Sometimes a fire is just an unfortunate accident. And sometimes it’s arson with malice aforethought–like the hundreds of slum fires around the world for purposes of gentrification. This fire at one of Myanmar’s eight concentration camps for Rohingya Muslims is likely akin to the latter kind, even though officials are suggesting it was started by an unattended kitchen stove & spread by wind.

At least 440 bamboo huts were destroyed, 2,000 made homeless, 14 people have been reported injured so far & there are unconfirmed fatalities.

Emancipation, US-style: these women in Kandahar, Afghanistan are receiving aid from a Muslim charity because, according to the caption, “Afghans are experiencing a food crisis despite a good grain harvest last year.”

See what happens when you send in US Marines to liberate women! Fifteen years of US-style emancipation & thousands of families are begging for food. Couldn’t the Pentagon’s salvation army truck in mountains of food from overstuffed supermarkets in the US?

Afghanistan may have had a bumper crop of grains but probably nothing compared to the size & acreage of its poppy crops which US military are busy guarding & CIA transport planes are busy flying out of the country for processing. Who has time for a little matter like food?

Smarmy Cruz is gone in a blaze of flatulence, promising to maintain the fight for “Judeo-Christian values” in the US. His defeat might be the one thing lesser evil politics has done right this campaign.

Leftists flocked to study groups to unravel the gibberish of Slovaj Zizek who calls himself a Marxist philosopher. Then he began ranting quite lucidly against refugees in the most racist, Islamophobic, & xenophobic terms. He was preferable when he was incomprehensible or when he philosophically evaluated toilets.

Pepe Escobar is a journalist many leftists look to for analysis of politics in the Middle East & Latin America. His analyses are more libertarian or undisciplined impressionism though not without interest. Except when it comes to Islamophobia.

When I brought home the Pit Bull, just over a week ago, she had recently given birth & was disoriented & demoralized. She was so sweet & grateful but I had my reservations about the Pit breed so notorious, right or wrong, for unprovoked violence–especially because my little ones were afraid so would surround her & get in her face barking.

An animal rescue fellow paid for a vet for her & when I expressed my reservations to the doc, he gave me a tutorial about Pits. He & his technician both insisted of all the breeds, Pits were the sweetest & most loyal & that of all the bites they’d sustained in many years of practice, only a couple were from them. This was so assuring & I completely trusted it. The only caveat was that I left her outside while the birds were about because she went out of control to get at them. She was inside at night, outside all day.

From the use of martial power, you’d think these Parisian gendarmes had nabbed a serious felon. But it turns out he’s a refugee in a makeshift camp under the Stalingrad metro station which is being dismantled for the third time in three months. He is being “evacuated.”

The story of the “evacuation” doesn’t quite add up. Reports say shortly after 6 am, most of the 500 Afghan & Sudanese refugees who had been staying in the squalid encampment (lacking basic necessities like toilets, food, medical assistance) began boarding chartered buses to take them to “reception” or “accommodation” centers. Police said about 1,350, mostly refugees from other encampments, had gathered to be re-located to the centers.

The disabled protesters who set out March 21st on crutches & in wheelchairs for a 234km/145 mi highway march to La Paz, the capital of Bolivia have arrived. They are demanding an increase in their state benefits from a paltry 1,000 boliviano (£102, $144) a year to 500 boliviano a month. In attempting to reach the National Palace where Bolivian president Evo Morales has his offices they were confronted with riot police blocking their way (shown in this photo), as happened the other times they made this protest trek.

A good share of the left have completely lost their bearings in evaluating the regimes that took over from the military juntas of the 1970s. It probably isn’t a coincidence that these oligarchic regimes transitioned from juntas to their liberal facade at a time when neoliberal economics began to be implemented. That’s something that needs to be investigated. But it was likely intended to make the transition to outright plunder of natural resources by multinational enterprises less confrontational.

Left analysts don’t see it that way. They crow about the dramatic reductions in poverty all over Latin America by regimes they consider left-wing & who they claim have rejected neoliberal economic policies. One research institute claims over 60 million people in Latin American have been lifted out of poverty by these beneficent regimes; according to the UN they have cut poverty almost in half in Latin America. Brazil under Dilma Rousseff is a showcase for them–which is why they denounce the protests against her neoliberal policies as rightwing.

According to reports, Bolivia under Evo Morales, who became president in 2005, successfully reduced its dependence on the IMF & World Bank for bail out loans & with deft economic policies was charting an innovative & independent course–some kind of sui generis formation that could short circuit the inherent inequalities of capitalism–a capitalism but not capitalism.

Maybe that kind of independence isn’t working out so well–more likely it’s completely phony–since last February Bolivia took a $200 million loan from the World Bank which it is still repaying for old loans. The new loan is for disaster & climate risk management & isn’t that admirable. But if they weren’t still paying back old World Bank loans, they’d have more than enough money to pay decent social security benefits to disabled workers.

There is no evidence of poverty reduction in Latin America that means a damn thing. The overwhelming evidence is for increasing poverty, child labor, homelessness, slum growth; neoliberal economics that slash social services, education, health care & expropriate indigenous peoples for multinational mining & agribusiness enterprises. That includes in Bolivia & Brazil.

Evil fairies from outer space bombing in Syria & good fairies in Latin America magically transforming the inherent inequalities of capitalism into utopia! Such is the regrettable state of political analysis coming from the left today.

(Photo is disabled protesters battling riot police in La Paz by Juan Karita/AP)

From the FB wall of Khurram Parvez, human rights activist in Kashmir:

DAY 22…
The Handwara minor girl & her family members today at 8 a.m again were prevented by the JK Police team led by Masroor Ahmad at Zachaldara while they were trying to leave for Srinagar. Still the Police & apologists of the State would want us to believe that the minor girl is under protection & not detention.

If you were asked to characterize media reporting on the struggles of Palestinians against Israel & Kashmiris against India, it would be incoherence. From media reports, you cannot tell what in the Sam Hill is going on if you don’t spend some time studying other sources. People get so confused they begin to think the solutions to these conflicts are as intractable as the coverage in impenetrable. That’s the entire point of such reporting: to render things stupid.

They’re not writing a book when they caption a photo but they shouldn’t try to pack so many confusions & irrelevancies into a few sentences. The caption to this photo read: “A Kashmiri-masked Muslim protester jumps in the air to avoid stones thrown at him by Indian police during a protest in Srinagar, Indian-controlled Kashmir, April 29, 2016. Government forces fired tear gas & pellet guns to stop rock-throwing Kashmiri youth after Friday prayers. The demonstrators were responding to a protest call by anti-India separatist leaders against what they said was government’s failure to arrest the troops involved in the recent killing of five civilians following an alleged molestation of a teenage girl student by an Indian soldier.