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New Mexico spaceport is only the latest entry in a triumphant time line of military and aerospace innovation in this southwestern state. Our video narrator speeds through Spanish colonialism and westward expansion to highlight the Manhattan Project’s work in Los Alamos, to the north, and Operation Paperclip, a secret program that recruited German scientists to the United States after World War II. Among them was Wernher von Braun, who brought his V-2 rockets to the state.White Sands Missile Range, a 3,200-square-mile military-testing site in South Central New Mexico’s Tularosa Basin, hosted much of this work. It’s home to the Trinity Site, where the first atomic bomb was detonated, and von Braun’s rocket testing site, too. Spaceport America is positioned adjacent to the Army property, in a tightly protected airspace. That makes rocket-ship testing a lot easier.

“It feels exciting, it’s like the future is now,”

For now, the spaceport is a futurist tourist attraction, not an operational harbor to the cosmos. The tour buses depart from a former T or C community center twice a day every Saturday. They pass thrift stores, RV parks, and bland but durable-looking structures, defiant underdogs against the mountains. We pass the Elephant Butte Dam, a stunning example of early-20th-century Bureau of Reclamation engineering that made it possible for agriculture to thrive in southern New Mexico; even so, a fellow spaceport tourist notes that the water levels seem far lower than what he recalls from childhood

The Heavenly Palace, the first module in China’s permanent space station, will be launched next year, a senior aerospace official confirmed Wednesday.

a crew of three taikonauts

Aerospace experts and military officials say the Chinese military space program has made major advancements in recent years, notably when it tested an antisatellite system in 2007, using a ballistic missile to shoot down one of its own weather satellites 540 miles up

since development in Florida began in earnest in the 20th century, state leaders and developers have chosen a cruel, unsustainable legacy involving the nonstop slaughter of wildlife and the destruction of habitat, eliminating some of the most unique flora and fauna in the world.

Consider this: several football fields-worth of forest and other valuable habitat is cleared per day2 in Florida, with 26 percent of our canopy cut down in the past twenty years.  According to one study, an average of 25 percent of greenhouse gas emissions come from deforestation worldwide.

Prodevelopment flacks like to pull out the estimates of the millions who will continue to flock to Florida by 2030 or 2040 to justify rampant development. Even some Florida economists ignore the effects of the climate crisis in their projects for 2049, expecting continued economic growth. but these estimates are just a grim joke, and some of those regurgitating them know that. By 2050, the world likely will be grappling with the fallout from 1.5- to 2-degree temperature rise and it’s unlikely people will be flocking to a state quickly dissolving around all of its edges.

the reality is we can't afford to look away because these outfits are costumes of white supremacy

yet another dog whistle for the white-supremacist fringe who'd prefer not to see people of color in "their" country, and if they do would rather they be the help

I won't — no, I can't — ignore this Columbus Day weekend choice to promote her "Be Best" campaign wearing khaki-hued ensembles inextricably linked to some of the world's most violent colonizers

when it comes to Africa, the first draft is an incomplete and inaccurate story of a continent waiting to be saved. If only the first story enters the archive, the creativity and agency of swaths of humanity will be lost, which will have consequences beyond the pandemic.

Museums outside Africa are filled with masks and pots from Africa, not necessarily because Africans themselves thought these masks and pots were interesting, but because colonizing armies and governments thought they were. A colonial archive would likely contain exhaustive records about a white district commissioner, down to the color of his socks, but not the black woman who worked in his home. It’s not because the latter is uninteresting or even unavailable for documentation: It is because those in power set the tone and the context for what goes into the archive, and subsequently, the stories that history will tell.

Africa is spoken for and spoken about, but so rarely allowed to speak, and this allows only a handful of narratives to survive

British history has a problem with nationalism, and indeed the nation — they’re not supposed to exist, or they exist in very unusual forms. A central claim of my book is that something I call the British nation, corresponding to the territory of the UK, emerged after 1945, with a national economy, national politics, and a self-consciousness of itself as a nation called Britain. But it had a rather short life and was broken up from the 1980s.

Before the nation came both the empire and a set of places that were located in a global, free-trading space. What came after the nation? A fresh commitment to a globalist, and in particular European, liberal economic perspective.

it’s striking how little impact decolonization had. Take the cases of India and Palestine in the 1940s: there were no major convulsions at home — nothing compared to what was happening in France during the 1950s.

Why is the world’s safest, most powerful country its biggest defense spender, more than triple the next spender (China)?

as a percentage of GDP defense has been hovering around 4-5% since the end of the Cold War. Nothing big has changed recently, but for an increase in DoD’s budget after 9/11 that is now being scaled back. The USAF is decades ahead of the Chinese and Russians in stealth and UAVs. We’re weaponizing space. We have ten times the number of nuclear warheads the Chinese have. (The Chinese are actually very responsible on MAD, not wildly overbuilding like we did, but no one ever gives them credit for that.) We have 11 carrier groups; China has zero. If you look at the total US national security budget – because a lot of defense-related spending in the US is done outside of DoD as a gimmick to make the DoD number look smaller than it really should be – it’s actually closer to 8% of GDP: DoD + VA + DHS + the intel community + DoE (which pays for US nukes) = $1T per annum. If Chalmers Johnson is right, we have bases of one kind or another in something like 2/3 of the world’s countries. If anything we look like an imperium, like the Delian League morphing into the Athenian Empire. But one Obama official says ‘leading from behind’ and we don’t charge into Syria – despite charging into Libya and Obama’s first term surge into Afghanistan – and suddenly it’s national security crisis. Good grief, think-tankers. Don’t be so lazy.

the blissful unwillingness to learn even the most obvious lessons from the GWoT: that the US – yes, even America – can’t do occupations well

constructed as a Panopticon

Life inside the Cellular Prison was lonely. Each prisoner had their own cell and their own set of tasks that were purposefully designed to take more time than the deadline provided. The prisoners wore raggedy uniforms as well as neck shackles and leg chains.Conditions were so bad that the facility received the moniker of Kala Pani: Black Waters. As a result, the prisoners often went on hunger strikes, the most notable of which took place in 1937. The inmates refused to take food for 45 days. With the help of Mahatma Gandhi, they were convinced to stop the strike.

Things took a different turn when Japan took control of the islands and filled the jail with British prisoners, making them experience their own invention

A US court has dismissed a compensation lawsuit lodged against Germany by two Namibian tribes for genocide and property seizures in colonial times. New York lawyers for Herero and Nama will appeal the ruling.

In the early 1900s, colonial troops killed tens of thousands of protesting Nama and Herero outright or expelled them to their deaths in the Omaheke desert region within what was then known as German South West Africa under an "extermination order" issued by colonial German General Lothar von Trotha.

Swain in her 23-page judgment dated Wednesday ruled that the principle of sovereign immunity made the case against Germany inadmissible.

No organization has ever had to police billions of users in a panoply of languages.

Despite criticism and concerns from civil society groups, the company has done little to change its strategy of pushing into developing societies with weak institutions and histories of social instability, opening up information spaces where anger and fear often can dominate

From October to March, Facebook presented users in six countries, including Sri Lanka, with a separate newsfeed prioritizing content from friends and family. Posts by professional media were hidden away on another tab.“While this experiment lasted, many of us missed out on the bigger picture, on more credible news,” said Nalaka Gunawardene, a Sri Lankan media analyst. “It’s possible that this experiment inadvertently spread hate views in these six countries.”

The concept of “white genocide”—extinction under an onslaught of genetically or culturally inferior nonwhite interlopers—may indeed seem like a fringe conspiracy theory with an alien lineage, the province of neo-Nazis and their fellow travelers. In popular memory, it’s a vestige of a racist ideology that the Greatest Generation did its best to scour from the Earth. History, though, tells a different story. King’s recent question, posed in a New York Times interview, may be appalling: “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization—how did that language become offensive?” But it is apt. “That language” has an American past in need of excavation. Without such an effort, we may fail to appreciate the tenacity of the dogma it expresses, and the difficulty of eradicating it. The president’s rhetoric about “shithole countries” and “invasion” by immigrants invites dismissal as crude talk, but behind it lie ideas whose power should not be underestimated.

Madison Grant. He was the author of a 1916 book called The Passing of the Great Race, which spread the doctrine of race purity all over the globe

When Nazism reflected back that vision in grotesque form, wartime denial set in. Jonathan Peter Spiro, a historian and the author of Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant (2009), described the backlash to me this way: “Even though the Germans had been directly influenced by Madison Grant and the American eugenics movement, when we fought Germany, because Germany was racist, racism became unacceptable in America. Our enemy was racist; therefore we adopted antiracism as our creed.” Ever since, a strange kind of historical amnesia has obscured the American lineage of this white-nationalist ideology.

Even as they gaze at the monument, tourists "overlook entirely" its reference to the role of America's indigenous people in the battle at Iwo Jima, said Elizabeth Rule, assistant director of the AT&T Center for Indigenous Politics and Policy. So, she helped create an app to change that. The memorial is the first entry in the new Guide to Indigenous DC app, which takes users on a walking tour of Native American history — and ongoing presence — in the nation's capital.

The free app, which Rule designed in collaboration with others at the AT&T Center and with the American Indian Alaska Native Tourism Association, features 17 sites around the city.

"The focus on D.C. is mainly driven by the desire to educate people that the capital of the nation, the seat of government, is an Indian space," said Rule, who is a member of Oklahoma's Chickasaw Nation.

Relic Traveller is set in a moment in the future where the global West is coming to a point of decline because of nationalism, while the African Union has come into prosperity, harmony, and independence. And it’s quite important that I say this: the project isn’t about a utopia. This point in time brings with it responsibility. During this shift, the African Union creates a range of initiatives, one of which is the Relic Travellers’ Alliance. Relic Travellers are people who are sent around the planet to pick up clues and, in particular, vocal testimonies from people who have been oppressed by the ghosts of colonization. These are stories and experiences of people who have not yet been allowed to be healed or learned from. These stories help to govern the future and create a space for healing, from a bottom-up rather than a top-down perspective.

in the past few years, particularly in the UK, there’s been a real resurgence of empire fetishism, and seemingly more reluctance than ever among the media and ruling classes to address the reality of this history

the films represent a warning to the West about its negligence, ignorance, mythical approach to history, omission of the histories and legacies of empire, slavery and colonization, and how those things affect the way that we live today: the way that Black people are still disenfranchised. They’re a stark warning that the West will undo itself as a result of the lies it has celebrated, taught, and disseminated for a while

if you're dealing with a bunch of herbivorous Social Democrats, they'll take you in one direction and you'll end up with a welfare state and full employment, but if their same knowledge is in the hands of a group of nationalist militarists, what you've really provided them with is the blueprint for highly efficient mobilization of a military economy in times of peace. So deep in the heart of neoliberal thought and conservative thinking about the modern state and its potential lies a fear of that possibility.

China’s not the Soviet Union, China's not fascist Italy, China's not Nazi Germany. The growth of China is a phenomenon that dwarfs all of those previous developments and has to be understood on the timeframe that was laid out for us by the economic data of somebody like Angus Maddison, who shows us global GDP all the way back to the birth of Christ. All the way through the beginning of the 19th century, the Asian economies actually dominate once you've adjusted GDP by purchasing power parity and so on.

It's tempting to say, is there anyone in the United States that could play the role of the British elite after World War One? But America's position of dominance was vastly greater than that ever by enjoyed the British so the psychological challenge of accepting this transition is far greater. And, of course, in key respects America remains an absolutely dominant player, most notably with regard its hard power, its weapons, but also in certain respects with regard to its financial centrality.

A more capacious geography for early America, and deeper research in both slavery studies and Native American history, are showing not only a more complex era but much more connection among seemingly remote people, places and phenomena.

In recent decades, historians have revealed a much more complex, Atlantic and globally connected, fully continental and foundationally Native, multi-imperial history. Not only is what we know about this period fuller and richer, but the way that research insights are coming together now informs a very different picture of early America – and thus of the nation’s foundations and development.

A turn to Atlantic history produced a wealth of studies on the dynamic economic, political and religious developments that revealed the ocean to have been an early modern commercial highway, powered by the Atlantic slave trade.

Europe’s identification with Black America, particularly during times of crisis, resistance, and trauma, has a long and complex history. It is fuelled in no small part by traditions of internationalism and anti-racism on the European Left, where the likes of Paul Robeson, Richard Wright, and Audre Lorde would find an ideological—and, at times, literal—home.

But this tradition of political identification with Black America also leaves significant space for the European continent’s inferiority complex, as it seeks to shroud its relative military and economic weakness in relation to America with a moral confidence that conveniently ignores both its colonial past and its own racist present.

the number of Europeans of color—particularly in the cities of Britain, Holland, France, Belgium, Portugal, and Italy—has grown considerably. They are either the descendants of former colonies (“We are here because you were there”) or the more recent immigrants who may be asylum-seekers, refugees, or economic migrants. These communities, too, seek to pollinate their own, local struggles for racial justice with the more visible interventions taking place in America. “The American Negro has no conception of the hundreds of millions of other non-whites’ concern for him,” Malcolm X observed in his autobiography. “He has no conception of their feeling of brotherhood for and with him.”

yellow fever, zika fever, dengue, chikungunya, ebola, SARS, Nipah virus, Kyasanur Forest disease, MERS, rabies, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, sleeping sickness, hantavirus-caused diseases, Japanese encephalitis, malaria

All these diseases emerged – or re-emerged, more virulent and dangerous – as a result of human encroachment on forests. Historically, we might trace them to tropical rainforests, but right now we must look closer to home. Because the forest was, till very recently, right here somewhere, in and about your housing colony, around that gated high-rise and its adjacent slum.

Diseases emerge when we clear forests, cut down trees, flatten hills, dam rivers, and squat on all this usurped territory. Within a 5 km radius of my home are breeding grounds for at least seven of those listed diseases. It’s not something we think about.

The Syrian/Lebanese mercantile community of Manchester existed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but they were not the only Arab group in the UK during this period. Moroccan traders formed a very distinct Arab community in Manchester.

Moroccan merchants began visiting Britain as early as the sixteenth century, arriving at the port of St. Ives in Cornwall in 1589

In the nineteenth century, Moroccan Muslim and Jewish traders began to settle in Manchester on a more permanent basis. In the 1830s Britain and Morocco signed treaties permitting their subjects to travel and trade in each other’s territories.