Author: M Barbu

Living in Epoch-Defining Times: Food, Agriculture and the New World Order

Farmerless farms manned by driverless machines, monitored by drones and doused with chemicals to produce commodity crops from patented genetically engineered seeds for industrial ‘biomatter’ to be processed and constituted into something resembling food. Data platforms, private equity firms, e-commerce giants and AI-controlled farming systems.

This is the future that big agritech and agribusiness envisage: a future of ‘data-driven’ and ‘climate-friendly’ agriculture that they say is essential if we are to feed a growing global population.

Into the grey zone: how the US could change the game with China and Russia

Washington should take more aggressive “grey-zone” strategies – warfare just short of armed conflict – to tackle China and Russia, according to a group of US military strategists including former defence chief Chuck Hagel.

In recommendations published by US think tank the Atlantic Council last month, the strategists said China and Russia had conducted unconventional offensives against the US, including online cyberattacks, and misinformation and disinformation campaigns.

Israeli committee authorizes plans for over 3,500 new settler units in occupied East al-Quds

An Israeli local committee has approved plans to build more than 3,500 new illegal settler units in the occupied East al-Quds, irrespective of the international outcry over the Tel Aviv regime’s settlement construction and land expropriation policies.

The Israeli anti-settlement group Peace Now reported that the construction of the units would largely cut off the city from the southern part of the occupied West Bank, further complicating any efforts to create a sovereign Palestinian state.

Kazakhstan unrest: Dozens killed, about 2,000 arrested as protesters clash with police in Almaty

Clashes between protesters and security forces have left dozens killed while about 2,000 have been arrested in Kazakhstan’s biggest city, Almaty, as nationwide protests continue over fuel price hikes in the oil-rich Central Asian country.

Police spokesman Saltanat Azirbek said on Thursday that tens of rioters had been “eliminated” overnight in Kazakhstan’s financial capital as they tried to storm government buildings.

The Global North Is Closing Its Doors to Migration

In July, British Home Secretary Priti Patel announced that the U.K. had agreed to pay France roughly $72 million to fund border personnel and equipment that would be used to stop asylum-seekers from crossing the English Channel. The deal came amid a dramatic rise in the number of channel crossings. In the first half of 2021, more than 8,000 asylum-seekers completed the voyage to land on England’s southern shore.

The War on Terror Is a Success — for Terror

Terrorist Groups Have Doubled Since the Passage of the 2001 AUMF

It began more than two decades ago. On September 20, 2001, President George W. Bush declared a “war on terror” and told a joint session of Congress (and the American people) that “the course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain.” If he meant a 20-year slide to defeat in Afghanistan, a proliferation of militant groups across the Greater Middle East and Africa, and a never-ending, world-spanning war that, at a minimum, has killed about 300 times the number of people murdered in America on 9/11, then give him credit. He was absolutely right.

What Does the Statement of the Five Nuclear-Weapon States on Preventing Nuclear War Tell Us?

The Doomsday Clock has been sitting the past year at 100 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been to civilization-ending apocalypse. The United States has done little to quell doomsday apprehensions by ratcheting up tensions with China over Taiwan and its warships in the South China Sea, as well as with Russia over Ukraine, further NATO expansion, and missile deployment in eastern Europe. Will the first-ever Joint Statement of the Leaders of the Five Nuclear-Weapon States on Preventing Nuclear War and Avoiding Arms Races help to put a damper on any potential conflagration?

How Cold War I (US-Soviet) Is Different From Cold War II (US-China) – Analysis

The United States has recently been talking seriously about starting a new Cold War with China. In Cold War with the former Soviet Union which mostly revolved ideological and security spheres, the two sides reached a strategic agreement to replace political threats with military ones. Thus, the former Cold War between the Kremlin and the White House began with an agreement, not a threat.

In the new Cold War; however, there is no such agreement between US and China and due to Beijing‘s economic rise as well as the profound geopolitical changes that have taken place in the Indo-Pacific region in recent years the political and economic threats are turning into military ones.

Smaller European Nations Uneasy As Germany’s Scholz Plans To Meet Putin

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz wants to reset relations with Moscow and is planning a face-to-face meeting with Russian leader Vladimir Putin later this month.

Senior German officials were already scheduled to get together with Russian counterparts in January in a bid to ease geopolitical tensions amid rising alarm that the Kremlin is planning a further military incursion into Ukraine.