Greene County Democrat

Tag: U.S.

  • Newswire: Peace talks be dammed; the U.S. and Israel invade Iran, and casualties mount

    Newswire: Peace talks be dammed; the U.S. and Israel invade Iran, and casualties mount

    by Frederick H. Lowe, BlackmansStreet.Today

    President Donald Trump announced on his social media that a joint invasion between the U.S. and Israel resulted in the death of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

    In addition, three U.S. soldiers were also killed, and five others were seriously injured, according to U.S. Central Command during “Operation Epic Fury,” the joint U.S.-Israeli military operation against Iran. Trump said more American deaths are expected. As of March 3rd, the death toll of U.S. Service personnel was 6, with many injured.

    At least 165 people were killed when a strike hit an all-girls school in Minab, which is in Iran’s southern Hormozgan province. A local official said among the dead were students, parents, and school staff.

    Trump also urged the Iranian people to “seize control of your destiny” by rising against the Islamic leadership that has ruled the nation since 1979.

    The attack on Iran by the U.S. and Israel was launched in the middle of diplomatic efforts to avert conflict. Congress was not consulted on the invasion, which has been cast as a war.

    President Trump does not have the power to declare war on another country. The Founding Fathers and the Constitution gave war authority and power to Congress, and Congress alone, said the ACLU.

    President Trump violated the Constitution when he announced that the U.S. was going to war and launched an open-ended bombing campaign against Iran, a country with nearly 100 million people, without ever going to Congress for authorization.

    President Trump ordered U.S. military strikes against Iran without prior congressional authorization, and key members of the U.S. Congress say they were not given intelligence briefings before the operation began.

    Several lawmakers strongly criticized the decision as a violation of constitutional and statutory war powers.

    The attack on Iran reportedly targeted military sites as well as the leadership of the Iranian regime.

    Explosions were heard in Israel and Gulf countries after Iran launched a wave of drones and missiles in a strong response to being attacked.

    Trump announced the invasion in an eight-minute speech after the first bombs had fallen.

    Antonio Guterres, the UN Secretary-General, called for an immediate cessation of hostilities and de-escalation and warned that a failure to do so risks a wider regional conflict with grave consequences for civilians and regional stability.

    Mr. Guterres declared that the military escalation in the region undermines international peace and security, and recalled that all Member States must “respect their obligations under international law, including the Charter of the United Nations,” which prohibits “the threat of the use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”

    The attack on Iran reportedly targeted military sites as well as the leadership of the Iranian regime.

  • Newswire : Trump slaps highest tariff yet on small southern African nation of Lesotho

    By Stacy M. Brown
BlackPressUSA.com Senior National Correspondent

     

    President Donald Trump has announced sweeping new tariffs on dozens of nations, including a record-setting 50% reciprocal tariff on the tiny southern African mountain kingdom of Lesotho — the highest levy imposed on any sovereign country by the United States.
    Trump’s move targets at least 60 countries with duties starting at 10%, with Lesotho and other African nations bearing some of the heaviest hits. The White House said the tariffs are aimed at addressing what it described as long-standing trade imbalances that hurt American manufacturers. In the case of Lesotho, the administration cited a 99% tariff on U.S. goods and a $264 million trade surplus in the kingdom’s favor as justification for the steep penalty. Lesotho, which exports diamonds and apparel to the U.S., imported only $8 million in American goods in 2022, according to the Tralac Trade Law Centre in South Africa.
    The U.S. government’s action also appears to signal the impending death of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), a landmark trade deal from the Clinton administration that allowed duty-free access to the U.S. market for many African exports. The pact will expire in September, but trade experts say the tariffs effectively end AGOA months ahead of schedule. “The reciprocal trade announcement policy will pull the AGOA rug from under our feet,” said Adrian Saville, an economist and professor at South Africa’s Gordon Institute of Business Science. “That will be gone. It will replace AGOA; you don’t have to wait for September.”
    Other African nations are also reeling. Madagascar faces a 47% tariff, Mauritius 40%, Botswana 37%, and South Africa — the continent’s largest exporter to the U.S. — 30%. For several of these countries, the tariffs could not come at a worse time as they struggle with severe poverty, natural disasters, or public health crises. Lesotho, for example, has one of the world’s highest HIV/AIDS infection rates and relies on South Africa for 85% of its imports.
    “African countries are being penalized for having trade surpluses, some of them achieved by pursuing export-driven development policies, as advised by the U.S.,” Bloomberg Africa economist Yvonne Mhango wrote. “Lesotho exports apparel to the U.S., a product that until recently enjoyed duty-free access and helped create jobs for the youth that migrates in large numbers to neighboring South Africa.
    One of Trump’s arguments for these tariffs is to bring back manufacturing jobs to the U.S. Slapping high tariffs on Africa is not going to help this narrative.” Lesotho now joins Saint Pierre and Miquelon — a French archipelago off the coast of Canada — as the only other territory to face a 50% reciprocal tariff from the Trump administration. While acknowledging the setback, the South African presidency said the tariffs make it even more important to reach a new agreement with the U.S. “The tariffs affirm the urgency to negotiate a new bilateral and mutually beneficial trade agreement with the U.S., as an essential step to secure long-term trade certainty,” the South African government said in a statement.

  • Jamaica seeking $10.6 Billion in slave trade reparations from Great Britain 

    Antique photograph of Cane cutters in Jamaica

    By Stacy M. Brown, NNPA Newswire Senior National Correspondent

    Jamaica has put a price tag on slavery and is sending the British government the bill. State officials of the Caribbean nation said they are asking Great Britain to pay $10.6 billion (USD) in reparations.

    The former British colony served as the center of the slave trade, where Africans were kidnapped, enslaved, and forced to work on sugar cane, bananas, and other plantations. That free and inhumane labor greatly enriched the slave owners.

    “We are hoping for reparatory justice in all forms that one would expect if they are to really ensure that we get justice from injustices to repair the damages that our ancestors experienced,” Olivia Grange, Minister of Sports, Youth, and Culture, told the Reuters news service.

    “Our African ancestors were forcibly removed from their home and suffered unparalleled atrocities in Africa to carry out forced labor to the benefit of the British Empire. Redress is well overdue.”

    In the U.S., Congresswoman Sheila Jackson-Lee has pushed H.R. 40, a bill to form a commission to study reparations for African American victims of the transatlantic slave trade. “Has anyone addressed the question of slavery and its comprehensive impact on Black Americans in this country? This is what H.R. 40 will do,” Jackson Lee remarked.

    While H.R. 40 doesn’t place a specific monetary value on reparations, it does focus on investigating and presenting the facts and truth about the unprecedented centuries of brutal enslavement of African people, racial healing, and transformation.

    The bill would fund a commission to study and develop proposals for providing reparations to African Americans.

    The commission’s mission includes identifying the role of federal and state governments in supporting the institution of slavery, forms of discrimination in public and private sectors against freed slaves and their descendants, and lingering adverse effects of slavery on living African Americans and society.

    Congresswoman Jackson Lee, who sits on numerous House committees, including the Judiciary, Budget, and Homeland Security, has made the reparations legislation her top priority during the 117th Congress.

    “I think if people begin to associate this legislation with what happened to the descendants of enslaved Africans as a human rights violation, the sordid past that violated the human rights of all of us who are descendants of enslaved Africans, I think that we can find common ground to pass this legislation,” Congresswoman Jackson Lee pronounced.

    In Jamaica, officials displayed shackles, coffles, slave collars, cotton screws, bear traps, branding irons, and other items used to control slaves as stirring evidence for the case for reparations.

    “We need a sense of outrage directed at those who could do such things to other human beings,” Verene Shepherd, a Jamaican resident, wrote in a petition on the Facebook page of the country’s National Council on Reparations.

    According to the National Library of Jamaica, about 600,000 Africans landed in Jamaica during the slave trade. “Seized from Spain by the English in 1655, Jamaica was a British colony until it became independent in 1962,” the Reuters report noted. 

    “The West Indian country of almost three million people is part of the Commonwealth, and the British monarch remains head of state.” Britain prohibited trade in slaves in its empire in 1807 but did not formally abolish the practice of slavery until 1834.

    To compensate slave owners, the British government took out a 20-million-pound loan – or $27.7 million U.S. – and only finished paying off the subsequent interest payments in 2015.

    Slaves and their descendants have never received compensation. “I am asking for the same amount of money to be paid to the slaves that were paid to the slave owners,” Mike Henry, a member of the ruling Jamaica Labour Party, told Reuters.

    “I am doing this because I have fought against this all my life, against chattel slavery, which has dehumanized human life.”