Mexico will elect a female president, but Mexican women will still lose

 Al Jazeera English

It is official: Mexico will elect its first female president next year.

One of the two top contenders in the June vote is 61-year-old Claudia Sheinbaum, the former mayor of Mexico City, a close ally of current President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) and a member of his National Regeneration Movement (MORENA). The other is 60-year-old Xochitl Galvez, the candidate for the opposition Broad Front for Mexico coalition.

On the surface, of course, the prospect of a female head of state would appear to be an undeniably positive milestone. But will the arrangement actually do anything to resolve the existential challenges faced by women in Mexico?

Unlike the coalition headed by Galvez, which includes tiresomely right-wing forces, MORENA identifies as leftist, meaning that Sheinbaum appears better positioned to guide the nation in a more progressive direction in terms of women’s rights. And yet her mayoral reign in the Mexican capital, which lasted from 2018 to June this year and coincided with the bulk of AMLO’s presidency, was not exactly empowering for women.

After all, you cannot really claim female empowerment during an epidemic of femicides, which skyrocketed 137 percent in Mexico from 2015 to 2020. At least 10 women and girls are killed every day in the country although pretty much all statistics relating to femicides are presumed to be underestimates given that many crimes go unreported or are reported as regular homicides. Tens of thousands of women are missing. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Trump is back and the liberal American media are loving it

 Al Jazeera English

On August 14, the evening of former US President Donald Trump’s fourth criminal indictment of 2023, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow hosted former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to discuss the indictments and the general domestic state of affairs.

In the Georgia case, Trump stands accused along with 18 others of attempting to subvert the 2020 election. Maddow’s 9pm show drew an unprecedented 3.93 million viewers.

One clip from the interview, posted to MSNBC’s social media networks, is titled “Hillary Clinton laments political system that rewards theatre over results”. In it, she explains that Trump’s successor Joe Biden is “not a performer in a political theatre sense”, which renders it more difficult to disseminate news of his alleged achievements as president across the “splintered information ecosystem” that dominates in the US – where most Americans “don’t get their news from MSNBC” but rather from “social media, if they get any news at all”.

Clinton wagers that, since talking about national infrastructure and other critical matters is “boring”, media venues choose to “talk about, you know, Donald Trump or one of these other people who do nothing but give us negative messages, [be]cause that is so much more exciting”.

Never mind that this is exactly what, you know, Maddow and Clinton were doing. READ MORE AT AL JAZZERA ENGLISH.

Panama’s doomsday warning is not about holiday shopping

 Al Jazeera English

The Panama Canal is in dire straits.

A severe drought is impeding navigation of the United States-dominated trade artery that bisects the isthmus of Panama in Central America.

As of mid-August, more than 200 ships were stuck at the canal. On August 26, CNN warned that the situation is “not a good sign for supply chains – or your holiday shopping”.

To be sure, even before the onset of accelerated anthropogenic climate change, the Panama Canal was never enormously environmentally compatible. The construction of the waterway, which began as a French undertaking in the late 1800s before being appropriated by the US and completed in 1914, encapsulated the recklessness and hubris of man’s efforts to dominate nature.

Thousands upon thousands of workers perished in the quest to bend the earth to imperial will. But at least they enabled future “holiday shopping”. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Remember that I love you most

 Al Jazeera English

The day before I found out that my father was dying, a dead cat appeared on the bottom step of the staircase in the apartment building where I was staying. It was late July, and I had rented a summer place in Fethiye, a town on Turkey’s southwestern coast where I had been a regular visitor since 2004.

Fearing that this was probably some sort of apocalyptic omen relating to my own life, I fought the urge to google “what it means when you see a dead cat”. When I finally did, it seemed there were a couple of possibilities. Seeing a dead cat could be “a symbol of death and rebirth”, Google said. Or it could be an apocalyptic omen.

The next day, my mother called to inform me that my dad had commenced in-home hospice care in Washington, DC, and that the end was near. His doctors at the hospital had been dispensed with, having shown themselves to be irremediably committed to the American way of pursuing profit at the expense of human wellbeing. My father’s final two chemotherapy treatments, which he had been reluctant to undergo, had done nothing to deter his prostate cancer and everything to ensure that his remaining moments on earth were spent in pure agony.

I began making preparations to travel to Washington, DC, my birthplace and the command centre of the country I had spent the past 20 years avoiding at all cost, having long ago diagnosed the United States as a downright sick land and disproportionately anxiety-inducing. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

The murders of Indigenous activists mark the death of the planet

 Al Jazeera English

In January 2022, Breiner David Cucuñame, a 14-year-old Indigenous Colombian activist, was shot dead in Colombia’s southwestern department of Cauca.

He was killed in the company of his father, during a routine unarmed patrol of Indigenous lands for the purpose of deterring incursions by militant groups. While the killing made headlines on account of Cucuñame’s young age, it was pretty much business as usual in the South American nation.

As of September 2021, 611 environmental defenders had already been assassinated in Colombia since the signing of the so-called “peace deal” in 2016, according to the Colombian Institute of Studies for Development and Peace (Indepaz). Of those 611 people, 332 were Indigenous.

And yet this snapshot of bloodshed in Colombia is but part of a larger, sinister global picture. Last year, the London-based NGO Global Witness released a report documenting no fewer than 1,733 murdered environmental and land-defence activists in the decade since 2012, amounting to one murder approximately every two days.

Even so, the NGO emphasised that its figures were “almost certainly an underestimate”. In 2021 alone, as per the Global Witness report, 200 land and environmental defenders were killed worldwide – nearly four per week. Significantly, more than 40 percent of the documented killings were of Indigenous people, who account for no more than five percent of the global population. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

I hate US sports. The women’s football team is making it more difficult

 Al Jazeera English

When I was in the ninth grade in Austin, Texas, I got it into my head that I wanted to join my high school football team – by which I mean American football and not the sport that most of the rest of the world calls football and the United States calls soccer.

It was not that I had any sort of talent for or even understanding of the game; I was simply irritated that only boys were permitted to play.

The team coach laughed at my proposal and told me I was not physically strong enough, and I became a cheerleader instead.

Jump ahead a few decades to the world of international football – yes, what the world calls football – and the US Women’s National Team (USWNT) has been rather more successful in combating gender discrimination in sport.

The favourites to win the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup currently under way in Australia and New Zealand, the USWNT made headlines last year when the US Soccer Federation agreed to pay both the women’s and men’s national teams equally and to award the women’s team $22m in back pay. The Federation also announced the “equalisation” of World Cup prize money.

Despite consistently outperforming their male counterparts, the female players had been earning considerably less money – business as usual in a country that forever flaunts itself as a bastion of equality and other noble virtues. According to the Washington, DC-based Economic Policy Institute, the gender pay gap in the US widened from 20.3 percent in 2019 to 22.2 percent in 2022. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Are you ready for a digital death?

 Al Jazeera English

In mid-June, after I had been in Italy for two weeks, I got around to reading the June 4 edition of the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, which I had bought – on June 4, of course – in accordance with my never-fulfilled vision of being one of those people who buys and reads a physical newspaper every day.

Prominently featured was coverage of the murder of 29-year-old Giulia Tramontano, who had been stabbed to death outside Milan in May by her boyfriend Alessandro Impagnatiello. She was seven months pregnant.

Page 12 of La Repubblica was devoted to the WhatsApp correspondence between Tramontano and Impagnatiello, helpfully colour-coded and divided into categories like “the quarrel about the lipstick”; “the separation announcement”; “the future of the baby”; and “the messages after he killed Giulia”.

To be sure, humans have always exhibited a certain fascination with murder. But the digital era has created novel opportunities for morbid voyeurism – while also raising obvious issues of privacy. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Israel wants to turn Jenin into another Gaza, siege by siege

 Al Jazeera English

One of the protagonists of Palestinian actor-director Mohammad Bakri’s 2002 documentary Jenin, Jenin – which deals with that year’s Israeli military attack on the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank – is a young Palestinian girl with brown bangs and no-nonsense eyes.

Picking her way in her school uniform through the rubble of the onslaught that killed 52 Palestinians, she swears: “We will not give up. Yes, they destroyed everything but we will rebuild it.” She also warns: “We’ll keep on having children. They’ll become stronger and braver than ever.”

Fast forward 21 years, and Jenin is once again on the receiving end of Israel’s fetish for destruction.

On June 19, Israeli combat helicopters fired missiles into the camp, ostensibly as part of an arrest operation that ended up killing five Palestinians, including a 15-year-old girl named Sadeel Naghniyeh.

Then in early July, in the worst attack on the West Bank since 2002, the Israeli armed forces terrorised the inhabitants of Jenin for two days and killed at least 12 people, including children. The massive aerial and ground assault involved helicopter gunships, missiles, drones, armoured vehicles, bulldozers and more than 1,000 Israeli soldiers.

That is what happens, it seems, when Palestinians keep rebuilding – and keep existing. Indeed, Al Jazeera quoted 56-year-old camp resident Ahmed Abu Hweileh on the takeaway from the bloody escapade: “The message to the world and the occupation is that this camp will keep on going. They tried to destroy it and it came back up.” READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Towards a Chinese missile crisis?

 Al Jazeera English

We have all heard the story. In October 1962, the world nearly suffered a nuclear holocaust on account of the so-called “Cuban missile crisis”, when the villainous Soviet Union undertook to install weapons of mass destruction on the island of Cuba, just 150km (93 miles) off the coast of the United States.

Often lost in the narrative – even to this day – is that Soviet missile activity in the Caribbean transpired only after the US had installed nuclear-equipped Jupiter missiles in Turkey, which bordered the Soviet Union.

More than sixty years later, Cuba is still a thorn in the side of the US, in spite of the ongoing, asphyxiating US embargo – which dates from the same year as the missile crisis and constitutes a weapon of mass destruction in its own right.

The Soviet Union is long gone, but the annoyingly resilient island nation has now allegedly decided to play host to yet another existential menace: the People’s Republic of China.

On June 8, the right-wing Wall Street Journal breathlessly reported that Cuba would soon boast a “secret Chinese spy base” focusing on the US, with Beijing signing up to pay Havana billions of dollars for the “eavesdropping facility”. Then on June 20, the same newspaper sounded the alarm regarding a new joint Chinese-Cuban military training arrangement on the island, raising the “prospect of Chinese troops on America’s doorstep”. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

SCOTUS is ramping up oppression in ‘the land of the free’

 Al Jazeera English

It is that time of year again: when the United States Supreme Court ruins everyone’s summer with its sociopathic rulings.

Last summer, on June 24, the top judicial body overturned Roe v Wade, the landmark ruling that legalised abortion nationwide in 1973. Hardest hit by the decision were poor women of colour, such being the institutionalised inequality that prevails in the world’s self-appointed paragon of justice.

The day prior to the demise of US abortion rights, the Supreme Court enshrined the right to carry a gun outside the home. This came almost one month after a gunman massacred 19 students and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.

Now in 2023, the court has proven equally committed to eroding the potential for wellbeing among significant sectors of the US population.

Take the recent ruling that bans colleges from considering race as a factor in admissions, a reversal of affirmative action policies that were meant to fuel diversity in schools and to atone, to some extent, for the country’s lengthy history of racialised socioeconomic oppression. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.