Deviantart. Peace Offering by Kombiz.
Almost exactly fifteen years after the first time the United States used a remote controlled flying robot to attack its enemies abroad, the chickens started coming home to roost. Oct. 2, 2016 was the day ISIS used a kamikaze drone to kill a pair of US-allied Kurdish troops and severely wound two French commandos in Iraq.
The American era of drone warfare had begun when the US military tried to assassinate the Taliban leader Mullah Omar
Time lapse of the destruction of a Rafah neighborhood. Illustration: IB
In the satellite pictures, it looks as if someone has taken an eraser to the lines of houses and farms, smearing them over the arid landscape. But it is Egyptian army bulldozers that are blotting Rafah away, block by block. It is the desolation of Sisi, the most shocking and lurid of the many ways that Egypt’s military has gotten everything wrong in Sinai, behaving like an occupying army on its own land, fighting a terrorist insurgency in the most inept way possible.
The last time I visited Northern Sinai, it was a windy winter week in 2008, under a morose sky.
Oval Map of the World, from Book on Navigation. Originally composed in 932 AH / 1525 CE and dedicated to Sultan Süleyman I ("The Magnificent"). Walters Art Museum.
Last week’s American air attack on a Syrian army convoy in the country’s southeastern desert passed largely unnoticed in the US media, but it suggests that Donald Trump and his generals are electing to shift to a strategy of long term geographic isolation of Bashar al-Assad’s regime.
Syria’s civil war began in widespread Arab Spring demonstrations demanding that the country’s hereditary dictator leave office.
Rio, Brazil. Photo CC: Barbara Eckstein
With the brightness and hustle of international sporting events gone, Brazil’s bills for the corruption that accompanied the Olympics and the World Cup must now be paid, write’s IB’s Joao Sette Camarra.
I live two blocks away from one of Rio’s most famous beaches,
Istanbul, 2014 Elections. Photo CC: Jonas Bergmeier
By narrowly supporting Tayyip Erdogan’s presidential power referendum, Turks this month voted away their own democracy: that was the consensus of opinion on April 16. But International Boulevard’s Baris Altintas finds paradoxical hope in how excruciatingly close was Erdogan’s victory, in the many violent and authoritarian measures he took to achieve even that, and in the hypothesis that accounting for widespread fraud, Erdogan actually lost the referendum.
Inside Turkey and abroad, many are describing President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s slim referendum victory on April 16, 2017 as a “Pyrrhic victory,”
Buenos Aires. Photo CC: John Schneider
There is an extraordinary moment in a television interview with Carlos Tevez from a couple of years ago. It was 2015 and the Argentine striker had recently returned to Boca Juniors, the most celebrated club in arguably the world’s most soccer-crazed nation. The precocious Tevez had risen from abject poverty to land a spot at Boca at just 16 years old.
In the 2015 interview, the commentator, Alejandro Fantino, is peppering Tevez with questions about his neighborhood
Photo Nassim Rouchiche.
There is a kind of synchronicity to Bongani Ncube-Zikhali’s experience of racist discrimination as a black African at the hands of official Algeria. A parallel to what Algerians themselves face on the other side of the Mediterranean, and a melancholic coda to Algeria’s once-proud role in the Pan-African and non-aligned world of the 1970s.
It is night time as the bus speeds through the Maghrebi countryside on its way to Algiers.
Berta Caceres. Photo CC: UNEP
Environmental activism in Latin America very frequently pits indigenous local leaders against rapacious companies backed by foreign money and the full military weight of the state. As IB’s Brian Hagenbuch writes here, the separate murders of two recent winners of the prestigious Goldman Prize over the past year, in Mexico and Honduras, threw a spotlight on a much larger pattern of violence and intimidation that claimed dozens of lives in the region.
Mark Baumer’s final blog post on January 21, 2017 was morbidly prophetic.
Photo CC: Victor
A symptom of Brazil’s political malaise under its corrupt right-wing caretaker government, writes International Boulevard’s Joao Sette Camara: the shifting morass of conspiracy theories surrounding the recent plane crash that killed a powerful judge.
It is the biggest corruption investigation in the history of Brazil: Operation Lava Jato
Photo CC: Geraint Rowland
President Trump’s recently proposed 20 percent tariff on Mexican imports isn’t just based on , writes International Boulevard’s Mateo Jarquin. There’s something deeper at play here:
Consider the disproportionate emphasis that Mexico receives in the context of all the NAFTA-bashing.
