Mali’s decision to kick out the UN peacekeeping mission is eliciting concerns from regional and international powers over its implication on the security of the region.
The junta of the West African nation announced the decision on June 16, blaming the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilisation Mission in Mali, known by its French acronym Minusma, for failing to respond to the country’s security challenges.
After armed men killed nine Chinese nationals at a gold mine in Central African Republic in March, a video circulated on the internet saying France had secretly ordered the attack and planned to discredit Russian mercenary group Wagner in the country.
Following his re-election, Erdogan reshuffled his cabinet, resulting in foreign and economic policy leadership changes. The new cabinet members are expected to strengthen Turkey’s international standing and address the country’s economic difficulties.
Last week I flew to Moscow, arriving at 4:30 pm on December 8th. In Moscow, it begins to get dark at this time of day, and there will be no sun until about 10 am at this time of the year – the so-called “black days” as opposed to “white nights”. Anyone who is used to living closer to the equator is disturbing. This is the first sign that you are not only in a different country, which I am used to, but also in a different habitat. However, as we drove towards the center of Moscow, which is more than an hour, traffic on the road, road works, everything looked normal. There are three airports in Moscow, and we flew to the farthest from the center, Domodedovo, the main international airport. There is a lot of renovation work going on in Moscow, and while this is holding back traffic on the roads, it indicates that prosperity continues, at least in the capital.
Carlos Garrido’s book The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism is undoubtedly an essential reading for any revolutionary American Marxist who is serious about building socialism. It is an open secret, and an embarrassment, among leftists in the west that they are politically impotent. Despite the fact that an increasing number of millennials and generation z’s in the United States have a positive attitude towards socialism and Marxism, Marxists remain relatively impotent. Notwithstanding the rising popularity of Marxism, this popularity has not, as of yet anyway, transitioned into political action with significant impact on the world. Garrido, like any good Marxist, believes that one of the key contributing factors to the impotence of our socialist movement is due to our lack of understanding what Marxism really means.
In the current political system, Prigozhin can only be against the elite so long as he is for Putin. It would take the slightest sign from the president for the Wagner boss to disappear.
No one in Russia embodies the anti-elite essence of populist politics today like Yevgeny Prigozhin, formerly known as “Putin’s chef,” more recently as the boss of a vast troll network, and right now as head of the infamous Wagner mercenary army.
Global Equality and Its Discontents
We live in an age of inequality—or so we’re frequently told. Across the globe, but especially in the wealthy economies of the West, the gap between the rich and the rest has widened year after year and become a chasm, spreading anxiety, stoking resentment, and roiling politics. It is to blame for everything from the rise of former U.S. President Donald Trump and the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom to the “yellow vest” movement in France and the recent protests of retirees in China, which has one of the world’s highest rates of income inequality. Globalization, the argument goes, may have enriched certain elites, but it hurt many other people, ravaging one-time industrial heartlands and making people susceptible to populist politics.
Turkey’s military “neutralised” 53 Kurdish militants in northern Syria, using ground artillery and drones in retaliatory strikes following an attack on a police post on the Turkish side of the border at the weekend, the defence ministry said on Wednesday.
A PKK terrorist accused of ordering a 2017 attack in Türkiye, was “neutralized” by National Intelligence Organization (MIT) in northern Iraq, security sources said Wednesday. The term is used to indicate terrorists killed or captured in operations.
A new wave of arrests in Uzbekistan have centered on religious lectures, songs, and social media posts, calling up memories of the not-so-distant Karimov era.
On May 31, a 57-year-old woman from Navai region was sentenced to three years of restricted freedom for liking a social media post in 2018, when she was in Turkey. The video she “liked” on the Odnoklassniki.ru social media platform was a religious speech in Uzbek delivered by a person named Rafik Kamalov.