How ‘The #New_York_Times’ Deceived the Public on North Korea | The Nation
▻https://www.thenation.com/article/how-the-new-york-times-deceived-the-public-on-north-korea
The New York Times may still have a Judith Miller problem—only now it’s a David Sanger problem.
What the New York Times Got Wrong About North Korea | The National Interest
▻https://nationalinterest.org/feature/what-new-york-times-got-wrong-about-north-korea-36467
“The problems with the Times story abound. North Korea never agreed to stop its nuclear development, and the sites in question were not hidden or secret since there has been no official disclosure of the sites. Moreover, Kim had publicly ordered the mass-production of nuclear warheads in his 2018 New Year’s speech.”
De par son impact et sa géographie, le New York Times est le média le plus délétère au monde quant à la sécurité physique des #civils des pays ennemis, notamment pauvres, des Etats-Unis.
#Irak
Jeff Sessions, Trump’s Pick for Attorney General, Is a Fierce Opponent of Civil Rights | The Nation
▻https://www.thenation.com/article/jeff-sessions-trumps-pick-for-attorney-general-is-a-fierce-opponent-of-ci
Jeff Sessions, Trump’s Pick for Attorney General, Is a Fierce Opponent of Civil Rights
He wrongly prosecuted black activists for voter fraud, was blocked from a judgeship because of racist statements, and opposed the Voting Rights Act.
Trump attorney general pick Jeff Sessions
Trump attorney general pick Jeff Sessions speaks to media at Trump Tower in New York on November 17, 2016. (AP Photo / Carolyn Kaster)
Donald Trump has chosen a white nationalist as his chief strategist and a white-nationalist sympathizer as his pick for Attorney General. Like the Confederate general he is named after, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III has long been a leading voice for the Old South and the conservative white backlash vote Trump courted throughout his campaign. Sessions, as a US senator from Alabama, has been the fiercest opponent in the Senate of immigration reform, a centerpiece of Trump’s agenda, and has a long history of opposition to civil rights, dating back to his days as a US Attorney in Alabama in the 1980s.
#trump #catastrophe_américaine (essai de nouveau tag) #états-unis
The Essential Ferrante | The Nation
▻https://www.thenation.com/article/the-essential-ferrante
The writer who goes by the name of #Elena_Ferrante has, over the past 25 years, produced seven novels. The most famous of them—My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and The Story of the Lost Child—form a quartet. Published in rapid succession between 2011 and 2014, these novels are set in a slum neighborhood in Naples that is marked by poverty, ignorance, and violence and yet constitutes, for its inhabitants, a world whose borders none may traverse. No amount of hardscrabble life on its mean streets is sufficient to wean anyone—and I mean anyone—of loyalty to the neighborhood’s addictive brutishness. If, on occasion, one or two of its denizens manage to escape, they are (symbolically speaking) likely to lose a limb tearing free, thereby remaining as maimed as those being left behind.
Did Human Rights Watch Sabotage Colombia’s Peace Agreement? | The Nation
▻https://www.thenation.com/article/did-human-rights-watch-sabotage-colombias-peace-agreement
“No” won because the right wing, led by former President Álvaro Uribe, was able to turn a vote that was supposed to be on peace into a vote on the FARC. The geographic breakdown of the referendum indicates that “no” won in areas where Uribe and his political party have their support. Take a look especially at the department of Antioquia, where Uribe got his political start as a champion of paramilitary death squads. Sixty-two percent of Antioquia’s voters cast “no.” In the department’s capital, Medellín, a city that has been sold in the United States as a neoliberal success story—Modern! Urbane! Fun! Come visit!—63 percent of voters said “no” (for Medellín’s neoliberal “makeover,” see this essay by Forrest Hylton).
Uribe served as president from 2002 to 2010. He is best thought of as a Colombian Andrew Jackson, riding to the top office of his country on the wings of mass murder, rural ressentiment, and financial speculation. As an ex-president, he has been toxic, doing everything he could to keep the war going.
The Colombian elite, especially the retrograde sector Uribe represents, has much to lose with peace: The end of fighting would create a space in which the country’s many social conflicts—having to do with land, labor, and resource extraction—could be dealt with on their own terms, rather than distorted through counterinsurgent politics. And peace would be costly for some sectors, especially for all those Colombians in the “security” business who for years have fed off the Plan Colombia trough.
Polls show that a majority of Colombians favor peace. But Uribe and his allies in the media and congress lied, obfuscated, and scared. They managed to convince a small minority (the 54,000-vote victory margin for “no” is about a quarter of the number of civilians killed or disappeared by the state since the start of the civil war) that the agreement was a giveaway to the FARC and that Santos was “delivering the country to terrorism.” The Times identifies Uribe and the “far right” as the “biggest winner.” The former president “had argued that the agreement was too lenient on the rebels, who he said should be prosecuted as murderers and drug traffickers. ‘Peace is an illusion, the Havana agreement deceptive,’ Mr. Uribe wrote on Twitter on Sunday after casting his ‘no’ vote.” Thus Uribe has forced himself on the bargaining table, with Santos saying, as paraphrased by the Times, that he would be “reaching out to opposition leaders in the Colombian Congress like former President Álvaro Uribe,” with the Times adding that “experts predicted a potentially tortured process in which Mr. Uribe and others would seek harsher punishments for FARC members, especially those who had participated in the drug trade.”
The campaign to keep Colombia’s war going had an unlikely ally: Human Rights Watch. José Miguel Vivanco, the head of HRW’s Americas Watch division, emerged as an unexpected player in Colombian politics when he came out strongly against the “justice” provisions of the peace agreement. Vivanco agreed with Uribe by offering the most dire reading of the agreement possible, saying that perpetrators—in the FARC and the military—of human-rights violations would receive immunity. Vivanco was all over the press in Colombia, with his comments used to build opposition to the accords. Once it became clear that he was lining up too closely with Uribe, he staged a mock public dispute with the former para-president, even while continuing to basically support Uribe’s position (h/t Alejandro Velasco).
Et au Brésil: Is Human Rights Watch Too Closely Aligned with US Foreign Policy?
▻http://cepr.net/publications/op-eds-columns/is-human-rights-watch-too-closely-aligned-with-us-foreign-policy
Part of that right-wing agenda is a close alliance with the United States and its Cold War strategy of “containment” and “rollback” with respect to the left governments in Latin America. And that is where Human Rights Watch, the most prominent US-based human-rights organization — its Americas Division in particular — comes in. HRW abstained from offering the slightest criticism of the impeachment process; even worse, the executive director of its Americas Division, José Miguel Vivanco, was quoted in the Brazilian media — on the day that the Brazilian Senate voted to permanently oust the president — saying Brazilians “should be proud of the example they are giving the world.” He also praised the “independence of the judiciary” in Brazil. Sérgio Moro, the judge investigating the political corruption cases, has been far from independent. He had to apologize in March for leaking wiretapped conversations to the press between former president Lula da Silva and Dilma; Lula and his attorney; and between Lula’s wife and their children.
Syrian Writers, Artists, and Journalists Speak Out Against US and Russian Policy | The Nation
▻https://www.thenation.com/article/syrian-writers-artists-and-journalists-speak-out-against-us-and-russian-p
via Eyal Weizman
A group of 150 Syrian intellectuals, composed mostly of writers, artists, academics, and journalists, all identifying themselves as secular democratic opponents of the Syrian regime, have issued the statement below to express their condemnation of the role played by both Washington and Moscow in their country. The signatories include globally known figures such as Paris Sorbonne professor Burhan Ghalioun, who was the first chairperson of the Syrian National Council in 2011-12; award-winning novelist Samar Yazbek, whose works are published in many languages; famous Syrian intellectual Sadik Jalal Al-Azm; Farouk Mardam-Bey, a writer who edits the most important collection dedicated to the Arab world in France; playwright Mohammad Al-Attar; and Yassin al-Haj Saleh, a prominent independent voice in the Syrian opposition.
▻http://angryarab.blogspot.com/2016/09/when-nation-magazine-covers-syrian-war.html
Is this a joke? [...] The signatories to this statement, like Sadiq Al-Azm, have been advocates of NATO intervention from the very beginning and most of the writers here work in Gulf regimes media, which have been calling for MORE—not less—US intervention in Syria. Burhan Ghalyun is even one of the signatories. Their protest is not against US military intervention in Syria but against US agreement with Russia over the cease-fire. But those nuances are too inconvenient fro the Zionist policies of the Nation magazine.
La lettre d’écrivains, d’artistes et de journalistes syriens dénonçant les politiques étasunienne et russe.
►http://lesakerfrancophone.fr/la-lettre-decrivains-dartistes-et-de-journalistes-syriens-denonca
Ils y dénoncent le fait que les deux puissances se soient débrouillées pour récupérer le combat de libération syrien sous l’alibi de la guerre contre le terrorisme.
Par des écrivains, artistes et journaliste syriens contre les politiques étasunienne et russe – Le 21 septembre 2016 – Source The Nation
Welcome to Brazil, Where a Food Revolution Is Changing the Way People Eat
▻https://www.thenation.com/article/slow-food-nation-2
Monteiro came to believe that nutritionists’ traditional focus on food groups and nutrients like fat, sugar, and protein had become obsolete. The more meaningful distinction, he started to argue, is in how the food is made. Monteiro is most concerned with the “ultraprocessed products”—those that are manufactured largely from industrial ingredients like palm oil, corn syrup, and artificial flavorings and typically replace foods that are eaten fresh or cooked. Even by traditional nutritionists’ criteria, these sorts of products are considered unhealthy—they tend to be high in fat, sugar, and salt. But Monteiro argues that ultraprocessed foods have other things in common: They encourage overeating, both because they are engineered by food scientists to induce cravings and because manufacturers spend lavishly on marketing.
[...]
But even if the data suggest that ultraprocessed products are driving the increased obesity rates, where does that leave the average consumer? Many families can’t afford to return to a time when one person stayed home and cooked for everyone, even if they wanted to.
But Monteiro says the demands of modern life don’t have to mean abandoning real food. He points to Brazil’s ubiquitous per-kilo restaurants, which serve fresh home-style dishes to diners who pay by weight. There are also opportunities to bring more fresh food into institutional settings like schools, hospitals, and the military.
#nutrition #obésité #agro_industrie #santé #nourriture #Etats-Unis #Brésil
