghostly voices cry out to be avenged.
I wish I were not compelled by conscience to write this, but it seems clearly evident to me that we stand on the edge of an abyss. The fate of the world rests in the hands of leaders who are clearly psychotic and who harbor death wishes. It’s not terribly complex. Netanyahu and Biden are two of them. Yes, like other mass killers, I think they love their children and give their dog biscuits to eat. But yes, they also are so corrupted in their souls that they relish war and the sense of false power and prestige it brings them. They gladly kill other people’s children. They can defend themselves many times over, offer all kinds of excuses, but the facts speak otherwise. This is hard for regular people to accept.
The great American writer who lived in exile in France for so many years and who was born 100 years ago this month, James Baldwin, wrote an essay – “The Creative Process” – in which he addressed the issue of how becoming a normal member of society dulls one to the shadow side of personal and social truths. He wrote:
And, in the same way that to become a social human being one modifies and suppresses and, ultimately, without great courage, lies to oneself about all one’s interior, uncharted chaos, so have we, as a nation, modified or suppressed and lied about all the darker forces in our history.
And lie and suppress we still do today.
Imagine, if you will, that Mexico has invaded Texas with the full support of the Russian, Chinese, and Iranian governments. Their weapons are supplied by these countries and their drone and missile attacks on the U.S. are coordinated by Russian technology. The Seven Mile Bridge in Florida has been attacked. The U.S. Mexican border is dotted with Russian troops on bases with nuclear missiles aimed at U.S. cities.
It’s not hard to do. That is a small analogy to what the U.S./NATO is doing to Russia.
Do you think the United States would not respond with great force?
Do you think it would not feel threatened with nuclear annihilation?
How do you think it would respond?
The U.S/NATO war against Russia via Ukraine is accelerating by the day. The current Ukrainian invasion of Russia’s Kursk region has upped the ante dramatically. After denying it knew in advance of this Ukrainian invasion of Russia, the demented U.S. President Joseph Biden said the other day when asked about the fighting in Kursk, “I’ve spoken with my staff on a regular basis probably every four or five hours for the last six or eight days. And it’s — it’s creating a real dilemma for Putin. And we’ve been in direct contact — constant contact with — with the Ukrainians.” Do you think Kamala Harris was kept in the dark?
Now how do you think the Russians are going to respond? How many red lines will they allow the U.S. to cross without massive retaliation? And what kind of retaliation?
Switch then to the Middle East where the Iranians and their allies are preparing to retaliate to Israel’s attacks on their soil. No one knows when but it seems soon. Something is coming and it won’t be pretty. Will it then ignite a massive war in the region with the U.S. and Israel pitted against the region? Will nuclear weapons be used? Will the wars in Ukraine/Russia and the Middle East join into what will be called WW III?
While the U.S. continues to massively arm Israel, Russian is arming its ally Iran and likely training them in the use of those weapons as the U.S. is doing in Ukraine. The stage is set. We enter the final act.
Natanyahu wants and needs war to survive. So he thinks. Psychotic killers always do.
The signs all point in one direction. No one should be shocked if the worst comes to pass.
“Phone’ll jingle, door’ll knock, open the latch.”
If you have time.
The post Something’s Coming, We Don’t Know What It Is But It Is Going To Be Bad first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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It appears that the West has finally got its story straight: that it was Ukraine’s authorities that blew up the Nord Stream pipeline; that president Zelensky personally authorised it, and that the CIA knew about the plot. However, why has a Western corporate media outlet suddenly revealed this now? And moreover, was it really Zelensky – or was it actually the US, and Western powers are now making the Ukrainian president the fall guy?
US finally gets it story straight over Nord Stream
The Wall Street Journal insists that, after Russia invaded its neighbour in early 2022, Ukrainian businessmen and military officers plotted to deal a blow to the delivery of Russian gas to Europe. This reportedly got the backing of President Zelensky at first, but then the CIA found out and suggested he call it all off.
The story goes that ‘rogue’ figures continued anyway, driven in part by alcohol. And now, German investigators have said Ukrainian operatives were responsible. Ukrainian officials have denied involvement, and are unlikely to testify or face extradition.
However, the sabotage certainly sounds more like something the CIA would be happily supporting, rather than trying to stop. Indeed, award-winning reporter Seymour Hersh wrote a piece in 2023, using an anonymous source, which suggested the CIA was responsible. There were also, as Hersh highlighted, many hints from US politicians about the threat that Nord Stream may face if Russia invaded Ukraine.
Vladimir Putin, who some have called “Frankenstein’s monster of neoliberalism”, emerged after the devastating period in the 1990s where living standards were drastically worsening and mass privatisation created severe inequality. And he was very cosy with Western leaders at the start. But far from suffering after two years of war, Putin’s economy seems to be doing fine. If anything, Western sanctions may have even pushed Putin into some more populist economic measures.
Zelensky, the CIA, Russia? So what?
So why is the news about Ukrainians being responsible for the Nord Stream attack coming now? Is it perhaps that the West is looking for a way to back away from the war and negotiate? As author Tony Norfield suggests, this could be “a sign Western support for Zelensky et al is fading”.
#Nordstream sabotage. The Wall Street Journal’s recycled story blames Ukraine
. This diverts attention from the real perpetrators: US, UK involvement – hence the investigation never published! But being the story target is a sign Western support for Zelensky et al is fading. pic.twitter.com/qbknN07W5a— Tony Norfield (@StubbornFacts) August 15, 2024
Journalist Thomas Fazi suggested that even if it was Ukraine (and presumably not the US), then it’s almost as damning a story anyway:
So the official version of the Nord Stream bombing (as per yesterday’s WaPo article) now is that Zelenskyy himself ordered Valerii Zaluzhnyi, former Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, to carry out the bombing — and that the CIA tried to stop them but the… pic.twitter.com/KnI8decBJr
— Thomas Fazi (@battleforeurope) August 15, 2024
Ultimately, though, and as Mint Press News alluded to – the finger still does point at the US:
Four senior Ukrainian officials told the Wall Street Journal that their military carried out the bombing of the Nord Stream pipeline in 2022, against the CIA’s wishes
Almost two years after the attack, which destroyed one of Europe’s key gas pipelines and inflicting great… pic.twitter.com/uLkt5N8Yph
— MintPress News (@MintPressNews) August 15, 2024
It was perhaps Declassified UK’s Matt Kennard which perhaps summed it up best:
The Nord Stream pipeline bombing was a major terrorist attack in heart of Europe.
If it had been blown up by Russia, Bellingcat would have launched a huge investigation.
When Bellingcat don’t look, it’s a strong signal that it was a US, UK, NATO, or allied operation.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine didn’t come without warning from a contextual vaccuum. And neither did the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines.
However, both had massive impacts on the world, hurting the poorest people the most – as is usually the case. As always – and whoever it was who blew up Nord Stream – it shows that the rest of us are just pawns in politicians’ global game of chess.
Featured image via the Canary
By The Canary
This post was originally published on Canary.
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This content originally appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and was authored by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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German prosecutors have issued an arrest warrant for a Ukrainian man over the 2022 sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines, German media reported Wednesday, with Polish prosecutors confirming they had received the warrant. Of course, the Canary is old enough to remember when the West said it ‘woz Russia wot did it’.
In the two years since the explosions hit the pipelines, speculation has been rife around who was responsible with Ukraine and Russia both vehemently denying any involvement. But German media reported on Wednesday 14 August that a European arrest warrant had been requested for a Ukrainian man, a diving instructor whose last known address was in Poland.
Going after Ukrainians for Nord Stream
The Polish prosecutor’s office told AFP it had received the warrant for a man named as “Volodymyr Z.” in June “in connection with proceedings against him in Germany”. However, the man left for Ukraine at the beginning of July before he could be detained, it said.
German investigators believe the man was one of the divers who planted explosive devices on the Nord Stream pipelines, according to the ARD broadcaster and newspapers Die Zeit and the Sueddeutsche Zeitung.
They have also identified two more Ukrainians, a man and a woman, who they believe acted as divers in the attacks, the reports said – believed to be a married couple who run a diving school in Ukraine. However, no arrest warrants have yet been issued for them.
Different German media outlets reported Wednesday that they had reached Volodymyr Z. and the woman in question, who both denied any involvement. The German federal prosecution service declined to comment when contacted by AFP.
German government spokesman Wolfgang Buechner also did not comment directly on the reports but stressed that German prosecutors’:
investigations are being carried out according to the law regardless of who is concerned and which results they lead to.
Buechner told reporters at a press conference that the results of the probe:
of course do not change anything about the fact that Russia is waging an illegal war of aggression against Ukraine.
Of course not – apart from the fact the West clearly tried some sort of false flag operation against Russia.
Polish prosecutors said the suspect had been able to leave Poland because German investigators did not:
include him in the database of wanted persons… The Polish Border Guard had no knowledge and no grounds for detaining Volodymyr Z.
Blame the Russians
Nord Stream’s two pipelines had been at the centre of geopolitical tensions as Russia cut gas supplies to Europe in suspected retaliation for Western sanctions over Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
Four large gas leaks were discovered in September 2022 in the pipelines off the Danish island of Bornholm, with seismic institutes recording two underwater explosions just before. While the leaks were in international waters, two were in Denmark’s exclusive economic zone and two in Sweden’s.
The pipelines were not in operation when the leaks occurred, but they still contained gas which spewed up to the surface and into the atmosphere. Cast your mind back, and the day after the explosions were detected, European leaders, particularly from countries like Poland and Ukraine, pointed fingers at Russia.
The Polish prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki described the incident as an act of sabotage, implying Russia’s involvement without providing concrete evidence. Ukrainian officials, already embroiled in a bitter conflict with Russia, quickly echoed this sentiment, viewing the explosion as another form of Russian aggression.
In the US, prominent figures in the Biden administration, including secretary of state Antony Blinken, stopped short of directly blaming Russia but strongly suggested that it was within Moscow’s capabilities and interests to carry out such an attack.
Mainstream Western media followed suit. Major news outlets like the New York Times, the Guardian, and CNN reported on these accusations, often with headlines that insinuated Russian responsibility.
The media narrative was heavily influenced by the broader context of Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine, its strained relations with Europe over energy supplies, and its previous actions that were perceived as hostile towards Western interests.
Nothing to see, here, says Zelensky
Now, we know it was Ukraine – or at least, people from the country.
The Ukrainian suspects are accused of transporting the explosives used in the attack in a sailing yacht called the Andromeda, according to the German media reports. The same yacht was searched by German investigators in January 2023.
According to reports at the time, a team of five men and one woman chartered the yacht from Rostock port to carry out the operation. In June 2023, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky insisted Kyiv knew nothing about any plan to blow up the pipelines.
As president he has the power to give orders, Zelensky said in an interview with Germany’s Bild daily.
“I did nothing like that. I would never do that,” he said.
Denmark, Sweden and Germany all opened investigations into the explosions. However, Denmark and Sweden both closed their investigations earlier this year.
Featured image via the Canary
By Steve Topple
This post was originally published on Canary.
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The trenchant critic of Putin was released this month, but says he saw captivity as an integral part of his campaign
For many people, if they had recently turned 70 and were faced with the prospect of a long stint in a Russian prison, their first instinct would be to dash to the airport and escape the country as quickly as possible. Oleg Orlov, one of Russia’s most experienced and respected human rights advocates, had that opportunity but never considered it an option.
Orlov, whose organisation, Memorial, won the Nobel peace prize in 2022, remained in the country after being accused of “discrediting the Russian army” for his commentary on the war in Ukraine. In February this year, he was convicted and sentenced to two and a half years in prison.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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This content originally appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and was authored by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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By Mick Hall
A leading peace campaigner is calling Aotearoa New Zealand’s decision to stay away from a peace event in Nagasaki paying tribute to victims of the Japanese city’s 1945 nuclear bombing “outrageous”.
Former trade union leader Robert Reid said New Zealand could have acted as a strong independent Pacific voice by attending today’s peace gathering, held annually on August 9 to commemorate the estimated 70,000 people killed in a US nuclear attack on the Japanese city at the end of World War II.
“New Zealand has missed an opportunity to demarcate itself from the cheerleaders of the Gaza genocide, from the US and the UK and other Western countries, and in a way has turned its back on Japan, which was an ally with us in the anti-nuclear position that New Zealand has held for many years,” the former Unite president said.
His comments come after a Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (Mfat) spokesperson confirmed to In Context neither New Zealand’s ambassador to Japan Hamish Hooper nor any other consulate official would be attending the peace ceremony, stressing the move was due to “resourcing” and unrelated to a boycott by Western nations following the city’s decision not to invite Israel.
The US and its Western allies are staying away from the peace ceremony because Nagasaki’s Mayor Shiro Suzuki declined to send an invitation to Israel to attend, over events in the Middle East and to avoid protests against the war in Gaza at the event.
In a statement a Mfat spokesperson said: “The New Zealand government will not be represented at the commemorations at Nagasaki on 9 August 2024. This decision reflects limited resourcing of the Embassy in Tokyo, and is not associated with attendance of other countries.”
However, it is understood New Zealand was represented at a commemoration event at head of mission level in Hiroshima last Tuesday. Nagasaki is located south of Hiroshima and a journey three-and-a-half hours by train.
Cancelled last year
The Nagasaki commemoration was cancelled last year due to a typhoon warning. New Zealand had been represented at both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki events in recent years, at head of mission level in 2022 and 2021.It only attended the Hiroshima commemoration in 2020, a period when covid-19 lockdowns and travel restrictions were widespread.
New Zealand’s absence comes after envoys of the US, Canada, Germany, France, the UK and other Western nations sent a letter to Nagasaki organisers expressing concern over the city not inviting Israel.
The letter, dated July 19, warned that if Israel was excluded, “it would become difficult for us to have high-level participation” in the event as it would “result in placing Israel on the same level as countries such as Russia and Belarus,” both having been excluded from the ceremony since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
In a statement on July 31 outlining the reasons for excluding Israel, Suzuki said officials feared protests against Israel’s actions in Gaza would take away the ceremony’s solemnity.
He added that he made the decision based on “various developments in the international community in response to the ongoing situation in the Middle East”.
ICJ ruled Israel as apartheid state
An International Court of Justice (ICJ) advisory opinion on July 19 ruled Israel’s occupation of Palestine illegal and that Israel was administering a system of apartheid through discriminatory laws and policies. Apartheid is a crime against humanity.In a 14-1 ruling, the ICJ directed Israel to immediately cease all settlement activity, evacuate settlers from occupied Palestinian territories, and pay reparations to Palestinians. It also voted 12-3 that UN states not render aid or assistance to Israel to continue the illegal occupation.
On July 30, the UN Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner said in light of the ruling: “States must immediately review all diplomatic, political, and economic ties with Israel, inclusive of business and finance, pension funds, academia and charities.”
There were protests on Wednesday following a decision by the Hiroshima municipality to allow Israeli representation at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park event the day before, while not inviting a Palestinian envoy on the basis that the occupied country was not a United Nations member and that Japan did not recognise it as a state.
“I understand New Zealand is not calling its absence a boycott, but just that it’s too busy, but it has attended in the past,” Read said.
“I think we’re just playing with words here. This was a chance for New Zealand to stand with the people of Palestine, to stand with the Japanese people, who have had bombs dropped on them and they have perhaps taken a weak way out by not attending.”
The Disarmament and Security Centre Aotearoa is holding a Hiroshima and Nagasaki commemoration event on Sunday, August 11, at Christchurch’s Botanic Gardens.
Virtual centre
The non-profit organisation is a virtual centre connecting disarmament experts, lawyers, political scientists, academics, teachers, students and disarmament proponents.Its spokesperson, Dr Marcus Coll, said he was shocked New Zealand would not be attending the Nagasaki event this year.
“These sorts of things should never be about resources because it’s the symbolism of it that is so important and actually showing solidarity with the victims of Nagasaki,” he said.
“In the Pacific region especially, we’ve really felt the effects of nuclear testing throughout the decades and then in Japan, there still are a lot of the survivors and their families are affected because of the intergenerational effects.”
Dr Coll spent seven years studying and working in Japan. His doctoral research involved interviewing and researching survivors of the atomic bombings, as well as indigenous rights activists, religious and military leaders, peace campaigners, and others who were instrumental in shaping New Zealand’s nuclear free identity.
He said Japan’s survivors had expressed awe at a small country in the Pacific taking a strong stand against nuclear weapons.
“New Zealand has really been a kind of a beacon of hope for a lot of those people,” he said.
Nuclear-free legacy
New Zealand became a nuclear-free country in 1987, with a Nuclear Free Zone, Disarmament and Arms Control Act that effectively banned US nuclear vessels from its waters.It led to New Zealand being frozen out of the ANZUS security treaty and allowed the country to develop a more independent policy engagement with the Pacific and the rest of the world.
“That came from the government level as well,” Dr Coll said.
“It was a groundswell from the public, which changed our policy, but governments of all stripes up until recently have really not contested that legacy and actually been kind of proud of it.
“It really is something that sets us apart, especially internationally and we’re respected for it . . . So, it seems like a real let down that our own government can’t even show up.”
Dr Coll said New Zealand had nurtured a significant link with Nagasaki, being the last place to suffer a nuclear attack in warfare.
“Our former director used to go to Nagasaki. She had very strong connections with the mayor there. There’s actually a sculpture in the Nagasaki Peace Park, given to the city on behalf of New Zealand cities and the New Zealand government back in 2000s, forging that strong connection.
“It’s called the Korowai of Peace. Phil Goff as foreign minister, the New Zealand ambassador and other civil society people were there . . . This decision I suspect is a kind of PR and not to attend is a blow to our heritage of promoting disarmament and being anti-nuclear.”
The US envoy to Japan Rahm Emanuel is expected to attend a peace ceremony at the Zojoji Temple in Tokyo on Friday instead.
Nagasaki was bombed by the United States on August 9, 1945, after Hiroshima had been hit by atomic bomb on August 6. The two attacks at the end of World War II killed up to 250,000 people. Japan surrendered on August 15.
Republished from Mick Hall In Context with permission.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
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Cybercrime — the malicious hacking of computer networks, systems, and data — threatens people’s rights and livelihoods, and governments need to work together to do more to address it. But the cybercrime treaty sitting before the United Nations for adoption, presumably by August 9, could instead facilitate government repression. By expanding government surveillance to investigate crimes…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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Russia and North Korea have agreed to cooperate on healthcare, medical education and science, Russian state news agency TASS reported.
Under the agreement, Russia and North Korea will work together in areas such as child health, healthy lifestyles and the fight against infectious diseases.
In particular, they will focus on the fight against tuberculosis, human immunodeficiency virus infection, acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, and hepatitis; prevention and treatment of cardiovascular, endocrine, oncological, among other diseases, the news agency reported on Tuesday.
They will also cooperate in training and retraining of medical professionals and regulation of the distribution of medicines and medical devices.
TASS cited a document published on the Russian legal information portal as saying that the cooperation “takes into account the principle of equality and mutual benefit, and implements measures to ensure the sanitary and epidemiological well-being of the people in accordance with the laws of the parties.”
Russia and North Korea have been stepping up cooperation on all fronts since summits between Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Russia in September last year and in North Korea in June this year.
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Low vaccination rates
Choi Kyu-bin, a research fellow at Seoul-based Institute for Human Rights Studies at the Korea Institute for National Unification, said in a report that North Korea’s vaccination rate was less than 50% for most of last year.
Citing data from the World Health Organisation and the U.N. Children’s Fund, Cho said North Korea had maintained vaccination coverage rates of more than 90% for many vaccines prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, but since it closed its borders in 2020, there has been a clear downward trend in vaccination rates.
In 2023, coverage was below 50% for many vaccines, except for the TB vaccine, and none of the 11 vaccines required for children under one year of age had coverage of more than 90%.
For example, coverage of the diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis primary, or DTP1, vaccine, which children should receive, halved from 98% in 2019 to 41% in 2023.
“Low vaccination rates put children’s health at risk,” Choi said, urging North Korea to step up access to international organizations to ensure smooth vaccine procurement and immunization.
Edited by RFA Staff.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Taejun Kang for RFA.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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Berlin, August 6, 2024—The Committee to Protect Journalists denounces Tuesday’s sentencing of exiled journalist Dmitry Kolezev to 7½ years in prison in absentia on charges of spreading “fake” news about the Russian army and urges authorities to stop harassing Russian journalists abroad.
“The lengthy prison sentence meted out to Dmitry Kolezev in absentia underscores Russian authorities’ intensifying repression of journalists who have been forced to flee the country because of their reporting,” said CPJ Europe and Central Asia Program Coordinator Gulnoza Said in New York. “Russian authorities must immediately stop their transnational crackdown on exiled Russian journalists who report critically on the war in Ukraine.”
The case against Kolezev, former editor-in-chief of the independent media outlet Republic and founder of the Yekaterinburg-based news site It’s My City, stems from his 2022 Instagram posts about the massacre in the Ukrainian city of Bucha, Kommersant newspaper reported.
“I thought it would take a couple of days, but it turned out to be some sort of judicial fast food: a verdict reached in two hours,” Kolezev said in a post on Telegram.
In 2022, Kolezev was designated a “foreign agent,” requiring him to submit reports of his activities and expenses to authorities and to list his foreign agent status on publications, and he was also added to the federal list of individuals wanted on criminal charges.
Russian authorities have effectively clamped down on independent reporting in the country since their full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Hundreds of Russian journalists have fled into exile, where they are now increasingly harassed by the authorities with fines, arrest warrants and jail terms in absentia.
This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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This content originally appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and was authored by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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This content originally appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and was authored by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
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This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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We speak with The Nation's Katrina vanden Heuvel about the prisoner swap between Russia, the United States and several other countries on Thursday that saw the release of 24 people, with 16 prisoners in Russia traded for eight Russian nationals held in the U.S., Germany and elsewhere. It was the biggest exchange of prisoners between Russia and the West since the Cold War era. Among those released are Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, former U.S. marine Paul Whelan and Russian American journalist Alsu Kurmasheva. Vadim Krasikov, a convicted Russian assassin who was in German custody after the 2019 killing of a Chechen dissident in Berlin, was also released and sent back to Moscow. Vanden Heuvel says it was “an extraordinary swap” that could pave the way for more diplomacy to wind down the war in Ukraine. “Negotiations and diplomacy are not about capitulation. They're about improving the conditions of a world which is too militarized and at war.”
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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This content originally appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and was authored by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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This content originally appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and was authored by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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Comprehensive coverage of the day’s news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice.
- Gershkovich, Whelan among prisoners swapped in US Russia prisoner exchange.
- Vice President Harris today eulogizes Sheila Jackson-Lee at memorial service for Houston Democratic Congresswoman.
- New York appeals court rejects Trump’s challenge to a gag order in his hush money trial.
- US recognizes Venezuelan opposition candidate Gonzalez as winner of Presidential election.
- Unlawful migrant crossings down last month at US Mexico border, according to government numbers.
- San Franciscans celebrate third annual Trans History Month in the city.
- Northern California Park Fire has scorched more than 393,000 acres and is 18 percent contained.
The post The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – August 1, 2024 Gershkovich, Whelan among prisoners swapped in US Russia prisoner exchange. appeared first on KPFA.
This content originally appeared on KPFA – The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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This content originally appeared on VICE News and was authored by VICE News.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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New York, August 1, 2024–The Committee to Protect Journalists welcomes reports that Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) editor Alsu Kurmasheva will be released as part of a prisoner exchange, and calls on Russia to release other jailed journalists and stop harassing those in exile.
“Evan and Alsu have been apart from their families for far too long,” said CPJ CEO Jodie Ginsberg. “They were detained and sentenced on spurious charges intended to punish them for their journalism and stifle independent reporting. Their reported release is welcome – but it does not change the fact that Russia continues to suppress a free press. Moscow needs to release all jailed journalists and end its campaign of using in absentia arrest warrants and sentences against exiled Russian journalists.”
Gershkovich and Kurmasheva were sentenced on July 19 to 16 years and 6½ years in prison respectively. Gershkovich, a U.S. citizen, spent 16 months in detention before being convicted on charges of espionage; Kurmasheva, a dual U.S.-Russian citizen, was held for more than nine months before she was convicted on charges of spreading “fake” news about the Russian army.
This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Arlene Getz/CPJ Editorial Director.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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Russia is closely following the recent steps by the United States and Japan to strengthen their military-political alliance and it is coordinating with China and North Korea on the matter, Russia’s foreign ministry said.
Washington and Tokyo announced Sunday that the U.S. was overhauling its military forces in Japan as the two countries deepen defense cooperation.
“It seems that the two countries, under cover of threats allegedly emanating from the DPRK, China and Russia, are fully engaged in preparations for a large-scale armed conflict in the Asia-Pacific region,” said the Russian foreign ministry’s deputy director Andrey Nastasyin at a press briefing on Wednesday.
DPRK, or the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, is North Korea’s official name.
“We have repeatedly warned that such activity can only increase the level of tension and accelerate the arms race in the Asia-Pacific region … We are coordinating on this issue with our Chinese and North Korean partners,” Nastasyin added without elaborating.
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and their Japanese counterparts Minoru Kihara and Yoko Kamikawa announced the plan for a revamp in a statement following a meeting in Tokyo, where they also called China’s “political, economic, and military coercion” the “greatest strategic challenge” in the Asia-Pacific region and beyond.
The ministers also criticized what they called China’s “provocative” behavior in the South and East China Seas, its joint military exercises with Russia and the rapid expansion of its arsenal of nuclear weapons.
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Under the new plan, U.S. forces in Japan would be “reconstituted” as a joint force headquarters reporting to the commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command to “facilitate deeper interoperability and cooperation on joint bilateral operations in peacetime and during contingencies,” the U.S. and Japanese ministers said.
“This will be the most significant change to U.S. Forces Japan since its creation, and one of the strongest improvements in our military ties with Japan in 70 years,” Austin told a press conference following the meeting.
He pointed both to the “upgrade” of U.S. Forces Japan with “expanded missions and operational responsibilities” and Japan’s new Joint Operations Command, saying that the allies were reinforcing their “combined ability to deter and respond to coercive behavior in the Indo-Pacific and beyond.”
Details of the implementation would be determined in working groups led by U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, media reported.
U.S. Forces Japan, headquartered at Yokota Air Base, consists of approximately 54,000 military personnel stationed in Japan.
Separately, the defense chiefs of South Korea, the U.S. and Japan voiced concerns over growing military and economic cooperation between North Korea and Russia, denouncing the North’s diversification of nuclear delivery systems and test launches of multiple ballistic missiles, as well as other actions that increase tension on the Korean Peninsula.
Edited by Mike Firn.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Taejun Kang for RFA.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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