In The News

Obama Travels to Asia, But Future of Trade Pact Is Uncertain

David Dapice April 21, 2014
President Barack Obama begins travels this week to Japan, South Korea, Malaysia and the Philippines as the United States strives to convince Asian allies that a pivot to Asia is real. An indicator of US policy success is the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade pact being negotiated by 12 Pacific Rim nations, explains economist David Dapice. Such regional trade agreements are emerging beyond the...

WikiLeaks Publishes Secret Draft Chapter of Trans-Pacific Partnership

Alex Hern, Dominic Rushe November 21, 2013
WikiLeaks, a website that exposes confidential government and corporate documents, has published a chapter on intellectual property rights from a proposed trade agreement negotiated by 12 Pacific Rim nations, most of which are democracies. “The 30,000 word intellectual property chapter contains proposals to increase the term of patents, including medical patents, beyond 20 years, and lower global...

Bradley Manning's 35-Year Sentence Is a Halfway House

Mark Mardell August 26, 2013
Bradley Manning joined the US Army in 2007 and two years later was charged with leaking classified information to WikiLeaks, including US embassy cables and a video showing civilians and journalists killed by a US helicopter in Iraq. He was convicted of espionage in July, though the judge dismissed the most serious charge, aiding the enemy, and issued a compromise sentence of 35 years, reports...

Sudan Blames Israel for Khartoum Arms Factory Blast

October 26, 2012
Factions in the Middle East may be waging shadow wars in neighboring countries. The BBC News reports that Sudan officials are blaming Israel for blasting an arms factory in Khartoum and notes that “a bitter secret war has been going on for a number of years between Israel and Hamas, with Sudan apparently very much one of the battlegrounds.” Sudan officials said the factory made traditional arms....

Assange Asylum Raises South America’s Ire

Alistair Burnett October 12, 2012
By fleeing to the Ecuadoran embassy in London, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, an Australian, escaped extradition to Sweden for charges of sexual assault and potentially being deported to the United States for spying. Intentionally or not, he also unleashed South American resentment over two centuries of domination, first by Europe and more recently by the US. Ecuador’s embassy in London, which...

Neighbors Eye Iraq’s Sectarian Rift With Unease

Angus McDowall, Parisa Hafezi December 27, 2011
No one can say what might have eventually happened had the US not invaded Iraq and removed despot Saddam Hussein. Now shown the exit door by Iraqi leaders, US troops leave Iraq even as the entire Middle East is in tumult. In Egypt, Bahrain, Tunisia, Syria, and other countries, citizens seek representative governments, while politicians are bitterly divided over secular and Islamist policies, as...

A Dispatch Disaster in Six Acts

Christian Stöcker September 2, 2011
More than 250,000 US State Department cables were released to WikiLeaks and, starting in November 2010, gradually published in newspapers around the globe with the understanding that sensitive details, including names of informants, would be redacted. Under the threat of denial-of-service attacks and censorship, WikiLeaks staff released password-protected copies of the cables to supporters. Not...