Nick Turse – Two Men, Two Legs, and Too Much Suffering

Nguyen Van Tu asks if I’m serious. Am I really willing to tell his story — to tell the story of the Vietnamese who live in this rural corner of the Mekong Delta? Almost 40 years after guerrilla fighters in his country threw the limits of U.S. military power into stark relief — during the 1968 Tet Offensive — we …

Paul Gottinger – US Enabled Saudi Arabia’s Crackdown on Pro-Democracy Protesters

Just days before Saudi Arabia performed a mass execution of 47 people, including four pro-democracy protesters; the US approved tens of millions in military contracts to the Saudi government. The contracts include $24 million to Raytheon Company for equipment relating to Patriot missiles, $12 million to Advanced Electronics Co. for electronics updates to F-15 fighter jets, and tens of millions …

Andrew Cockburn – A Special Relationship

One morning early in 1988, Ed McWilliams, a foreign-service officer posted to the American Embassy in Kabul, heard the thump of a massive explosion from somewhere on the other side of the city. It was more than eight years after the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, and the embassy was a tiny enclave with only a handful of diplomats. McWilliams, a …

More Than A Few Bad Eggs: Industrial Farms Exploiting ‘Organic’ Label for Profit

Thanks to industrial food producers who are “gaming the system,” eggs labeled as “organic” may not be very different from the factory-farmed versions consumers are trying to avoid, warns a new report from the non-profit Cornucopia Institute. Indeed, for some large-scale producers, the label “appears to be nothing more than a profitable marketing term to apply to the agro-industrial production …

William Greider – Hillary Clinton Is Whitewashing the Financial Catastrophe

illary Clinton’s recent op-ed in The New York Times, “How I’d Rein In Wall Street,” was intended to reassure nervous Democrats who fear she is still in thrall to those mega-bankers of New York who crashed the American economy. Clinton’s brisk recital of plausible reform ideas might convince wishful thinkers who are not familiar with the complexities of banking. But informed skeptics, myself …

BILL McKIBBEN – Falling Short on Climate in Paris

Paris — THE climate news last week came out of Paris, where the world’s nations signed off on an agreement to finally begin addressing global warming. Or, alternately, the climate news came out of Chennai, India, where hundreds died as flooding turned a city of five million into an island. And out of Britain, where the heaviest rains ever measured …