“For years, two of America’s closest allies, Japan and South Korea, have mostly marched to the beat of their own drums. As neighbors in northeast Asia, they have often cooperated. But the brutal history of Japan’s 1910-1945 occupation of the Korean Peninsula was always an emotional backbeat preventing close ties. On Tuesday, after a bilateral summit, their leaders – who both took office last year – changed the tempo quite a bit. In a gesture purposely human rather than diplomatic, Japanese Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae and South Korean President Lee Jae-myung sat down and played the drums together. They performed the song ‘Golden’ from the 2025 animated film ‘KPop Demon Hunters.’ Ms. Takaichi had once been a drummer in a heavy metal band while Mr. Lee had long dreamed of playing drums.” (01/14/25)
“A British owned, Canadian-made whisky is at the centre of a spat between two provinces that is testing a unified ‘Team Canada’ approach in the face of US tariffs. It started after the whisky maker, Diageo, said it will shut down a bottling plant in Ontario to move some of it closer to US consumers. Soon after, Ontario Premier Doug Ford angrily poured out a bottle of Crown Royal in front of reporters, and now says the product will be removed from provincial liquor stores. This has alarmed neighbouring Manitoba, where a Crown Royal distillery is a key employer in the small town of Gimli. In a symbolic visit to the Gimli distillery on Tuesday, Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew urged Ford to ‘do a 180.'” (01/14/25)
“China’s trade surplus with the entire world hit an all-time record of $1.19 trillion in 2025, Beijing just announced. But here’s the stunner in the report. China’s surplus with the U.S. declined by 22 percent. The reason: U.S. tariffs on Chinese exports average over 50 percent. That’s a good outcome, since China’s chronic trade surplus is based on illegal mercantilist policies, including currency manipulation, subsidies, and domestic market protection, that cost the U.S. and other nations jobs. In the past, the main loser has been the United States. China simply diverted subsidized exports to other nations with lower tariffs. But what of Trump’s other tariffs? They are an incoherent mash-up.” (01/14/25)
“Syria’s military said it would open a corridor Thursday for civilians to evacuate an area of Aleppo province that has seen a military buildup following intense clashes between government and Kurdish-led forces in Aleppo city. The army’s announcement late Wednesday — which said civilians would be able to evacuate through the ‘humanitarian corridor’ from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursday — appeared to signal plans for an offensive in the towns of Deir Hafer and Maskana and surrounding areas, about 60 kilometers (40 miles) east of Aleppo city. The military called on the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces and other armed groups to withdraw to the other side of the the Euphrates River, to the east of the contested zone. Syrian government troops have already sent troop reinforcements to the area after accusing the SDF of building up its own forces there, which the SDF denied.” (01/14/25)
“Democratic Socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is focusing on affordability. But his ‘free stuff’ policy agenda would flunk an introductory economics midterm. For example: free bus rides will increase demand and cause overcrowding as service deteriorates. Can you envision New Yorkers queuing up like Londoners? Ditto free childcare, with risk of fraud. Ditto rent freezes, which are not likely to spur a rent-relieving housing supply surge. Does Mamdani really think public employees will work the same long, intense hours at city-owned grocery stores that private-sector owners do to earn a living while building their generational wealth? Or that it’s a good idea to shutter natural gas plants supplying 500 megawatts of reliable energy, which New York’s Independent System Operator extended beyond their planned retirement in mid-2025 lest the city suffer blackouts.” (01/14/25)
Source: In These Times
by Amie Stager & Sarah Lazare
“Unions and community groups gathered in front of the Hennepin County Government Center in downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota this morning to announce a day of ’no work, no school, no shopping’ on January 23 to oppose the ferocious assault on the state by federal immigration authorities. ‘We are facing a tsunami of hate from our own federal government,’ Abdikarim Khasim, a Minnesota rideshare driver, told the crowd. ‘We’re going to shut it down on the 23rd. We’re going to overcome this.’ JaNaé Bates Imari, representative of the church Camphor Memorial UMC, told the crowd that the joint action will be ’a day when every single Minnesotan who loves this state — who loves the idea of truth and freedom — will refuse to work, shop and go to school.'” (01/13/25)
“Tehran has warned U.S. allies in the Middle East it will strike U.S. bases on their soil if Washington attacks Iran, a senior Iranian official told Reuters on Wednesday, following President Donald Trump’s threats to intervene in support of protesters. The death toll from Iran’s unrest climbed to almost 2,600, a rights group said, as the clerical establishment seeks to quell nationwide protests posing one of the biggest challenges to their rule since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. … Trump has said military action is among the options he is weighing to punish Iran over the crackdown.” (01/14/26)
“The regime change supporter’s favorite trick is to pretend the people in the targeted country are an ideological monolith. All Iranians hate their government, all Venezuelans wanted freedom from Maduro, etc. They do this constantly. Thing is, it requires them to dehumanize the very population they’re claiming to care about. They need to pretend the people in the empire-targeted nation are these weird creatures with some kind of Pluribus-style alien brain virus that makes them all think the same as each other, unlike any other human population they themselves have ever encountered. You have never been to a country where everyone has the same attitude toward their government. Neither have I. That would be freakish and abnormal. That’s not how humans are.” (01/13/25)
“‘Tom, I got nothin.’’ That’s all I wanted to say to Tom Engelhardt, the kindly and incisive editor of TomDispatch.com. He’d called to check in and see what I was planning for my next piece. I wanted to tell him, ‘I’m staring at starvation and genocide, the destruction of American democracy and the rule of law, along with the ongoing incineration of our planet. I’m a damp ball of grief, and I’ve got nothing useful to say about any of it.’ Furthermore, I wanted to add, ‘Anything I could say about the present disaster has already been said comprehensively and better by someone else.’ That ‘someone else’ includes myriad excellent journalists who have departed (voluntarily or otherwise) from a mainstream media that has repeatedly acquiesced to Trump, succumbing to a malaise of self-censorship at flagship newspapers like the Washington Post and even the New York Times.” (01/13/25)
“On Saturday, Larry Krasner, the elected Democratic district attorney of Philadelphia, posted a photo of himself on social media. It was a black-and-white picture of a stern-looking Krasner in a dark suit, one hand to his sunglasses. At the bottom of the photo, in all caps, was ‘FAFO’, which of course stands for ‘f*** around and find out.’ The accompanying message said, ‘To [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and the National Guard: if you commit crimes in Philadelphia, we will charge you and hold you accountable to the fullest extent of the law.’ Made in the context of the Minneapolis shooting, the post was part of a new wave of tough-guy progressivism in which state and local Democratic officials around the country apparently hope to intimidate the federal government over the enforcement of federal immigration law.” (01/13/25)
