* Drone Killings * Korea * Turkey * French Election

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ELLEN GRADY, demottgrady6 [at] gmail.com

Grady is part of the Ithaca, New York Catholic Worker movement, which has been a key part of organizing against the U.S. government killer drone assassinations program outside Hancock Air Force Base. Nine activists were arrested following a “Good Friday” action, which included activists being “crucified” on drones. See statement and pictures at UpstateDroneAction.org.

TIM SHORROCK, [currently in South Korea] timshorrock [at] gmail.com, @timothys
Shorrock just wrote the piece “In South Korea, War Hysteria Is Seen as an American Problem: The big issue here is the May 9 presidential election, which is expected to bring a progressive to power” for The Nation. Shorrock is spending April and May working at Gwangju’s 5.18 Archives to integrate his collection of declassified U.S.-government documents on Korea into the archive’s collection of materials on the 1980 Gwangju Uprising. In 2015, he was named an honorary citizen of Gwangju for his reporting on the U.S. role in Korea during the uprising.

CHRISTINE HONG, cjhong [at] ucsc.edu
Hong is a professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz. She debunks the idea that the Obama administration had a policy of “strategic patience” toward North Korea, noting that it launched cyber attacks and had massive military exercises targeting North Korea. See her interview, along with Korea scholar Bruce Cummings, on “Democracy Now.”

KANI XULAM, kani [at] kurdistan.org, @AKINinfo
Xulam is director of the American Kurdish Information Network. Many are decrying Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s increasing power following a referendum this weekend granting the presidency more power. Xulam has warned for years about the militarism and increasing authoritarianism from Erdogan. See news release from earlier this year: “Tillerson Praises Increasingly Authoritarian Turkey.”

JEAN BRICMONT, [in France] jean.bricmont [at] uclouvain.be, @JeanBricmont
The first round of the 2017 French presidential election is set to be held on April 23. Bricmont is author of Humanitarian Imperialism: Using Human Rights to Sell War. He is also a mathematical and statistical physicist at the University of Louvain, and the co-author of Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science.