The #Violence of '#Conservation'

The Violence of ‘Conservation’

By Fiore Longo, March 09, 2020

Along with WWF, as well as palm oil and logging conglomerates, UNDP is a sponsor of the $21.4 million conservation project. A sizeable chunk of this funding goes to ‘conservation’ in Messok Dja, where the rest is allocated to TRIDOM, another forest situated across Cameroon, the Republic of Congo and Gabon. Under pressure from activists, the UNDP launched an investigation after receiving letters from the Baka in 2018 and complaints from Survival International (SI).

 

Amid Coronavirus Outbreak, Trump-aligned Pressure Group Pushes to Stop Medicine Sales to Iran

By Eli Clifton, March 09, 2020

With a novel strain of coronavirus rapidly spreading around the world, Iran has been hit particularly hard, with 107 deaths and 3,515 infections recorded so far. Yet the pressure group, United Against Nuclear Iran, is carrying on with its campaign targeting medical trade with Iran despite the Trump administration’s special financial channels for humanitarian goods and medicine to reach the beleaguered country.

 

Israel Confiscates Sole Medical Vehicle Serving 1,500 Palestinians

By Middle East Monitor, March 09, 2020

Israeli occupation forces have confiscated the only vehicle available to a medical team serving the needs of some 1,500 Palestinians in an isolated region of the southern West Bank, reported Haaretz. According to the paper, this is the second time that the vehicle – which serves the residents of Masafer Yatta in the south Hebron hills – has been seized within a year, “cutting off healthcare to an isolated and impoverished population” living inside an Israeli military firing zone.

 

The History of Socialism and Social Democracy. SYRIZA’s Betrayal of Greece Is a Spectre Haunting the Left

By Max Parry, March 09, 2020

‘Super Tuesday’ in the 2020 presidential election season is over and Senator Bernie Sanders’s time as the unlikely frontrunner for the Democratic nomination may have stopped just as quick as it began. Despite an unprecedented smear campaign coordinated by the party leadership and corporate media against him, the self-described “democratic socialist” not only managed to single-handedly de-stigmatize the latter as a dirty word in U.S. politics but at one point seemed like he had improbably overtaken former Vice President Joe Biden as the favorite to be the party nominee.

 

International Court Approves Probe of US War Crimes in Afghanistan

By Bill Van Auken, March 09, 2020

An appellate panel of the International Criminal Court (ICC) ruled Thursday that an investigation leading to the potential prosecution of US officials for war crimes during Washington’s nearly two-decade-old war in Afghanistan can move forward. Fatou Bensouda, the court’s Gambian-born chief prosecutor, whose US visa was revoked for her pursuit of the probe, praised Thursday’s ruling, stating, “Today is an important day for the cause of justice in Afghanistan.”

 

New Putin-Erdogan Deal Is Sugar-coating the Turks’ Surrender

By Scott Ritter, March 09, 2020

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Erdogan, accompanied by their respective senior national security advisers, met in Moscow on March 5. The purpose of this emergency summit was to negotiate the terms of a ceasefire that would bring an end to heavy fighting in Syria’s Idlib province that threatened to draw their two nations into direct military conflict. After more than six hours of meeting, a new agreement, packaged as an “additional protocol” to the “Memorandum on Stabilization of the Situation in the De-escalation Area as of September 17, 2018” (better known as the “Sochi Agreement”), was agreed to by both parties.