The Obama administration may finally get some good news. Iraq’s recent elections for parliament might actually result in a non-sectarian, pro-American government. This outcome would enable the Obama administration to fulfill its goal of removing all but 50,000 support troops by this August and drawn U.S. forces down to zero by the end of 2011.
The survivors of the devastating earthquakes in Haiti and Chile are still scrambling to deal with the damage. Here, however, pundits are still scrambling to explain the dramatic difference in impact. Haiti’s quake on January 12 came in at 7.0 on the Richter scale, leveled the capital city, and left more than 200,000 dead. Chile’s earthquake on February 27 registered a magnitude of 8.8, which means it was 500 times more powerful than the Haiti shock. But fewer than 1,000 Chileans died, and the damage to buildings was considerably less.
Tremendous effort is underway to rebuild Chile after it was hit on February 27 by an 8.8-magnitiute earthquake. This tragedy was followed by seven-meter high tsunami and several less devastating after-shocks. The coastal city of Constitucion and the resort town of Iloca lie in ruins, while much of the historic center of the city of Curico is either damaged or destroyed. It’s believed that around 550 people died overall.
Earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, and other natural disasters shed light on social cracks and fissures invisible in everyday life. These disasters provoke social crises that states tend to resolve with militarization, which in turn shows the profound crises that our societies have been undergoing.
Lately, the news from Mexico has not been particularly positive. Every day the number of victims of the ongoing turf wars in the northern border area of the country grows. In 2009, Mexico reported 7,724 drug war-related deaths,1 while in January of this year alone, the number of people killed in Ciudad Juárez reached a stunning 227. Recently, over the weekend of March 13, 2010, nearly 50 people were killed in that bloody city, including employees and family members of the U.S. Consulate. Most scholars and politicians believe that these deaths are all related to drug gang activity, implying that they are the result of in-gang struggles for control of businesses and territory; fights amongst gangs for routes, and because of clashes with the military.
Recently, I wrote about a crew of pundits and warrior-journalists eager not to see the U.S. military leave Iraq. That piece appeared on the op-ed page of the Los Angeles Times (and in alonger version at TomDispatch.com) and then began wandering the media world. One of its stops was the military newspaper Stars and Stripes.
Victor Hugo famously quipped: “[I]l existe une chose plus puissante que toutes les armées du monde, c’est une idée dont l’Heure est venue.” Here’s one such powerful idea: a multi-state union that stretches from the Fertile Crescent to the Silk Road, connecting the Indian Ocean to the Caucasus, and the Mediterranean to Central Asia – a grand political-economic-security union (precise name to be determined) that finally brings the peoples of this ‘region’ under the same banner.
How might the changing political relationship between Cuba and the United States influence Cuban-American literature?
In its draft “Preliminary Damage and Needs Assessment” (PDNA), which was prepared with the help of some of its bilateral and multilateral donors, the government projected total damages and losses caused by the quake at close to eight billion dollars.
On February 18, 1977, a thousand Nigerian soldiers surrounded the Kalakuta Republic and burned it to the ground.
As republics go, Kalakuta wasn’t very large. Only 100 or so people lived there. But the immensely popular musician Fela Anikulapo-Kuti had created this compound, in the Nigerian capital of Lagos, as a joyful and democratic space in an otherwise corrupt and dictatorial country. The sovereignty of Fela’s republic was always under threat. And even though the invaders threw his mother from the second floor on that day in 1977, and even though the soldiers cracked his skull, and even though the government jailed him for trying to defend himself, Fela continued to fight back. He used his Afrobeat music and biting lyrics as his weapon.