Welcome. This is James Corbett of the Corbett report with your Sunday update from the Center for

Research on Globalization at global research.CA for the 17th day of July 2011.

And now for the real news.

The world welcomed a new nation to the international community last week as South Sudan officially became its own country.

Obtaining independence from Sudan on July 9th, the Republic of South Sudan became the 193rd member state of the United Nations in a general assembly vote earlier this week

and Africa's first new country since Eritrea became an independent state in 1993.

So far coverage of the story in the Western establishment media has unproblematically portrayed the creation of South Sudan as the hard-won fruit of a valiant and spontaneous liberation movement among the southern, mainly Christian and animist population, who have been engaged in a decades long struggle against the mostly Arab North, where embattled President Omar al-Bashir has been broadly criticized for his rule.

He was indicted last year by the International Criminal Court for genocide in the Darfur region.

However, critics and independent journalists note that Sudan has long been the victim of outside

interference by Western powers with financial interests in the vast resource wealth of the region.

They allege that mainstream Western press about South Sudan has gone out of its way to find human interest angles in the story that are conspicuously free of historical context or geopolitical analysis.

Britain's telegraph newspaper ran a story on Tuesday,

noting that South Sudan will be able to take part in the London 2012 Olympics

but face a race against time to do so under their own flag.

The Daily Star Out of Lebanon ran an entire article devoted to how a wildlife preserve hopes

to attract more tourists now that the South is its own country.

The Washington Times posted a feature story about Chicago Bulls Forward Luoldeng, traveling

to South Sudan to host the country's first post-independence basketball clinic.

The New York Times ran a lengthy report about South Sudan's independence celebrations,

providing great detail about the festivities, the personal experiences of random Sudanese, and a lengthy list of the foreign dignitaries in attendance.

But as independent journalist Russ Baker notes in an essay criticizing such reporting, the Times does not even mention the question of South Sudan's

primary resource until the 24th paragraph of their article when they note,

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