EU

Beijing isn't waiting for Brussels to act - it's playing offense. China's Ministry of Commerce issued its warning on Saturday, just one day after the European Commission held internal consultations on trade policy toward China. The pressure playbook is well-rehearsed: Brussels deliberates, Beijing responds publicly and forcefully, without waiting for concrete decisions to land.

What This Story Is Really About

The Museum of Archeology of Great Britain has received a priceless treasure - part of a small tablet made of wax, where the capital of Britain is mentioned. According to the historians' assumption - the tablet was something like a postal address and belonged to someone from the Romans. The document was dated by scientists from 65 to 85 years AD. This is the oldest written mentioning of London. Earlier it was 117 AD, and the record, where it was written about London, was made by the famous Roman historian Tacitus.

Almost everyone knows about United States and Canadian investment in Mexico thanks to the ample information provided regarding the North American Free Trade Agreement. But how many people are aware of Dutch investment in Mexico? Not many, probably.

 Yes, the Dutch can be secretive and sly in trade, but the fact is that the Koninkrijk der Nederlanden, or Kingdom of the Netherlands, is the second — yes, second — largest foreign investor in Mexico with an amount totaling more than US $45 billion.

Tucked away at the back of the old Muslim cemetery on the outskirts of Kos town on the Greek island are a series of freshly dug graves, around half with headstones. Most but not all are named.  

Buried here are 37 refugees who, fleeing from Bodrum on the Turkish coast, drowned in the waters of the Aegean. Most of them are Syrian, but there are plenty of Afghanis and Iraqis, too. Relatives of the refugees with unmarked graves had promised to return when they could afford to pay for the headstones.

Are the leaders of European member states of NATO planning to follow the example of José Manuel Barroso, who became a lobbyist for Goldman Sachs after his term as president of the European Commission? Were they using the NATO summit to prepare for a career switch as consultants to General Dynamics or some other US arms manufacturer?

Not that long ago in Europe, one had to go to a church, a temple or a mosque to imbibe industrial quantities of religious doctrine.

Since the beginning of the 21st century, however, it has become possible to access it in a great and self-satisfied profusion on the editorial pages of the continent’s “serious” and nominally progressive dailies, papers like The Guardian, El País, La Repubblica, Le Monde,and Suddeutsche Zeitung.

The particular brand of theology being pushed?

Despite claims made during NATO Summit Warsaw 2016, that “NATO remains a fundamental source of security for our people, and stability for the wider world,” it is clear that the threats and challenges NATO poses as existing to confront are in fact threats of its own, intentional creation and continued perpetuation.

The market was supposed to save the planet.

That, at least, was the argument of many economists grappling with the problem of climate change. As fossil fuels became scarcer, they pointed out, the price of oil and natural gas would go up. And then other options, like solar and wind, would become cheaper, particularly as investment flowed into that sector and drove down the cost of new technologies.

And voila: The invisible hand would gradually turn down the global thermostat.

Paris and London are multiplying their categorical declarations against Daesh, its programme of ethnic cleansing and its terrorist attacks. And yet they are preparing in secret for the ethnic cleansing of Northern Syria with a view to creating a pseudo-Kurdistan, and the re-localisation of Daesh to Al-Anbar in order to create a « Sunnistan » there. Thierry Meyssan analyses this plan, and underlines the numerous contradictions in the official discourse.

Is the military intervention by France, Israël and the United Kingdom in Syria legal ?

In international press, a lot of ink has been devoted to the BRICS. Without a doubt the participation of the five-party in the world economy block has increased over the course of the last years, competing directly with the United States and the European Union. However, the details about the New Development Bank and the Contingent Reserve Arrangement make it clear that its members resist to abandoning the orbit of the dollar in order to destroy the shell of the Bretton Woods institutions.