Since 1962 the US imposed an economic blockade on Cuba designed “to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.” Until 1990 this brutality was greatly alleviated by the solidarity of the socialist countries which provided the Cuban people with essential trade and aid. That provided some protection, but as the film 638 Ways to Kill Castro, the US had other tools, including many acts of terrorism and biological warfare.
The Pentagon was scheduled on Friday to brief Elon Musk on the U.S. military’s plan for any war that might break out with China, two U.S. officials said on Thursday.
China’s hybrid “state capitalist” system, driven by centralized planning and fierce competition, has led to dominance in critical technological fields and emerging markets. Western multinational corporations are advised to adopt a pragmatic approach to capitalize on four key strengths of China’s economy: its innovation ecosystem, its investment in the Global South, its ultra-competitive markets, and its vast consumer base. Those who fail to engage risk losing global revenue and strategic opportunities.
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Army has for years experimented with high-altitude balloons and long-endurance, fixed-wing, solar-powered platforms capable of operating in the stratosphere. Now the service is pursuing prototyping efforts that could lead to programs of record, including one able to deploy launched effects.
SMDC’s Space and Missile Defense Center of Excellence actively works across the Pentagon to find high-altitude platforms, payloads and command-and-control capabilities for the service. This includes small, tactical balloons for payloads such as extended-range communications up to large, stratospheric balloons, according to a command fact sheet. In April 2022, for example, U.S. Army soldiers launched a Thunderhead High-Altitude Balloon System during exercise Balikatan 22 in the Philippines.*
In November 2022 The Breakthrough Institute (BTI), drawing from Academia, NGOs, and the UN, released a report, which others digested, on the supposed inextricable link between the solar industry’s supply chains and Uyghur slave prison labor in China. China deniessuchclaims. The report praises initial moves by the US and the EU to counter these allegedly ongoing human rights violations and extols countries and the solar industry to move the various parts of its manufacturing process out of China. As the fight for nuclear and responsible renewable energy development intensifies in the US, this narrative is gaining traction as another tool to counter the 100% renewable extremists. However, the US also has a prison slave labor problem, one that it does not even deny. We are also in a time of ratcheting tensions between the US and China, in which these narratives would be useful in stoking anti-China sentiments. However, bringing up these facts in a simplistic argument leads to the inevitable accusation of whataboutism and little else. As such, it is worth making a more longform argument which clearly lays out the current conditions of slave labor in both countries. Once it is shown that China has progressed further along in the abolition of slavery than the US, it will be clear how this narrative is just another in a long list of anti-Chinese propaganda.
The US heating season has officially begun, and new warnings show that a quarter of all Americans could experience energy emergencies this winter if temperatures fall below average due to tight fossil fuel supplies.
The global energy crisis triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is causing profound and long-lasting changes that have the potential to hasten the transition to a more sustainable and secure energy system, according to the latest edition of the IEA’s World Energy Outlook.
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