Category: TRENDS IN GEOPOLITICS

While tensions between the United States and Iran have eased somewhat following President Trump’s assassination on 3 January of Iranian general/ number two political leader Qasem Soleimani, Washington has warned more killing of Iranian officials remain a U.S. policy option. Speaking at the annual Davos meeting in Switzerland last week, U.S. Special Representative to Iraq,...

Now in its fourth month, the countrywide demonstrations in which several hundred have been killed and thousands wounded continued this weekend, as hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens took to the streets. Lacking jobs and basic living standards, and calling for new elections and an end government corruption, the demonstrators were beaten and killed by...

On Sunday, millions of Indian citizens continued the two months-long protests against the passage of the Citizenship Amendment Act, spearheaded by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling Hindu nationalist party, which grants citizenship to religious minorities – except Muslims – from neighboring countries. Some seven million people in the state of Kerala formed a human chain that...

Last week, as President Emmanuel Macron presented his controversial pension plan to his council of ministers, thousands of union members from the rail and transport sectors ended their six-week strike, citing the financial stress of staying off the job. Many of the public transportation workers who had been protesting, but returned to work out of...

The ongoing protests against lack of jobs, a decaying economy, and government corruption that began on 17 October last year, and forced its Prime Minister Saad Hariri to resign, continues. Despite the announcement by Hassan Diab, the new Prime Minister, of his appointing 20 new ministers whom he vowed to work with to solve protesters’...

Juan Guaidó, who with U.S. backing and that of some 50 nations, claims to be the legitimate president of Venezuela, received a cool reception at the recent meeting of government and financial leaders in Davos. Despite his recent meeting and endorsement by U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo last week, as reported in the Trends Journal,...

As the top of the economic ladder meet in Davos this week, the bottom rungs, sunk in poverty, deep in desperation, lacking basic human needs, and having lost everything and with nothing left to lose, are losing it. While stock markets across the globe, from which the one percent reap the riches, reach new highs,...

Over the past four days, the street protests that began in October, but were halted following America’s assassination of General Soleimani at the Baghdad airport on 3 January, have continued. Adding to the over 500 killed and the thousands wounded by Iraqi security forces, another five demonstrators were reported killed and scores more wounded. Thousands...

There were already over 50,000 U.S. troops in the Middle East before the assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, a buildup by the Trump administration despite the President’s promise as a candidate to “end all endless wars.” Since the assassination, the Pentagon has been increasing its ground, air, and sea forces in the region by...