Figures in the documents help us to quantify IS financing. From IS’ richest province in fossil fuels, revenues and expenditures for the province come in the form of millions of dollars on a monthly basis, not tens or hundreds of millions. As can be seen, a plurality of the income actually comes from confiscations of property and money.
It is now one hundred years since drugs were first banned in the United States. On the eve of this centenary, journalist Johann Hari set off on an epic three-year, thirty-thousand-mile journey into the war on drugs. What he found is that more and more people all over the world have begun to recognize three startling truths: Drugs are not what we think they are. Addiction is not what we think it is. And the drug war has very different motives to the ones we have seen on our TV screens for so long.
In Chasing the Scream, Hari reveals his discoveries entirely through the stories of people across the world whose lives have been transformed by this war. They range from a transsexual crack dealer in Brooklyn searching for her mother, to a teenage hit-man in Mexico searching for a way out. It begins with Hari's discovery that at the birth of the drug war, Billie Holiday was stalked and killed by the man who launched this crusade–and it ends with the story of a brave doctor who has led his country to decriminalize every drug, from cannabis to crack, with remarkable results.
Chasing the Scream lays bare what we really have been chasing in our century of drug war–in our hunger for drugs, and in our attempt to destroy them. This book will challenge and change how you think about one of the most controversial–and consequential–questions of our time.
$1.3 trillion a year or 11% of GDP in international dollars. This assumes conventional financing and conventional technologies and conventional processes.
corpkit is a tool for doing corpus linguistics. It does a lot of the usual things, like parsing, concordancing and keywording, but also extends their potential significantly: you can concordance by searching for combinations of lexical and grammatical features, and can do keywording of lemmas, of subcorpora compared to corpora, or of words in certain positions within clauses.
Although the oil price has fallen as instability has risen across the Middle East it doesn’t mean the region is less strategically important. The west ignores the region at its peril
So, if the west ignores the Middle East or addresses the region’s problems only through military means (the US has spent $2tn in its Afghan and Iraqi wars, only to create more instability), rather than relying on diplomacy and financial resources to support growth and job creation, the region’s instability will only worsen. Such a choice would haunt the US and Europe – and thus the global economy – for decades to come.
United State wars are getting repetitive. Always the same old scenario. The mainstream media alert public opinion to the latest “villain” supposedly threatening to slaughter “his own people”. The U.S. does the job instead with its drones and missiles. The new “villain” is soon forgotten, but his country is left in a shambles, with competing fanatics vying to dominate the chaos. Something new is needed. How about a Woman War President? Hillary Rodham Clinton has painstakingly groomed herself for the role. Her record as Secretary of State shows that she is fully qualified to be the first woman to be known as the “mother of all drones” or even to launch World War III.
“Veteran journalist Diana Johnstone captures the imperial worldview of Hillary Clinton in memorable detail. Hillary the Hawk, as U.S. Senator and Secretary of State, never saw a weapons system she did not support, nor a U.S. war practice she did not endorse.” – Ralph Nader
The risk here, however, is that the American neocons and liberal interventionists remain drunk on their dreams of a permanent U.S. global hegemony that doesn’t broach any rivalry from Russia, China or any other potential challenger to America’s “full-spectrum dominance.” If these war hawks don’t sober up – and if Obama remains their reluctant enabler – the chances that the crises in Ukraine or Syria could escalate into a nuclear showdown cannot be ignored. Thus, Russia’s move last week was truly a game-changer; and Putin is no longer playing games. One can only hope Obama can break free from the belligerent neocons and liberal war hawks.
The Archivist: Unseen Islamic State Financial Accounts for Deir az-Zor Province
