Global News Round-up

 

 

• Yesterday members of the Jewish community and allies delivered a clear message at the Israeli consulate in Toronto, Canada about bloodshed from Israel’s violence in Gaza and across historic Palestine. Rabbi David Mivasair, a member of Independent Jewish Voices, said, “It can no longer be business as normal at Israel’s consulates in Canada. The death and destruction inflicted by Israel in Gaza, as well as the heightened violence by Israel across Palestine, cannot be washed away. This belligerence is the latest in an ongoing aggressive 73-year settler-colonization project by Israel across historic Palestine. The ceasefire doesn’t end the injustice and oppression.”

• In recent days at the port of Livorno (Tuscany), Italy the Liberty Pride ship of the US Army's Maritime Security program has docked. The ship must load weapons and equipment from Camp Darby. Camp Darby is located between Pisa and Livorno and is the fourth largest US arsenal outside the United States. Liberty Pride will deliver its cargo to the port of the Romanian city of Constanta on the Black Sea on the 23rd of this month, as weapons are needed for the Ukrainian-US Sea Breeze 2021 exercise. This year 27 countries (including 16 NATO members) with the involvement of military units, airplanes, and ships will participate in the war games. These countries will be joined by Observers for a total of 35 nations involved. 

• Nicaragua’s Sandinista government is calling out blatant U.S. interference as the country prepares to hold its presidential election in six months. The U.S. is preparing economic sanctions in an attempt to generate hunger as a weapon against the elected government as previous regime change efforts have been unsuccessful. Washington's 'Reinforcing Nicaragua’s Adherence to Conditions for Electoral Reform (RENACER) Act', introduced in March, would require the U.S. government to increase sanctions on Managua. President Daniel Ortega recently remarked, "Here the Yankee Ambassador goes about here and there, promoting his candidates, as if he were Nicaraguan... He is not Nicaraguan! If he wants to promote candidates, he should promote them in the United States, as North American Candidates, yes. The Yankee Ambassador should not get involved here, as he is indeed getting involved, nominating candidates, pressuring political parties, so that the political parties accept the candidate the Yankee wants. He thinks we are still in the times of the Yankee Occupation."

• Congressman Brad Sherman (D-California), senior member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, introduced the 'Peace on the Korean Peninsula Act'. Among other things, the bill calls for serious, urgent diplomatic engagement in pursuit of a binding peace agreement constituting a formal end to the Korean War. In 1953, the parties to the Korean War signed an Armistice Agreement that pledged an end to “all acts of armed force in Korea until a final peaceful settlement is achieved.” Common sense tells us that this conflict ended in July 1953. But in fact, the US only signed an armistice. Therefore, the US technically remains in a state of war with North Korea. This situation does not serve anyone’s interest.  

• The Cártel Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG) has established itself as one of the most feared paramilitaries in Mexico over the last decade. Images of the group have become the standard depiction of the Mexican cartels writ large. Their propaganda videos often feature groups of masked men bristling with enough small arms to make them formidable against even conventional armies. In an interview aired on Mexico’s Telemundo network in May 2019, a former CJNG soldier described his experience at a training camp and claimed that the cartel employed U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) to train their recruits. According to the former sicario (assassin), there was “a group of elite Marines, there were [members] of the United States Navy, there were Delta Forces, there was everything there.” The Special Forces training has been funded under the Plan Mérida, which has resulted in the U.S. providing more than $1.6 billion for fighting the War on Drugs, most of it in military aid.