“With US forces holding the purse strings and oil fields in Syria, the US intends to make Syria an international pariah state much like North Korea.”
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/us-syria-assad-remove-north-korea-2018-2
“200,000 Salvadoran refugees who were granted U.S. Temporary Protected Status – some of whom have been living in the U.S. for nearly a generation – are being thrown under the bus. The federal government is stumbling over a problem of its own creation, having made it almost impossible for the Salvadorans who lawfully have lived, worked, paid taxes and raised children under TPS to acquire permanent status.”
“Minor missteps—a traffic violation or a workplace dispute—can turn lethal for unauthorized immigrants.”
Read more: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/15/when-deportation-is-a-death-sentence
“‘I refused to secretly spy,’ he said, ‘because my honor meant more to me than my freedom.’ His prosecution was political, he said, an extension of the bitter rivalry between the nation of his birth and the one where he’d chosen to spend his life.”
Read more: https://theintercept.com/2018/02/05/ahmad-sheikhzadeh-spy-iran-nuclear-program-fbi/
“More than a dozen former Pentagon officials, CIA analysts, US military officers, and think tank experts, as well as a retired South Korean general who spent his entire professional life preparing to fight the North, have all said variants of the same thing: There is a genuine risk of a war on the Korean Peninsula that would involve the use of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. Several estimated that millions — plural — would die.”
Read more: https://www.vox.com/world/2018/2/7/16974772/north-korea-war-trump-kim-nuclear-weapon
“So, why is Vice-president Mike Pence attending the Winter Olympics in South Korea? Is it because he’s a sports fan who just wants to enjoy the quadrennial spectacle of the Olympic games? Unfortunately, no. Pence is going to the games for political purposes. He intends to use them as an opportunity to level a propaganda attack against North Korea, the communist regime that the U.S. government has long been committed to regime-changing.”
Read more: https://www.fff.org/2018/02/08/political-gamesmanship-olympics/
“A kind and loving local chef woke up Tuesday morning to a dozen cops and health department officials raiding his home. Khemuel ‘Chef’ Sanders had his business shut down, all of his equipment stolen by the state, and his life ruined because he made food in his home to give to the homeless.”
“The Foreign Ministry statement warns Russian citizens that when abroad they face a serious threat of arrest by other countries at Washington’s request, after which they could be extradited to the United States. The statement, published on Thursday, also warns Russian citizens that upon extradition they will face biased treatment at the hands of the U.S. justice system. The U.S. State Department declined to comment.”
“In the 1970s, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act shifted the focus of the Bureau of Land Management from resource extraction to conservation. The policy marked the beginning of the Sagebrush Rebellion, a grass-roots revolt among ranchers, loggers and miners against environmental laws, like the 1964 Wilderness Act and the 1973 Endangered Species Act. Rural communities believed these new restrictions and regulations undermined their prosperity and shifted the fate of small-town economies into the hands of the federal government.”
“The U.S. invaded Afghanistan, killed, tortured, and incarcerated hundreds of thousands of people, and bombed the country to smithereens because the Taliban refused to comply with Bush’s unconditional extradition demand. It’s also why the invasion was not limited to simply capturing or killing bin Laden but also extended to a regime-change operation against the Taliban itself. That’s why there has been a civil war in Afghanistan ever since.”
Read more: https://www.fff.org/2018/01/30/u-s-destruction-afghanistan/