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Walter Rodney and the Racial Underpinnings of Global Inequality

Tianna Paschel Items
While inequality has become a topic of increased popularity and politicization in recent years, most of the attention has focused on how 1% own an increasingly large share of the world’s wealth, rather than on inequalities between nations. In a global context in which national borders and citizenship pose few barriers to the mobility of capital, the reality is also a story of the world’s richest nations continuing to reap a disproportionate amount of the globe’s profits.

What Percent Virus Are You?

Hannah Moots FiveThirtyEight
With advances in genome sequencing and computational tools to analyze genomic information, researchers are able to estimate that about 8 percent of the human genome is made of sequences that originated as invasive retroviruses. To put that number in perspective, genes make up about 1 percent to 1.5 percent of your genome.

Following Negotiations, No Rockettes Will Be Required to Perform at Inauguration

Maggie Penman NPR
After a stern message to the dancers from their own union, the American Guild of Variety Artists, reminding them of the terms of their contracts and that refusal to perform at Trump's inauguration could result in termination, both the employer and the union have issued new statements. However, the AGVA emphasized the original compulsory contract terms by saying the there was no room for politics in the workplace.

Where Have All the Lobbyists Gone?

Lee Fang The Nation
On paper, the influence-peddling business is drying up. But lobbying money is flooding Washington, DC like never before. What’s going on?

Benefit Cuts Pushed People Out of the Work Force in NC

John Quinterno and Dean Baker News & Observer
If the point of cutting unemployment insurance compensation was to get people back to work and spark job growth, North Carolina’s policy choice appears, at first glance, to be a failure. If the point was to push people out of the labor force, it appears to be working.

U.S. Adopts Israeli Demand to Bring Iran’s Missiles into Nuclear Talks

Gareth Porter Inter Press Service
Under Secretary of State Sherman also suggested at one point that there would be no real need to prohibit any Iranian missile if the negotiations on the nuclear programme were successful. “Not having a nuclear weapon,” she said, “makes delivery systems almost — not wholly, but almost — irrelevant.” That admission underlined the wholly political purpose of the administration’s apparent embrace of the Israeli demand that Iran negotiate limits on its ballistic missiles.

Neocons and the Ukraine Coup

Robert Parry Consortium News
American neocons helped destabilize Ukraine and engineer the overthrow of its elected government, a “regime change” on Russia’s western border. But the coup – and the neo-Nazi militias at the forefront – also reveal divisions within the Obama administration, reports Robert Parry.