Japan Embraces Commercial Whaling, Pulls Out Of Global Alliance That Banned It Japan is withdrawing from an international group that bans commercial whaling, saying it will resume commercial hunts for the first time in 30 years next July. Japan will leave the International Whaling Commission, which put a moratorium on commercial whaling in the 1980s. npr.org/2018/12/26/680143270/japan-embraces-commercial-whaling-pulls-out-of-global-alliance-that-banned-pract
Rail plan puts North and South Korea on track for closer ties North and South Korea have held a symbolic groundbreaking ceremony they hope will lead to the resumption of road and rail links across their heavily armed border.A delegation of 100 officials from the South, including the transport and unification ministers, made the two-hour train journey to attend Wednesday’s ceremony at Panmun station in the North Korean border town of Kaesong. theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/26/rail-plan-puts-north-and-south-korea-on-track-for-closer-ties
Turkey amasses troops at border as operation against Syria’s Kurds looms Turkey has sent massive reinforcements to areas in its south, in preparations for a push into Syria’s northeast. As troops roll to the border, the country’s top officials have made bellicose remarks, vowing to fight “terrorism.”A large Turkish military unit has been filmed in the town of Karkamis at the Turkey-Syria border. Right across it lies the Syrian town of Jarablus. rt.com/news/447396-turkey-troops-syria-border/
Mexico: Governor of Puebla and senator die in helicopter crash A Mexican governor and her husband were killed in a helicopter crash on Monday.Martha Erika Alonso, the new governor of Puebla state, and her husband, former governor of the same state and sitting senator, Rafael Moreno, died when their helicopter crashed on a mountain outside the state capital. dw.com/en/mexico-governor-of-puebla-and-senator-die-in-helicopter-crash/a-46856917
Bosnia protests: Davor Dragicevic defiant after arrest The father of a young man who died in mysterious circumstances in northern Bosnia has been released without charge after he was arrested at a protest on Tuesday.David Dragicevic, 21, was found dead last March in the city of Banja Luka. His family say police are concealing the truth about his murder.David's father Davor was arrested at the latest in a series of protests. bbc.com/news/world-europe-46684661
Executives In Fukushima Nuclear Disaster Deserve 5-Year Prison Terms, Prosecutors Say The former chairman and two vice presidents of the Tokyo Electric Power Co. should spend five years in prison over the 2011 flooding and meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, Japanese prosecutors say, accusing the executives of failing to prevent a foreseeable catastrophe. npr.org/2018/12/26/680175363/executives-in-fukushima-nuclear-disaster-deserve-5-year-prison-terms-prosecutors
Greenland's Rapid Ice Melt Persists Even in Winter, Study Finds In the latest troubling study regarding how the climate crisis is affecting the world's iciest regions, a new report by the Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS) found that the second-largest ice sheet in the world is currently melting even in winter.The study follows a report released earlier this month showing that Greenland's ice melt rate is currently faster than it's been in about 7,000 years. .. commondreams.org/news/2018/12/26/greenlands-rapid-ice-melt-persists-even-winter-study-finds
The saa made an agreement with the one big US military base in Syria yesterday to move some troops into manbij and a few other places, as well they are in negotiations to strength saa and one big US military base in Syria lines.
Angel Cruz
Has Assad and R0java/S.DF made a formal and official alliance or is Assad doing this for other reasons?
Hunter Robinson
#Shutdownstories: federal employees reveal impact of government closure Federal employees affected by the partial shutdown of the US government have been voicing their frustrations of spending the holidays worrying about their next paycheck.Donald Trump marked Christmas Day by insisting the shutdown will last until his demand for funds to build a wall on the US-Mexico border is met. theguardian.com/us-news/2018/dec/26/shutdownstories-federal-employees-government-shutdown-impact
Chicago chapter of Women’s March cancels 2019 rally amid national org’s anti-Semitism controversy The Chicago chapter of the Women’s March has canceled its rally planned for January, citing high costs and insufficient volunteer hours, the Chicago Tribune reported Wednesday.The newspaper noted that the cancellation of the event, which in the past drew hundreds of thousands of people to the city, comes amid growing controversy surrounding the group’s national leaders and their ties to Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who has made several anti-Semitic comments in the past. outline.com/Zy4k4p
Africa is about to become the world’s largest free trade zone South Africa’s and Togo’s parliaments this month ratified the agreement establishing the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). The total number of countries committing to the deal has thus grown to 49.Once the agreement comes into effect, it will create a tariff-free continent, covering a single market of 1.2 billion people in 55 nations with a combined gross domestic product of about $3 trillion. rt.com/business/447419-africa-free-trade-wto/
Dow jumps 1,086 points to post its biggest point gain on record as stocks storm back from worst-ever Christmas Eve Stocks staged a recovery Wednesday as Wall Street attempted to shake off four sessions of sharp declines that led major US indexes to near bear-market territory.The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 5%, or more than 1,000 points, and recorded the largest daily point gain in its history. Meanwhile, the S&P 500 climbed 4.9%. markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/stock-market-news-stocks-storming-back-after-worst-christmas-eve-2018-12-1027832548
Jace Stewart
From what manbij military council and the Syrian War map are saying it is more or less just doing more with the alliance they have with the Russians and Saa and that the north doesn't fall to the Turks and their FSA.
Justin Martin
OP/ED
Bolsonaro’s Brazil: Chicago Boy-style Neoliberalism On January 1, 2019, Jair Bolsonaro will begin his four-year term as Brazil’s president. Everyone expects his government to follow a neoliberal path. The only question that seems to remain is how far they can actually go.When it comes to neoliberal reforms, all eyes are on Paulo Guedes, Brazil’s next minister of the economy, who will head a ‘super-ministry’ that combines finance, industry, trade and planning. Guedes is a committed neoliberal. He not only earned his PhD at the University of Chicago where he was taught by the extreme right-wing economist Milton Friedman, but he is also a well-known fan of the Chicago boy economists who managed Chile’s economy during the Pinochet dictatorship, turning Chile into the first experiment in neoliberalism in Latin America. counterpunch.org/2018/12/26/bolsonaros-brazil-chicago-boy-style-neoliberalism/
Belgium Is No Island Over the last four years Belgian premier Charles Michel’s government had rallied a broad swath of the Right. In 2014 his Reformist Movement and its liberal allies made a pact with the Flemish nationalists of the New Flemish Alliance (N-VA) and the Flemish Christian Democrats, uniting on a Thatcherite platform of increasing the pension age and slashing sickness benefits. Yet other differences lingered.While the liberal parties admire French president Emmanuel Macron, the Flemish nationalists stand much closer to Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. And with national elections just months away, last week the N-VA decided to pull the plug on the government. The stated reason: the Prime Minister’s support for the United Nations’ Global Compact for Migration, which foresees international cooperation on handling this issue.Indeed, the fall of the Belgian government sheds light on a worrying development, extending beyond its borders. Today, the whole political climate is shifting to the right. Not only is nationalism the talk of the day, but social movements are under attack and universal human rights are under threat. Ideas which until recently seemed the sole prerogative of the far right are now becoming mainstream: not just in Belgium, but around the world. jakkkobinmag.com/2018/12/belgium-new-flemish-alliance-far-right
Ten Lessons from the Yellow Vests The Radical Education Department presents 10 lessons from the Yellow Vest movement which has exploded out of France in the last month. itsgoingdown.org/ten-lessons-from-the-yellow-vests/
Asher Foster
When you support a neoliberal globalist to own the libtards
Christopher Lewis
This is it. Last true communist revolution crushed.
Because the only way the BO interacts with the board anymore is to go on drunken banning sprees.
Julian Johnson
What will it take for you to admit that you were always wrong about them?
Angel Roberts
There is a literal Maoist party that has been fighting for the control of Turkey but you don't hear about them, instead the K*rds who wanna break Turkey into smaller pieces so that Corporations can have more power.
Why does the West have a strong wanting of Catalonia, Scotland, Kurds, South Sudan, and etc to be Independent? It's so that Corporations can enslave them more.
Do you also want the Arabs and Kurds to succeed in breaking Iran in "National Liberation", which is literally what John Bolton wants?
Alexander Reed
Aside from Sudan the West doesn't want those things you retard. Just Western "leftists" who idealize independence, and they are a very small minority.
Gabriel Collins
Okay since you obviously know jack shit the PKK within Turkey has an alliance with Marxist-Leninist, MLM, Hoxhaist and other revolutionary socialists in Turkey itself. See: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peoples'_United_Revolutionary_Movement You can see this manifest in Rоjava as members of the MKLP fight along side them. Also Literally the worst fucking take I've ever heard.
Pretty sure Bolton wants the destruction of Iran as an entity tbh, but yeah critically support the opponents of revolutionary separatist groups to support NATO countries and islamist regimes.
Matthew Rivera
Explain why an Army Ranger writes papers on why Gramsci says you should support (the US Army intervention in) Kurdistan
No because Iran is an anti-imperialist power, Turkey is not. So if the PKK achieved an independent DemCon state it would weaken NATO. Such a Kurdish state would also immediately fall into the Axis of Resistance since it would be inherently hostile to NATO and the West.
Leo Cook
And this leads to "National Liberation is inherently pro NATO"? Even a separatist movement within a NATO state? You high bruv? Or so paranoid about an imperialist bloc you cannot see the forest for the trees.
Kevin Turner
I hope the fishermens and whoever buys that dies a slow and painful death
James Lopez
Tbh all Glory to Sea Shepherd. THE WORLD IS A VAMPIRE
Nolan Perez
Then their failing pretty hard at it considering their putting Socialist forces in charge of them
You realise that most Turkish Marxist groups that are engaged in open revolutionary activity / Peoples war are literally allied with the …SDF… right? And the Turkish Communist Party and the Turkish Labor Party (Hojhaists) are also allied with the HDP which is also supportive of one big US military base in Syria?
This is just you pretending to know what Marxists on the other side of the planet want
"Support Kerensky in his Anti-Imperialist Struggle against the ""Bolsheviks"" or as I call them "A hundred GERMan bases in Russia" and their attempts to balkanise russia!"
Jonathan Turner
Critically support Harold Covington and Neo-Confederates
David Nelson
It's funny because Japanese don't even eat whale meat. It's all a power play of the ministry of fisheries. Back when they hunted them for """scientific""" purposes all the whales ended up in a fridge and that's it.
Dominic Richardson
Last time I checked they weren't Marxist-Leninists.
Michael Anderson
Turkey is by far the most peripheral and least trusted member of NATO and there is frequently talk of kicking it out. Any new Kurdish state would have to constantly appeal to NATO to stop Turkey from attacking. NATO would be strengthened in that they would have a new client state to station troops and threat to pressure Turkey whenever that country becomes uncooperative.
Brayden Barnes
If that’s the case then why does every NATO country consider the PKK a terrorist group and aid Turkey in fighting them?
Christopher Harris
If the US actually supported Kurdish separatists in a 1 v 1 fight with Turkey Erdogan will probably just leave NATO and join the CST / CSTO like he's been basically threatening to if the US lets the Kurds secede The US would lose the Bosphorus to Russia and would gain a small landlocked socialist state in its peripheral as return
It just isn't a fair trade for the US
Justin Hall
Dude Turkey is the staging point of NATO's nuclear weapons towards Southern Russia and their airbase for operations in the ME: it is pretty bloody important.
Carter Harris
It's also the most powerful NATO member absent the US. You might not realize this, but most of NATO is an empty shell. Turkey is one of the few significant military powers in NATO.
Jack Thompson
Any separatist movement of note in the West is Far-Right. Brexit was started by BNP which is gonna lead to the UK being kicked out of any possible European Army and will led to a weakened UK and also a weakened EU.
Kayden Lopez
… The brexiteer movement was started by the Referendum Party and the Anti-Federalist league; both of which were libertarian orgs. The BNP never actually made much impact on euroscepticism since their main gripes were with multiculturalism and ethno-nationalism. The anti-EU sentiment came from UKIP and centre-right papers. Also the BNP weren't separatist, the separatists in the UK are either radlib or openly socialist.
The collapse of the BNP was also mirrored by the rise of UKIP which is the kind of friendly nationalism that people actually can stomach.
Griffin went and acted like a retard on BBC which caused it to collapse, Euroskepticism wouldn't have succeeded without that.
Angel Brooks
The absolute state of ☭TANKIE☭s.
Asher Thompson
Regionalism is literally a Nazi tactic that was made to weaken the USSR and NATO was literally founded by Nazis. NATO is no longer the strongarm of the West but of Corporations because they have found that nations are a hindrance.
Bigger is always better.
Anthony Gray
UKIP always outperformed the BNP at almost every level by a factor of at-least 2. Any boon they gained from the BNP's collapse was miniscule.
William Robinson
==THE PKK AND NATO ARE ALLIES AGAINST TURKEY MADE BY NAZKEM GANG==
Lenin literally advocated the self determination of nations you dip. Was he a Nazi? Was Ho Chi Minh a Nazi for wanting to dismember the French Empire? You’re retarded. An independent socialist or DemCon Kurdistan in Turkey would weaken a key NATO player and strengthen the Axis of Resistance. It would fundamentally weaken imperialism while giving the Kurds the right to self determination as an oppressed nation. Turkey is a borderline fascist state anyway, it’s not as if keeping it together will wars of corporations when Sultan Erdogan and his porky cronies run it like their personal fiefdom anyway. What would weaken corporate power is biting off a chunk of it and implementing socialism there.
Liam Gomez
he was also against reactionary / petty tribalism, Zionism for instance, which Roj*va is basically a mirror image of.
Benjamin Richardson
First off, R0java isn’t the PKK. Second, R0java and Syrian Kurds aren’t seeking independence. Third, Turkey is easily the worst offender as far as treating Kurds like shit is concerned. It was basically an apartheid state for most of its existence. Fourth, if the PKK was successful it would establish a socialist state in the region that would cripple a major NATO power. Give me a single reason why we shouldn’t support the PKK.
Also comparing the Kurdish struggle to Zionism is incredibly disingenuous. Not only has the PKK directly participated in anti-Zionist struggles, it’s a total false equivalencey. The Kurds are not settlers, they’re indigenous to the region and on the contrary have been the victims of settler colonialist policies by the Turks and some Arabs. They are far more similar to the Palestinians than the Zionists. I’m also wondering how you distinguish between “petty tribalism” and legitimate natlib movements.
Dominic Barnes
It is a documented fact that the Kurds have been selling oil to Israel while ISIS was selling oil to Turkey.
Blake Wilson
The KRG has, which is a completely different group with no connections with the PYD and PKK. Seriously, you guys don’t even seem to know the basic facts of the situation. Iranian, Syrian, and Iraqi Kurds all operate independently of one another and have different ideological tendencies and political alignments. The KRG is allied with Turkey ffs, while the PKK is waging a guerrilla war against the Turkish government. Second, the KRG selling oil to Israel doesn’t change the realities of the status and conditions of Kurdish people. The Israelis are colonizers, the Kurds have been colonized, especially in Turkey.
Joshua Jackson
Nah
Where? Citation needed And even if true this Dosent change the Socialist nature of the experiment of northern Syria
A fractured UK by Cornwall, Scotland, and etc leaving under "Progressive" forces would weaken the UK. UK leaving the EU means that for a possible European Army it would fall under Germany, which literally had a plot of Nazis in their special forces trying to seize control under a literal Day of the Rope and conquer Prussia and Silesia and other former German lands.
Nigel has a German wife and this might seem small but in the realm of Intelligence this could mean a lot.
Gabriel Price
I didn’t say that, I said Kurds in Turkey are an oppressed national minority, and so comparing their struggle to Israel’s imperialism makes no fucking sense. I also said that the KRG are a totally different organization that collaborates with imperialism. The PKK meanwhile fights against Turkish apartheid, Zionism, Islamism, and NATO domination of of the Middle East. You’re just conflating the two either because you’re stupid or because you want the PKK and fledgling one big US military base in Syria-SAA anti imperialist front to lose for some reason.
Adrian Lewis
Roj*va is supported by Israel so no.
Most Syrian Kurds have only been in Syria in the past century, after being expelled from Turkey. Sucks, but they're not "indigenous."
Joseph Wilson
No they aren’t. Israel paid them some lip service but they aren’t backing them in any meaningful capacity. Not with weapons, not with funds, nothing. R0java also isn’t going around colonizing or ethnically cleansing other groups, and has been doing literally the opposite. The SyDF is a multi-ethnic coalition including Assyrians, Kurds, Turkmen, and Arabs. They are allied with the SAA against NATO. They are absolutely nothing like Israel. Also, get it through your fucking head, we’re talking about the PKK, which is not the PYD. I don’t understand what you aren’t getting here. PYD, PKK, and KRG are all separate groups, stop conflating them. They certainly aren’t fucking colonizers building a settler state. The PKK fought against Israel in the Lebanon War and other conflicts ffs.
Jacob Kelly
If you listen to Grandpissdaddy (or whatever it is) the CIA literally are there in R0java and the USA was giving the Kurds the same sort of weapons that led to Gulf War Syndrome and the rise of cancer in Fallujah
There was a thread about it here a long time ago.
Sebastian Thomas
100% psychosomatic. the tie to DU munitions is tenuous at best.
Kayden Gonzalez
That great user, too bad it has literally nothing to do with the PKK insurgency in Turkey.
Isaiah Phillips
KRG Literally has nothing to do with North Syria and is hostile towards them
Anthony Anderson
Lol no
Landon Watson
I didn't think so, but what is it all for then? You say a power play, but to what end? Why hunt whales?
Zachary Gray
100% effort argument
Christian Stewart
...
John Flores
What do you call one big US military base in Syria?
Elijah Robinson
Not a "settler state"? Almost the entirety of the population of the North Syria is native to the region to begin with?
"Rоjava is a kurdish settler state" is literally Turkish propaganda.
Blake Collins
Not a settler state. The people living there have done so for centuries, and the Kurds have made an explicit effort to see to the needs of other ethnic groups in the region.
Cooper Anderson
Probably that Gramsci's theory of hegemony can be used for liberal and reactionary purposes. Oddly, it seems more vulnerable to liberal and reactionary repurposing currently than permanent revolution.
