India: host to Bollywood, spirituality, and one of the seven ancient wonders of the world. From the snow-dusted Himalayas in the North to the sultry sun-washed beaches, backwaters, and forests of the South, India is a land of abundant beauty. Scattered throughout the country are temples finely carved with depictions of Hindu gods and goddesses. Home to more than a billion people, India “pulsates with a spectacular mix of people, traditions and landscapes,” according to Lonely Planet. Flaunted as a success story of neoliberal development, the economy continues to grow and the state remains stable, despite India being an intensely pluralistic society. More than 700 languages are spoken; Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, Sikhism, Jainism, Zoroastrianism and Judaism are only a sample of the many religions practiced in the country.

However, development has not been equal for all. Many minorities face consistent repression by a strong but violent state. Women of “untouchable” class continue to be subjected to forced sterilization. Protesters and union and other work-place organizers continue to be imprisoned. Indigenous people are violently evicted from their homes to make way for mines and dams. Rising nationalism has even led to the famous Indian cricketer, Amir Khan, to speak out against increasing intolerance.

The levers of power (both regional and national) in India have long been in the hands of a political elite. Political influence is bought by the economically privileged and the result is all too predictable: tax exemptions and havens, land concessions, cheap credit and subsidies on electricity and water for the wealthy; malnourishment, precarious (and often dangerous) work from a young age, and a lack of access to basic healthcare for the poor. Oxfam estimates that if India stemmed the rise in economic inequality, it could end extreme poverty for 90 million people by 2019. Yet, the likelihood of it doing so is slim.

Every year, more than 2,000 farmers in Punjab kill themselves to escape the shame of chronic debt. In the past 20 years, up to 40,000 farmers have taken their lives. Many of their families are left destitute, receiving no state support. Punjab was at the forefront of the Green Revolution, a movement in the 1960s to modernize agriculture with more intensive use of fertilizer and pesticides, and mono-cropping. The Green Revolution has had profound environmental, economic and social consequences.

Pesticides and mono-cropping have depleted micro-nutrients in the soil. Farmers have experienced reduced crop yields, resulting in lower incomes. Large multinational corporations advocated the use of hybrid and GM seeds, which need to be repurchased every year. This has increased costs for farmers. In the past, conventional seeds were harvested for subsequent seasons. Those same pesticides and GM crops were manufactured by the multinationals that lobbied for the Green Revolution. The new agricultural design forced many farmers to turn to credit; firstly to pay for the adaptation to industrial farming and then to help farmers meet their basic needs as crop yields fell.

The expansion of Islamic State group terror is buttressed by the unhesitant support of Turkey, along with some other states.

In this regard, the first aspect of the Kurdish resistance against the Islamic State group vis-a-vis the Turkey-Islamic State group collaboration is that the AKP government carried out a proxy war against Rojava Kurds via the Islamist terror group in order to block or at least contain a Kurdish success in Syria. The AKP government is also responsible for Islamic State group attacks against the Kurds and leftists in Turkey for not conducting an effective investigation despite all the evidences. The Islamic State group carried out three bomb attacks; in Diyarbakır during an electoral rally of pro-Kurdish-Leftist HDP; in Suruç, a town on the Turkey-Syria Border; and in Ankara during a peace march.

The second is that the Kurdish resistance in Rojava unmasked this dirty collaboration, especially during the Kobanê war. In fact, Turkey’s collaboration with and utilization of jihadist groups, particularly against the Kurds, had not started with the Islamic State group and had not come out from nowhere. It has done in the scope of their interventionist approach to the Middle-East and can be dated back to the beginning of 2011 when they supported another jihadist group, the Nusra Front, the Syrian branch of al-Qaida, which is no less cruel than the Islamic State group. Following an internal split within the Nusra Front, it was replaced by the Islamic State group, which has been carrying out attacks on the liberated Kurdish land since then with the help of the AKP government. The AKP-Islamic State group collaboration will continue as long as one needs the other. But there is a balance of terror here for Turkey, created by Turkey: in the case that it stops its collaboration with the Islamic State group, it is quite likely the terror group will turn on them, since the only gate for its logistic needs is the Turkish border.

Turkey is in collaboration with the Islamic State group both politically and ideologically, which expands on many channels as it has been listed with details by David L. Phillips in Huffington Post. The Islamic State group served Turkish interests militarily by fighting the Kurds, while the AKP government facilitated the murderous campaign of the Islamic State group logistically and financially. The AKP government provided military equipments to the group as well. Three trucks full of weapons stopped in Adana region on Jan. 19,2014. Despite the denial of the government, it has been clear that these weapons would be delivered to the Islamic State group. According to many surfaced documents and media coverage, in addition to these three, there were many other trucks of weapons delivered to the Islamic State group, which were also supported by videos and photos taken by Kurdish YPG and YPJ fighters. Moreover, Turkish soil was used by Saudis for the transportation of arms to the Islamic State group.

The AKP government has also facilitated the border crossing of newly recruited Islamic State group members according to a document signed by Interior minister of the time Muammer Güler on June 13, 2014. It has also been asserted by international media that the Erdogan government has turned a blind eye to the “gateway to jihad” through the country’s border with Syria. Many official amendments and questions in the Parliament of Turkey issued by opposition parties for the official answer of the government concerning the facilitation of border-crossing for jihadists remained unanswered. Among many other unanswered questions, HDP Member of Parliament Ibrahim Ayhan tabled a question for the interior minister if the the government provided Islamic State group members with shelter in the refugee camp in Akçakale district.

Islamic State group fighters, including high ranking commanders, received medical care and were treated in the hospitals of the border cities of Turkey. Turkish journalist Fehim Taştekin claims that the government allowed the purchase and the sale of oil from the territory occupied by the Islamic State group. Moreover, according to other sources, some of President Erdoğan’s family members are involved in the trade of Islamic State group oil.

Born on a Wisconsin farm in 1868, Edward Sheriff Curtis grew up to become a commercial photographer in Seattle. In 1895 he photographed Princess Angeline, the daughter of the Duwamish chief Seattle, for whom the city was named.

That encounter sparked Curtis' lifelong fascination with the cultures and lives of Native American tribes. He soon joined expeditions to visit tribes in Alaska and Montana.

In 1906, Curtis was approached by wealthy financier J.P. Morgan, who was interested in funding a documentary project on the indigenous people of the continent. They conceived a 20-volume series, called The North American Indian.

With Morgan’s backing, Curtis spent more than 20 years crisscrossing North America, creating over 40,000 images of more than 80 different tribes. He made thousands of wax cylinder recordings of native songs and language, and wrote down oral histories, legends and biographies.

Two more young men were shot in my neighborhood last night. Last week, another unarmed black man was killed by police. Last month, a woman in Ohio whose fetus would have been stillborn had to drive 300 miles to get an abortion. The U.S. has the highest GDP in the world, but women who live here rank an abysmal 28th according to the World Economic Forum’s global gender gap index. Even more shocking: the U.S. is home to one tenth of the world’s poorest people, according to the recently released Global Wealth Databoook 2015. “That seems impossible,” says Paul Buchheit on Inequality.org. “It requires a second look at the data, and then a third look. But it’s true. In the world’s poorest decile (bottom 10%), one out of ten are Americans… Incredibly, then, nearly 50 million of America’s 243 million adults are part of the world’s poorest 10%.”

While the world paused to grieve terrorist attacks by ISIS last week, U.S. weapons manufacturers took it as a green light to shore up new contracts and add to their enormous profits and the U.S. House of Representatives exploited the moment to push through racist and xenophobic policies that would exclude certain refugees from entering the U.S. Meanwhile a prime source of terrorist attacks, the U.S. government itself, continued its many decades of state-sponsored terrorism, making us what Noam Chomsky calls the “http://inthesetimes.com/article/17311/noam_chomsky_the_worlds_greatest_terrorist_campaign” To know what it means in human terms, consider the words of former Air Force pilot and drone operator Brandon Bryant who said in an interview on Democracy Now, “I killed 13 people, and only three of them were actual combatants.” He goes on: “I didn’t really understand what it meant to kill at first. It was horrible. The first time was horrible. The second time was horrible. The third time was numbing. The fourth time was numbing. But, of course, the first time sticks with you the longest.”

The victims of his attack are of course not here to tell us how they feel.

Most of us are not former drone operators, but we all have something in common with Brandon Bryant. We watch what our country does to its own people and to others abroad, and we start to feel numb. How can we stay tuned in to all these atrocities? How can we respond in responsibly?:

To make sense of this apparently senseless provocation, it is necessary to cut through the multiple layers of obfuscation which surround Western narratives around Syria and ISIS. The reality is that the forces essentially line up today just as they did at the outbreak of this crisis in 2011: with the West, Turkey and the gulf monarchies sponsoring an array of death squads bent on bringing down the Syrian government; and Russia, Iran, Iraq, Syria (obviously) and Hezbollah resisting this project; the rise of ISIS has not fundamentally changed this underlying dynamic. Indeed, the next-to-useless impact of the West’s year-long phony war against ISIS – alongside its relentless funneling of weaponry to militias with an, at best, ambiguous relationship with Al Qaeda and ISIS – has demonstrated that the Syrian state (or “Assad” to use the West’s puerile personalization) remains the ultimate target of the West’s Syria policy. As Obama himself put it, the goal is not to eliminate ISIS, but rather to “contain” them – that is, keep them focused on weakening Syria and Iraq, and not US allies like Jordan, Turkey or the US’s favoured Kurdish factions. In civil wars, there are only ever really two sides: those who want the insurgency to overthrow the government, and those who want the government to defeat the insurgency. In the Syrian civil war, NATO remains on the same side as ISIS. In this sense, Putin is entirely correct when he commented on the Turkish attack it was a “stab in the back, carried out by the accomplices of terrorists” and asked: “do they want to make NATO serve ISIS?”

Russia’s direct entry into the Syrian conflict two months ago, however, has caused utter panic in the ‘regime change’ camp. Belying all their ‘anti-ISIS’ rhetoric, the US and Britain were openly horrified that Russia might actually be putting up an effective fight against the group and restoring governmental authority to the ungoverned spaces in which it thrives. Immediately, the West began warning of ‘blowback’ to Russia, and ramping up advanced arms shipments to the insurgency. Within a month, a Russian passenger plane was blown up, with ISIS claiming responsibility and British Foreign Minister Philip Hammond calling the attack a “warning shot”. It was a “shot” alright, aimed not only at Russia, but also at her allies; the downing of the plane on Egyptian soil was a deliberate act of economic war against the Egyptian tourist industry, a punishment for Egypt’s support for Russia and Syria and its choking off of fighters to Syria since Sisi came to power. Then, two weeks later, came the attack on Paris. White supremacist niceties prevented Hammond calling that a “warning shot”, but that is precisely what it was, this time at those within the regime change/ anti-Russia camp who were showing signs of ‘wobbling’. Hollande had suggested back in January that sanctions on Russia should be lifted asap, and more recently had showed a willingness to cooperate with Russia militarily over Syria: a ‘red line’ for France’s ‘Atlantic partners’. This is what France was being punished for.

Nevertheless, the net continues to close on the West’s death squad project in Syria. From the start the key to ISIS success has been, firstly, the porous Syria-Turkey border, through which Turkey has allowed a free flow of fighters and weapons back and forth for the past four years, and secondly, the massive amounts of finance ISIS receives both from oil sales and from donors in countries prepared to turn a blind eye to terror financing. In recent weeks, all of this has been threatened by the Russian-led alliance (of which France is increasingly willing to be a part).

The past week has seen a large scale Syrian ground offensive, supported with Russian air cover, in precisely the Syrian-Turkish border region which is the death squads’ lifeline: a move which prompted the Turkish foreign ministry to warn of “serious consequences” if the Russian airstrikes continued. Simultaneously, Russia has embarked on a major campaign against ISIS’ reportedly 1000-strong oil tanker fleet which is so crucial to the group’s financial success. As the Institute for the Study of War reported, “Russian military chief of staff Col. Gen. Andrey Kartapolov announced on November 18 “Russian warplanes are now flying on a free hunt” against ISIS-operated oil tanker trucks traveling back and forth from Syria and Iraq, claiming that Russian strikes had destroyed over 500 ISIS-operated oil trucks in the past “several days.”” This massive dent in the group’s oil transporting capacity even shamed the US into belatedly and somewhat half-heartedly launching similar attacks of their own. The smashing of ISIS’ oil industry will not only be a blow to the entire death squad project, but will directly affect Turkey, widely thought to be involved in the transportation of ISIS-produced oil, and even Erdogan’s family itself, as it is the company run by his son Bilal that is believed to be running the illicit trade.

....... But then, a far more unjust invasion and war followed in 2003, following a decade-long siege that cost Iraq a million of its children and its entire economy.

Their entertainers, media experts, intellectuals and philosophers made careers from dissecting us, dehumanizing us, belittling everything we hold dear; they did not spare a symbol, a prophet, a tradition, values or set of morals. When we reacted and protested out of despair, they further censured us for being intolerant to view the humor in our demise; they used our angry shouts to further highlight their sense of superiority and our imposed lowliness.

They claimed that we initiated it all. But they lied. It was their unqualified, inflated sense of importance that made them assign September 11, 2001 as the inauguration of history. All that they did to us, all the colonial experiences and the open-ended butchery of the brown man, the black man, any man or woman who did not look like them or uphold their values, was inconsequential.

Furthermore, they carried out massive social and demographic experiments in Iraq which have been unleashed throughout the Middle East, since. They pitted their victims against one another: the Shia against the Sunni, the Sunni against the Sunni, the Arabs against the Kurds, and the Kurds against the Turks. They called it a strategy, and congratulated themselves on a job well done as they purportedly withdrew from Iraq. They disregarded the consequences of tampering with civilizations that have evolved over the course of millennia.

Many of us are still honorably fighting for our communities; others despaired: they carried arms and went to war, fighting whoever they perceive to be an enemy, who were many. Others went mad, lost every sense of humanity; exacted revenge, tragically believing that justice can be achieved by doing unto others what they have done unto you. They were joined by others who headed to the West, some of whom had escaped the miseries of their homelands, but found that their utopia was marred with alienation, racism and neglect, saturated with a smug sense of superiority afflicted upon them by their old masters.

It became a vicious cycle, and few seem interested now in revisiting General Schwarzkopf’s conquests in Iraq and Vietnam – with his smug attitude and the amusement of western journalists – to know what actually went wrong. They still refuse to acknowledge history, the bleeding Palestinian wound, the heartbroken Egyptian revolutionaries and the destroyed sense of Iraqi nationhood, the hemorrhaging streets of Libya and the horrifying outcomes of all the western terrorist wars, with blind, oil-hungry dominating foreign policies that have shattered the Cradle of Civilization, like never before.

On our flight home from Tel Aviv to the U.S., I sat next to an orthodox rabbi who was very proud of Israel, a self-proclaimed Zionist. He was surprised to hear that my partner and I had just visited Israel/Palestine on our own, not with a tour group, and asked if we hadn’t been afraid of all the stabbings being done by Palestinians. I said we hadn’t seen any. His reply was telling. “See,” he said, “this uprising is not that big of a deal. The Israeli people just keep on going.”

The term “intifada” focuses on the stone-throwers, and doesn’t address the reason for the uprising. It doesn’t speak to the ongoing violence of the Israeli settlers and military who are every day perpetrating intolerable crimes much more serious that stone throwing. It doesn’t give the context of the open air imprisonment and ongoing Nakba of Palestinians.

Moreover, what we witnessed in our short visit was not a single organized rebellion, but something more like the spontaneous reactions of young black Americans in Ferguson and Baltimore. The disturbances in the West Bank are not the planned actions of so-called terrorists, they are the outbursts of anger and hopelessness that comes from being daily abused by an occupying army and aggressive settlers and not seeing a future other than continued and worsening incarceration.

The realities of the occupation were everywhere we went. On the van from the airport in Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, we traveled on a modern highway bordered by walls and barbed wire that is for cars with yellow tags only (Israeli settlers), not for those with white tags (Palestinians). In Jerusalem, from Damascus Gate to almost every intersection in the old city, there were gangs of soldiers on duty, with their machine guns slung casually from their shoulders, checking out anyone who looked Arab.

As we moved about on buses, we went through a number of military checkpoints where soldiers got on the bus and young Palestinians were forced leave the bus to go through a security “cage.” In the Area C village of Al Aqaba, we saw the nearby army post and heard the bullets and missiles being fired off as part of their trainings and as a form of intimidation of the locals. In the village of Bil’in and the cities of Bethlehem and Hebron, we saw the regular military dispersal of young people with tear gas and sound grenades.

We did not get to experience the military’s common use of skunk spray, thank god, though we did hear about it. Nor did we see the process of home demolitions or witness any killings by settlers, although settler violence was in the news daily, done with complete impunity and even the support of the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF).

What we are seeing now on the West Bank is not so much a unique intifada as yet another courageous expression of resistance to the occupation. The rabbi may have been right that Israelis just keep on going, but indeed so do the Palestinians.

“I didn’t know absolutely nothing.” That double negative is from Sergio de Castro, talking about the killing, disappearances, and torture that took place when he served as Chile’s economic and finance minister during the Pinochet regime’s most brutal period. It’s from a great documentary that premiered this week in Chile, Chicago Boys, made by Carola Fuentes, a journalist, and Rafael Valdeavellano, a filmmaker.

Sergio de Castro is among the vilest of the “Chicago Boys,” Chilean economists who studied at the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger and who, after the September 11, 1973, coup, helped impose on their fellow citizens a punishing program of extreme economic austerity. In the film, de Castro recalls climbing a hill in Santiago so he could watch the Air Force bomb La Moneda, the presidential palace where Salvador Allende was soon to die. As flames poured out of the palace’s windows, he felt, he says, an “infinite happiness.” De Castro says he “didn’t know anyone who had been killed” by his government, even though representatives from the World Bank, the IMF, and the US State Department kept complaining about the repression. Asked by Carola Fuentes if he ever brought up those complaints with Pinochet, he said no. De Castro says he feels great “pain,” not just for the “tortured but the torturers” but that, knowing what he knows now–that thousands were killed or disappeared and tens of thousands tortured during his tenure–he still would have served Pinochet. “There aren’t any corrective measures that are painless,” de Castro says.

Fuentes and Valdeavellano have dug up terrific home movies of the first class of Chicago Boys, studying and socializing in Hyde Park in the mid-1950s, replete with narrow lapels, thin ties, and endless cigarettes. Friedman, now dead, appears in passing. He was “brilliant in his exposition, naïve in his proposals,” says Ricardo French-Davis, who took classes with Friedman but broke from the orthodoxy. The documentary nicely reveals how ideological the Chicago Boys were, trained not just in the technical details of monetarism but, as one of them puts it, inculcated with “a religious belief in the efficient operation of the totally liberalized markets.” They understood their mission in continental terms. They were determined to, Ernesto Fontaine, another original unrepentant Chicago Boy who appears in the documentary, says elsewhere, “expand throughout Latin America, confronting the ideological positions which prevented freedom and perpetuated poverty and backwardness.”

The exchange program that brought the Chileans to Chicago was funded by public money, from the US government’s Point Four foreign-aid program. “I don’t think there has been a better investment of American taxpayers’ money,” Fontaine says in the film. The program was targeted at weakening Keynesian developmentalism in Latin America, at spreading, as one former University of Chicago president put it, “the Chicago influence” and “market economics” throughout Latin America. Considering the dominance of Keynes and Marx in Chile and elsewhere, a number of adjectives could be attached to the program: quixotic in the face of statist hegemony; Gramscian in its success at marching through and transforming the institutions; and Jesuitical in its determination against seemingly long odds.

On November 28 and 29,hundreds of thousands of people around the world will take to the streets in more than 2000 events in 150 countries to turn up the heat on leaders heading to the Paris Climate Summit.

Frontline community representatives, unionists, faith leaders, and families will call on politicians to forge an ambitious new global climate agreement this December that speeds up the just transition from fossil fuels to 100% renewable energy and protects vulnerable people from worsening climate impacts. The people’s call for leadership will be harder and harder to ignore.

In Kampala, Uganda, 500,000 people are expected progress through the city led by popular local leaders and celebrities and topped off with a concert, all while Pope Francis is in town.

Across The Philippines, over 20 events, marches, and rallies are planned. In Manila, 20,000 people are expected to converge in Quezon City as part of a broad march with six contingents: climate-impacted communities, faith organization, youth, labor, anti-coal and renewable energy.

More than 60 events are planned across China with students coming together for a series of events including round table discussions, bike rides, screenings and more. While in Hong Kong, Taipei and Seoul hundreds are taking to the streets to demand a just transition to 100% renewable energy. And in Vietnam, a big climate music festival is planned, bringing together more than 1500 youth.

In Ottawa more than 10,000 will be marching for climate solutions and justice, while in Vancouver indigenous leaders will be heading a march joining the global call for climate action.

In Germany, the streets of Berlin will throng with people calling for a 100% clean, renewable future and a quick phase-out of coal.
In Australia, climate marches are being organised around the country. While in New Zealand there will be a marches in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch.