It’s time for our weekly segment The Week in Review, where we’ll talk about the week in politics, policy, and international affairs. This week we talk about a big roundup of the Democratic debates this week on subjects like criminal justice, nuclear proliferation, and immigration; the new tariffs on China; and the new economic warfare against Iran.
The Syrian government has agreed to a truce and a ceasefire in the war-torn northwestern region of Idlib, on the condition that a Turkish-Russian buffer zone is implemented. The announcement yesterday followed weeks of heavy government bombardment, and came as talks resumed in Kazakhstan between Turkey, which backs the Syrian rebels, and government supporters Russia and Iran. Ambassador Peter Ford, the former UK Ambassador to Syria, joins the show.
In a series of tweets yesterday, President Trump announced another round of tariffs on $300 billion worth of Chinese goods that had not already been targeted. The Chinese government immediately announced retaliatory countermeasures. And stock markets around the world fell on the news. Brian and John speak with David Ewing, the chair of the San Francisco chapter of the US-China People’s Friendship Association.
From late 1918 through the summer of 1919, African-American soldiers returned to the United States from duty during World War I. They had fought and served valiantly, and they were anxious to get back to their families and their lives. What they returned to instead was violence, racism, and Jim Crow. And all of that culminated in the summer of 1919 in a series of riots across American. It was called Red Summer and it electrified the movement against racism in the country. Officially, 150 people were killed, almost all of them black. But the Arkansas State Archives says that 200 African-Americans were killed in that state alone. Dr. Gerald Horne, a professor of history at the University of Houston and the author of many books, including his most recent “Jazz and Justice: Racism and the Political Economy of the Music” newly available from Monthly Review Press, joins the show.
It’s Friday! So it’s time for the week’s worst and most misleading headlines. Brian and John speak with Steve Patt, an independent journalist whose critiques of the mainstream media have been a feature of his site Left I on the News and on twitter @leftiblog, and Sputnik producer Nicole Roussell.
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