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When you see that, I immediately called General Mattis. I said, what can we do? And they came back with a number of different alternatives.  And we hit them very hard. Now, are we going to get involved with Syria? No.  But if I see them using gas and using things that — I mean even some of the worst tyrants in the world didn't use the kind of gases that they used.  And some of the gases are unbelievably potent. So when I saw that, I said we have to do something.

people just don't see this, the level of brutality, the level of viciousness.

I was sitting at the table.  We had finished dinner.  We're now having dessert.  And we had the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you've ever seen and President Xi was enjoying it. And I was given the message from the generals that the ships are locked and loaded, what do you do? And we made a determination to do it, so the missiles were on the way.  And I said, Mr. President, let me explain something to you.  This was during dessert. We've just fired 59 missiles, all of which hit, by the way, unbelievable, from, you know, hundreds of miles away, all of which hit, amazing. BARTIROMO:  Unmanned? Brilliant. TRUMP:  It's so incredible.  It's brilliant.  It's genius.  Our technology, our equipment, is better than anybody by a factor of five.  I mean look, we have, in terms of technology, nobody can even come close to competing.

Survivors from 13 Cambodian villages along the Vietnamese border told The Intercept about attacks that killed hundreds of their relatives and neighbors during Kissinger’s tenure in President Richard Nixon’s White House. The interviews with more than 75 Cambodian witnesses and survivors, published here for the first time, reveal in new detail the long-term trauma borne by survivors of the American war. These attacks were far more intimate and perhaps even more horrific than the violence already attributed to Kissinger’s policies, because the villages were not just bombed, but also strafed by helicopter gunships and burned and looted by U.S. and allied troops.

U.S. troops implicated in killing and maiming civilians received no meaningful punishments

Experts say Kissinger bears significant responsibility for attacks in Cambodia that killed as many as 150,000 civilians — six times more noncombatants than the United States has killed in airstrikes since 9/11.

Since the invasion of Ukraine, Nadana Fridrikhson, a TV host on a Russian ministry of defense-owned channel, has been a repeat guest on Italy’s talk shows, claiming that Ukraine “has a Nazi problem,” and denying that Russian forces were behind the atrocities committed against Ukrainian civilians in Bucha.

numerous Kremlin mouthpieces and apologists for President Vladimir Putin regularly hosted on Italian networks in the name of balance

what is perceived as the Italian media’s soft treatment of the Kremlin, and their embarrassing tendency to roll out the red carpet for Putin’s accomplices

one of a handful of people to have stood at the nexus of these three disastrous governments, to have been in the room to witness Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Boris Johnson operate

“It’s a story really about how the US, UK and Russia have all ended up in the same spot weirdly, not just in terms of Covid-19 but also populist politics and many of the same out-of-control inequalities,”

In her view populist governments are useless at handling complex problems of governance, almost by definition

what would later be claimed, by those who led it, as one of the most successful propaganda operations in postwar British history. A top secret operation that helped overthrow the leader of the fourth most populous country in the world and contributed to the mass murder of more than half a million of its citizens.

Recently released in Britain’s National Archives are pamphlets purporting to be written by Indonesian patriots, but in fact written by British propagandists, calling on Indonesians to eliminate the PKI, then the biggest communist party in the non-communist world.

The outcome of the turmoil was a brutal and corrupt 32-year military dictatorship whose legacy shapes Indonesia to this day

The first thing to note is that Mali’s problems, and those of the wider Sahel -- countries on the belt of land that runs along the southern edge of the Sahara -- are not new. There was no lack of intelligence about them. In September 2011, the European Union prepared a detailed strategy paper on the region, with recommendations of what to do and how to tackle the issue of the Sahel becoming an empty space free for jihadists to roam. The U.S. also has been deeply involved there for more than a decade, training soldiers for counterinsurgency operations and closely monitoring the situation on the ground.

On Malian television, local interviewees say it is right that France should help Mali in its hour of need, because Malian soldiers of the legendary Tirailleurs Senegalais regiment died for France, including in the two world wars.

it is likely, failing a quick victory, that the rest of Europe will soon face a choice: either support the French and the Malians with real resources, or concede defeat in an area where Europe's interests, including its energy supplies, are directly threatened.

numerous books and studies have sought to explore the complex connections between the environment and social friction. But the need to do so has gained increased currency -- and urgency -- not least because many climate scientists believe that the cyclical climate patterns driving weather in many of the world's less developed regions will become more frequent and more intense as average global temperatures rise. That notion helped inspire a new study conducted by a team of researchers at Columbia University's Earth Institute. Indeed, what Parenti hypothesized anecdotally through Loruman's story and profiles of myriad other conflicts brewing across the globe, the researchers attempt to quantify statistically -- perhaps for the first time. The analysis, to be published Wednesday in the journal Nature, reveals a striking connection between global climate and civil conflict -- though the underlying mechanism driving that connection remains something of a mystery.

effected

not everyone is convinced. Halvard Buhaug, a senior researcher at the Center for the Study of Civil War in Norway said he was intrigued by the study's findings, but he said far more research was needed. "All of us agree that climate is not going to be the sole driver of conflicts, and at best, it may contribute to some or even many," Buhaug said in an interview. "But I remain skeptical about the causal effect of climate on many conflicts." He pointed in particular to the near instantaneous impact of El Niño on conflicts suggested in the new research. Disruptions in trade or agricultural under-performance -- and associated changes in state income -- Buhaug said, would likely take far longer to manifest than the findings suggest. He also said he was puzzled by the fact that the authors appeared to carefully, and correctly, eliminate the possibility that local changes in temperature and rainfall could fully account for any upticks in violence. "What could it be that could have such an immediate effect but does not work through local changes in climate?" Buhaug wondered.

after a worldwide campaign, and many long meetings and legal arguments, the new draft of the international crimes against humanity treaty has lost an outdated definition of gender that could be used to limit protections for women and LGBTIQ people in war.

Previous drafts of this treaty included a definition of gender borrowed from the Rome Statute (which governs the International Criminal Court (ICC)) that isn’t clear on who is protected. It says: “the term ‘gender’ refers to the two sexes, male and female, within the context of society” – overlooking trans and gender non-conforming identities and leaving it open to dangerous interpretation

Can human rights advocates working together make a difference? Just ask Ray Acheson, who led a civil society advocacy coalition that secured a legally-binding provision on gender-based violence in the Arms Trade Treaty. Ray recalls: “At the beginning, we were getting questions [from governments] like, ‘What does gender-based violence have to do with the arms trade? I don’t get the connection.’ By the end, we had a hundred states saying that it had to be in the treaty and it had to be legally binding”.

Many scholars of International Relations (IR), especially in the past couple decades, have sought to study and teach about a more diverse set of political actors to counter-act the biases of a relatively homogeneous professoriate. In a word, this has been described as an effort to decolonize IR. As was noted in a 2016 symposium in Perspectives on Politics, however, political scientists still all too frequently ignore indigenous groups—including Native nations in the United States

IR as a subfield currently lags behind other subfields in examining indigenous experiences

International Security and International Organization had exceedingly few relevant results, and International Studies Quarterly fared slightly better, but these IR journals did indeed lag behind the other journals in terms of substantive research on indigenous experiences

Protectionist measures by national governments during the coronavirus crisis could provoke food shortages around the world, the UN’s food body has warned.

a shortage of field workers brought on by the virus crisis and a move towards protectionism – tariffs and export bans – mean problems could quickly appear in the coming weeks, Maximo Torero, chief economist of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, told the Guardian

Kazakhstan, for instance, according to a report from Bloomberg, has banned exports of wheat flour, of which it is one of the world’s biggest sources, as well as restrictions on buckwheat and vegetables including onions, carrots and potatoes. Vietnam, the world’s third biggest rice exporter, has temporarily suspended rice export contracts. Russia, the world’s biggest wheat exporter, may also threaten to restrict exports, as it has done before, and the position of the US is in doubt given Donald Trump’s eagerness for a trade war in other commodities.

People who participated in and witnessed OUR operations overseas recounted blundering missions—carried out in part by real estate agents and high-level donors—that seemed aimed mainly at generating exciting video footage and that, in their view, potentially created demand for trafficking victims

Experts and advocates for sex workers and trafficking survivors also questioned whether OUR's ties to a corrupt Thai police agency could lead to repression of pro-democracy activists, and whether it and similar NGOs truly help survivors or have been successful in identifying or dismantling trafficking networks. In all, these people told a story involving alarming amateurism that potentially endangers both those carrying out missions and the people they're meant to help.

The image of armed men racing into dangerous situations to rescue sexually abused children has been a hit with OUR’s donors and with media outlets, which have run hundreds of flattering stories about its work.

Activists overestimated the WTO’s sway. As the Columbia economist and militant free-trader Jagdish Bhagwati told Liza Featherstone and me in an interview a couple of years later, the organization’s entire budget was smaller than the IMF’s travel budget, which should give you an idea of the two institutions’ relative importance. But it nonetheless served as something of a home address for global capitalism

the WTO scheduled its next major meeting for Doha, a site where riots seemed highly improbable, two years later. That 2001 meeting opened a trade round that continues to this day because no one can agree on anything still

Organized labor had, at least for this event, shunned the nationalist rhetoric of old in favor of international labor solidarity. A South African mineworker quoted Marx by name, urging the workers of the world to unite — to a great cheer from the crowd. There were jingoistic bleats from some Steelworkers and Teamsters, but it was largely contained.

the impacts of hardening European Union border policy, which forces refugees back to a dangerous country where they live at the mercy of Libyan militias

UNHCR said it had heard allegations of detainees being used as forced labor in the Gathering and Departure Facility, but it could not verify them.) In the months afterward, Alex returned to detention only for his meetings with UNHCR staff. He was interviewed and fingerprinted, and finally given good news: He would be evacuated to Rwanda.

Over the past three years, the EU has allocated nearly 100 million euros, around $100 million, to spend on the Libyan coast guard, with the aim of intercepting and stopping boats of migrants and refugees who are trying to reach Europe. Tens of thousands of people who could have their asylum claims assessed if they managed to reach European soil have instead been returned to Libya to spend months or years in for-profit detention centers where sexual violence, labor exploitation, torture, and trafficking have been repeatedly documented. They wait, in the unlikely hope of being selected for a legal route to safety.

western culture has been permeated by the idea that humans are selfish creatures. That cynical image of humanity has been proclaimed in films and novels, history books and scientific research. But in the last 20 years, something extraordinary has happened. Scientists from all over the world have switched to a more hopeful view of mankind. This development is still so young that researchers in different fields often don’t even know about each other.

An English schoolmaster, William Golding, made up this story in 1951 – his novel Lord of the Flies would sell tens of millions of copies, be translated into more than 30 languages and hailed as one of the classics of the 20th century. In hindsight, the secret to the book’s success is clear. Golding had a masterful ability to portray the darkest depths of mankind. Of course, he had the zeitgeist of the 1960s on his side, when a new generation was questioning its parents about the atrocities of the second world war. Had Auschwitz been an anomaly, they wanted to know, or is there a Nazi hiding in each of us?

not for a second did I think to doubt Golding’s view of human nature. That didn’t happen until years later when I began delving into the author’s life. I learned what an unhappy individual he had been: an alcoholic, prone to depression; a man who beat his kids. “I have always understood the Nazis,” Golding confessed, “because I am of that sort by nature.” And it was “partly out of that sad self-knowledge” that he wrote Lord of the Flies.

The United States is the largest donor among the WHO’s 194 member states, giving about $450 million last year. The WHO said the U.S. cut in funding would affect childhood immunizations, polio eradication and other initiatives in some of the most vulnerable parts of the world

The administration plans to fill the void left by its withdrawal with direct aid to foreign countries, creating a new entity based in the State Department to lead the response to outbreaks, according to interviews and a proposal prepared by the department. The U.S. will spend about $20 billion this year on global public health. (About $9 billion of that is emergency aid for COVID response.) But the senior administration official conceded that important activities led by the WHO, including vaccination initiatives, need to continue. It is not yet clear what will happen to those programs when American funding and participation end, the official acknowledged.

The new directive will require officials to divert their attention from pandemic response in order to review a list of their WHO-related activities and try to justify them on national security and public health safety grounds

The Israeli army’s expanded authorization for bombing non-military targets, the loosening of constraints regarding expected civilian casualties, and the use of an artificial intelligence system to generate more potential targets than ever before, appear to have contributed to the destructive nature of the initial stages of Israel’s current war on the Gaza Strip, an investigation by +972 Magazine and Local Call reveals

The investigation by +972 and Local Call is based on conversations with seven current and former members of Israel’s intelligence community — including military intelligence and air force personnel who were involved in Israeli operations in the besieged Strip — in addition to Palestinian testimonies, data, and documentation from the Gaza Strip, and official statements by the IDF Spokesperson and other Israeli state institutions.

The bombing of power targets, according to intelligence sources who had first-hand experience with its application in Gaza in the past, is mainly intended to harm Palestinian civil society: to “create a shock” that, among other things, will reverberate powerfully and “lead civilians to put pressure on Hamas,”