News in Brief: 31 August 2007

A brief list of news for the day:
India: Committee to go into Left concerns. The Congress leadership has accommodated the Left parties’ concerns on the India-U.S. nuclear agreement by putting in place on Thursday a (political) committee to examine their objections as well to give the assurance that “the operationalisation of the deal will take [...]

Delay

Thursday’s posts and news briefs will likely be delayed until after 15:00 Eastern Standard Time.
I’ve been up until morning researching and writing a piece on the modernization of India’s military and strategic partnership with the U.S., and I have to go to a series of work meetings during the day.
This is the price of socialising [...]

Arctic Oil and the Law of the Seize

Rene Wadlow writes in Toward Freedom:
There is a touch of the 19th century scramble to divide Africa among European colonial powers in Russia’s decision to drop a capsule containing a Russian flag on the Arctic sea floor not far from the North Pole on August 2nd. In preparation for the 1885 Berlin Conference which was [...]

How Did We Get Into This Mess?

George Monbiot writes in Monbiot.com (originally published in the Guardian):
For the first time, the United Kingdom’s consumer debt now exceeds our gross national product: a new report shows that we owe £1.35 trillion(1). Inspectors in the United States have discovered that 77,000 road bridges are in the same perilous state as the one which collapsed [...]

Relativism and the Foundations of Philosophy

Erich von Dietze reviews Steven D. Hales’s book, Relativism and the Foundations of Philosophy. Below is an excerpt available in metapsychology:
his book is a dense and carefully argued defense of relativism. I had once thought that I had sorted out my views on relativism but this book has made me think again, and much more [...]

Bolivia’s Agrarian Revolution: Trying to Keep the Promises of Past Governments

Douglas Hertzler writes in Andean Information Network:
Bolivia has more land per capita than any other country in South America, but it is still the poorest country on the continent, partly because it has the most inequitable land tenure. The western third of the country, where most of the indigenous majority lives, is mountainous and relatively [...]

Bolivia’s Constitutional Assembly Temporarily Suspended

Emily Becker and Kathryn Ledebur write in ZNet:
On Aug 6, 2006 Bolivia’s Constitutional Assembly began to write a new constitution to restructure the government, reform education, and decide on controversial themes such as coca policy and regional autonomy and natural resources. At the conclusion of its one year mandate, the Assembly has generated over [...]

Intellectuals & Power: A conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze

Below is from libcom.org:
This is a transcript of a 1972 conversation between the post-structuralist philosophers Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, which discusses the links between the struggles of women, homosexuals, prisoners etc to class struggle, and also the relationship between theory, practice and power.
MICHEL FOUCAULT: A Maoist once said to me: “I can easily understand [...]

The A.K.P.’s Complex Victory in Turkey

Dario Cristiani writes in Power and Interest News Report:
The elections have represented a sort of paradox for the A.K.P.: they have demonstrated how the party has strongly increased its popular support but, at the same time, has fewer seats than before the elections. That is because the M.H.P. has exceeded the electoral threshold of ten [...]

Bulgaria, U.S. Bases and Black Sea Geopolitics

W. Alejandro Sanchez writes in Power and Interest News Report:
The USS Forest Sherman, a guided missile destroyer of the Sixth Fleet, visited the Bulgarian port of Varna in early August and carried out joint naval exercises with the Bulgarian navy. This event would normally be seen as routine. However, the announcement of an American troop [...]