TFF Blog

TEHRAN – Farhang Jahanpour, an adjunct professor in the Department of Continuing Education at the University of Oxford and a Middle East expert, says that all other signatories to the JCPOA, including the European Troika (the UK, France and Germany) have stated that they are for the nuclear accord, since Iran has remained committed to the deal. (JCPOA = Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action = the deal about nuclear technology between Iran and the five UN Security Council members + Germany + EU. You can read it here.) “Nevertheless, EU countries are in a difficult position with the American demands,” Jahanpour tells the Tehran Times in an exclusive interview. Jahanpour, also a former senior research fellow at Harvard University and TFF Board member, says that Europe is playing a double game with Iran. “On the one hand, they [European countries] have stated openly that they support the JCPOA and have...

  . No other country has seen so many “blue berets”- UN peacekeeping troops- in its short history. The Belgian colonialists may have exploited it and transferred massive amounts of its wealth back to Belgium but one leader after another has continued in its steps, making use of the country’s vast mineral deposits to build an edifice of wealth and unilateral power. Leaders have played on tribal fears and insecurity. War has been the outcome. In the last few years there has been talk of winding down the large contingent. A kind of peace seemed to have arrived. No longer. There are still 16,000 UN troops there. The way the UN peacekeepers work has changed a lot since their first deployment soon after independence. Then the accent was on not using arms. UN soldiers accused of misbehavior were rare. Today force, even killing, is widely used by peacekeepers. So are...

Statistic on Billboard Explained   By World Beyond War – David Swanson In 2008, the United Nations said that $30 billion per year could end hunger on earth, as reported in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and many other outlets. The Food and Agriculture Organization has not updated that figure since 2008, and has recently told us that such figures do not require much updating. In a separate report, most recently published in 2015, the same organization provides a figure of $265 billion as the cost per year for 15 years to permanently eliminate extreme poverty, which would eliminate starvation and malnutrition – a broader project than just preventing starvation one year at a time. The FAO’s spokesperson informed us in an email: “I think it would be incorrect to compare the two figures as the 265 billion has been calculated taking into consideration a number of initiatives...

    It’s been an odd couple of months for southern Africa. No one predicted last year that in almost the same breath the long-serving dictator of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, and the super-corrupt president of South Africa, Jacob Zuma, would be soon overthrown – and non-violently to boot. In Zimbabwe the army did trigger Mugabe’s demise, but it was a sort of passive coup, a non-violent withdrawal of support. In South Africa Zuma was compelled to stand down as leader of the African National Congress because of a majority vote against him in an assembly of the ANC, the party of black protest against former minority white-led rule. Again, all done non-violently. What is more, in South Africa, although violence had played some part in black liberation, the negotiations that took place in the closing years of the apartheid regime were accomplished without violence.  There were peaceful negotiations between the...

The time of the Clinton administration. There is a very good article with links and a PDF on OffGuardian here. It’s a mind-boggling story about how five Americans were tasked with influencing the election of Boris Yeltsin in competition with other candidates who, when they started working in Moscow, had much higher poll figures than he had. This was a couple of years after Bill Clinton had broken all important Western politicians promises to Mikhail Gorbachev to the effect that NATO would not expand “an inch” and started doing exactly that – a process that ended with the crisis and tension in today’s Ukraine. Fortunately, there are Western media that have told you quite a bit about US meddling in the elections and other political affairs of other countries: Huffington Post“The US has been meddling in other countries’ elections for a century. It doesn’t feel good.” Los Angeles TimesThe US...

  How rude can you get? The US vice-president, Mike Pence, sitting one row in front of the sister of the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un refused to turn round and say hi. She was one outstretched arm away from him. For the whole of the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics he sat with his back to her. It didn’t have to be a handshake – unless the lady initiated it – but a pleasant expression and a friendly hello would not only be what mother told all us men to do when meeting a lady, it would a way of saying, “We Americans hope that we can substitute ploughshares for the sword”. It would have complemented what the South Korean prime minister did which was to welcome Kim with a beaming smile and handshake, a meal and a serious round of talks during which she passed on...

  By Gunnar Westberg February 16, 2018   This is how I would summarize the new US Nuclear Posture Review, issued last week by the Trump administration: • We can fight and win a nuclear exchange • We are prepared to use nuclear weapons against a conventional attack, e.g. a cyberattack • We may consider using nuclear weapons against a nuclear-weapons-free country • We care not to mention our obligations under NPT Art VI • We have never heard of the climate effects of nuclear war.   In January 2017, President Donald Trump ordered a new Nuclear Posture Review (NPR). The report is now available. It is 75 pages long. Most of the material repeats earlier NPRs. I will here concentrate on the new aspects.   “Escalate to de-escalate” Russian military writers have discussed the possibility of using “small” nuclear weapons if the country is attacked by an adversary with...

82b7f244a4b771c73a0b601ec5″>Associated Press – right out of the Secretary of Defence’s own mouth. Newsweek picked up this – breaking – story but virtually no one else. Compare that with thousands upon thousands of articles throughout the Western press just parroting American officials’ statements, including President Trump’s when he found it appropriate in April 2017 to attack Syria with cruise missiles to teach “the regime” and its “dictator” a lesson for its alleged attack on Khan Seykhoun, stating that “there can be no dispute that Syria used banned chemical weapons.” Some of us thought it was a bit too early because there could be no dispute either about another, much more important, thing – namely that, at the time, there could not have been any evidence collected or analysed. TFF and its Associates has stated a few things about the media coverage of Syria in general and the chemical attacks in particular...

  • We are soon going to have a clash between President Donald Trump and international law. This is predicable when one examines the presidential discourse over what to do about North Korea and its possession of nuclear-tipped rockets. He has threatened “fire and fury” which doesn’t sound like the opening words of the UN’s Charter: “We the peoples of the United Nations determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war…..and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained……and for these ends to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbours.” There should be no question that if the Charter is followed that Trump cannot legally make a pre-emptive strike, either one nuclear or conventional, unless war is imminent because of threatening moves by the antagonist. He could...

Most bankers, economists and investors after a couple of drinks, will admit that money is not wealth. Money is a metric, like inches and centimeters, for tracking real wealth: human ingenuity and technological productivity interacting with natural resources and biodiversity undergirding all human societies along with the daily free photons from our Sun, as described in “Valuing Today’s Circular Services Information Economies”. So brainwashed are we by the false money meme of “money as wealth” that whenever anyone proposes needed infrastructure maintenance, better schools and healthcare or any public goods, we are intimidated by some defunct economist who says “Where’s the money coming from?” They ought to know better, since, of course money is not scarce, it’s just information as I pointed out in 2001 at the annual meeting of the Inter-American Development Bank in an invited talk “Information, The World’s Real Currency, Is Not Scarce “(see World Affairs, April-June, Vol. 5, 2001, Delhi,...

  By Richard Falk • More than 25 years ago I took part in a major conference in Kuala Lumpur affirming the importance of human rights. At the end of the second day, the convener of the conference, Chandra Muzaffar, a leading advocate of human rights and democracy in Malaysia, arranged for a few of the speakers to meet with the controversial leader of the country, Prime Minister, Mahathir. I was the only Westerner among the 4 or 5 of us given this opportunity. As soon as we entered the room, Mahathir looked straight at me while posing a rhetorical question: “Why do Western human rights NGOs and experts look only at our performance with respect to civil and political rights when our natural preoccupation is the promotion of economic and social rights?” Of course, his assertion was meant to challenge the complacent Orientalizing conventional wisdom, reducing the practice of...

  No it didn’t. The mainstream media are totally irresponsible in their priorities. At the moment of writing, five hours after the world’s most dangerous document was presented, no major Western media has featured it prominently. This means it won’t be. No chance it would go viral. The increasing risk of nuclear war isn’t important. While people talk about fake, a much larger issue is omission: What is hidden to you? What world order issues are deliberately down-graded? What threats to humanity end up at the bottom of page 38 after 10 pages of sports, entertainment and celebrity stories. Another technique is cover-up, talking about something else such as the ever convenient North Korean “threat” or Russia’s latest evil plot. It’s not only ignorance. There are media and other power elites who know exactly what to hand out to you and how. And what to fake, omit and cover up...