The White House unveiled its budget request for the 2024 fiscal year Thursday, with the largest ever proposed spending on the military. It is a $1 trillion budget for world war. The Biden administration wants the resources to fight Russia in Ukraine, intensify its buildup towards war with China in the Far East and sustain US military aggression in the[Read More…]
Israeli military and intelligence units carried out multiple acts of aggression over the weekend against Iran and Iranian forces in Syria. The attacks were the first offensive military operations under the ultra-right government newly installed in Israel, under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. A drone attack, likely staged from within Iran by Israeli operatives, hit a weapons facility in the central[Read More…]
Over the past three days, relentless Israeli airstrikes killed at least 45 Palestinians, including 16 children, and caused extensive devastation. At least 400 were wounded, many severely, and the handful of barely functioning hospitals and clinics were overwhelmed. Some 2.3 million Palestinians live in Gaza, confined by Israeli and Egyptian military cordons and fences. Hundreds of powerful bombs and missiles[Read More…]
In an action that combines brazen theft, imperialist brutality and unlimited hypocrisy, the Biden administration announced Friday that it will seize control of $7 billion in Afghanistan financial assets, held largely at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, rather than return them to the Afghanistan central bank. Media attention has largely been devoted to Biden’s splitting of the $7[Read More…]
Russian Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia accused the United States of “whipping up tensions” and seeking to provoke a Russian invasion of Ukraine, in a debate at the United Nations Security Council over the mounting crisis in Eastern Europe. “The discussion about a threat of war is provocative in and of itself,” he said. Turning to US Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, he continued,[Read More…]
By an overwhelming bipartisan margin of 88-11, the US Senate voted Wednesday to approve the largest military budget in history, nearly $770 billion, some $25 billion more than the Biden administration had requested. The legislation passed the House of Representatives last week by a similar bipartisan margin, 363-70, and it now goes to the White House for President Joe Biden’s[Read More…]
As the global climate summit COP26 drags out to its miserable end this week in Glasgow, Scotland, the major capitalist powers and the banks and corporations that call the shots in national and world politics have largely failed in their efforts to use the summit to provide a semblance of “progress” in resolving the global climate emergency. The rival powers[Read More…]
In what the US military described as a “complex attack,” several terrorists attacked a screening checkpoint at a gate into the Kabul airport and a nearby hotel on Thursday, inflicting a horrific toll of death and destruction. Unnamed Afghan health officials told the media that at least 60 Afghan citizens were killed and another 140 wounded. The Pentagon said that[Read More…]
In the days following the desperate evacuation of US troops from Afghanistan, the corporate press has launched an international propaganda campaign raising concerns for the “human rights” of residents of the Central Asian country. For the last 20 years, the corporate media and imperialist powers of the world raised no objections as the United States killed over 100,000 people, set[Read More…]
On Monday afternoon, US President Joe Biden delivered a nationally televised address in response to the collapse of the US-backed puppet government in Afghanistan. The scale and historical impact of the catastrophe suffered by American imperialism in Afghanistan, which in many respects exceeds even its defeat in the Vietnam War, found expression in the speech, perhaps the bleakest address by[Read More…]
The latest report issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Monday morning goes beyond all previous global scientific documents to definitively link human industrial and agricultural activity to climate change, and to link climate change to specific weather events like recent droughts, heat waves, storms and flooding. Some 234 scientists summarized the results of more than 14,000 separate[Read More…]
Co-Written by Benjamin Mateus and Patrick Martin The coronavirus killed at least 812 people in the United States Tuesday, the highest death toll since the pandemic began, while nearly 25,000 new cases were reported, bringing the total number infected to more than 188,000, the largest number in the world by far. Along with the unprecedented scale of the infection, its[Read More…]
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced Tuesday afternoon the beginning of a formal impeachment inquiry directed at Donald Trump. The investigations currently being conducted by six separate House committees will now be funneled through the Speaker’s office to determine whether articles of impeachment should be drawn up against the US president. The action marks a significant escalation in the conflict within[Read More…]
A federal judge ordered Chelsea Manning to prison Friday morning for an indefinite period of time, after the former Army private, jailed for seven years for providing information to WikiLeaks exposing US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, refused on principle to answer any questions before a secret grand jury investigating the media organization and its founder Julian Assange. “The[Read More…]
President Trump’s proclamation of a state of national emergency on the southern US border is a frontal assault on constitutional norms and democratic rights in America. It is the first time in American history that a president has sought to usurp the constitutional prerogative of Congress to decide how public funds are to be spent. The actual text of the[Read More…]
Seven-year-old Jackeline Caal died in the custody of the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) last week, the agency admitted Thursday. The child’s death was a direct consequence of the savage repression of immigrants by the Trump administration, which has intensified to the point where such deaths cannot be considered accidents. They are the inevitable and deliberate result of policies[Read More…]
The Democratic Party won control of the House of Representatives in the midterm elections on November 6, gaining more than the 23 seats required for a majority. With many House races too close to call or with large numbers of votes still uncounted, particularly in states like California and Washington, which provide for voting by mail, the five television networks[Read More…]
The US Senate on Saturday confirmed Brett Kavanaugh as associate justice of the Supreme Court in a near-party-line vote of 50 to 48. Kavanaugh was sworn in only a few hours later by Chief Justice John Roberts in a private ceremony with no press in attendance. Kavanaugh will take his seat on the high court when it resumes work Monday,[Read More…]
Hurricane Florence, one of the most powerful storms ever to strike the US mainland, came ashore early Friday morning north of Wilmington, North Carolina. The hurricane generated winds of more than 100 miles per hour and drove a ten-foot storm surge over beaches and boardwalks along a wide swathe of coastline. The worst impact of the storm surge was expected[Read More…]
The number of hungry people in the world continues to grow, reaching 821 million in 2017, or one in every nine people, according to the report, “The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2018,” released Tuesday in Rome by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, the World Health Organization, UNICEF and other groups.[Read More…]
The Trump administration announced Monday that it would retaliate against the International Criminal Court (ICC), a judicial panel established under the auspices of the United Nations, if the ICC took any action against US military or civilian officials over charges of war crimes in Afghanistan. The announcement was made by National Security Advisor John Bolton in a speech to the[Read More…]
In one of the cruelest and most outrageous violations of human rights in American history, the Trump administration has refused to reunite nearly a thousand of the immigrant children forcibly separated from their parents under the “zero tolerance” policy Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) began to carry out in early May. The deadline of[Read More…]
More than a dozen working-class protesters have been shot and killed by police, Special Forces and pro-government militias across south and central Iraq over the past week, amid a widening popular upsurge against the US-backed government of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi. The driving force of this movement is anger that seven years after the official withdrawal of the US military[Read More…]
Court documents made public in Virginia and Texas give a glimpse of the systematic brutality being meted out to immigrant children in both public and private jails. Children are strapped down, hooded and beaten, or drugged by force, as part of the everyday procedure in what can only be called the American Gulag. An Associated Press report published Thursday gave[Read More…]
After a reportedly heated meeting of the US National Security Council on Wednesday, the Trump White House announced that there was no change in US policy toward Syria, despite a volley of comments and tweets by President Trump demanding an immediate pullout of the 2,000 US troops now deployed in the country. The meeting with the National Security Council was[Read More…]
Hundreds of National Football League players took part in symbolic protest actions against police violence Sunday, kneeling or sitting during the playing of the US national anthem before professional football games, or locking arms with those who did. Dozens of players have been taking part in such protests since the beginning of the season, angered by the continuing police shootings[Read More…]
President Donald Trump announced a major escalation of the US war in Afghanistan in a nationally televised speech Monday night, although he gave no details either about the number of additional troops that will be sent or the extent or duration of the military commitment. Trump also made menacing threats against Pakistan in remarks clearly crafted in close coordination with[Read More…]
The Trump White House plunged deeper into political crisis Thursday, as President Trump and top aides gave conflicting accounts of how and why Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, and FBI and Justice Department officials flatly contradicted the White House version of events. As the Trump administration scrambled to defend the decision to fire Comey, Democrats have seized on the[Read More…]
More than 20 million people face imminent starvation in four countries, United Nations officials warned over the weekend, the largest humanitarian crisis since the end of World War II. All four countries—Yemen, Somalia, South Sudan, and Nigeria—are wracked by civil wars in which the US government is implicated in funding and arming one of the contending sides. UN emergency relief[Read More…]
A three-judge Appeals Court panel issued a unanimous ruling Thursday afternoon rejecting the Trump administration’s claim of “unreviewable” presidential power and sustaining a judicial order that bars enforcement of Trump’s temporary ban on travel from seven Muslim-majority countries, as well as his temporary ban on the entry of refugees from any country. The 3-0 ruling was signed by judges William[Read More…]
The US Congress took its first legislative action of the new congressional term on behalf of the corporate elite, as the Senate voted by 54-45 to pass a resolution rescinding the Stream Protection Rule adopted by the Department of the Interior in December. The rule restricts the dumping of waste by coal companies engaged in a technique known as “mountaintop[Read More…]
President Donald Trump has chosen an ultra-right acolyte of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia to fill the vacancy created by Scalia’s death a year ago, nominating Neil Gorsuch, a federal appellate judge from the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, based in Denver, Colorado. Trump unveiled the nomination in a prime-time television production Tuesday night that had been hyped[Read More…]
US President Donald Trump fired the acting attorney general, Sally Yates, an Obama administration holdover, after she defied instructions to defend Trump’s executive order banning the entry of refugees and visitors from seven Muslim-majority countries—Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. Yates precipitated the crisis by overruling a finding by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which approved[Read More…]
President Donald Trump has ordered US government agencies to expedite approval of the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, running roughshod over opposition by environmentalists and Native American tribes. The Dakota Access Pipe Line (DAPL) has encountered impassioned opposition, with thousands gathering despite the deep freeze of the North Dakota winter to block completion of the 1,200-mile-long pipeline, which is[Read More…]
The Senate Armed Services Committee gave near-unanimous approval Wednesday to Donald Trump’s choice to head the Pentagon, voting by 26-1 to approve retired Gen. James “Mad Dog” Mattis as the next secretary of defense. The nomination now goes to the full Senate for a confirmation vote, expected this week, as soon as Trump is inaugurated and submits the nomination officially.[Read More…]
Flatly defying last week’s United Nations Security Council resolution, the Israeli government has announced that it will move ahead with thousands of new homes in East Jerusalem and elsewhere in the occupied West Bank territories seized by force nearly 50 years ago in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Jerusalem’s municipal government was expected to approve more than 600 housing units[Read More…]
The first debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump was a political and cultural abomination. It demonstrated, in both style and substance, the thoroughgoing decay of American capitalist society over many decades. It says a great deal about the US political system that, out of 330 million people in America, the choice for president has been narrowed down to these[Read More…]
FBI Director James Comey announced Tuesday that his agency will not recommend criminal charges against Hillary Clinton for her use of a private email server to handle government communications during her four years as secretary of state in the Obama administration. Comey read out a lengthy prepared statement that criticized Clinton and her staff in harsh terms, saying they had[Read More…]
An Ordinary German Pogrom 
The Sudden Death of Giant Panda Lele Highlights Systemic Failures at Memphis Zoo 
Fresh investigation needed on the 2008 Jaipur bomb blasts 
Adani Stock Scam An Opportunity To Curtail Hindurashtra Conspiracy 
Urgency of Stepping Up Backward Class Schemes as only 6% of Allocated Funds Spent in First Nine Months of Financial Year 
At least 40 immigrants dead in fire at US-Mexico border 
Contemporary Anti-Semitism – A Jewish View from Germany 
In memory of 40th Anniversary of Military Dictatorship in Argentina 
Poor work conditions, non-compliance with Constitutional provisions seriously impact adolescent girls in workforce 
Take action against K Surendran for insulting Women 
Calculated Exoneration: Command Responsibility and War Crimes in Afghanistan 
DOJ Called Upon to Investigate Environmental Activists Abuses 
The World’s Coffee Shops Have Emerged as Plant Milk’s Front Line 
Lara Sheehi’s ordeal, like Steven Salaita’s, is not quite over 
“Facing Clear Evidence of Peril” in a Country of Lies 
The case of Kashmir: A Gandhian Resolution 
Non-Availability of Badly Needed Funds for Dalit Students Increases Their Difficulties 
A bureaucrat-turned- minister in a mess 
Hundreds Of Thousands Of Workers’ 24-Hour Mega Transport Strike Halts Germany 
Oldest Interfaith Organization in America Calls for Children to Have More Rights Than Guns 
What’s the Best Way Out from the War in Ukraine? 
How Indigenous Land Management Practices Are a Blueprint for Climate-Resilient Agriculture 
In memory of Hugo Chavez on 10th death Anniversary 
Xi’s ‘Chilling’ Remarks: A Multipolar World Offers Challenges and Opportunities to the Middle East and Africa 
Ukraine War – US-China Relations And the Doomsday Clock 
Anti-Rahul Defamation Card Has Its Limitations! 
Questions We Should Ask to Understand Real Impact of Poverty Reduction and Welfare Schemes 
Punjab: Democracy Under Siege? 
Declaration excessive dividends by the Board of HZL may not be in compliance with Section 123 of the Companies Act 
Men, masculinities, and gender equality 
EU Warns After Russia Plans To Place Tactical Nuclear Weapon In Belarus 
A Hazardous Decision: Supplying Ukraine with Depleted Uranium Shells 
Media and the March to War 
The Basic Issue is not of Taking Sides in Superpower Rivalry, it is of Durable Peace to Save Earth’s Life 
The Pentagon’s Budget from Hell 
“…I want poetry to be detonated like a bomb!” -Nathalie Quintane 
Bundelkhand Must Choose its Priorities Carefully 
Citizenship: Beyond the Forked Vision 
Caste-wise census is necessary for balanced development 
Tribal woman murdered after rape in Rohtas and strong protest demanding punishment of culprits 
Our beloved K.P.Sasi is no more. Filmmaker, cartoonist, writer, mentor, friend and above all tireless activist championing the cause of every underdog, Sasi breathed his last, mid-afternoon this Christmas day – after battling a medical condition for months. I remember the last time I met him, almost exactly a month before he passed away, at the ayurvedic healing center in[Read More…]
