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 I'm sure everyone on this blog has heard that all this is about China.  Supposedly it started with the Panama Canal dust up, spread to Mexico in the guise of fighting the cartels, zoomed over to Venezuela to stop the flow of oil to China from there and now it culminates with Iran.

If I'm stating it correctly this is a direct shot across the bow to Chinese energy supplies and some are stating that it will slow down their AI program (I seriously doubt that...too much solar and nuclear going on).

Others are stating that its all about to petrodollar.  Iran talked about trading for oil only in the Chinese dollar and that some of the other countries "targeted" were all about that shit too.

I don't know what to think of it but if true then its some big time chess going on that the media is either missing or not telling us about.

Of course there are other theories too.  But this one sings the most to me.  What do ya'll think?

NOTE!!!!

I might be mistating all of the above.  Hopefully I gave enough cliffsnotes to get most to understand the direction I was heading.

 

The purpose of this study is to enhance the evidence base on how organised crime groups (OCGs) have evolved into transnational geopolitical actors, to evaluate the suitability of international legal frameworks for holding them accountable, and to offer policy recommendations to strengthen this accountability. The study finds that international law fails to adequately define or reflect the transformation of OCGs into geopolitical actors. Instead, it relies on outdated conceptions of criminal hierarchies, which confine organised crime to the transnational rather than international legal domain . International law is therefore restricted in its ability to categorise these groups as legal entities, even where their actions resemble crimes against humanity in their intent and scale . This definitional oversight has practical consequences: EU external action efforts generate relatively little information on geopolitical threats tied to OCGs, and the international criminal, humanitarian, and human rights infrastructure is unable to directly confront the actions of these groups. The study calls for the redefinition of OCGs as part of a new Directive, as well as practical measures to refine criminal justice mechanisms, improve cross-border cooperation, update EU external action threat assessments and support existing international legal frameworks to more effectively account for the geopolitical behaviours and impacts of OCGs.
Source : © European Union, 2026 - EP

The purpose of this study is to enhance the evidence base on how organised crime groups (OCGs) have evolved into transnational geopolitical actors, to evaluate the suitability of international legal frameworks for holding them accountable, and to offer policy recommendations to strengthen this accountability. The study finds that international law fails to adequately define or reflect the transformation of OCGs into geopolitical actors. Instead, it relies on outdated conceptions of criminal hierarchies, which confine organised crime to the transnational rather than international legal domain . International law is therefore restricted in its ability to categorise these groups as legal entities, even where their actions resemble crimes against humanity in their intent and scale . This definitional oversight has practical consequences: EU external action efforts generate relatively little information on geopolitical threats tied to OCGs, and the international criminal, humanitarian, and human rights infrastructure is unable to directly confront the actions of these groups. The study calls for the redefinition of OCGs as part of a new Directive, as well as practical measures to refine criminal justice mechanisms, improve cross-border cooperation, update EU external action threat assessments and support existing international legal frameworks to more effectively account for the geopolitical behaviours and impacts of OCGs.
Source : © European Union, 2026 - EP

Lets Letteratura Trieste Piazza Hortis 4, Trieste
In occasione della Settimana Internazionale della Francofonia, che celebra la fondazione dell'Organisation internationale de la Francophonie (20 marzo) per commemorare e promuovere i valori di solidarietà, diversità culturale e dialogo tra oltre 300 milioni di francofoni nel mondo, Museo LETS – Letteratura Trieste organizza la tavola rotonda “Re-Trouver Trieste”, in programma giovedì 19 marzo 2026, dalle 16 alle 19, nello Spazio Forum del (…)

- Agenda / Ailleurs

La colère n’est toujours pas retombée au Sénégal, 48 heures après la décision du jury d’appel de la Confédération africaine de football retirant le titre de la CAN 2025 au Sénégal au détriment du Maroc. Ce jeudi devant la presse, la Fédération sénégalaise de football a affirmé engager le combat devant le Tribunal arbitral du sport, plus haute juridiction sportive basée à Lausanne.

World Water Day 2026 (March 22) will be celebrated at a high-level event at United Nations Headquarters in New York under the theme “Water and Gender Equality”, highlighting the links between equitable water access, sustainable development and human rights. Source: UN News

By Lyla Mehta and Alan Nicol
BRIGHTON, UK, Mar 19 2026 (IPS)

The 2026 campaign on World Water Day’s focuses on Water and Gender – ‘where water flows, equality grows’ . While substantial progress has been achieved across a range of gender indicators spanning education, health and public participation, the situation around WASH (water, sanitation and hygiene) is still marked by deep inequalities with women and girls disproportionately affected – and this reflects the persistence of global patriarchy.

More than 2 billion people still lack access to safely managed drinking water. In households without piped water, women and girls are made to be responsible for about 70–80% of water collection trips worldwide, taking anything from 30 minutes to four hours daily. This time can instead usefully be spent on education, productive activities or even leisure and rest, but they don’t have the choice.

The situation is even more dire for sanitation with 3.4 billion people lacking access to safely managed sanitation. All this affects women’s and girl’s dignity, safety, security and the privacy and comfort needed for dignified menstrual health management. At the same time, there is poor progress on women’s economic participation.

These patterns have remained remarkably persistent despite improvements in water and sanitation infrastructure. The sheer time and labour required for poor women and girls around WASH activities, combined with gendered inequalities and power imbalances under the persistence of patriarchy not only directly affect girls’ enrolment in education but inevitably diminishes their capacity for productive economic activity, the net impact of which worldwide is a huge dent in human development progress.

Water as a weapon of war against women and girls

Not only that, but the apparent normalisation of wars and genocides wrought largely by men means almost daily violations of international humanitarian law including the weaponisation of water and sanitation infrastructure as a target of attack. Most recently, the United States’ bombing of a freshwater desalinsation plant in Iran and retaliation by Iran on another desalination plant in Bahrain set a dangerous new precedent.

When water and sanitation infrastructure become fair game in war, as we’ve seen in Gaza, Sudan and Ukraine in the last few years, existing gender inequalities around water and sanitation mean women and girls suffer most, compounding risks including sexual violence.

Male violence and malevolence are back

What we’re seeing real-time and online is something even more worrying. That is the resurgence of more explicit patriarchy desiring control over women’s lives and subjugation into traditional roles away from public life. From the slashing of Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programmes to the rollback of reproductive rights across the world from the USA to Chile, the resurgence of ‘toxic masculinity’ is forcing gender rights, feminism and equality off the agenda and they are equated with pejorative notions of ‘wokeism.’

Some institutions are already reframing debates in response. For instance, the World Bank is increasingly framing gender as about economic activity and jobs, rather than about rights. This is reflected in their new Water Mission implementation strategy that refers to employment but only mentions gender six times and women four times even though the gross inequalities in labour power and economic effects are, as stated above, so vast.

The gender backlash and reductionism in rights framings helps reinforce stereotypes and accepted norms, including the gendered division of labour in water collection, rather than confronting this more forcefully – and, at a minimum, asking why this is the case rather than accepted as a given.

If views persist that women and girls are responsible for water-related subsistence tasks, it ignores specific needs around sanitation and menstrual hygiene and increases male domination in decision-making and water management. Which is precisely what patriarchy seeking to achieve – domination and subjugation.

The rollback on funding for WASH continues

A year ago, Keir Starmer cut the UK aid budget by about 40 per cent. These cuts have been devastating for water and sanitation progress in some of the world’s poorest and most war-torn countries with direct and lasting consequences for women and girls. The cuts particularly impact countries like Sudan, Ethiopia and Palestine, already reeling from largely male-driven wars, conflicts and genocide.

It is estimated that around 12 million people will be denied access to clean water and sanitation as a result. These cuts directly affect gender equality because reduced access to water and sanitation impacts schooling, being at work and increases the risk of gender-based violence.

The UK justifies the cuts as a way to move away from direct aid around WASH to strengthening capabilities and partnerships. But these partnerships between the UK and Global South countries such as Nigeria focusing on growth, jobs and reducing aid dependency can backfire as more and more people’s health deteriorate, including more women suffering from ill health and long-term illnesses.

Ultimately, a waning collective effort to support gender equality in WASH provision opens the door to long-term decline in gender rights and economic development. Additionally, the dismantling of USAID is already having devastating consequences for gender equality and women’s health. Just when greater focus is needed on WASH projects to ensure we are not backsliding on gender rights, aid is being cut.

In sum, persistent inequalities, the gender backlash, illegal and forever wars and aid cuts lacking a moral compass have diluted global collective action on gender inequality. The least policymakers could do would be to achieve and maintain leadership that realises human rights for all in WASH provision, a substantial rationale for which has to be a big- ticket focus on the social and economic empowerment of women and girls.

Any other direction would be disastrous, enabling patriarchy and misogyny to grow even deeper roots in global society.

Professor Lyla Mehta is a Professorial Fellow at IDS and a Visiting Professor at Noragric, the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. She trained as a sociologist (University of Vienna) and has a PhD in Development Studies (University of Sussex).

Dr. Alan Nicol is the Strategic Program Leader – Promoting Sustainable Growth, at the International Water Management Institute (IWMI)

IPS UN Bureau

 

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/ Répression, Prison, Justice - Droits humains / Répression, Prison, Justice

Caf executive committee member Augustin Senghor says the decision to strip Senegal of the 2025 Afcon title is "unacceptable, abject and we have to denounce it".

Lee Jae-myung’s ascent—from factory floors to South Korea’s presidency, carried aloft by the Democratic Party—has been marketed as a parable of grit, resilience, and populist authenticity. Yet governing under a shadow of unresolved criminal allegations, Lee now presides over a far starker transformation: the long-term degradation of democratic restraint through the consolidation of coercive state power. Even where convictions were overturned or cases remain pending, the scandals themselves—Daejang-district profiteering, politically convenient rezoning deals, and illicit remittances linked to North Korea—continue to cling like exhaust fumes that never quite dissipate. Under the banner of “reform,” the prosecutorial system was dismantled and replaced by a swollen police apparatus that concentrates authority over major crimes, intelligence gathering, and institutional oversight units—an architecture that trades legal contestation for administrative command. Revived police intelligence units, cosmetically rebranded but structurally familiar, resurrected the habits of political surveillance without restoring the external checks that once constrained them. This is not the democratization of justice so much as a classically illiberal power swap: authority shifted from a visible, litigable institution to a sprawling police bureaucracy insulated by discretion and scale. In the long run, such hypertrophy corrodes democratic development itself, normalizing surveillance as governance and substituting managerial control for popular accountability. South Korea’s old prosecutorial monopoly has been exchanged for a mega-police—accountable upward, politicized downward—an arrangement not merely convenient for a presidency under a permanent cloud, but actively hostile to the patient, adversarial checks on which durable democracy depends.

Lee Jae-myung holds four confirmed prior convictions—all resulting in fines—that together sketch an early and revealing pattern of ethically dubious, ends-justify-means conduct. In the early 2000s, he impersonated a prosecutor in order to secretly record and intimidate the mayor of Seongnam City during a corruption investigation; when confronted, he escalated by filing false charges, ultimately earning convictions for simulating public authority and perjury, compounded by violating a confidentiality pledge when he publicized the recording. Earlier still, as a political activist in the 1990s, Lee led a violent occupation of the Seongnam City Council over an ordinance dispute, obstructing official proceedings and physically injuring three councilors—injuries lasting two to three weeks—for which he was fined five million won. These pre-office episodes—abuse of authority, betrayal of trust, and willingness to deploy physical coercion—take on added significance when viewed alongside unresolved mega-cases rooted in municipal governance: the Daejang-dong public–private development project in Seongnam City (roughly $375 million in public losses tied to preferential treatment for private developers, with close aides already convicted), the Baekhyeon-dong rezoning scandal involving alleged breach of trust and illicit lobbying, accusations of embezzlement through Gyeonggi Province funds, and approximately $8 million in illegal remittances to North Korea. The absence of jail time and the lack of post-inauguration verdicts as of February 2026 have not softened these critiques; they have sharpened them, reinforcing the view that Lee is a serial opportunist whose early methods have merely scaled up alongside his power.

From Criminal Exposure to Police Expansion, South Korea Moves Toward a Surveillance State

It is within this context—not abstraction—that Lee’s signature institutional project must be judged. Branded as “prosecutorial reform,” his government did not merely curb an overmighty legal caste. It dismantled the prosecutorial system altogether, formally abolishing prosecutors’ investigative authority by October 2026 and transferring its core functions to the police. What replaced the so-called “prosecutor republic” was not a diffusion of power, but its consolidation—this time in uniform.

The centerpiece of this shift is the Heavy Crime Investigation Headquarters (hereafter Jungsubon). By 2026, Jungsubon had expanded to more than 6,400 officers, absorbing over 1,600 new hires in a single year. Its jurisdiction now spans the “nine major crimes”: corruption, economic crime, public officials, elections, defense, disasters, drugs, national security, and cybercrime—virtually the entire domain once monopolized by prosecutors. Budgets and manpower increased by roughly 30 percent in tandem, while oversight mechanisms lagged behind. The police, unlike prosecutors, operate without an external indictment authority or a genuinely independent supervisory body. Power moved laterally, not downward.

The internal dynamics of this expansion are equally revealing. In 2026 alone, 1,214 officers were reassigned from riot control units into Jungsubon divisions focused on phishing, narcotics, and financial crime. Applications for detective posts surged by 2.2 times amid public hype surrounding the new elite investigative corps. Career advancement within the police has been recalibrated around centralized investigation and intelligence work, embedding surveillance-oriented policing at the apex of institutional ambition. This was not accidental. It was design.

The resurrection of the police Information Division completes the picture. Officially abolished in 2024 after decades of criticism over political surveillance, the division returned quietly but extensively: 1,424 officers redeployed across 198 police stations nationwide. The stated rationale was operational failure—intelligence lapses exposed by a high-profile kidnapping case in Cambodia. Yet the response was not narrow correction but wholesale revival. To blunt public backlash, the units were rebranded as “Cooperation Officers,” a cosmetic fix meant to sanitize a historically toxic function. Interior Ministry assurances that there would be “no spying” were paired with a telling caveat: oversight would remain internal.

What emerges from these reforms is not democratized law enforcement but a fused apparatus of investigation, intelligence, and enforcement—a “mega-police” state. Authority now flows through Police Review Boards and the National Police Commission, bodies structurally tethered to the executive. The old prosecutorial monopoly has been replaced by something more opaque: a police force that gathers intelligence, controls investigations, and reviews itself, all within a single bureaucratic ecosystem.

Defenders argue that this merely ends prosecutorial abuse. But the cure may be worse than the disease. Prosecutors, for all their pathologies, were constrained by courts, adversarial procedure, and public visibility. Police power, by contrast, is front-loaded with surveillance—communications metadata, financial tracking, informant networks, digital monitoring. When such tools are deployed at scale across elections, corruption, and national security, the boundary between crime control and political management erodes rapidly.

The danger here is structural, not conspiratorial. Under a presidency burdened by ongoing legal exposure, the incentives for politicized enforcement need not be explicit. Anticipatory compliance—investigators intuiting the preferences of those who control budgets, promotions, and jurisdiction—does the work quietly. Abuse does not require orders; it emerges organically.

South Korea did not slide into a surveillance state through tanks in the streets. It arrived there through reform bills, staffing tables, and administrative fixes to elite crisis. In dismantling one illiberal institution, Lee Jae-myung’s government constructed another—larger, less transparent, and harder to challenge. What he governs today is not merely a country under a cloud, but a security architecture optimized for governing under one.

AMENDMENTS 1 - 305 - Draft report 2025 Commission report on Albania
Committee on Foreign Affairs
Andreas Schieder

Source : © European Union, 2026 - EP

AMENDMENTS 1 - 305 - Draft report 2025 Commission report on Albania
Committee on Foreign Affairs
Andreas Schieder

Source : © European Union, 2026 - EP

La décision du jury d'appel de la Confédération africaine de football (CAF) de réattribuer la Coupe d'Afrique des nations au Maroc provoque une avalanche de réactions, à commencer par celle du Sénégal qui annonce un recours devant le Tribunal arbitral du sport et réclame une enquête internationale pour corruption. Un coup dur pour le foot africain ? On va plus loin avec Zyad Limam, Florent Rodo et Hervé Kouamouo, journaliste spécialiste de football africain. 

ÄNDERUNGSANTRÄGE 1 - 163 - Entwurf eines Berichts Empfehlung an den Rat, die Kommission und die Vizepräsidentin der Kommission/Hohe Vertreterin der Union für Außen- und Sicherheitspolitik zu der Förderung der transnationalen Governance im Bereich Wasser im Interesse der Konfliktverhütung und des Friedens
Ausschuss für auswärtige Angelegenheiten
Leoluca Orlando

Quelle : © Europäische Union, 2026 - EP

Le milliardaire français va être renvoyé devant le tribunal en décembre prochain pour des accusations de corruption d'agent public au Togo. Le groupe Bolloré est soupçonné d'avoir bénéficié d'avantages en échange de prestations sous-évaluées pour la campagne du président togolais Faure Gnassingbé en 2010.

ÄNDERUNGSANTRÄGE 196 - 633 - Entwurf eines Berichts Bekämpfung transnationaler Repression – Eine EU-Strategie für den Schutz der Souveränität und der demokratischen Werte Europas
Ausschuss für auswärtige Angelegenheiten
Hannah Neumann

Quelle : © Europäische Union, 2026 - EP

As Russia exports record levels of crude oil through its so-called “Shadow Fleet,” consisting of poorly insured, improperly maintained, ships and operating in violation of international maritime law. As a result, security concerns in the Baltic Sea are rising. Could the fleet be restricted—or even blocked—from operating there?