Week of February 19, 2018
Intrepid Report
Newsletter | ||||
Monday
By Brett Redmayne-Titley
“This is not good!” cautions a new Lebanese friend in a stern tone of warning, clutching this reporters arm for emphasis. “This, where you are going. . it is their neighbourhood . . . Hizbullah’s neighbourhood. They control this completely!”
By Linh Dinh
In Saigon, the foreign tourists stay mostly downtown, where they can patronize American bars, and restaurants serving Indian, Thai, Korean, Italian, Mexican and Middle Eastern food, not to mention McDonald’s, Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Popeyes, Starbucks and Lotteria, the last a Japanese chain. With English as the lingua franca, they can be overseas, yet somewhat at home, and with their smart phones, they can be anchored further in the familiar. Once, traveling meant having virtually no news from home, and no choice but to be immersed in the alien. How many still remember picking up an International Herald Tribune to find out, say, if the Phillies won three days ago?
By Jack Balkwill
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt can’t fly coach because people in coach inform him that he is “Fucking up the environment,” so he is forced to fly First Class, where, ostensibly, people don’t give a damn if he is “fucking up the environment.” This is his actual excuse.
By Michael Winship
On Wednesday, St. Valentine’s Day, I had just printed out an article from the CNN website headlined, “Exclusive: Gun lobbyist helped write ATF official’s proposal to deregulate.” Minutes later came news of gunfire at a high school in Parkland, Florida. By nightfall, 17 were dead.
By Harvey Wasserman
My beloved childhood friend, someone I’ve known since before elementary school, has lost his grandson in the latest Florida shooting.
Tuesday
By Brett Redmayne-Titley
With the last shot of the 2006 war fired and the IDF moving back into Israel, Lebanon began to heal its wounds. At the same time, Hizbullah, that had so successfully turned back the tides of war, began to rebuild—this time in new ways.
By Jack Balkwill
It is amazing to hear from the corporate media warnings about those who spread what they call “fake news.” Amazing because nobody spreads more fake news than the mainstream press. This week they are parroting FBI charges that 13 Russians are the most important part of the control of our elections, as always, without investigating the charges.
The president's proposal ‘could be a significant blow to the slew of protesters who spent years agitating against the Keystone XL pipeline and more recently the Dakota Access one.’
By Jessica Corbett
As green groups continue to denounce the Trump administration’s recently unveiled infrastructure plan as a “scam” that’s designed to keep the nation trapped in its “dirty and destructive past,” analysts are also warning the proposal will “make it harder for the next big anti-pipeline movement” to launch successful legal challenges to new fossil fuel projects.
By Martha Rosenberg
Bisphosphonate bone drugs are among the most harmful and misrepresented drug classes still on the market. But that has not stopped Pharma-funded medical associations like the American Society of Bone and Mineral Research, the National Osteoporosis Foundation and the National Bone Health Alliance from periodically wringing their hands over low sales.
By Stephen Lendman
Washington’s rage for dominance began by exterminating its native people to expand the nation from sea-to-shinning sea.
Wednesday
Rather than heeding the warnings from the UN to open up Gaza’s blockade and allow vital aid, what we have witnessed over the course of the last decade is a periodic all-out Israeli assault on Gaza’s vital infrastructure.
By Darius Shahtahmasebi
GAZA—Near the end of last month, Haaretz reported that, according to an expert hydrologist, 97 percent of Gaza’s drinking water has been contaminated by sewage and salt. The UN also confirmed that this was the case early last year, and clearly, the situation has remained unchanged even up until 2018. Robert Piper, the UN’s local coordinator for humanitarian and development activities, has called the situation “really very serious” and stated that “[w]e are falling far behind the demand for clean drinking water for Gazans.”
By Julia Conley
As nearly 250,000 Puerto Ricans remain without power five months after Hurricane Maria struck the island territory—the longest blackout in U.S. history—the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) said Sunday it will reduce its operating reserve to save money, as the island’s government moves toward privatizing the authority.
By Stephen Lendman
The pattern is familiar, corporate predators profiting from natural and other disasters.
By Linda S. Heard
President Abdul Fattah Al Sissi is arguably the first Egyptian president with an eye firmly focused on his nation’s long-term economic health. He is motivated largely by a burgeoning population projected to increase by as much as 20 per cent in 2020 and unlike many of his predecessors he eschews short term feel-good fixes.
By Robert Reich
First, you can complain. Yell. Bang on the dinner table. Tell your family and friends the man is a dangerous fool. Explode every time you read something about him. Swear every time you see him on TV. Go ballistic when you listen to him or about him on the radio.
Thursday
By Sheldon Richman
Donald Trump has embraced the popular “peace through strength” doctrine (PTSD) with his characteristic panache.
By Jan Oberg
We’ve witnessed a sustained Western media attention to the alleged interference by Russia (Putin) in American politics in favour of President Trump’s election. The same media seem to find it less interesting to write about US meddling in the political affairs, including elections, in other countries. But scattered articles—good ones—do exist.
By Julia Conley
Bottled water companies have relied on predatory marketing practices and exorbitant lobbying efforts to sell Americans on the inaccurate belief that pre-packaged water is cleaner and safer than tap water—a notion that is costing U.S. households about $16 billion per year.
By Stephen Lendman
Mahmoud Abbas long ago lost credibility for collaborating with Israel as its enforcer against his own people—for special privileges he’s enjoyed for years, growing super-rich, much of his ill-gotten wealth stashed in offshore tax havens while most Palestinians remain deeply impoverished and viciously persecuted, besieged Gazans most of all.
By Denis A. Conroy
Walking along Hans Crescent every morning on my way to work, I stop briefly to look up at the balcony fronting the room which Julian Assange occupies in the Ecuadorian Embassy. I’ve been passing his place of residence for five years now and I’ve yet to catch a glimpse of him. What I do see though, are some of Her Majesty’s compliant factotums doing their surveillance—best to keep tabs on the Ecuadorian Embassy and to monitor the founder of WikiLeaks . . . now in situ . . . compliments of the arse-licking British government ‘doing-it’ for American imperialism.
Friday
By Wayne Madsen
Bernie Madoff, who is serving a 150-year sentence after being convicted of running a $64.8 billion fraud scheme in New York in 2009, has been permitted by Trump administration officials to quietly resume running investment schemes from the medium-security Federal Correctional Institute in Butner, North Carolina. According to a high-level enforcement official of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission who contacted WMR, Madoff, who is 79, has been permitted to maintain contact with the outside world to direct investments from assets he continues to control from the prison, which has been nicknamed “B’nai Butner” due to its heavy concentration of Jewish white collar criminals and the only kosher-certified chef and kitchen in the federal Bureau of Prisons system.
By John W. Whitehead
We are caught in a vicious cycle.
By Edward Curtin
The Trump and Netanyahu governments have a problem: How to start a greatly expanded Middle-Eastern war without having a justifiable reason for one. No doubt they are working hard to solve this urgent problem. If they can’t find a “justification” (which they can’t), they will have to create one (which they will). Or perhaps they will find what they have already created. Whatever the solution, we should feel confident that they are not sitting on their hands. History teaches those who care to learn that when aggressors place a gun on the wall in the first act of their play, it must go off in the final act.
By Ramzy Baroud
As soon as Virgin Atlantic Airlines introduced a couscous-style salad “inspired by the flavours of Palestine,” a controversy ensued. Israel’s supporters ignited a social media storm and sent many complaints to the company, obliging the airline to remove the reference to Palestine.
By Stephen Lendman
On Tuesday, US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley responded to Mahmoud Abbas’ Israeli/Palestinian peace plan presented to Security Council members.
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