At the top of the show, Mohamed Elmaazi, journalist and contributor to numerous outlets including Jacobin, The Canary, The Grayzone and The Dissenter joins the show to talk about the Senate GOP opposition to reviving the Iran Nuclear Agreement. And, they talk about the British Supreme Court yesterday refusing to hear Julian Assange’s appeal of an appeals court’s decision to allow his extradition to the United States. The decision is expected to be affirmed by the Home Secretary, which will then, technically, set the extradition in motion. There is one final step for Julian, he can still appeal the extradition to the European Court of Human Rights.
Then, Garett Rappenhagen, Director of Veterans for Peace joined the conversation to talk about numerous unexplained deaths at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Over the past few months, some reporters have taken notice of what appears to be an unusual number of violent or unexplained deaths among active duty soldiers there. Rolling Stone reported a few months ago that 83 active-duty soldiers stationed at Fort Bragg died in the 18 months ending June 2021. Eleven of those deaths were due to “natural causes,” but for 33 of those deaths the causes were “undetermined.”
Next on the program, Daniel Lazare, writer and journalist, joins the conversation to talk about the latest on the Iran nuclear agreement. Even if the US and Iran were to come to an agreement, there’s a good chance that the Senate would reject it. Do relations between the two countries go back to square one? Then they talk about the White House meeting with TikTok influencers. I’m sure there won’t be any tag on their content saying that it came from White House talking points. A lot of what the White House put out there were economic talking points. It seems the TikTok meeting was meant more to influence people to vote Democratic in the coming midterm elections than it is to influence the debate on Ukraine according to Lazare.
For the last segment, Nii Akuetteh, is a Ghanaian born policy analyst and activist. He is the founder of the Democracy & Conflict Research Institute based in Accra, Ghana joins the show to talk about a recent Wall Street Journal article about the mining of cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The story recently highlighted what could herald a change in the way mining is done, at least in the DRC. It notes that for more than a decade, Chinese companies have been buying out American and European miners in the DRC’s cobalt belt. Now a court has accused one of China’s biggest players there of underestimating one mine’s reserves and therefore cheating Congo out of millions of dollars of royalty payments. Akuetteh confirms that the Congo has been cheated out of royalty payments for as long as cobalt has been mined from the region.
The Misfits sign off for today.
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