Barack Obama

As another New South Wales Labor leader bites the dust, Aleks Wansbrough asks why “reliable Gladys” is so immune to criticism? 

In 2008, the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations published a report titled US-Latin America Relations: A New Direction for a New Reality. Timed to influence the foreign policy agenda of the next US administration, the report asserted: “the era of the US as the dominant influence in Latin America is over.”

Then, at the Summit of the Americas the next year, then-president Barack Obama promised Latin American leaders a “new era” of “equal partnership” and “mutual respect”.

Under the Donald Trump administration, the US government and weapons manufacturers are making a killing through arms sales to other countries, writes Jose Olivares.

What’s the fate of Cuba in the age of Trump? It is not an easy question to unravel, but Canadian author and journalist Arnold August provides some answers in his latest book, Cuba-US Relations: Obama and Beyond.

For the better part of six years, Baba Jan, a founding member and activist of the left-wing Awami Workers Party (AWP) in the Pakistani-occupied disputed territory of Gilgit-Baltistan, has been behind bars on a life sentence for ‘terrorism’ charges. His crime? Demanding rights for Hunza’s poor and displaced.

One year after European Union leaders signed a deal with the Turkish government to cut off the wave of desperate refugees seeking to reach Europe’s shores, the policy has caused even more death and suffering.

US President Donald Trump promised to cut through the disarray in the two parties of capitalism in the US by forcing on them a new strongman – himself – who knows how to get things done and make deals.

But the Republican health insurance debacle, with Trump’s replacement to Obamacare being withdrawn due to lack of support in Congress, not only cut him down to size, but represented the triumph of that very disarray over the new president. The strongman proved to be not so strong and the dealmaker could not close the deal.

March against DAPL in San Francisco.

A Lakota prophecy tells of a mythic Black Snake that will move underground and bring destruction to the Earth. The “seventh sign” in Hopi prophecy involves the ocean turning black and bringing death to many sea-dwelling creatures.

It does not take an over-active imagination to make a connection between these images and oil pipelines and spills.

In 2010 President Obama directed the CIA to assassinate an American citizen in Yemen, Anwar al-Awlaki, despite the fact that he had never been charged with (let alone convicted of) any crime, and the agency successfully carried out that order a year later with a September 2011 drone strike.

A placard condemns Obama's drone wars.

Powers that went largely unchallenged during the Obama administration are now in the hands of President-elect Donald Trump — and that’s a frightening prospect.

End the embargo of Cuba cartoon

New at LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal: Kurdish women struggle for a new society in Rojava and Fidel Castro: 'We don't need anything from the Empire'.

Cuban President Raul Castro has insisted on the need for the United States to end its more than 50-year-long economic blockade on the Caribbean island after US president Barack Obama’s historic visit to the island on March 21. Castro also took the opportunity of the first visit to Cuba by a US president in more than 80 years to say his government rejected “double standards” on human rights.