The recent crash of a US Air Force CV-22 Osprey aircraft off the southern coast has once again highlighted Japan’s enduring lack of control over its own territories, even 78 years after the Pacific War.
Japan is beginning construction today, January 12, of a new base intended to be used primarily by the US military on the uninhabited island of Mageshima in Kagoshima Prefecture, despite years of resistance to the controversial plan and a questionable process by which the island was acquired by the government.
Senator Elizabeth Warren and other US lawmakers are demanding that the Pentagon stop its systematic undercounting of civilian deaths after more than two decades of the so-called Global War on Terrorism.
The US House of Representatives passed a mammoth US$858 billion military spending bill, putting the US budget for weapons and war-making higher than the next nine countries combined. Also attached to the bill was unprecedented US taxpayer funding for Taiwan’s military.
The family of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh expressed hope that the FBI’s newly announced investigation into her death will bring them “closer to justice,” as Israeli officials declared that they will not cooperate, and even condemned the United States for opening a probe at all.
In a move that critics are calling a “dangerous escalation,” the United States is reportedly preparing to deploy up to six nuclear-capable B-52 bombers to northern Australia, where they would be close enough to strike China.
A group working for peaceful relations between the United States and China has sent a letter to leaders of both countries imploring them to end or limit “dangerous and provocative military maneuvers” in the South China Sea and near Taiwan that could lead to all-out war.
Largely outside of the public view, the United States has been prosecuting an intermittent, fifteen-year-long bombing campaign in Somalia which has killed an estimated 2,000-3,000 people, including dozens of noncombatants. US actions could be considered tantamount to a secret war about which most people are unaware.
Pentagon contractors operating inside Afghanistan over the past two decades raked in nearly US$108 billion—funds that “were distributed and spent with a significant lack of transparency,” according to a new report. However, even this figure is just a fraction of the over US$14 trillion which the Pentagon spent in order to lose the war in Afghanistan.
As US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi departs for an Asian trip that may include a stop in Taiwan, anti-war voices are sounding the alarm over a visit they say would needlessly provoke China during a time of already heightened global tensions from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
