Category General

Wikileaks releases the Syria Files

Yet more confirmation that Wikileaks remains an essential news organisation. Today they did this: Today, Thursday 5 July 2012, WikiLeaks began publishing the Syria Files – more than two million emails from Syrian political figures, ministries and associated companies, dating from August 2006 to March 2012. This extraordinary data set derives from 680 Syria-related entities…

Watch the mining vultures start to circle Afghanistan

This was inevitable (via Reuters): Exxon Mobil Corp (XOM.N) is contemplating participation in an oil and gas tender of six blocks in northern Afghanistan, a company spokesman said on Monday. Access to the world’s oil reserves for companies like Exxon has gotten tougher in recent years as governments assert tighter control of their resources. Opportunity…

The clueless American war in Afghanistan

An extract from a new book by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan, author of the … startling book about the disastrous Iraq invasion, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: When Richard Holbrooke became the Obama administration’s Afghanistan point man in January 2009, Summer Coish was keen to join his civilian…

Preying on Haiti; a study in disaster capitalism

Via Haiti Grassroots Watch: Twenty billion dollars worth of gold, copper and silver hidden in the hills of the hemisphere’s poorest country. Investors in North America so convinced of the buried treasure, they have already spent 30 million dollars collecting samples, digging, building mining roads and doing aerial surveys. The fairy tale is true, but…

2012 proves that dangers for reporters increasing by the day

Columbia Journalism Review has the shocking facts: … With 72 journalists killed so far this year, 2012 is on pace to be the deadliest on record, the International Press Institute (IPI)… announcedhere on Sunday. The media freedom organization’s executive director, Alison Bethel McKenzie, choked up and struggled to speak as she… addressed… the group’s annual conference. “From Somalia to…

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