US President Donald Trump retweeted three videos Wednesday morning that were posted by Jayda Fransen, the deputy leader of Britain First, a fascist outfit that has specialized in such activities as “mosque invasions” and “Christian patrols” in urban areas with large Muslim populations. Trump’s latest tweeting is an escalation of a political strategy aimed at inciting and encouraging far-right forces.[Read More…]
A few days before the Halloween hearings held by the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism, where powerful tech companies would provide testimony about their roles disseminating “fake news” during the 2016 election, Twitter announced it would no longer accept advertising from the Russian government-sponsored broadcast channel Russia Today (RT), or the state-owned Sputnik. In a Twitter PublicPolicy blog post (10/26/17), the company said it would “off-board advertising[Read More…]
On November 18, just days before the 50th anniversary of United Nations Resolution 242, the US State Department took its first step towards severing its ties with the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). The timing of this decision could not be any more profound. The first formal contact between the US and the PLO occurred in mid-December, 1988, when US Ambassador[Read More…]
Apartheid Israel is intimately involved in Aung San Suu Kyi-led Myanmar’s Rohingya Genocide through supply of advanced gunboats and armaments as well as military training to genocidal Burmese forces in Rakhine state. Palestinian Genocide–imposing Apartheid Israel has similarly been involved in the Maya Indian Genocide in Guatemala, Sri Lankan Tamil Genocide, South Sudan Civil War, Syrian Genocide, Iraqi Genocide,[Read More…]
Ahwazi Arab activists incarcerated in Iran’s infamous prisons are facing all forms of torture, persecution, and oppression at the hands of prison staff in punishment for supporting freedom, according to reports smuggled out. The Iranian regime has been launching crackdowns even more brutal than usual against activists in the region and across Iran, fearing an uprising, with the people[Read More…]
Several years ago in Cameroon, a country in West Africa, a Western Black Rhinoceros was killed. It was the last of its kind on Earth. Hence, the Western Black Rhinoceros, the largest subspecies of rhinoceros which had lived for millions of years and was the second largest land mammal on Earth, no longer exists. But while you have probably[Read More…]
Theatre, hysterics, denunciations. No tight, orderly and sterile space could ever entirely contain those dark characters with lengthy butcher’s bills and blood soaked attributes. Screams accompanied accusations; words to make all blush were shouted at witnesses, lawyers and judges. In the sanguinary mess of attack, counter-attack and retribution, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia was meant to rise,[Read More…]
(Recalling youth from violence through confidence building measures is good but the question is why did the youth take to violence in the first place?) The Chief Minister has announced amnesty for the first time stone pelters. The cases against these would be reviewed and withdrawn. The initiative is supposed to have been taken on the advice of the new[Read More…]
Narendra Modi rode the wave of ‘Gujarat Model of development’ in 2014 to catapult himself to the most powerful office in India. The social media campaign, most probably waged with the help of Madison Avenue agencies, that heralded the State’s economic performance nothing short of spectacular and credited its success to the visionary leadership of Narendra Modi started years[Read More…]
It is the reflection of level of democracy in India that we are reducing to the level whether somebody is wearing a Janeu ( sacred thread) or not. The sacred thread which the brahmanical leadership of this country if proud of flaunting today is nothing but a mischief by the priestly class. Though it is the fundamental right of[Read More…]
Mahatma Jotirao Phule was born into a lower caste Mali family in a Brahmin hegemonic society, about a decade after the British defeated the Peshwas in 1818. This may explain his lifelong resistance to caste and gender hierarchy, which was fuelled and given shape by his exposure to Western radical literature and missionary writings and his involvement in contemporary Indian[Read More…]
India’s apex court has – thankfully – put an interim break to the brouhaha over the much-publicized Hadiya conversion-and-marriage case. Whatever will be the final verdict in this case to be pronounced by the Supreme Court, there is one section, the key benefactor, that is rejoicing with a perverse pleasure from the rooftop. It is the Sangh Parivar, for[Read More…]
Akhil Gogoi, the leader of Krishak Mukti Sangram Samiti of Asom, and Chandrasekhar of Bhim Sena in Western Uttar Pradesh have been under detention for many months now. Akhil was arrested on 13 September under sedition charges by the BJP government of the state. On 25 September a total of 122 cases against him were clubbed together under the National[Read More…]
29 November 2017, New Delhi: Since Monday (27 November) the state government of Assam has launched an all-out offensive against indigenous communities and people’s movement Krishak Mukti Sangram Samiti. No one can deny Assam state governments openly Hindutva character as the root cause of this repression of muslims and Mising, Karbi, Rabha, Dimasa, Bodo, Koch, Kalita, Ahom and other indigenous[Read More…]
North Korea test fired a long-range missile today that appears to have the range to potentially hit most parts of continental United States, including its capital Washington DC. The test took place amid high tensions on the Korean Peninsula stoked by the Trump administration’s threats to use military force to destroy North Korea’s nuclear and missile facilities. North Korea fired[Read More…]
By Andre Vltchek and Mira Lubis From Indonesian Borneo (Kalimantan): She was just standing there, in the middle of burning land, surrounded by stumps of trees, fire everywhere, smoke rising towards hopelessly gray sky. The expression on her face was mischievous, almost girlish. I had no idea how old she was: she could have been 28, just as she couldeasily[Read More…]
Billionaires, both liberal and conservative ones, own, and their corporations advertise in and their ‘charities’ donate to, America’s mainstream (and also many ‘alternative news’) media. They do this not so as to profit directly from the national ‘news’media (a money-losing business, in itself), but so as to control the ’news’ that the voting public (right and left) are exposed[Read More…]
Few could have colonised a role as comprehensively as David Suchet playing Hercule Poirot, that pedantic, fastidious figure of sleuthing fame created by Agatha Christie. Manner, affectation, and delivery all seemed immaculate, read, and even delightful. Invariably, this sort of thespian appropriation and adaptation creates its hordes of admirers, zealots who refuse to accept rivals, pretenders, or usurpers. Kenneth Branagh,[Read More…]
Israel, the USA, and Saudi Arabia are doing everything to lay the foundations for war against Iran. That is why Iran and its people must be demonized and dehumanized. The Israeli governments have been doing this since the Shah of Iran was overthrown by the Iranian people. In general, all Sunni Muslim countries get along very well with Iran, except[Read More…]
“What do they talk about these days at Parent Teacher Association meetings?” — Question asked by one of the author’s home schooled youngsters. Cobalt is such a health hazard that it has a respiratory disease named after it – cobalt lung, a form of pneumonia which causes coughing and leads to permanent incapacity and even death. Even simply eating vegetables[Read More…]
I had long left watching the PR agents on the TV studios discussing nationalism or pushing the particular agendas of their political parties. It is over 5 years that I stopped buying newspapers or magazines. I do go through the news through my twitter handle as well as some other forwarded material but that too I am quite selective. In[Read More…]
V.R. Krishna Iyer (J) has rightly observed : “In our world prisons are still laboratories of torture, warehouses in which human commodities are sadistically kept and where spectrums of inmates range from drift-wood juveniles to heroic dissenters. It is established that conviction for a crime does not reduce the person into a non-person, so he is entitled to all the[Read More…]
An antibody is a protein produced by the body’s immune system when it detects harmful substances, called antigens (bacteria, fungi, parasites, and viruses) and chemicals. Many of us conceive of nature as a boundless resource to be exploited without any consequence. But, the natural world is vulnerable and our natural resources are precious and finite. Changing climates are[Read More…]
“Once a submariner, always a submariner.” Douglas Renken, Canadian submariner, CBC, Nov 26, 2017 A certain type of grief and moroseness accompanies deaths at sea. Not being naturally adapted to living in water, humankind has braved the aqueous environment, seeking to conquer it and tame its residents. At sea, the great battles of mythology are waged, its stories echoed in[Read More…]
Once again, the Arab League woke up from its deep slumber on November 19th 2017. The League was in a deep paralyzing sleep despite the urgent need for its duties to deal and to solve the issues inflicting the Arab World such as the threat of the terrorist groups, the Zionist Israeli brute oppression of Palestinian Arabs and the[Read More…]
The barbaric attack that killed 305 worshippers including 27 children during Friday prayers ( 24 November 2017) at the Rawda mosque in North Sinai, Egypt is a tragic reminder to the entire human family that the threat of terrorism is as deadly as ever. Though no one has formally claimed responsibility, it is reported that some of the terrorists carriedDaesh[Read More…]
Russia’s tsar regent Boris Godunov exiled, as punishment, a 300-kilogram copper bell to the Siberian town of Tobolsk, in the east, from Uglich in 1591. The exiled bell had to cover a distance of 2,200 kilometers. The bell’s crime: to the tsar regent, the bell appeared as a symbol of political unity of the rebel residents of Uglich. The bell,[Read More…]
Are such designations ever useful? At the stroke of a pen, an entire state is designated “terrorist” or a seemingly milder sponsor of terrorism, its name finding a way onto a list of supposed unmentionables and moral inverts. Obscure groups and more notable countries huddle together, supposedly sharing some disreputable common ground and we are none the wiser on the[Read More…]
While I happened to be researching another subject, a central question in the investigation came to be how Iran — which supplied none of the 9/11 terrorists and no financing to them and no organizing of them, and which hasn’t been connected with nearly as many terrorist incidents globally as Saudi Arabia has — came to be officially called[Read More…]
“Are we supposed to kill women and children?” “Kill everything that moves.” (2) In Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (Metropolitan Books. New York. 2013), Turse writes that the US military’s official position, and the popular understanding in the US, is that leadership “has never condoned wanton killing or disregard for human life.” (2) On the rare occasions[Read More…]
“We are such stuff As dreams are made on; and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.” — from The Tempest In Shakespeare’s The Tempest, it is characteristic of Prospero that he has learned to view political life in light of the transitoriness of human achievement in general. Though his initial error was to neglect political life entirely, he[Read More…]
“The big kahunas of business are to be blamed, but the finger-pointers have to be held accountable too.” — Rachel Oxman A recent Gizmodo article focuses mainly on worker horror related to the business practices of Amazon and shocking revelations respecting lack of legislation, but there’s lots more to focus on in reviewing the Amazon phenomenon, which accounts for[Read More…]
Prefatory Note Demonetisation is, beyond doubt, the most talked of action taken by the incumbent NarendraModi regime, as yet, which came to be in place in May 20141, just over three and a half years back replacing the UPA regime, with the Congress at the head, soundly defeating it in the national poll held a while earlier.2, 3, 4 One[Read More…]
The UP CM Adityanath says criminals will be killed, that no power in the world can stop building of a temple at Ayodhya even though there is an established judicial process to try and sentence criminals and the Ram temple issue is sub-judice. Aadhar is being forced down the throats of citizens despite SC orders to the contrary. The RSS[Read More…]
Assamese media has been time and again criticized for sidelining media ethics while reporting. In a latest case, they have continued with such behavior. A month back a meeting was held in Delhi to discuss some important issues related to Assam. The updating of National Register of Citizens and the persisting delay in the process was to be discussed. Some[Read More…]
India in the past few years has seen ‘self-styled’ cultural soldiers out there to defend the culture of India. They may operate in many names ‘Ram Sena’, ‘Hindu Sena’ or ‘Karni Sena’. Their stated aim is to protect ‘culture’, ‘morality’ from the negative cultural influences of the west or other religions. This they seek to undertake in the name of[Read More…]
One of the most challenging problems of our times is homelessness. While we continue to record improvements in dealing with poverty, homelessness has been plagued with an unimaginative response from policy pundits.The apathetic approach of successive governments is symptomatic of the disease that ails India’s housing system. Housing is often the bedrock of other development interventions: owning land boosts health[Read More…]
Former Navy Chief Admiral L. Ramdas has requested that a “high level judicial inquiry” into “mysterious circumstances” of the death of Brijgopal Harkishan Loya, the Special CBI Judge presiding over the trial of BJP President Amit Shah and several Gujarat Police Officers in the Sohrabuddin fake encounter case. In a letter addressed to Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra, Admiral[Read More…]
In Pakistan Street protests have affected cities like Imamabad, and is spreading in other cities as well. About six persons have died and more than two hundred have been injured. PTI has reported that the police aided by paramilitary Rangers and Frontier Constabulary yesterday launched a massive operation against activists of Tehreek-i-Khatm-i-Nabuwwat, Tehreek-i-Labaik Ya Rasool Allah and Sunni Tehreek Pakistan[Read More…]
It was another etching in a chronicle of extended violence. For days, resistance by refugees and asylum seekers against forced removal from the Lombrom Naval Base on Manus Island had taken very public form. Images of defiance and distress were receiving international attention. With no electricity, with water supplies destroyed, things were getting dire. As the weekend dawned, PNG officials[Read More…]
The Australian Foreign Policy White paper was touted as a main course for consumers of policy, a document that revealed the inner workings of those creatures working for the Department of Trade and Foreign Affairs. Its temper is predictable, its prose wooden, the voice of a satrap trapped in the body of a sovereign. There were the traditional nods, the[Read More…]
“We should be clear about what it costs to bare one’s soul and make an authentic difference.” — one of the author’s home schooled youngsters I’ll be relocating to Lodi, California soon, the place that Credence Clearwater Revival “honored” back in the day when they made a fuss about getting stuck there… “again.” And — once again — I[Read More…]
Not all the water in the rough rude sea Can wash the balm from an anointed king. (King Richard, Act 3 Scene 2) The ability of scientists to not only record and analyze brain activity but also influence it is growing, and those in academic circles on all levels — I humbly and respectfully submit — are obliged to[Read More…]
(Dateline: Rome, Nov. 23, 2017) We should make no mistake about who commands in the European Union. Germany commands. For example: The “special Paris-Berlin relationship” makes headlines, but for Germany that relationship is nothing special. Not so for France. Traditional France is always in search of old glories while practical-pragmatic Berlin chooses Germany’s partners and the nature of their relationship. Germany[Read More…]
A new wave of dust storms has hit the cities of Ahwaz in the south and south west of the country, a phenomenon to which the Ahwazi people have become accustomed. Dust storms have become commonplace in throughout Ahwaz region. According to the IRNA news agency, hospitals and health centers in Ahwaz capital received more than 300 cases of[Read More…]
Small scale and massive resource fights are totally understandable while predictable. They’ve been transpiring for millennia because practically everything alive needs to steal energy, directly or indirectly, from something or someone else to continue to exist. This transfer of energy, usually, involves killing. Imagine this happening on the African plains, for instance. There a leopard trounces on a gazelle. Sometimes[Read More…]
The world we find ourselves in is complex and full of contradictions. It is easy to fall for rudimentary textbook propaganda based on simplistic dichotomies, such as ‘the good guys versus the bad guys’. If we are not aware of the complexities and nuances facing us, we can fall for this type of propaganda, whose sole aim is to keep[Read More…]
“Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today?” — Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot Arguably, the most haunting passage in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ classic novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, describes the army arriving to quell striking banana workers in the mythical town of[Read More…]
Private companies — i.e., Fox News, CBS, “New York Times,” Twitter,Facebook, etc. — can and will slant, shape and selectively share news, and other information in any perspective that their corporate management pleases. This has always been the case since the beginning of writing, talking and creating periodicals, and it’s not stopping now. noun. an employee whose allegiance to his[Read More…]
After one commissioner called the FCC’s newly-released plan to roll back net neutrality “worse than one could imagine,” a second commissioner is now calling voters to make sure the proposal by Republican Chairman Ajit Pai does not go through. In a Los Angeles Times op-ed published Thursday—entitled “I’m on the FCC. Please stop us from killing net neutrality“—Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel points to the overwhelming public support[Read More…]
The president embarked on his first foreign trip with a clear-eyed outlook that the world is not a “global community” but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage. We bring to this forum unmatched military, political, economic, cultural and moral strength. Rather than deny this elemental nature of international affairs, we embrace it….[Read More…]
Russian President Vladimir Putin has said his Iranian and Turkish counterparts have supported a proposal to hold a “Syrian people’s congress” that will bring together government and opposition figures. The Russian President on Wednesday (Nov 22) hosted Hassan Rouhani and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, just as some Syrian opposition groups met in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia’s capital, before United Nations-sponsored talks in Geneva.[Read More…]
In your heart of hearts, a heart-shaped mirror. Mirror of peace between wings of fire. In that living crucible—a gleam of blue light. Light is your soul: Angel of Life. Soul is as hard to follow as footsteps of God. Soul is as easy to affirm as trust. Soul is felt. She is shared. The same as when lovers share[Read More…]
”I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled …” —Jonathan Swift, 1729 (from “A Modest Proposal”) I am writing this on Thanksgiving eve. Tomorrow, like so many other fellow[Read More…]
With the end of British paramountcy on 15th August 1947 India’s towering leader, Jawaharlal Nehru, famously declared India’s ‘tryst with destiny’. What followed the aspirational beginning of a new India was light years away from Nehru’s democratic socialism or secularism . Hundreds & thousands of Muslim refugees were killed, if not with the consent of Nehru, but at least[Read More…]
Financial services are like clean water and electricity. They are made possible though ideal financial societies that provide safe and convenient ways of managing their everyday simple monetary affairs. This philosophy is known as financial inclusion. It includes providing affordable, safe and properly regulated financial tools to people. These tools enable them to save and to responsibly borrow—allowing them[Read More…]
Nazareth: Can anyone still doubt that access to a relatively free and open internet is rapidly coming to an end in the west? In China and other autocratic regimes, leaders have simply bent the internet to their will, censoring content that threatens their rule. But in the “democratic” west, it is being done differently. The state does not have[Read More…]
The Labour Party in the UK, which has a good chance of taking political power at the next election, has been involved in a process of policy development which involves taking up ideas from the commons movement and is focused around the revival of and protection of commons. In one week I have now been to three public events commemorating[Read More…]
While Zimbabwe was changing under various inexorable forces of power, the more sterile surrounds of The Hague and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia offered the scene for a conviction. The “Serb Warlord” or the “Butcher of Bosnia”, as he has been termed in various circles, had finally received a verdict few were doubting. One of the doubters[Read More…]
Gonna raise me an army, some tough sons of bitches I’ll recruit my army from the orphanages — Bob Dylan, Thunder on the Mountain The Southeast corridor of the U.S. — particularly, Georgia and Florida — have a higher per capita representation among the military than any other region. The South, in general, boasts 40% of the total number of military[Read More…]
Padmawati was all dressed up for the occasion- a red saree with an equally red blouse and a small ghunghat that carefully covered the charm of her dark face. A small nose ring which curved and curled into a nathuri stuck on to her right nostril. The two artificial garnets of her nathuri glittered in the sunlight. Three blackish-grey tattoo[Read More…]
(People allege that the governance is missing in Kashmir but in reality, the State has been put on an “Auto-Pilot” like an aircraft taking a long range flight!) It is usual practice with the flight crew of a long range passenger aircraft goingon long flights usually inter-continental ones, to put the aircraft on “Auto-Pilot”. The “Auto-Pilot” controls all functions of[Read More…]
I compose this letter in my mind’s scribble pad sitting in the eastern verandah of the wild refuge you adopted as your home 2 decades back. Beyond the Diwi-Diwi tree, the path leads to the small pond that you always used to invite me to join for a dip as a break from my urban home. I can hear racket-tailed[Read More…]
Women and girls play a lesser recognised role as drivers of growth and progress and powerful agents of change. Gender remains a critically important and largely ignored lens to view development issues across the world. Gender inequality is not only a pressing moral and social issue but also a critical economic challenge. India has a larger relative economic value at[Read More…]
Open internet advocates warned that “we’re running out of time” to save the web from corporate control and called on Americans to make their representatives’ phones “ring off the hook” Tuesday after FCC chairman Ajit Pai unveiled his long-awaited plan to scrap net neutrality that critics slammed as “naked corporatism” designed to give a major gift to the telecom industry at the expense of[Read More…]
Robert Mugabe resigned as president on Tuesday, six days after Zimbabwe’s military first moved against him. His resignation was announced in the midst of a debate in parliament on impeachment initiated by his factional rivals in the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF). Mugabe, 93, who has led the country for 37 years, refused to go after last Wednesday’s[Read More…]
The strongman lost some muscle this week. Robert Mugabe, a leader of the liberation movement that transformed colonially pressed Rhodesia into post-colonial Zimbabwe, had issued a letter of resignation. There had been no orgy of blood, no ordering of grievances with a vast butcher’s bill – at least for now. Over 37 years Mugabe had become one of bad boys[Read More…]
During the spring of 1999, as part of Voices in the Wilderness’s campaign to end indiscriminately lethal U.S./U.N. economic sanctions against Iraq, the Fellowship of Reconciliation arranged for two Nobel Peace laureates, Adolfo Perez Esquivel and Mairead Maguire, to visit the country. Before their travel, Voices activists helped organize meetings for them with a range of ordinary Iraqis affected by[Read More…]
The principal aim of the Paris Agreement as laid down under its Article 2 is to hold the “increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels.” Article 2 also stresses upon, inter alia,“Increasing the ability to adapt to the adverse impacts of climate change.” The Paris Agreement is, in fact, replete with Articles that[Read More…]
“What’s the shock about how men are sexually harassing women in the context of our horrid societal and environmental momentum?” — question asked by one of the author’s home schooled teens Imagine a half-dozen Emergency Medical Technicians putting bandages on a person who has been assaulted by a knife-wielding psychopath. The EMTs are trying desperately to stop this person[Read More…]
Earlier this summer, a paper published in the journal Nature captured headlines with a rather bleak forecast. Our chances of keeping global warming below the 2C danger threshold are very, very small: only about 5%. The reason, according to the paper’s authors, is that the cuts we’re making to greenhouse gas emissions are being cancelled out by economic growth. In the coming[Read More…]
In a recent talk before Chatham House think-tank in London, Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, approached the issue of a Palestinian state from an intellectual perspective. Before we think of establishing a Palestinian state, he mused, “it is time we reassessed whether the modern model we have of sovereignty, and unfettered sovereignty, is applicable everywhere in the world.” It[Read More…]
Nazareth: Investigative journalist Gareth Porter has published two exclusives whose import is far greater than may be immediately apparent. They concern Israel’s bombing in 2007 of a supposed nuclear plant secretly built, according to a self-serving US and Israeli narrative, by Syrian leader Bashar Assad. [https://consortiumnews.com/2017/11/18/israels-ploy-selling-a-syrian-nuke-strike/] Although the attack on the “nuclear reactor” occurred a decade ago, there are pressing[Read More…]
On 20 November 2017, Palestinians from various civil society organizations held a protest outside the SA Embassy in the West Bank Palestinian city of Ramallah. One protestor held a placard reading “We stood firmly with your liberation struggle, too much to expect your support for ours?”, another protestor held a poster reading “South Africa can’t support our struggle for self determination? Do[Read More…]
When I was a young adult, I told my Mohawk friend, Ray Fadden, that I was disturbed by the brutality that lays at the base of life and told him that I had observed that all life proceeds by wreckage of other life. How could it be otherwise in a closed energy system such as we have on Earth? Thus,[Read More…]
If he had lived, President John F. Kennedy would have been 100 years old this year. At Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow, his family would be raising a glass in his honor. But as we all know, he was murdered in Dallas, Texas on this date – November 22nd – in 1963. A true war hero twice over, he risked his[Read More…]
The number of people sitting outside AIIMS, waiting to be treated, reflects the grim reality of health sector in states like Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Haryana, etc. “I am counting the last days of my life, along with waiting to get operated; whichever comes soon will end my ordeal,” said attendance Mishra from West Champaran district of Bihar. He visited countless[Read More…]
All but admitting that Google is engaged in censorship, Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google’s parent company Alphabet, announced that Google will create algorithms designed to “de-rank” web sites such as RT and Sputnik on its news delivery services. In a question and answer session at the Halifax International Security Forum in Canada over the weekend, Schmidt laid out Google’s[Read More…]
The American economy is basically a war economy. The American military industrial complex with its associated other industries and corporations; banking and finance, intelligent technologies, telecommunication, military research, spying and surveillance departments, mercenary terrorist groups and proxy wars around the whole globe, are the major contributing factors to the revenues of the American mega-corporations, that are covertly controlled and[Read More…]
More than 3 lakh suicides in three decades and millions of other lives ruined would qualify as a national disaster forcing the government to tackle it all guns blazing in any democracy. Alas, it does not in the one that claims to be the largest of them all, the democracies. In fact it hardly gets registered even as a minor[Read More…]
Climate change was again placed at the centre of global diplomacy over the past two weeks as diplomats and ministers gathered in Bonn, Germany, for the latest annual round of United Nations climate talks. COP23, the second “conference of the parties” since the Paris Agreement was struck in 2015, promised to be a somewhat technical affair as countries continued to negotiate the[Read More…]
Scholars have wondered what “triggers” might be in the social furniture of a culture that might propel a people to embrace a bill of rights. Australia remains proudly, and idiosyncratically, opposed. Previous efforts to enshrine a charter of rights have failed, accused of being totalitarian usurpations, dangerous incorporations of foreign laws, and a straightjacket on political will. Rights, in actual[Read More…]
According to a nationwide study [[https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/drug-overdose-data.htm] conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a greater number of U.S. Americans died (approximately 65,000) from drug overdoses last year than were killed during the course of the Vietnam War. All part and parcel of capitalism’s war against life itself. The emotional and physical pain, anxiety, and depression inflicted by the[Read More…]
“All those sociological ingredients, the endless articles and insightful interviews, the official reports and incessant pontificating tomes don’t warm the body, let alone the soul. Privileged people aren’t just letting souls waste away, they continue to stir up the coldest, sickest brew imaginable for the immserated, not acknowledging that all souls are the same, deserve the same.” — one[Read More…]
Co-Written by Peer Bilal Baba & M Altaf Kumhar About the History, there is a thing that we are never sure what exactly happened because often, the facts get mutated with the ravages of time and travel.Padmavati, the upcoming Bollywood film based on a poem about a Rajput ‘fictitious’ queen written by the16th century Sufi poet Malik Muhammad Jayasi, has[Read More…]
The poor themselves can create a poverty-free world all we have to do is to free them from the chains that we have put around them -Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus When I first initiated livelihood finance projects for women, more than two decades back, I encountered stiff resistance from the local elders who couldn’t believe that their women could[Read More…]
– Remember what I asked you first?
– ‘Do you have parents?’
– One of your eyes is huge and red – do you know this?
– No
– Don’t you look at mirrors?
– Looked at one long ago
Silence.
Co-Written by Dave Lannen and Laura Franseen My friend Laura and I recently contemplated the mental strain that combatants, civilians and non-combatants — such as medics — face. Battlefield medicine is a remarkable success story; however, frontline soldiers and civilians are subject to increasingly deadly weapons. More survive to reach combat hospitals, but they suffer a more complex degree of[Read More…]
According to a report by the United Nation’s International Labour Organization, nearly 200 million people are victims of modern slavery or child labor around the globe. In 2016, 40.3 million men, women and children were victims of modern slavery. Nearly one in ten children, or 151.6 million people, are victims of child labor. The report defines “modern slavery” as “the various forms[Read More…]
As many as a million children have been orphaned by the war in Syria which is in its sixth year, Aljazeera reported Sunday (Nov 19). The UN has warned against the dangers facing children without parents such as lack of education, trafficking and being indoctrinated by armed groups. Many children are living in orphanages being run by local charities[Read More…]
A shocking and dire warning has been issued by over 15,000 scientists that we are badly running out of time to save the Planet from over-exploitation and man-made global warming. This warning is backed by data on disastrous trajectories in 9 out of 10 key areas over the last 24 years, comes 25 years after a similar warning by[Read More…]
Women Against Sexual Violence and State Repression (WSS) stands firmly with the survivors who have faced sexual harassment at the hands of the perpetrators on and off the list and, most importantly, extends solidarity in this moment of unravelling narratives, disjointed arguments and personal struggles of individuals voicing their experiences. The last few weeks have seen lists of sexual harassers[Read More…]
Within alternative movements there is much interest in introducing local currencies and they have been central elements in many Transition Towns and other initiatives. Unfortunately I think most of these have been quite misguided, failing to grasp the power a local currency can have, and not likely to make a significant contribution to goals such as town sustainability and resilience.[Read More…]
Another twist in the farce over the stained treatment of refugees on Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island has surfaced. New Zealand has been insisting for some time that it is more than willing to welcome some 150 to its shores. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, much to the irritation of Australia’s Turnbull government, has been particularly enthusiastic. Australia has remained resolutely[Read More…]
As the debate on the Arya-Vysya attack against me was taking place at the national and international level two things have happened. One, the Chandrababu Naidu Government in alliance with BJP in Andhra Pradesh arrested me in my home on 28 October, so that I would not go to Vijayawada (Amaravathi) and attend the public meeting. This public meeting[Read More…]
Frederick Nietzsche spent his fortieth-birthday reflecting on how the Middle East had provided three major exportations of prophetic doctrinal interpretations of god-speak. He poured over the four etchings of Muhammad, Moses, Isaiah and Jesus he had in his possession, beholding a formidable gallery of conscionable males expressing passion for what they believed werethe indisputably correct paths toward salvation, revealed[Read More…]
First of three interviews from the cradle of the revolutionary uprising Aneek, an independent, radical Baanglaa monthly from Kolkata, India, in its 53rd years of publication, interviewed three leaders of the Naxalbari Uprising. The leaders with working class background were organizing armed struggle of the poor-landless peasantry in the Naxalbari region since the earliest days of the revolutionary initiative. Following[Read More…]
If there was a striking theme in the Trump Asian trip, it was a clearly less muscular policy towards China. U.S. naval patrols to reinforce freedom of navigation rights in the South China Sea were always provocative and appear to have ceased. The U.S. has also withdrawn from the Trans Pacific Partnership now been led by Japan and clearly[Read More…]
That WW II was a ‘good war,’ ‘good’ triumphing over ‘evil’ a madman had brought about, has been a gargantuan deception solidified in Wall St owned media & movies ominously conditioning us to tolerate profitable genocide ad infinitum! Criminally insane Hitler was used by wealthy capitalists to invade the USSR. Even Jewish Holocaust survivors quietly support new genocides by[Read More…]
You are a gift.
Wrapped. Untouched.
In an islet.
“My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son will ride a camel.” – Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum, first Prime Minister of United Arab Emirates Try this simple mental exercise. Imagine a hypothetical Middle Eastern monarchy in which: Virtually[Read More…]
Since the breakup of the Soviet bloc and China’s turn toward free markets, many economists have pronounced an “end of history,” where capitalism reigns supreme as the ultimate form of economy. Perhaps “there is no alternative” to a globalized neoliberal economy, as former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher often said. Indeed, free markets in which individuals compete to get what[Read More…]
The global energy system is in a state of flux. Renewables are experiencing rapid deployment and steep pricefalls. A growing portion of global energy is provided by electricity. There’s a slow, but apparently inexorable move away from coal in China. And there’s a surge in natural gas and oil production in the US. These are just some of the insights[Read More…]
“The only choice left to us is to decide how much worse we are willing to let things get. We still have time to save, or restore, a large part of the gentle and benevolent environment that has made our lives possible. We can’t, however, do it easily. We can’t do it at all without at the same time making[Read More…]
“[I]n this open step the sheep wander from Asia into Europe, and the Kirgiz shepherd drives them back again into Asia without knowing that he has crossed a geographer’s frontier.” Thus describes Geroid Tanquary Robinson a part of Russia in Rural Russia under the Old Regime, a History of the Landlord-Peasant World and a Prologue to the Peasant Revolution[Read More…]
It had not happened in decades. On Tuesday, members of the US Congress gathered to consider the scope of presidential power in launching a nuclear strike. The state of the mind of the current president was very much at the forefront of the discussion, even if some present preferred not to name him specifically. One senator who was fairly frank[Read More…]
Ahmed Mola Nissi The right to life, liberty and security of person have been asserted under Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 6 and 9 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political rights (ICCPR) and Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Without a doubt, the right to life is one of the[Read More…]
I am so used to hate speech and sometimes hate crimes carried out for any number of reasons that it is now in my blood. I’ve been trying to stop them since I was five years old and saw Hiroshima Maidens, civilians, in NYC for reconstructive surgery for missing body parts. The War Was Won Before Hiroshima—And the Generals Who[Read More…]
“Stockton was named an All-America City four times in the last eighteen years. I think it has the potential to become an All-World City next year.” — one of the author’s home schooled youngsters A Brownfields site is any land in the United States that has been contaminated by hazardous waste and identified by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as a[Read More…]
This month marks the 70th anniversary of the death of Wolfgang Borchert, a young German writer who was seriously wounded in World War II then imprisoned for resistance activities. Physically destroyed, he lived only two years after the war. During that time he wrote antiwar literature that is widely read in Germany but little known in the USA, where it[Read More…]
On the Sept 22, 2017, during a march of All India Kisan Sangharsh Co-ordination Committee, one of its leaders Mr Yogendra Yadav (henceforth YY) told us, “So, what we are witnessing is the beginning of something that can only be described as a peasant rebellion”[1] Because, there were outbursts of peasants’ movement in several states of India in the last[Read More…]
Sixty nine years after Father of the Nation Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated, a “shrine” dedicated to his killer Nathuram Godse was set up in Guwalior by the Hindu Mahasabha on Wednesday (Nov 15), Hindustan Times reported. The ultra right wing organization installed a bust of Godse inside its office premises amid Vedic chants to mark the anniversary of his[Read More…]
Poverty won’t allow him to lift up his head; dignity won’t allow him to bow it down — Malagasy Proverb The global battle against poverty has acquired a new dimension this year with Pope Francis declaring 19 November 2017 as the First World Day of the Poor. Hereafter it will be observed on 33rd Sunday of every year. The[Read More…]
In September 2014, I had occasion to write an article entitled Unity or Separation? – Did the Scots Decide Sensibly?1 In that year, the provincial government of Scotland, the Scottish National Party (SNP), and a large part of the Scottish people, who wanted to secede from the United Kingdom, held a referendum on the question. A majority voted No. The secessionists were[Read More…]
One of my friends of ten years wrote, “The question of our time is this: Have we now moved past a critical fork in our evolutionary road and will this lead to our extinction? Many scientists today are saying that the answer is YES.” “No” is my opinion as there will probably be small pockets of people in climate okay[Read More…]
On November 8th, Britain’s Daily Mail bannered “NATO tells Europe to prepare for ‘rapid deployment’:” and sub-headed “Defence chiefs say roads, bridges and rail links must be improved in case tanks and heavy vehicles need to be quickly mobilised” (to invade Russia, but the newspaper’s slant was instead that this must be done purely defensively: “In October, NATO accused[Read More…]
Last week’s resignation of Lebanon’s popular Prime Minister Saad Hariri has fueled a plethora of politically inspired conspiracy theories. At the forefront are some of Iran’s several Lebanese proxies who immediately in knee-jerk fashion, accused Saudi Arabia of holding Hariri hostage while they demanded the PM’s return to Lebanon. For what purpose is still not clear. Many in Lebanon[Read More…]
During a stay at the American Academy in Berlin some years ago I was standing in the library at a window looking out over the troubled morning waters of the Wannsee when from the shelves near me a book title leapt to my eyes. It seemed like a stroke of providence for me to find in that north European setting[Read More…]
There were undeniably several confusions that the workers in general faced during the first fifty years of forward march of international communist movement since the Petrograd Soviet days. What exactly Rosa meant in her criticism towards Russian socialists? How Trotsky differed from CPSU headed by Stalin? Then what happened to all the members of the Central Committee that led the[Read More…]
Sumanta Banerjee (b. 1936), political and civil rights activist and social scientist, moved to the revolutionary position of the Naxalbari peasants’ upsurge in the north-eastern India while working as a journalist for The Statesman in the late sixties, and joined the movement in 1973. He had to resort to underground life while carrying on his revolutionary tasks in rural and[Read More…]
Northern railway in March 2015 made provision for extending e-ticket facility for PwDs by discontinuing to issue concession tickets on the production of certificate issued by CMO, and procedure made for new concession certificate is complicated as it is assigned to DRMs, hence poor disables are feeling the burnt. Handicapes are oneof the most vulnerable section of the society transcending[Read More…]
Recently the Hindu Mahasabha built a temple of Godse, the killer of Gandhiji, in Gwalior. An idol of Godse was installed. This was inaugurated on 15th November commemorating 68 years since he was hanged. This was natural for the Hindutva fringe groups who glorify Hindu fanatics. Since the advent of the present Government into power, a process which has been[Read More…]
Shakina Ashfaq, 50, is the latest life claimed by the AADHAR, the name given to the 12-digit unique identification (UID) number by the government of India. The reports suggest that she died of hunger. The authorities, as is unsaid standard operating procedure, claim that preliminary inquiries suggest that she didn’t die of hunger, she rather died of some illness.[Read More…]
It is a common refrain in the country that news has declined in content and quality. Social media is full of debate on the issue since innovations like the paid news and scandals like Radia tape. A common thread of concern is that the media is scandalizing, preaching and serving the masses a low comedy in the name of[Read More…]
Elippathayam (The Rat Trap) is a 1981 Malayalam film written and directed by Adoor Gopalakrishnan. It tells the story of a man trapped within himself unable to understand the changes taking place around him. It seems Indian Cinema also is caught in rat trap. No, it would be a bit flattering for Indian Cinema to use the rat trap metaphor.[Read More…]
The question of our time is this: Have we now moved past a critical fork in our evolutionary road and will this lead to our extinction? Many scientists today are saying that the answer is YES. In recent years the inherent danger of irreversible degradation as a result of human activity has been forcing both scientists and nonscientists to focus[Read More…]
Incidents of hate crimes, particularly against African-Americans, Jews and Muslims, went up to 6,121 during 2016, seeing an increase of 4.6 percent compared to the previous year, according to data released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on Monday (Nov. 13). A hate crime is defined by the FBI as a “criminal offence against a person or property[Read More…]
Co-Written by Romana Rubeo and Ramzy Baroud A proposed law at the Italian Parliament is set to punish the boycott of Israel. In the past, such an initiative would have been unthinkable. Alas, Italy, a country that had historic sympathies with the Palestinian cause has shifted its politics in a dramatic way in recent years. Most surprisingly, though, the Left is[Read More…]
American Capitalism in Crisis Americans in large numbers are becoming puzzled and agitated. Every day newspaper headlines blare out that the US is in trouble, together with our Western free market allies. The government doesn’t work as political divisiveness freezes decision-making. The extent of inequality is “obscene,” to borrow an oft-used description by Bernie Sanders. The elected president comes over[Read More…]
THE ANGUISH OF A MOTHER OVER HER CHILDREN AND THEIR LOST DREAMS GONE FOREVER The world has just honored yet another Armistice Day – Remembrance Day – Veterans Day for all those who lost their lives in armed defense of their nation’s right to exist and remain a free people. Nation’s like the United States, Canada and Israel pay[Read More…]
It was certainly a show, but getting to the meat of it was difficult. US President Donald J. Trump, on his return from an Asian tour lasting twelve days, had set out to “correct” mistakes made by those who had come before him. The fear, however, was that he was going to make a fresh number of his own. There[Read More…]
Rajputs are very upset over film Padmavati which they feel has wrongly depicted her story. I am not fascinated by Hindi Cinema’s treatment with history as without romance Hindi Cinema does not exists. The Bombay films have rarely given any justice to historic characters or should I say they are incapable of making period films. They can only create[Read More…]
(The present condition of the flood spill over channel is such that even a small flood can turn into a disaster!) For last three years various engineering departments have been inspecting, debating and discussing flood prevention measures to prevent any disastrous floods in future. The 2014 flood which was the most disastrous to have occurred in a century, has not[Read More…]
And when the dark clouds moved
In a sky that I could not reach
I took a shot
Of a sun
That has never risen.
A Woman in Bareilly in the state of Uttar Pradesh of India, died due to starvation as she was denied food ration since it was not linked to her Aadhaar card. ANI reported her husband was refused ration as ration shop owner allegedly demanded the woman be present for bio-metric fingerprint verification. She was unwell for past 5 days. The[Read More…]
Yikes. Over 15,000 scientists hailing from more than 180 countries just issued a dire warning to humanity: “Time is running out” to stop business as usual, as threats from rising greenhouse gases to biodiversity loss are pushing the biosphere to the brink. The new warning was published Monday in the international journal BioScience, and marks an update to the “World Scientists’ Warning to[Read More…]
The San Francisco-based 9th Circuit Court of Appeals Monday (Nov.13) allowed President Donald Trump’s Muslim travel ban 3.0 to go partially into effect, exempting persons with ‘bona fide relationships’ to the US. The Monday order means the ban will apply to people from Iran, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia and Chad who do not have connections to the United States.[Read More…]
In a recent incident in the United States, yet another unarmed man was shot dead by police after opening his front door in response to their knock. The police were going to serve an arrest warrant on a domestic violence suspect – the man’s neighbour – but went to the wrong address. See ‘Police kill innocent man while serving[Read More…]
“The problem I’ve always had with ‘objectivity’ as a concept is that it doesn’t have an agreed upon meaning.” — Dr. Anthony DiMaggio, author of “Confronting the Cult of Objectivity” What school has teachers who handle Social Studies and Humanities subjects without advocating a particular political point of view? Is that even possible? Certainly, there’s plenty of talk — always has[Read More…]
The overall figure was comfortable, though hardly dashing. 62 percent of Australians (7.82 million) decided that same sex marriage was a perfectly feasible, even desirable notion, while 38 percent (4.87 million) did not.[1] Out of 150 federal seats, 133 registered affirmative totals in returning their response to the question “Should the law be changed to allow same-sex couples to marry?”. [Read More…]
In the neoliberal War on Humanity and War on Terra, there are the Bad Guys (the neoliberals, One Percenters, Super Rich, US Alliance military, warmongers, moronic Trumpists, fascists, neo-Nazis, religious right, and genocidal Zionists) versus the Good Guys (the anti-war, anti-nuclear, anti-Apartheid, anti-discrimination, pro-environment social humanists). However the Good Guys have been severely compromised by many activists who are[Read More…]
Global Peace, Security And Conflict Resolution: Approaches to Understand the Current Issues and Future-Making by Mahboob A. Khawaja. Lambert Academic Publishing, Germany, October 2017. Softcover with 433 pages. ISBN 978-3-659-58644-6 In a global worldfraught with individualistic politics and massive propaganda, increased violence is used as means to enforce change and militarism leading to global disorder.The author initiates a courageous reasoned[Read More…]
Two figures tower over the idea, and the realisation, of industrial America. The first is Henry Ford, whose factory process dedicated to mass car production featured specifically focused machinery, a moving assembly line, and a linear process of interdependent tasks. The second giant in this regard is Frederick W. Taylor, whose principles of scientific management involved the division of factory[Read More…]
Whether the string of scandals, now hounding Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, lead to his sacking or not, it matters little. Though nearly half of Israelis polled last July – well before the scandals took a much dirtier turn – believe that Netanyahu is corrupt, a majority of Israelis said that they would still vote for him. A recent survey conducted by Israel’s Channel[Read More…]
An increasing number of people across the world are currently signing a petition The text of the petition reads like this: Dear friends, Eight years ago as UK Prime Minister and chair of the G20, I tried to end the injustice of global tax havens. But as the “Paradise Papers” leak shows, trillions are still being siphoned off to dodge[Read More…]
Canada unfortunately is not just a follower of the U.S. but a strong forward carrier of the British Imperial system as well. Strong racial biases, pro-Zionism, acceptance of colonial settler practices are and were well advanced in Canada without U.S. assistance. Within the current globalized world, Canada still pretends to be a ‘peacekeeper’, a thin disguise for the maintenance of[Read More…]
For these words, Steve Bannon, the former chief strategist to President Donald J. Trump and currently Executive Chairman of Breitbart News Network, received standing ovations at the annual gala of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) at the Hyatt in New York City. ZOA, the extreme right-wing Zionist organization, has been for Trump and Bannon right from the start. Besides[Read More…]
[This piece has been updated and adapted from William D. Hartung’s “Nuclear Politics” in Sleepwalking to Armageddon: The Threat of Nuclear Annihilation, edited by Helen Caldicott and just published by the New Press.] Until recently, few of us woke up worrying about the threat of nuclear war. Such dangers seemed like Cold War relics, associated with outmoded practices like building fallout shelters[Read More…]
The occupied East Jerusalem suburb of Issawiyeh has long been a flashpoint for confrontations between Israeli soldiers and its Palestinian residents. But even by Israel’s repressive standards, the crackdown to which the town has been subjected over the past three years has been extreme. In July 2014, and like in many Jerusalem areas, the people of the town – known for the[Read More…]
The tsarist Russia, the empire-system for which a section of today’s intellectuals feel love, was experiencing rapid capitalist expansion and growth till the World War I. Absence of profit wouldn’t have driven capitalists to the expansion. And, labor pushes up growth. And, having profit is impossible without toilers’ strained muscles and wet brows. And, the Great October Revolution is by[Read More…]
The history of the 1917 Russian Revolution and its aftermath, can be divided into four phases – (i) the historical circumstances surrounding the 1917 revolution that led to the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks; (ii) the post-revolution experiments in setting up a socialist system in Russia under the leadership of Lenin in the 1920s, and by Stalin from the [Read More…]
When the nation celebrated children’s day, much was discussed about the pathetic situation of education as well as malnutrition of children. But, a recent Supreme Court observation on education of disabled has raised many questions on the right of disabled children to equal education along with normal children. ( Supreme Court suggests separate schools for children with disabilities :[Read More…]
Mr. Chandrashekhar Ravan, the founder of the Bhim Army remains in custody despite the Allahabad High Court granting him bail in all the cases registered against him. Ravan is in custody because of the Government of Uttar Pradesh has registered a case against him under the provisions of the draconian, National Security Act, 1980. The NSA provides for ‘preventive detention’,[Read More…]
Co-Produced by C.S. Sharada Prasad & Isha Ray November 19th is World Toilet Day. Enormous progress has been made in the global effort to provide safe and affordable toilets for the world’s poorest citizens since World Toilet Day was first declared in 2001. Significant strides have been made in “reinventing” toilet designs for low-income, water-short, un-sewered urban zones; celebrities such[Read More…]
Surkh Gul with her daughter. Photo by Dr Hakim “My family’s water well has dried up,” 18-year-old Surkh Gul said. “Ours too,” echoed 13-year-old Inaam. A distressed Surkh Gul lamented, “We have to fetch water from the public well along the main road, but that water is muddy, not fit for drinking. I get bottled water for my two-year-old daughter.[Read More…]
I am working on a book with the title “THE CLIMATE EMERGENCY: Two time scales”. A pdf file of a first draft of the book can be freely downloaded from the following link: http://www.fredsakademiet.dk/library/climate.pdf I urge you to download this file and to send the link or file to friends who might be interested. Also, if you have a website,[Read More…]
The UN has announced record average levels of CO2. So states the annual flagship report released October 30 by its World Meteorological Organization. The average levels measured using ships, aircraft and land stations have reached over 400 parts per million (ppm), prompting the authors and other scientists to urge strong action. At the 23rd Conference of the Parties (COP23) of[Read More…]
The bottom half of humans own next to nothing, but they own as much as the world’s richest 80 individuals do, because though the bottom half are poor, there are 3.79 billion of them. The average person among the richest 80 owns 45,750,000 times as much as does the average person among the lower half. In other words: in terms of[Read More…]
Climate scientists have warned of the negative impacts of climate change for several years now. In September 2016, scientists declared that atmospheric CO2 levels had permanently crossed 400 parts per millionfor the first time in 4 million years and were unlikely to decrease in our lifetime. It is amply clear that there are limits to human ability to mitigate greenhouse[Read More…]
The program usually pokes fun, riddles and irks a fourth estate that has long given up the chase for verity. Media Watch, after years of weather beaten but reliable service, remains Australia’s only real source of genuine critical comment about journalistic practice and its poorer practices. Over the years, it has exposed fictions, unearthed myths and lampooned incompetence. Not, however,[Read More…]
Civilised society, in India, is failing in all counts and working hard to prove that all that is so far, even it is quite minimal, acquired as positive civilisational characters such as humanism, universalism and rationalism, in actuality, are meaningless. For todays religiously indoctrinated, being religious and ritualistic is what is being civilised; rest is all peripheral and non-essential. What[Read More…]
The downturn in the Indian economy is not a sudden development that had come about now, nor due to any “technical reasons,” as is made out to be by the ruling BJP leaders. Unable to explain why industry sector, exports and agriculture and domestic consumption are stagnant if not going down with each passing year since BJP came to power,[Read More…]
Prime Minister does not leave an opportunity to quote Dr Baba Saheb Ambedkar. RSS has been calling him ‘pratahsmarniya’ and Amit Shah has been going to have food at the ‘Dalit’ localities. BJP has been going wild on its Dalit outreach programme and there is nothing wrong in politics to strengthen its outreach but the question is how would[Read More…]
Another dastardly lynching of a Muslim man for transporting cows has taken place in Rajathan. The police on Sunday registered a case of murder on the basis of the family’s complaint. The family of a Muslim man, whose dismembered body was found on the railway tracks near Govindgarh in Alwar district of Rajasthan on Friday, has claimed that he was[Read More…]
The threat of mass famine in Yemen is as real as ever — in spite of the reopening of the port of Aden and the Wadea land crossing on the Saudi-Yemen border. This is not enough, according to the UN Office of Humanitarian Aid (OCHA). The blockade of all ports especially Hodeida should be lifted immediately. Most humanitarian aid[Read More…]
In this sobering exclusive analysis for INSURGE, Professor Ugo Bardi dissects historical statistics on war to unpick the patterns of violence of the past and uncover what this says about the present — and our coming future. He warns that statistical data suggests we are on the brink of heading into another round of major wars resulting, potentially, in mass deaths on a[Read More…]
Nazareth: The scandal surrounding Priti Patel, who was forced to resign as Britain’s international aid minister last week after secret meetings with Israeli officials during a “family holiday”, offers a small, opaque window on the UK’s powerful Israel lobby. Patel’s off-the-books meetings with 12 Israelis, including prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, were organised by a British lobbyist in violation of[Read More…]
“Be proud you’re an Indian, but be careful who you tell.” — from the documentary Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page really got rocked the first time he heard Link Wray’s Rumble. A lot of people did, musicians and others. In fact, you could say it was what the monolith was to those primates in the “Dawn of Man” segment[Read More…]
Co-Written By Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese The climate crisis is upon us. It seems that every report on climate conditions has one thing in common: things are worse than predicted. The World Meteorological Report from the end of October shows that Greenhouse Gases (GHGs) are rising at a rapid rate and have passed 400 parts per million. According to Dr. Kevin[Read More…]
It was as dreary as listening to the formulaic assessments of political economy by an unreconstructed Leninist. But Sunday morning with Steve Ciobo, Australia’s trade minister, was such an occasion. The Trans-Pacific Partnership, withering away on the branch of false optimism, has been an instrument of deserved suspicion and opprobrium from popular movements across countries suspicious about the paternalistic follies[Read More…]
19th Century witnessed many revolutions in the realm social movements and theories. The ordinary people, the working population, the wretched of the earth [Fanon] who entered in the arena of political theory through Rousseau in the 18th century found a profound spokesperson in the genius of Karl Marx in the 19thcentury. Marx, as a student of jurisprudence, history and philosophy, at a time when[Read More…]
This lecture by Mirza Yawar Baig is take on India as it is today and the challenges that face us in the immediate future. He says “It is my address to my fellow citizens to say that it is time we accepted the role of citizenship and understand that it means to take responsibility for the welfare of our nation[Read More…]
This paper looks into the food security and nutrition security situation in Gaza Strip, and
possible consequences on adolescents’ growth and development.
Prime Minister Binali Yildirim Saturday (Nov 11) denied Turkey’s involvement in an alleged plot involving former U.S security adviser Michael Flynn to kidnap U.S.-based controversial cleric Fetullah Gulen, allegedly behind last year’s coup attempt to overthrow President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Extraditing Gulen is a major priority for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In an interview with CNN television host Fareed[Read More…]
“Why aren’t they screaming?” — from Philip Larkin’s The Old Fools The Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) is typically taken by students some time during their last two years in high school. It purports to assess how well test takers solve problems. However, the Big Problem for the students — for us all, truth be told — is that no[Read More…]
Regarding any order to invade and or kill in another country: “An order which is unlawful not only does not need to be obeyed but obeying such an order can result in criminal prosecution of the one who obeys it. Military courts have long held that military members are accountable for their actions even while following orders — if the[Read More…]
During its zenith the Ottoman Empire extended over parts of three continents; Europe, Asia and Africa. Its rule had also spread over the Arab World in the Middle Eastern region for long four centuries. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire the Western colonial powers (the Illuminati, the Hidden Hand, the Khazars, the Rothschilds, the Zionists or whatever you[Read More…]
The officials are called one by one to lay wreathes, a ceremony of mechanical efficiency. With each laying comes the sense of wonder at how this could happen. Political figures are the first to vote in parliaments and side with the executive when it comes to wars. The temptations of human drives to tempt, and then succumb to death, were[Read More…]
Why the Democrats’ Victories Do NOT Spell The End of Trumpian Fascism… and How They Could Potentially Make The Situation With The Regime All The More Dangerous Last night I watched the MSNBC response to the election of a number of Democrats in off-year elections around the country progress from giddy to rapturous to delirious. I’m always glad to see[Read More…]
Special note: Don’t read about the films recommended prior to seeing them. I’d recommend watching the 2012 documentary Four Horsemen — immediately — along with the 2017 Oren Moverman feature film The Dinner. I urge the reader to do that post haste, in spite of the fact that the former only received a 67% approval rating by critics on[Read More…]
Let’s be really clear right up front. This statement says it all: I saw my first victims of war when I was five years old. They were innocent civilians, who had been bombed with an atomic bomb in Japan. They were missing body parts and were wrapped in gauze like mummies while in NY, USA for reconstructive surgery. People who[Read More…]
In 2013, the villagers of Village Kondasawali, Police Station Jagargunda, district Sukma, Bastar Divison, Chhattisgarh had lodged a complaint with the Collector regarding the fact that a few years before that, in 2007, some SPOs and Salwa Judum leaders had come to their village, burnt 95 huts in three settlements in their panchayat, killed 7 people, and threatened the villagers[Read More…]
We hope many of you have watched this remarkable documentary “Four Horsemen”. Although the film vouches for capitalism, it calls for bloodless revolution. Moreover, it calls for the cooperation of humanity to over ride the coming crises. It’s a remarkable film that connects all the dots of all the crises humanity faces collectively, a task that Countercurrents.org has been doing for[Read More…]
We will keep missing out if we insist on relying solely on our intellect, acquired knowledge, reason and intelligence; human potential encompasses much more. I am fascinated with the insights the evolution of science provides, particularly astronomy, cosmology, quantum physics and medicine. Medical research and technology opened the doors to the insides of our brains, considered by ourselves superior and in many[Read More…]
Every year on November 11, India celebrates National Education Day. The day also commemorates the birth anniversary of India’s first education minister Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. He was a literary figure and during his lifetime he emphasised on development of quality education and provision for compulsory education to all children upto 14 years of age. India has seen great educationists[Read More…]
Gujarat till now had been projected as a unique model of development, which needs to be replicated in all other places. The Prime Minister in his speeches during election campaigns in 2014 Lok Sabha elections and Assembly elections in other states had sought to state that he would turn the country and other states into Gujarat. Gujarat was emulated as[Read More…]
The Gaekwad family lives in a single-room-house on the outskirts of a city. The family cooks their food, eats it and sleeps in the same room. This room is also used as a play area by their three-year-old child. Lack of credit has prevented the Gaekwads from obtaining a loan to improve their living conditions. There are millions of low-income families[Read More…]
I am not as abusive as Harvey Weinstein, nor as narcissistic as Bill O’Reilly. I’m more respectful to women than Donald Trump, and not as sleazy as Anthony Weiner. Judged by the standards set by these public reprobates, most of the rest of us men appear almost saintly, and therein lies a danger. The public disclosure of these men’s behavior—from[Read More…]
Young people in Gaza are finding few prospects for a better life. Anne Paq /ActiveStills On Tuesday, 29 August, Mohannad Younis swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills and ended his life. He was only 22 and seemed to have much going for him. A budding author, he had recently completed a series of short stories and just put the finishing touches on a[Read More…]
“It became apparent to me that a people would never abandon their means of livelihood, good or bad, capitalistic or otherwise until other methods were developed which would promise advantages at least as good as those by which they were living.” —- Job Harriman (quoted in a Counterpunch article) I saw a notice in a local newspaper recently in[Read More…]
Waves of anger, fear and open hostility have greeted the influx of refugees and migrants from the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Some have reached levels of paranoia and xenophobic violence that have resulted in death. Across Europe politicians hurry to build “Fortress Europe” but the flood of humanity threatens to bring down the walls. Predictions of the change[Read More…]
“…the crown prince has broken forever the great compromise that exists in the kingdom: between the royal family and the clergy, and between the tribes.” — Robert Fisk As Robert Fisk makes clear, what’s going on between Saudi Arabia and Lebanon is far from clear. And as the leader of Lebanon’s Hezbollah underscored an hour ago on BBC, the Saudis have[Read More…]
Trump Says Saudi Elites Caught In Anti-Corruption Probe Were ‘Milking’ Kingdom For Years. This is just nonsense from Trump. Corruption is and has been everywhere in Saudi Arabia. How else could it be with all the countless billions changing hands in a fairly closed society? So, it is easy for a guy like the new Crown Prince to glance[Read More…]
As these myriad examples show — sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. Yet nothing can serve as an excuse for giving up the struggle to provide something of value regardless of the way that life personally turns out for oneself in my opinion. This first account I heard from some USA National Public Radio (NPR) program while driving in[Read More…]
RT, the Russia-based oppositional TV and Internet broadcaster, announced Thursday that the US Department of Justice has forced it to register as a “foreign agent” under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). Washington has given the outlet until Monday to register as a foreign agent or its director could be arrested and its assets frozen. The move is a product[Read More…]
To, The Prime Minister Government of India New Delhi –110 001 Narendra Modi Ji, We would like to invite you, as also Arun Jaitley Ji, The Chairperson of GST Council, to come and watch a Kannada musical, Taayavva. We are performing this play at ADA Theatre, Bengaluru, on 21st Nov 2017, at 07:00 PM. This play is about a mother.[Read More…]
What happens in the Arctic doesn’t just stay up north. It affects the world, as that region is the integrator of our planet’s climate systems, atmospheric and oceanic. At the moment, the northernmost places on Earth are warming at more than twice the global average, a phenomenon whose impact is already being felt planetwide. Welcome to the world of climate breakdown — and to the world[Read More…]
Saudi Arabia’s crown prince Mohammad bin Salman’s brash attempt to consolidate power at home and assert primacy abroad will have ramifications far and wide. Some of these will be felt in Palestine, where a shaky reconciliation agreement holds out the best hope in a long time for some relief for two million Palestinians in Gaza after 10 years of isolation imposed by Israel and Egypt. One danger is[Read More…]
So much after the fact; so much in terms of opportunism gone to seed and destruction. But planned historical calamities tend to be rare. There are only absurd moments, dastardly opportunities, and tragic convergences. History is less the outcome of wise deliberation than folly dressed up as reason, occasionally tinged by a touch of malice. On November 2, 1917, the[Read More…]
It is a year since Donald J. Trump’s election as president on November 8, 2016, and a couple of months less since his inauguration. In that time the bombast has not stopped, the achievements remain meager. The threats against North Korea continue — now on Trump’s Asian tour. President Moon of South Korea is from the rapprochement party, bemused at[Read More…]
by Richard Martin Oxman “What’s the difference between our enabling the Saudis to blockade Yemen and making it possible for Stalin, Mao and Hitler to commit their atrocities?” — Question asked by one of the authors home schooled teenage charges The Saudi-led coalition has not allowed Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) flights into Yemen for the past few days, directly hindering[Read More…]
The Gulf Cooperation Council consisting of Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirate, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and Bahrain was formally established in May 1981.The Charter stipulates that the purpose is “to effect coordination, integration and inter-connection between Member States in all fields in order to achieve unity between them.” The 1979 Iranian Revolution led[Read More…]
In a momentous decision on 28 July, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was disqualified from holding public office by the country’s Supreme Court on the flimsy pretext of holding an ‘Iqama’ (a work permit) for a Dubai-based company. Although it is generally assumed the revelations in the Panama Papers, that Nawaz Sharif and his family members own offshore companies, led[Read More…]
The Indian government on Thursday said it has sought details about the US announcement to provide nearly USD 500,000 to NGOs to promote religious freedom in India. The US has announced it wants to “increase societal tolerance” and reduce “religiously-motivated violence” and discrimination in India with the nearly $500,000 grant to NGOs in the country. The state department had[Read More…]
The GM Contamination Register database is run by Genewatch and Greenpeace and contains cases of genetically modified (GM) contamination dating from 1997. The authors of a 2014 paper, published in the International Journal of Food Contamination, analysed 400 or so cases in the database by crop and country. GM rice accounted for about a third of contamination cases, despite the fact there is[Read More…]
The large swathes of cotton farms in Central India have been the epicentre of a global crisis that has gripped the rural population in crippling debts and driven thousands to suicide. But amidst the gloom, it is the women of this region who have emerged as the torchbearers of hope and progress. This new hope comes in the form[Read More…]
Under a Hindutva sky
I lay me down to die
but suicide is a moral crime,
so maybe it’s not yet my time.
When it comes to disasters, it is as if India’s tryst with ‘iconic’ dates continues unhindered. Although not warranting any commemorative celebrations, the onset of these dates year after year has not been without their share of apprehensions. Human psyche is such that it has a proclivity for registering debacles more consistently than achievements. Although our country does not fall[Read More…]
Tens of thousands of people protested yesterday in Catalonia against the detention of Catalan nationalists as political prisoners by the Spanish central government after the October 1 Catalan independence referendum. The protest—called as a strike by the small, Catalan-separatist Intersindical-CSC union—pointed to wider opposition to the suspension of Catalonia’s elected government by Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, and Rajoy’s moves[Read More…]
One can understand the annoyance Maharashtra’s director general of police Satish Mathur faced last Monday when he was stuck in traffic for half an hour in the central business district CBD Belapur. Four policemen were transferred for failing not to clear the way for him. Mr Mathur would feel much less annoyed if he realized that his discomfort is nothing[Read More…]
The Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) expresses its deep concern over the inhuman and degrading treatment being meted out to Dalit rights activist Chandrashekhar Ravan by the government of Uttar Pradesh. Last reported, Mr. Ravan, was rushed to the Lala Lajpat Rai Memorial Medical College from Saharanpur on Nov 8, 2017 for ‘stomach infection’. Mr. Ravan, completely healthy at the[Read More…]
It is easy for those of us in the West to overlook how important China has become to the world economy, and also the limits it is reaching. The two big areas in which China seems to be reaching limits are energy production and debt. Reaching either of these limits could eventually cause a collapse. China is reaching energy production limits in a[Read More…]
The postponing of an Israeli Knesset Bill that would have annexed major illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank to the Jerusalem municipality is the result of behind-the-scenes US and, possibly, European pressure. But the story of the so-called ‘Greater Jerusalem law’ does not end there. Israel wants to maintain an absolute demographic Jewish majority in Jerusalem, including in[Read More…]
For the past nine months, we have seen widespread attacks on the common good. The latest assault is the Republicans’ proposed tax reform, a huge transfer of wealth to the richest one-tenth of one percent. This legislation would also greatly increase the national debt, supposedly a major red line for Republicans. In addition, President Trump continues to: 1) slow[Read More…]
The distinguished Ahwazi Arab political activist, Ahmad Mola, was brutally murdered outside his home in the Netherlands on Wednesday. Although some reports claim that the killers were apprehended, there has been no official confirmation, with other reports suggesting that they escaped. Fifty-four-year-old Mola, who is survived by his wife and five children, fled Iran with his family in 2005 in[Read More…]
According to just released information sourced from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the FSNAU between October 2015 and April 2016, a period of only six months, upwards of 400,000 Somali’s, two thirds of whom were children, died of starvation. And the famine, if anything, has gotten worse since then. Here the world is now, 18 months later[Read More…]
Washington, D.C.–November 6, 2017–With collusion scandals on his back, President Trump visits Manila and Clark Field, Pampanga, Philippines, historic outposts of the then rising U.S. Empire at the turn of the last century. Today, virtually a neocolony, the Philippines serves once again as a springboard for U.S. imperial interventions in the Asia-Pacific region. Various government agreements have converted the former[Read More…]
This week, the California Board of Education will sign off on the final updates for textbooks used in the state’s middle schools, including how those books depict India’s caste system. Even though I live in Seattle, I plan attend the meeting in Sacramento and have been asked to say a few words. In speaking out about caste — that complex[Read More…]
People’s Union for Democratic Rights has long been drawing attention to egregious violation of rights of workers governed under various labour laws. Most important of these rights is the fundamental right to form trade union, so as to engage in collective wage negotiations and to ensure that conditions on shop floor do not become tyrannical. Ever since the economic reforms[Read More…]
Hot on the heels of purging his main rivals for the Saudi throne, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has dramatically ratcheted up tensions in the Middle East, accusing Iran of an “act of war.” This makes clear that the consolidation of power in the hands of the most hardline, anti-Iranian faction of the Saudi royal family threatens to trigger a[Read More…]
This is a report of the four-member fact finding team constituted by Committee for Protection of Democratic Rights (CPDR) to inquire into the demolition of homes in Garib Nagar, Bandra East between 26th October and 2nd November 2017 and the eruption of major fire in the same basti on 26th October. The Fact Finding Team members were Adv. Suresh Rajeshwar,[Read More…]
The massacre at the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs was, to put it simply, effective and spectacular. It also had the resonances of the primeval, ignoring the sanctity of the church in favour of murder within it. The alleged assailant managed to do less God’s work than his own, slaughtering 26 and injuring 20 others. The regularity of these[Read More…]
Colonialism creates the patriotism of the colonized. Kept at the level of a beast by an oppressive system, the natives are given no rights, not even the right to live. Their condition worsens daily. And when a people has no choice but how it will die; when a people has received from its oppressors only the gift of despair,[Read More…]
The antiquated and autocratic tsarist political system was more than enough to provide rationale for the Great October Revolution, which has been dealt widely by many political scientists and politicians. Condition of the proletariat in the country the Revolution was organized – Russia – bolstered the rationale. Political developments in the country and political fight the proletariat was waging[Read More…]
Four US soldiers died in Niger on October 4, and the president’s insensitive phone call to the widow of one has brought the subject of the military in every corner of the world back in the news. The UN has 193 members. The US has over 240,000 troops in at least 172 of them, some of which are embroiled in[Read More…]
Unimaginable brutality in Iranian regime’s prisons unveiled by an escaped Ahwazi political prisoner Ghazi Haidari is drowning in his own blood. The prominent Ahwazi writer, historian and activist from Arab Ahwaz region in the south and south-west of Iran was imprisoned and brutally tortured by the regime there for the ‘crime’ of human rights advocacy. Although he managed to escape[Read More…]
Rats fleeing a sinking ship – the ship of white male privilege The floodgates have opened. All the disgusting, depraved details are surfacing. Now the “public” is learning what the majority of us already knew – that men of power have been sexually abusing and harassing women for generations. It was simply the norm. Most women have experienced it in[Read More…]
My great-grandfather was thrown in prison in Europe when he was aged twelve. He was put in a small mud filled room with water dripping from the mud ceiling and walls. In fact, it was a hole, some sort of chamber dug out underground with a few barred windows at street level up high beyond reach from the inmates for[Read More…]
In these very dark times – these end- times created by nuclear weapons – seeing the truth is dependent on the will to truth, and the will to truth only arises when people believe they are free to alter the circumstances in which they find themselves. This belief in freedom is at the core of all existential thought and is why we need to resurrect it today.
Daayan! Demonetisation!
Destroyer of lives both men and women!
Benefactor to corporates ‘ paytm’
And much publicised BHIM !
Karunakaran is a cartoonist
Dr Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd whose book “Smajika Smugglerlu: Komatollu’’ angered the Hindutva forces posted threatening posters in front of his house. According to Dr Kancha Ilaiah these posters which appeared on 4th November night is a warning to attack or kill him. He has filed a complaint to The Station House Officer, Osmania University, Hyderabad. Here is the full text[Read More…]
The world is in ruins. It is literally burning, covered by slums, by refugee camps, and its great majority is ‘controlled by markets’, as was the dream and design of individuals such as Milton Friedman, Friedrich von Hayek, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Führers like Kissinger and Brzezinski, sacrificed tens of millions of human lives all over our planet,[Read More…]
Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has delivered a speech in Ahmadabad not as a political leader but as an economist and citizen of India where he has put some important analyses on demonetization and GST. It is a general perception among the vast section of the people who work hard on streets and mainly belong to unorganized sector and small[Read More…]
‘If a guy named Mohammad blew up that church yesterday. O my God, O my God, Washington would be on fire,” says MSNBC Moring Joe Host. Joe Scarboroug was alluding to Sunday’s shooting at First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas that killed at least 26 people and injured 19. Just last week after New York president immediately talked[Read More…]
The predicament of Imran Khan’s fanboys has been somewhat like the pubescent girl who falls head over heels in love with a promiscuous playboy; and when her family and friends try to knock some sense into her by telling her that your sweetheart is cheating on you, instead of heeding to their well-meaning advice, she thinks they are jealous of[Read More…]
Count the cows & the cakes
of dung, lynch a few men
every time
you get their tally wrong.
Director Stephen Frears’s Victoria and Abdul, based on the book of the same name by Shrabani Basu, draws upon the diaries of Abdul Karim (1863–1909) that were published in 2010. Karim was an Indian clerk who shared an unusual bond with Queen Victoria in the last fifteen years of her life, which shook up the royal household and British upper[Read More…]
Santoshi Kumari The recent hunger deaths of Santoshi Kumari in Simdega, Vaidnath Ravidas in Dhanbad and Ruplal Marandi in Deoghar district of Jharkhand have exposed the violation of the mere right to life being caused by the mandatory requirement of linking Aadhaar with ration cards and the poor implementation of the National Food Security Act (NFSA) in the state. These[Read More…]
The Sangh Parivar elements that worked hand in glove with Arya Vysyas, who wanted to lynch me at Parkal on 23 September, after the TDP Parliament member T.G Venkatesh issued a threat on 17thSeptember came with true colours. They caught hold of just 22 year old Dalit boy, who sported big saffron tilak on his forehead and said that[Read More…]
This was another case of the big and the powerful undercutting the tax systems of the world. But could anyone be genuinely surprised at the revelations to come out of the Paradise Papers on the workings of the tax haven industry? Of the 13.4 million files revealed by the Süddeutsche Zeitung, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and some 90[Read More…]
The moment the Great October Revolution proclaimed its victory “the English and French press was filled with horrible stories about the servants of the revolutionaries, the massacres of the propertied classes, the ruin of the innocent ministers of Kerensky and of the Tsar’s regime, about the anarchy in the streets of Petrograd and the chaos in the provinces.” (Morgan[Read More…]
Mel E. Lindsey no longer believes the American people are represented by their government. The 90-year-old resident of Long Beach, California—who served in the U.S. Navy during World War II and who spent more than 50 years in education—is concerned for the future of the nation he fought for and for the children he taught. Wanting to do something about[Read More…]
“There’s many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.” — Flannery O’ Connor As Wikipedia indicates, Maus is cartoonist Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel about an exchange with his father respecting WWII Holocaust matters. It was the first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize, but it’s not what I’m focusing on here, my title notwithstanding. That[Read More…]
The Socialist Party demands immediate release of Chandrashekhar Azad ‘Ravan’, Bhim Army chief, from prison and removal of National Security Act (NSA) imposed on him. Chandrasekhar is lodged in Saharanpur jail from 9 June 2017. He is an accused in the four cases of inciting violence and property damage in the incident of Saharanpur Dehat Kotwali on 9 May 2017.[Read More…]
The resignation of Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri, announced Saturday in Riyadh over Saudi state media, marks a further escalation of the US, Saudi and Israeli preparations for military confrontation with Iran. After becoming prime minister for a second time in 2016—he previously held the office from 2009 to 2011—Hariri, the leader of the Lebanese Sunni Future Movement party, headed[Read More…]
It took some time of muzzling and concealment before the horror, but various Democrats have finally come clean about the Hillary Clinton machine: things were, it seems, rigged, stacked, and doctored. This was the language of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump from opposite sides of the political spectrum, the code of anti-establishment anger, the message for disruptive change. Such anti-establishment[Read More…]
Years ago, a friend of mine, when we were discussing goodness and malevolence, casually mentioned that even the worst criminals nearly always thought that whatever they were doing was constructive and the problem, then, became one in which different people hold radically different outlooks concerning whatever stands for benefits. In this sense, Josef Mengele (a human representing the epitome of[Read More…]
Co-Written by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers The work to transform society involves two parallel paths: resisting harmful systems and institutions and creating new systems and institutions to replace them. Our focus in this article is on positive work that people are doing to change current systems in ways that reduce the wealth divide, meet basic needs, ensure sustainability, create economic and racial justice[Read More…]
On November 7, 2017, Elston McCowan could well become the first Green Party candidate to defeat a Democrat in Missouri. If he wins the Ward 2 race in St. Louis City he will also become the first Green Party candidate to beat a Democrat in an overwhelmingly black district. And it might not be crazy to think that McCowan[Read More…]
The Enduring Peaceful Struggle for the rehabilitation of the Wang-Marathwadi dam oustees has succeeded at last! According to the Directives issued by the Water Resources Department, Government of Maharashtra on October, 31st, 2017, to the Executive Director, Maharashtra Krishna Valley Development Corporation, shall Rehabilitate the of Wang Marathwadi Dam Affected Families above the Reservoir Fringe and shall grant them cash[Read More…]
After another Uprising Indian Government resorted to its last option ‘dialogue’ to bring back ‘normalcy’ in Kashmir. Since July 8 2016, when famous militant commander Burhan Wani got killed in an alleged encounter by Indian security forces, it has been a tough time for state as well as central government to settle down the nerves. It has been a norm for Government[Read More…]
In India, the priorities of people are constantly undergoing changes. These are, in fact, a result of the changes the development landscape is undergoing. A generation or two ago, ending hunger would have been the overwhelming need. Not any more even if malnutrition remains a challenge. Development also has brought electricity, more roads, pumps and overhead tanks — all[Read More…]
Right to Food Campaign activists of Jharkhand have written an open letter to Ajay Bhushan Pandey CEO, Unique Identification Authority of India on the cancellation of Ration Cards because they were not linked to Aadhaar cards. Large numbers of ration cards were recently cancelled in Jharkhand because they had not been linked with Aadhaar. To Ajay Bhushan Pandey CEO, Unique Identification Authority of[Read More…]
Peoples Union for Democratic Rights strongly condemns the imposition of the National Security Act (NSA) against Bhim Army’s founder leader Chandrashekhar Azad by Yogi Adityanath’s government, on 3 November 2017, a day after he was granted bail by Allahabad High Court. Chandrashekhar had been arrested on 8 June 2017 on charges of inciting violence and destruction of property, in connection[Read More…]
Janhastakshep strongly condemns the persecution of the Bhim Army Chief, Chandra Shekhar Azad by the UP government in no uncertain terms. As is well known by now that in May this year in the caste riot between Dalits and the dominant upper caste, Thakurs, in Shabbirpur village in Saharanpur District, many houses of the Dalits were gutted down and the[Read More…]
Co-Written by Megan Hicks, Poco Kernsmith & Joanne Smith-Darden In the wake of sexual assault and harassment allegations involving Harvey Weinstein and Bill O’Reilly, Americans may be learning just how prevalent sexual violence is in our society. So, what can be done to prevent it? We have studied how family, school, and neighborhood environments influence violent youth behavior. Building from[Read More…]
Capitalism has been the world’s dominant economic system for more than 700 years. And as it brings the planet to new crises, author Raj Patel believes it’s important to imagine what might replace it. But reform won’t happen unless we understand capitalism’s appeal and historical rise, says Patel, a food justice activist and professor at the University of Texas at[Read More…]
A common thread throughout history is that great leaders did the right thing at the right time, with courage and integrity. The current climate crisis has thrust our generation into such a moment in history. Today, we face a threat and an opportunity like none we have seen before and have a small window of time in which to take[Read More…]
Denouncing Lenin and his “band” of Bolsheviks by their class enemies is endless while discussing the Great October Revolution. One of the few denouncements bases its arguments on “machines and money”. The main argument put forward by this machines and money-group is: as an economy Russia was “not” matured for the Revolution, and Lenin with his “band” of Bolsheviks thrust[Read More…]
A group of renowned leaders and scholars from different backgrounds, in a joint statement issued in New Delhi today demanded the central government to protect the freedom of association guaranteed by our constitution to all sections of society and to refrain from targeting any organization or group as part of political agenda. They have strongly demanded to stop demonizing Social[Read More…]
“‘Let there be light!’, he said, as he lit the dry grass with his Rick and Morty customized Bic. ‘Sick, sick, sick’, he whispered to himself as he drank in the swim of the flames, left, right, all swirly up and down as they grew in the wind, his grin widening. Wondering where he should go next. Thus begins[Read More…]
Since the year 2000 at least 22 pharmaceutical companies have settled criminal and civil suits for over $10 billion in fines. Companies have been found guilty of fraud, kickbacks, false claims, and off label promotion. For example, In May 2007 Perdue Pharmaceuticals, makers of the opioid Oxycontin, was found guilty of “off label promotion” and paid over $600 million[Read More…]
Jesus Christ walked on water as per certain Christian belief systems. It appears that the local clergy who supported the struggle of the fishing community against Vizhinjam Transit Harbour has finally decided to allow Adani to walk over a globally significant bio-diversity region of an ocean in Kerala. The fisher people were on strike for 12 days. The Communist government[Read More…]
In 1917, the British government unleashed the Zionist Jewish colonial enterprise that is now Israel. In the process, it meted out on Palestinians destruction, dispossession and oppression that are ongoing to this day. [Watch Al Jazeera English video: 100 Years On: The Balfour Declaration explained] The language used in the document that facilitated this disaster, the Balfour Declaration,is devious and[Read More…]
Sexual harassment – it’s revelation, that is – is all around at the moment, a toxic cold that is giving political establishments not so much a sneeze as debilitating pneumonia. In Britain, the cold covered various parties, initiating investigations, concerns and the promise of further actions. It also hit Michael Fallon, the Defence Secretary who found himself without a portfolio,[Read More…]
Is this not one of international politics most significant ‘coincidences’ that the Balfour declaration for the creation of Israel was adopted in the same fateful year, November 1917, in which the February and October 1917 communist revolutions were taking place in Russia? No informed person can deny the importance of energy for industrial economies, but it is generally assumed in[Read More…]
A look at history assures us that successive British kingdoms/governments up to the present day have a very atrocious history perpetrating brutal terrorism, genocides, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, rapes of women and children, violations of human rights, whole scale destructions, the ugliest racism, betrayals, theft of land and natural resources of all the other countries in the whole world[Read More…]
In her recent book “What Happened”, Hillory Clinton makes endless tearful, self-pitying excuses for the disastros 2016 US election, in which the climate-change-denying, racist, wealth-worshipping Republican Party gained control over the Presidency, the Congress and the Senate. But what really happened in that terrible election was that voters were faced with a choice between two evils, and many disillutioned[Read More…]
One may easily argue that climate change represents the greatest ever threat to the continued existence of civilization. And such a threat, global and multi-generational in its scope, cannot long go unabated. Let me be very clear: We humans cannot, under any circumstances, afford to ignore climate change. Rather, we have to muster our very best efforts to combat it,[Read More…]
While speaking at Diwali-Milan function organised at the BJP headquarters in New Delhi on Oct 28, 2017, Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a veiled warning to his own party men said BJP is speaking in different voices. He called for a debate on internal democracy in political parties, asserting that the growth of “true democratic spirit” within them is[Read More…]
The seven-million strong American Muslim community fears a backlash after the Tuesday (Oct. 31) attack in New York when a driver ploughed a truck through crowds in lower Manhattan killing eight and injuring a dozen more. Imam Mohammad Qatanani, spiritual leader of the Islamic Center of Passaic County (N.J.), said: “People here feel they will be blamed as a[Read More…]
UDALGURI,Assam November 3: The concerned authorities in Assam assigned to detect and deport illegal immigrants mostly Bangladeshis appears to be on an overdrive when it comes to branding Indian nationals as ‘foreigners’ not only brandishing their power tool to harass genuine Bengali speaking people but even Hindi-speaking people whose ancestors migrated from Bihar,Uttar Pradesh decades back to Assam.Can one imagine[Read More…]
Tales of exaggeration and outright lies by this president are not new. In 1974, the New York Times did a profile on the young Trump. He claimed he was worth $200 million when his taxable income then was $2,200 a week; that he was of Swedish heritage; that he had graduated at the top of his class at Wharton! [Read More…]
“It’s only twenty minutes away, thirteen miles between Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Pleasanton via I-580, but I’d say that not a single soul among the 82,270 citizens who live in that San Francisco suburb know anything about what’s going on within the government’s secretive realm unless they work there.” — Richard Martin Oxman What exactly are Tanks &[Read More…]
From the clutches of these hatred mongers
And fake marketers
Into that world of freedom, let the country awake
Co-Written by Paul Mitchell and Alex Lantier After imposing Article 155 of the Spanish Constitution to suspend Catalonia’s elected government last week, Spain, backed by the European Union (EU), is rapidly moving towards a military regime. As High Court judge Carmen Lamela remanded into custody eight ministers of the Catalan regional government, Spanish armed forces chief General Fernando Alejandre threatened[Read More…]
It could not have been scripted better for the demagogues and security hysterics. With the country still grieving in confusion in the aftermath of the Las Vegas slayings, inflicted by an individual who resisted the classification of terrorist at the hands of the Nevada authorities, in came Sayfullo Saipov. Saipov, who fit the fanatic’s bill, the ideologue’s cut, and popular[Read More…]
November 2, is exactly 100 years after the issuance of the Balfour Declaration, the pledge given to the World Zionist Movement in a letter signed by the British Foreign Secretary to support the establishment of a ‘national home’ in the then Ottoman millet of Palestine. Certainly ‘a day of infamy’ for the Palestinian people and their friends around the world,[Read More…]
Israeli commanders, stationed along Syria’s southern border and the Golan Heights and Quneitra Valley, with some of their forces now operating daily more than 14 km inside Syrian territory, reportedly are expressing plenty of confidence these days. One reason is because they believe that Iranian-Hezbollah forces are losing the high stakes struggle to win the hearts and minds of Syria’s[Read More…]
Arab Masses Victims of the Modern Warfare Truth is One, not many. The Western leaders propelled by the ambiguous animosity of ‘the clash of civilizations’ are using sectarian violence as the engine of sophisticated warfare to destroy the Arab Middle East. Syria is destroyed, Iraq dismantled, Libya gone, Yemen ruptured and according to Robert Fisk, House of Saud comes[Read More…]
Hate is spreading like an oil stain over the Earth. Hate is even further encouraged by populists who purport to speak in the name of the people. Populist politicians try to obtain the support of the electorate by all means without worrying about the viability of their proposals. They invariably rage against the ‘elite’. Ever since Trump took office, the[Read More…]
I was dismayed to recently read that all whites should be removed from societies via interbreeding with darker skinned people. No, I am not making this wackiness up in my mind. it is real and stems from a professor in NYC [1]. Some people, apparently she included, feel that the way to get around the dilemma of all-white families is[Read More…]
The work of Adani on Vizhinjam Transit Harbour has stopped due to the struggle of the local people. The struggle is on the 11th day. Both Adani and the Kerala Government are embarassed. Now, the possibility would be on negotiations for rehabilitation and compensation. How can you rehabilitate and how can you compensate? The southern tip of Arabean sea is[Read More…]
What just used to be rumors, suddenly,became official facts. The Government of the United States of America, which for years and decades has been sick and tired of the ‘rebellious UN agency’, decided to leave it, slamming the door behind its back. In its official Press Statement, the U.S. Department of State declared: “On October 12, 2017, the Department[Read More…]
The solemnity of the 100th commemoration of the Anzac victory of courage and dash in the 1917 Battle of Beersheba was desecrated by the opportunistic propaganda of PM Netanyahu, by the Australian PM Turnbull’s grovelling echo of Israel’s outrageous lies and by the business pragmatism of Israeli patsy, the Aotearoa/New Zealand, Governor-General Reddy. For months, while Australian and New Zealand[Read More…]
River Shabari flows through the Dandak forests. Along its banks live people from many tribes, the Adivasis – Gond, Kondh, Koya, Koitur, Shabar, Soro… so many names have history given to them. The epic Ramayana tells the tale of Shabari, the lady from these tribes who had turned into stone. But this is another tale. Below the bed of river[Read More…]
“Rukhsaar! Rukhsaar!”…..Rashida was running as fast as her 12 year old legs could carry her. She was out of breath by the time she reached her home. “What happened? Why are you looking so distraught?” Rukhsaar enquired urgently. Not waiting to calm her breath, Rashida blurted out…..They are coming…They are coming…. These words were enough to numb Rashida’s 16 year[Read More…]
Who is your Role Model? Think of someone you know or knew personally, not a public figure. For how many of you is that a parent or a teacher? If I asked your children the same question, what do you think they would say? Who would they be thinking of you? How do you know? What about you inspires your[Read More…]
Kerala police unleashed brutal force against people protesting against the proposed liquefied natural gas (LNG) pipeline of Gas Authority of India Ltd (GAIL) at Mukkom, near Calicut in which dozens of agitators were injured. The agitating mob blocked rural roads with lighted tyres and threw stones at police vehicles. Tension prevailed in the area as the police resorted to a[Read More…]
Townsville: The cicadas are studding the night with their sound, and occasionally, the curlews manifest with calls that string out a melody of mournful death. The reminder of Queensland, and certainly this part of the Australian state, is total. As the dawn breaks, an election is being fought for the state, and its politicians are generally of one unchanging mind: Adani’s[Read More…]
Anthropocene: relating to or denoting the current geological age, viewed as the period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment. The call came a little before 5 am, the morning of Monday, October 9. I stumbled toward the phone and retrieved the message. A neighbor’s voice, “Get ready to evacuate!” Huh? A[Read More…]
There is more than a little irony in Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to attend a “celebration” dinner this week in London with his British counterpart, Theresa May, marking the centenary of the Balfour Declaration. Palestinian objections to the 1917 document are well-known. Britain’s Lord Balfour had no right to promise a “national home for the Jewish people” in[Read More…]
by Valleria Ruselli and the Oxman Collective “If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.” — Emma Goldman “If voting made a difference, they wouldn’t let us do it.” — Mark Twain Oh, voting can change some things, but let’s go beyond that bumper sticker mentality. When powerful social tensions have roiled the U.S. throughout its history — making progressive[Read More…]
Soviet Union demonstrated the first experiment in human history of the application of science and scientific methods for building socialism. Planned scientific and technological research had contributed hugely to successful building of socialism in USSR, especially during the first three plan periods after October revolution. For the first time, science was liberated from the dictates of Private ‘Capital’ and [Read More…]
(For any dialogue to succeed the primary requirement is a conducive environment. One cannot ask somebody to talk by holding a gun to his temple!) It is a very welcome initiative from Government of India to hold talks with all stake holders in Kashmir to resolve the basic problem and bring peace to the area. Kashmir problem has been hanging[Read More…]
Contrary to common sense, we could experience booming GDP and stock market valuations all the way to society’s imminent collapse. As we reel from one natural disaster after another—hurricanes Harvey, Irma, Maria, wildfires in California—climate scientists explain how they’re not really “natural” at all. They’re the anticipated consequence of a breakdown in the world’s climate, one that will become far more extreme[Read More…]
From Brussels, where he fled to escape prosecution by Spanish authorities, deposed Catalan regional premier Carles Puigdemont appealed yesterday for the European Union to intervene in the secession crisis. Last week, Madrid invoked Article 155 of the Spanish Constitution to impose an unelected regime in Catalonia in response to the October 1 Catalan independence referendum. Now Puigdemont is asking the[Read More…]
Eight people have been killed and more than a dozen injured after a truck mowed down people on a bike path in Lower Manhattan. FBI is treating the incident as an act of terrorism and the driver of the vehicle has been shot by the NYPD and taken into custody alive. The suspect has been identified as a 29-year-old Uzbek[Read More…]
David Cronin, Balfour’s Shadow. A Century of British Support for Zionism and Israel, Pluto 2017. In November this year, the British Conservative Party and the Zionists will commemorate the centenary of the Balfour Declaration (BD). For the Palestinians and the Arabs in general, it should be a day of mourning. No historical document has screwed up a region such as[Read More…]
Film actor Praksh Raj is a good actor who has acted in several films in different languages. He has portrayed various characters representing good and bad. He has received various national awards as well as other awards for his talent. Any actor may present a character in a film, but the person may have a certain degree of social consciousness.[Read More…]
“The tradition of man and horse is part of us. It is part of Australia.” Australian Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, Oct 31, 2017 Exaggerated truths have been flowering in the rhetoric following the visit of Australian politicians to ceremonies commemorating the light horse charge at Beersheba. Not a single wisp of objectivity has manifested itself in covering the proceedings, the[Read More…]
India’s immediate past President Pranab Mukherjee (82) in his The Coalition Years, 1996-2012 – his twelfth book – tells his own tale about the last 16 years of his experience in active politics until 2012, when he became the President of the Republic. He was in active politics for 43 years (1969-2012), holding important positions as MP; Leader of[Read More…]
Israeli footprints are becoming more apparent in the US security apparatus. Such a fact does not bode well for ordinary Americans. US Senate Bill S.720 should have been a wake-up call. The Bill, drafted by the Israel lobby group, American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), as part of its “2017 Lobbying Agenda” is set to punish any individual or[Read More…]
Co-Written By Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese This week, the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, which promoted giving Palestine to the Jewish people, will be celebrated in London. Around the world, there will be protests against it calling for Britain to apologize for the damage it inflicted. Students from the West Bank and Gaza will send letters to the British government[Read More…]
As Henry Grunwald puts it “Journalism can never be silent, that is its greatest virtue and its greatest fault”. But what can be more distressing for a democracy than silencing this critical weapon often termed as its fourth pillar? In the last half a decade Indian media has been rattled by the death of some prominent journalistic voices -allegedly by[Read More…]
31 October 2017 – thirty three years have passed since the anti-Sikh pogrom carried out in Delhi between 31st October and 4th November 1984, following the assassination of the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh body guards. The official figure of those massacred in the violence stands at 2700, while according to unofficial estimates it is closer to 4000 in[Read More…]
Hunger in Africa has its roots in a History of Colonialism and Neo-colonialism 
The Climate March: Magnificent and Misdirected 
Imagining a Progressive Pentagon 
“Lost Voices of Fentanyl” Rally at the White House 
Indian Government Must First Evict Dalai Lama & his Followers before Admonishing Canada for Separatist Activities 
Peasant-rebels: lineages of insurgency 
Mission to Free Assange: Australian Parliamentarians in Washington 
Bayer-ICAR Collaboration Raises Serious Concerns Regarding Indian Farm Policy 
Place of Minorities as Allotted by Savarkar, Golwalkar and Upadhyaya 
What is in the name? Attempt to stop the usage of ‘India’ by the Government 
Poona Pact: A Reappraisal 
Hate Speech Inside Parliament: Reaching a New Low 
Criminal Justice And Freedom of Speech 
75,000 Climate Protesters Marched In New York With Demand To End Fossil Fuels 
On the Dark Side of the Moon.. 
Avoiding the War on Terror would have saved over 10 million lives at home and abroad 
The Angertainer Steps Down: Rupert Murdoch’s Non-Retirement 
Climate Emergency Update, September 2023 
My appeal to Meta’s Oversight Board: Palestinian political and resistance organizations & individuals are not “terrorists” as classified by Israel 
Artificial Intelligence: Profit Versus Freedom 
How Can We Understand the Passage of Time? 
Pre- and Post-Soviet Language Policy in the East-Baltic States 
Breadcrumb 
Three Indian Movies win TIFF 2023 Awards 
Ukrainian president holds crisis talks in Washington amid failure of “spring offensive” 
Zelensky Faces Difficult Time In Washington D.C. 
Stumbling Towards Old Age And Looking for Someone to Lean On 
Tolstoy’s Dilemma 
Ukraine Peace Activists Protest During Zelensky White House Visit 
“Our world is becoming unhinged”: Antonio Guterres 
How Chances of Direct War between the USA and Russia Are Increasing 
G20 Biofuel Alliance threatens Food security 
Thousands Of Auto Workers Strike In Three U.S. Plants, Face Financial Hardship 
Submission To Australian National Anti-Corruption Commission, NACC: Mainstream Media Lying 
In The Name of Decolonization 
Is This the End of French Neo-Colonialism in Africa? 
Tel Aviv’s Losing Brands: Israeli ‘Coup’ and the Death of False Democracy 
Tackling Global Emergencies – UN International Day of Peace 
The Futility of Feudalistic Democracy Bayer over-riding Bhartiya Krishi 
My Amma (Malayalam word for Mother) passed away on August 22, 2023 at 3.10 AM. It is always difficult to deal with the passing of a parent, that too one’s mother. I thought the grief would go away. No it didn’t. All those bitter sweet memories won’t go away. At night I lie awake for hours. My friend, guide and[Read More…]
