• Listen to this segment with Courtney Morris

Uprising’s guest expert Courtney Morris, an assistant professor of African American and women’s Studies at Penn State University, analyzes today’s news headlines:

In what could turn out to be a major embarrassment for the US in its war against Islamic State rebels, a weapons airdrop to Kurdish fighters seems to have gone missing. And ISIS claims it has the weapons. Although the US has admitted that one of its airdrops was unaccounted for, it has not yet confirmed that an ISIS video claiming to show the captured weapons, are indeed the missing ones. Meanwhile, the United Nations has declared that ISIS actions against the Yazidi ethnic group in Iraq, carried out this summer may have amounted to genocide. Reports of horrific brutality, sexual assault and mass killings point to an effort aimed at eradicating Yazidi people altogether. And, lest we forget US brutality in Iraq, a federal judge has just issued a new deadline for the Obama Administration to explain why it refuses to release photos showing the torture and abuse of Iraqi detainees at the hands of US forces. Many have defended the secrecy saying the photos, if released, would play right into the hands of ISIS. Click here for a Guardian newspaper article about the missing weapons, here for an Al Jazeera article about the UN report on Yazidis, and here for a Commondreams article about Abu Ghraib photos.

The St. Louis Dispatch has just released an analysis of the official county autopsy of 18 year old Michael Brown’s body. Brown was fatally shot by officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson this summer, prompting the largest anti-police brutality protests in recent years. The newspaper’s analysis claims that Brown was shot at close range and may have been reaching for Wilson’s gun, refuting eye-witness reports that Brown had his hands up in the air. The analysis also stands in contrast to a preliminary autopsy conducted soon after the shooting which found no gunpowder on the body and concluded that shots were not fired at close range. Meanwhile, Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon has convened a special panel, to “conduct a thorough, wide-ranging and unflinching study of the underlying social and economic conditions” in Ferguson. Click here for a Washington Post article about the autopsy report, and here for a Guardian newspaper article about the Ferguson commission.

And finally, in Mexico the government’s human rights commission has just issued a scathing report of a gruesome incident at a warehouse in the Southern part of the country last year, concluding that as many as 12-15 people may have been killed by so-called rogue soldiers. The victims were alleged to be suspected gang members. The incident was apparently covered up by local authorities and military personnel. The report comes just weeks after a number of students in the southern state of Guerrero went missing and are suspected to have been killed and buried in mass graves. Click here for a Guardian newspaper article about the story.