Asia is the fastest growing and most dynamic region of the world according to a recent IMF Report; “Recovery Unabated Amid Uncertainty”.[i] Asia and the Pacific will contribute around 70 percent of global growth this year as expansion accelerates after Covid-19 supply chain disruptions, with ongoing geopolitical turmoil and war in Europe, as well as, various hybrid over the horizon[Read More…]
Thousands of patients are facing delays in getting treatments for cancer and other life-threatening diseases, with drug shortages in the United States approaching record levels, said a report by the New York Times. The report — “Drug Shortages Approach an All-Time High, Leading to Rationing — said on May 17, 2023: “Hospitals are scouring shelves for supplies of a drug[Read More…]
Which war has been the longest war of the USA? No, it is not the 21 year War on Terror. It is the 51 year old War on Drugs, starting during the presidency of Richard Nixon. Of course this great leader may have disturbed over the increasing drug addiction, but was the war on drugs primarily motivated by this? Not[Read More…]
In this series, Weaknesses of the National Security Strategy 2022, I’ve been discussing and refuting the claims made in the National Security Strategy 2022, which I refer to as the Sullivan & Biden NSS, even though it’s not clear whether or not Biden’s National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, wrote the document. Claim 4. The USG defends against “aggression and coercion[Read More…]
U.S. mainstream media (MSM) are facing criticism from former U.S. President Barack Obama and U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham. Earlier, famous journalist Seymour Hersh has also criticized the U.S. MSM. Barack Obama has claimed Americans are so divided by the country’s polarizing media outlets that they cannot even begin to address controversial challenges based on a common understanding of reality. “The[Read More…]
We’ve been talking about the claims made within the National Security Strategy 2022. It’s not known whether or not National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan is the actual author, but I refer to it as Sullivan & Biden’s NSS. Claim 3. Nations that don’t open their markets and resources to us are bad. Throughout the NSS 2022, Sullivan & Biden continually[Read More…]
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies On May 16, 2023, The New York Times published a full-page advertisement signed by 15 U.S. national security experts about the war in Ukraine. It was headed “The U.S. Should Be a Force for Peace in the World,” and was drafted by the Eisenhower Media Network. While condemning Russia’s invasion, the statement[Read More…]
A photo Beijing released on March 6th of Chinese President Xi Jinping delivered a seismic shock in Washington. There was the Secretary-General of the Chinese Communist Party standing between Ali Shamkhani, the secretary of Iran’s National Security Council, and Saudi National Security Adviser Musaad bin Mohammed al-Aiban. They were awkwardly shaking hands on an agreement to reestablish mutual diplomatic ties. That picture[Read More…]
North Korea’s Foreign Ministry has claimed NATO is seeking to increase its influence in Asia, citing growing “military collusion” with Japan, which hosted a delegation from the military alliance last month to discuss ways to step up cooperation. In comments carried by the state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on Monday, an official with the Foreign Ministry’s Japan Research Center,[Read More…]
We’ve been discussing the claims made within the National Security Strategy 2022, which I refer to as Sullivan & Biden’s NSS, though whether or not National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan is the actual author is unknown. Claim 2. The US Government (USG) is in the midst of a fierce international competition; winning the competition is vital and will make a[Read More…]
History Speaks to Clarify the Facts of Life To be an informed and progressive generation of people for sustainable change and human development, we must discover unambiguous and self-evident knowledge-based understanding of history to reform the socio-ethnic and political contradictions covered up by adroit. In books and historic records, we encounter some of the unimaginable, intangible and mysterious narratives on[Read More…]
“Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; Who rules the Heartland commands the World Island; Who controls the World Island commands the World” (Sir Halford John Mackinder, 1919) The term geopolitics was first used by the Swedish political scientist Rudolf Kjellén (1864−1922) in 1899, but the term did not become popular in academic circles until it became used in[Read More…]
I just love it when all the media political pundits and talk show hosts ( News Talk?) throw out that word Democracy. You don’t have to go to a ranch to find more bull excrement than that. Folks, this is not a democracy and probably never was one… all the way back to our founding. Why? MONEY MONEY MONEY is[Read More…]
A bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers has introduced a bill to oppose the normalization of relations between Syria and other nations. The Arab League reinstated the country this month, while Saudi Arabia announced the reopening of diplomatic channels with Damascus after ten years. Media reports said: The Assad Anti-Normalization Act threatens “governments considering normalization with the Assad regime” with severe consequences, according to[Read More…]
It wasn’t easy to write about the National Security Strategy 2022 because just reading the document was so repulsive that I came down with a fever the next day.[1] Every time I analyze it I feel an iron claw gripping the back of my neck. It’s also not clear exactly who wrote it. I called my US Congressman’s office[Read More…]
Following the notorious coup in Ukraine in 2014, supported by the USA and some allies, which ousted a democratically elected government, a number of very important changes took places in policies. The political aspects of these policy changes have been better known even though largely ignored in the big media discourse. These include pressures from those who facilitated the coup[Read More…]
Talk about the dangers of artificial intelligence, actual or imagined, has become feverish, much of it induced by the growing world of generative chat bots. When scrutinising the critics, attention should be paid to their motivations. What do they stand to gain from adopting a particular stance? In the case of Geoffrey Hinton, immodestly seen as the “Godfather of AI”,[Read More…]
The women-led anti-hejab movement that began after the death of Mahsa Amini on September 16, 2022, in Iran, is ongoing. Even though the street protests have subsided, many Iranian women defy to comply with wearing Islamic hejab in public. Nonetheless, the Islamic government is fighting to enforce hejab by various means, including closing stores that admit women without headscarves and[Read More…]
Donald Trump is about as useless as a tastebud on an anus. Anyone who has paid attention to the verdict in the E. Jean Carrol case and/or the CNN “townhall” on May 10 in New Hampshire knows that Trump is an inveterate liar; and that’s only if you hadn’t learned that over the past eight years or so. I’ve just[Read More…]
The U.S. is meddling in Türkiye’s upcoming presidential and parliamentary elections, Ankara’s Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu claimed on Friday. Speaking to CNN Turk, Soylu weighed in on the decision by presidential candidate Muharrem Ince, who leads the opposition Homeland Party, to drop out of the race on Thursday ahead of Sunday’s vote. Ince attributed the withdrawal to a “slander campaign,” which[Read More…]
The military industrial complex is comprised of the arms industry and defense contractors, their supporting research establishment, lobbyists and assets. In recent years the military industrial complex of many countries has expanded rapidly, particularly in the case of the USA whose military-industrial complex is much more immense and vast than that of any other country. The military industrial establishment of[Read More…]
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and other senior Pentagon officials have urged U.S. lawmakers to extend the federal borrowing limit, insisting a default on the national debt would be devastating for America’s reputation and “embolden” China. Testifying at a Senate Defense Appropriation hearing on Thursday, both Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley spoke in support of the[Read More…]
Europe is joining a number of other regions on the planet in suffering a prolonged water crisis; and it is one that shows little sign of abating. To this can be added the near catastrophic conditions that exist in other parts of the globe, where ready and secure access to water supplies is more aspiration than reality. Since 2018, according[Read More…]
After almost 79 years on this beleaguered planet, let me say one thing: this can’t end well. Really, it can’t. And no, I’m not talking about the most obvious issues ranging from the war in Ukraine to the climate disaster. What I have in mind is that latest, greatest human invention: artificial intelligence. It doesn’t seem that complicated to me.[Read More…]
The Taliban’s ability to lead Afghanistan remains questionable and ongoing instability has provided the Islamic State the opportunity for expansion. On April 25, 2023, U.S. officials confirmed that the Taliban had killed the head of the Islamic State (IS) cell operating in Afghanistan. Though his identity has not been revealed, the IS leader is believed to have masterminded the 2021 Kabul airport attack that[Read More…]
How to measure soft power? As social power is to a very extent a kind of social capital, the measurement of soft power is, in principle, difficult from the methodological viewpoint concerning social sciences. Methodologically, some indicators are usually used to measure the size of hard power, like geographical resources, economic power, or military potential. Compared with the relatively[Read More…]
‘Revolution’ is a very positive word that has been increasingly used in a negative sense as well. So it is important to be clear about how this word is used here in a very positive sense. When the problems of any system increase, normally it should be possible to resolve these or reduce these within the system. However when the[Read More…]
Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair ordered the 1998 bombing of Iraq despite repeated warnings that such a move was unlawful, according to documents published by Declassified UK, an investigative outlet that focuses on UK’s military and intelligence agencies, on 17 April 2023 (https://declassifieduk.org/blair-misled-parliament-over-1998-iraq-bombing-files-show/). Blair would follow the same template – insisting that illegal military action was legal – when[Read More…]
It looks like 2008 all over again. Economic and financial mismanagement feature in scorching, consuming brilliance. The culpable, bungling banksters, have returned with their customary, venal incompetence. In the customary script, they habitually seek the role of the public purse to socialise their losses. Along the way, they will avoid richly deserved prison sentences, lie low, and return to repeat[Read More…]
Albert Einstein’s letter to Sigmund Freud In 1931, the International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation invited Albert Einstein to enter correspondence with a prominent person of his own choosing on a subject of importance to society. The Institute planned to publish a collection of such dialogues. Einstein accepted at once, and decided to write to Sigmund Freud to ask his opinion[Read More…]
U.S. President Joe Biden has said U.S.’s reputation would be “damaged in the extreme” if the government were unable to pay its bills, insisting a default on the national debt is simply not an option. Addressing reporters after a meeting with congressional leaders on Tuesday, Biden said the sit-down was “productive,” noting that all sides agreed to find a “path forward[Read More…]
It’s a lose-lose situation for Ukrainians. While they are dying to defend their land, financial institutions are insidiously supporting the consolidation of farmland by oligarchs and Western financial interests. So says Frédéric Mousseau, Policy Director of the Oakland Institute, an independent think tank. Depending on which sources to believe, between 100,000 and 300,000 Ukrainian soldiers (possibly more) have died during[Read More…]
Asia currently accounts for more than half of the world’s new and confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths, with India, Indonesia and the Philippines being among the hardest-hit. Combined, WHO regions Western Pacific and South-East Asia reported 1,140,000 new cases and increases of more than 20% in hospital and ICU admissions reported in several countries. These figures are widely considered as[Read More…]
The way mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin and his private army have been waging a significant part of Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine has been well covered in the American media, not least of all because his firm, the Wagner Group, draws most of its men from Russia’s prison system. Wagner offers “freedom” from Putin’s labor camps only to send those released convicts to the[Read More…]
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has criticized the UK for its treatment of Julian Assange. He said the WikiLeaks founder has been imprisoned for his professional activities as a journalist and called on the government to release him. “It is an embarrassment that a journalist who denounced trickery by one state against another is arrested, condemned to die[Read More…]
Perhaps billions around the world saw at least part of the coronation of King Charles III and marvelled at the pomp, the pageantry and the glorious choral music. The colourful military uniforms and the final parade of thousands of British and Commonwealth military forces testified to past imperial glory. However the lavish circa $200 million coronation ignored the ongoing deadly[Read More…]
In Britain, pageantry has always been a palliative and plaster for the dark and dismal. Be it in times of crisis, the chance to put on an extravagant show, usually at vast expense, is not something to forego. Central to this entertainment complex is the Royal family, that archaic vestige of an era that refuses to pass into history. The[Read More…]
When Emmanuel Macron, the President of France, said while returning from a recent tour of China that European countries should not be like vassals of the USA, should not be dragged into a war with China and should be able to exercise strategic autonomy, there were voices of protest within Europe but also of support. It is likely that the[Read More…]
by Dae-Han Song and Alice S. Kim South Korea’s far-right President Yoon Suk Yeol is rushing South Korea headlong into the middle of the new Cold War that the United States is waging against China. Yoon’s aspiration to position South Korea as a “global pivotal state” is turning South Korea into a bigger cog in the U.S. war machine and stakes South[Read More…]
Future historians will likely look back at the debt ceiling rituals being reenacted these days with a frustrated shaking of their heads. That otherwise reasonable people would be so readily deceived raises the question that will provoke those historians: How could this happen? The U.S. Congress has imposed successive ceilings on the national debt, each one higher than the last.[Read More…]
Among the most visible species threatened with extinction are leopards, tigers, elephants, orangutans, gorillas and rhinoceroses. What may be of even greater consequence, however, are the millions of species we cannot see, the microbiome of the Earth which is essential to the life of plants and animals worldwide. As the Sixth Great Extinction proceeds, our attention ought to turn as much to these[Read More…]
May 9th! Moscow Celebrates Victory Over Nazi Germany’s Most Massive and Genocidal Invasion in History, but with incomprehensibly little or no public condemnation of American corporations having earlier heavily rearmed Hitler’s Nazi Germany as British and French armies stood down in cooperation and in violation of the Versailles Treaty’s prohibition of German rearmament.[Read More…]
Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has told CBS News that the conflict in Ukraine may be approaching a turning point, and that Chinese-brokered peace talks could begin by the end of 2023. “Now that China has entered the negotiation, it will come to a head, I think by the end of the year,” the 99-year-old diplomat told CBS[Read More…]
I turn 60 this year. My health is generally good, though I have aches and pains from a form of arthritis. I’m not optimistic enough to believe that the best years of my life are ahead of me, nor so pessimistic as to assume that the best years are behind me. But I do know this, however sad it may[Read More…]
Dimitri Shostakovich A Victim of U.S. Propaganda War in Ukraine Preface The best of all ways for humanity to begin to heal the massive amounts of evil hatred, malevolent rage, unchecked violence, cancerous suspicions, and an all but total collapse of trust between the warring parties that the war in Ukraine has created and continues to foster, is to re-assert[Read More…]
Editor & Author’s Preface: This piece doesn’t explain itself much, nor argue effectively (with citations and footnotes), but speaks to those who have already come to understand the situation in — at least — the basic shape I have. To do otherwise would require months of work, if not years. So this is a distilled essay for those who are waking up from the[Read More…]
Agendas, exaggerations, and misrepresentations guide media reports of the Peoples Republic of China (PRC). Illogical descriptions and unverified information are apparent in many reports. Not being logical and not validating information is troublesome and the reason is obvious ─ validating information and being logical yields a truthful perspective and that perspective is damaging to those who shape specious opinions of[Read More…]
A long time back I was visiting some remote villages where the murder of a youth who had raised his voice against corruption of a powerful local contractor and politician had attracted a lot of attention. There was an undercurrent of simmering anger among people but no one was willing to discuss many details openly, much less make any accusations.[Read More…]
The recent emergence of OpenAI’s ChatGPT (part of the Generative Pre-trained Transformer family of language models) has attracted a lot of attention throughout the world. It is a chatbot released in November 2022, and, according to OpenAI’s website, its “dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer followup questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests.” The[Read More…]
Source: author + www.craiyon.com Perhaps the recent media hype about artificial intelligence (AI) and “not-really-so” OpenAI’s program called ChatGPT, made many people worried about AI. Some – even inside AI – are convinced that, we can’t afford an AI-shima – a Fukushima-like atomic accident inside our computers and the Internet. Like another nuclear accident that affects millions, we can’t afford[Read More…]
The former Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, has been somewhat of an absentee in the Federal seat of Cook. Since losing the May 2022 election, he has been aggressively chasing up contacts and deals on the consultancy circuit, bellyaching about the usual talking points: the gruesome China menace; defence matters; and, just to round it off for good measure, additional[Read More…]
As the only G20 country to ban nuclear power by federal law, Australia is now considering where to build an east coast base for its new American-British Missouri class nuclear-powered submarine fleet. On the short list of three possibilities are Brisbane, Newcastle or Port Kembla (Aboriginal for “plenty of waterfowl”). The New South Wales (NSW) Port Kembla on the Tasman[Read More…]
In December 1936, love won out for the British king Edward VIII, and he gave up the throne to marry Wallis Simpson, an American socialite. What is socialite? According to Google Dictionary: “a person who is well known in fashionable society and is fond of social activities and entertainment.” Typically, this term is applied to a female. Think Paris Hilton,[Read More…]
Defiant Cuba celebrates May Day. An AFP report (“Communist Cuba celebrates Worker’s Day, four days late”), datelined May 5, 2023, said: “Cuba finally celebrated May Day on Friday, four days late, after the original celebration of workers was postponed due to the risk of rain and trimmed down as a result of a fuel shortage. “The May 1 celebration is[Read More…]
De-dollarization now looks inevitable and threatens to become a national security concern, according to International Crisis Group co-chair Frank Giustra. A Business Insider report — “De-dollarization is no longer a matter of if, but when — and is a national security concern, says International Crisis Group cochair”, May 3, 2023, — said: In commentary published in Responsible Statecraft, Frank Giustra said[Read More…]
Selected days for commemoration serve one fundamental purpose. Centrally, they acknowledge the forgotten or neglected, while proposing to do nothing about it. It’s the priest’s confession, the chance for absolution before the next round of soiling. These occasions are often money-making exercises for canny businesses: the days put aside to remember mothers and fathers, for instance. But there is no[Read More…]
We celebrate World Press Freedom Day in May as a reminder that the role of news organizations is to speak truth to power. Not for manufacturing consent—to use Chomsky’s famous words—for the government and the ruling classes. It’s an occasion to remember three people who exemplify the need to speak the truth: Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame and Julian Assange of WikiLeaks; and[Read More…]
This year’s May Day celebration in Cuba was interrupted by severe storms that knocked out electricity in much of the country. Authorities had no choice but to postpone the traditional mass marches. But for over 150 young grassroots organizers from the United States who had traveled to the country to mark the holiday, this turn of events was just more[Read More…]
by Waseem Ahmad Bhat and Adil Qayoom Mallah Online scams and frauds have become a major concern for individuals, businesses, and governments worldwide. The rapid growth of internet and digital technologies have provided ample opportunities for fraudsters and scammers to prey on unsuspecting victims. The youth are vulnerable to these scams due to their lack of experience and knowledge in[Read More…]
There is one critically important aspect of human life in the 21st century which is unique to this century. This highly significant factor was not present in any other century but is certainly present in the 21st century as perhaps the most important aspect of our life. What is it? In all previous human history, no matter how big the[Read More…]
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies In his 1987 book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, historian Paul Kennedy reassured Americans that the decline the United States was facing after a century of international dominance was “relative and not absolute, and is therefore perfectly natural; and that the only serious threat to the real interests of[Read More…]
by Ben Freeman and William D. Hartung The military-industrial complex (MIC) that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned Americans about more than 60 years ago is still alive and well. In fact, it’s consuming many more tax dollars and feeding far larger weapons producers than when Ike raised the alarm about the “unwarranted influence” it wielded in his 1961 farewell address to the[Read More…]
In broad terms, the national interest refers to the goals of foreign politics, objectives, or policy preferences that benefit a nation or society as a whole. That is the foreign policy equivalent of the public interest. However, the concept of national interest is practically vague and contested. The concept is most widely used by realist theorists, for whom it is[Read More…]
by C.J. Polychroniou and Noam Chomsky Artificial intelligence (AI) is sweeping the world. It is transforming every walk of life and raising in the process major ethical concerns for society and the future of humanity. ChatGPT, which is dominating social media, is an AI-powered chatbot developed by OpenAI. It is a subset of machine learning and relies on what is[Read More…]
Mexico’s president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador asked his U.S. counterpart Joe Biden to stop the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) from funding groups hostile to his government, according to a letter presented to journalists on Wednesday, echoing previous Mexican criticism of U.S. interventionism. President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has in the past accused several media organizations of being[Read More…]
Keir Starmer, as the Labour leader, pledged to create a better future based on several progressive policies, including nationalization, higher taxes, and cancelling of tuition fees. These policies were crucial to persuading Labour Party members to elect him as their party leader. However, Keir Starmer has abandoned the policy promises that helped him win the leadership position. If u-turn is[Read More…]
China is maximizing the opportunity to strengthen its diplomatic and economic ties with the Middle East (ME) as the United States gradually reduces its military presence there. With longtime U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia, Beijing has already signed significant agreements and maintained friendly ties with Iran. China’s interactions with the ME have historically been driven primarily by economic considerations. There[Read More…]
Careful accounting reveals 85 instances of the US attempting to overthrow foreign governments since WW2 and that the US was successful in 50 instances, with craven US lackey Australia being involved in 8 of these regime changes. A detailed and documented summary of this gross and criminal US violation of Humanity has been sent as an Open Letter to all[Read More…]
Where is Danish foreign policy headed? Everything now revolves around the war in Ukraine and rearmament against Russia, which is quite openly called our enemy, and where sanctions are being extended and trade and contacts are being cut off in all areas. NATO now also talks about China in its new strategy papers. But what about Africa, which has for[Read More…]
President Joseph Biden has done what many from his own party dreaded but dare not say. Last month, via a painful video, the aged Democrat declared his candidacy for a second term in the White House, branding himself a defender of US democracy. For a politician lacking the mettle of competence, awareness, and, at certain points, basic clarity of the[Read More…]
The world is changing. In fact, it has been undergoing seismic change that long preceded the Russian-Ukraine war, and the recent US-Chinese tensions in the Taiwan Strait. In fact, the US debacle in Iraq and the Middle East, and the humiliating retreat from Afghanistan were only signs of the decline in US power. Leading US neoconservative strategists have once argued in “Rebuilding America’s Defenses:[Read More…]
What Ukraine needs today above all is a large-scale, sustained, community-based rehabilitation and reconstruction effort, with added emphasis on nutrition, health, care for the ill and the injured, and many more sustainable livelihoods. So all well-wishers, real and fake ones, please send Ukraine medicines and medical equipment, generous economic support and construction material they may lack, but please keep your[Read More…]
The foreign ministers of Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, and Iraq said on Monday after meeting in Amman said the government in Damascus should re-establish the rule of law on all of Syria’s territory, ending the presence of foreign armed groups and terrorists,. Jordan hosted the meeting, the first of its kind since Syria’s membership in the Arab League was[Read More…]
In 1935, the Congress of American Writers was held in New York City, followed by another two years later. They called on ‘the hundreds of poets, novelists, dramatists, critics, short story writers and journalists’ to discuss the ‘rapid crumbling of capitalism’ and the beckoning of another war. They were electric events which, according to one account, were attended by 3,500[Read More…]
Russian President, Vladimir Putin, realized early, in his country’s invasion of Ukraine, that adversaries do not always fight wars on a battlefield. The realization that Russian military superiority could not easily overcome Ukraine’s moral superiority and its defensive capabilities succeeded the recognition by Ukraine’s NATO allies that Russia could not be defeated militarily and might be defeated by imposing sanctions[Read More…]
As threats of war, weapons and violence increase at many levels in a deeply troubled world, the peace movement, in all its nobility and good intentions, is found to be too weak to respond adequately to these big challenges. Far too many people are paid to work full time for weapons and wars than for disarmament and peace–in fact the[Read More…]
A Gazan Ph.D. candidate studying in India, Mohammad Abunahel steadily refines and updates a map on the World BEYOND War website, dedicating a portion of every day to continue researching the extent and impact of USA foreign bases. What is Mohammad Abunahel learning, and how can we support him? On the few occasions when a government moves toward converting property[Read More…]
There are many definitions and/or understandings of war. However, from the very academic point of view, war can be understood as an armed conflict between at least two sides usually but not necessarily states fought usually for some (geo)political goals. The focal conceptual idea of war is the use of force between large-scale political subjects like states, empires, or coalitions.[Read More…]
by Pavan Kulkarni and Prasanth Radhakrishnan More than 500 people have been killed and 4,000 injured since fighting broke out between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) on April 15. Groups such as the Sudan Doctors Union are worried the fighting could escalate after the evacuation of foreign nationals. Thousands have already fled the country.[Read More…]
In the aftermath of the horrific Nashville school shooting that took the lives of three adults and three little children, Tony Perkins president of the Family Research Council, refused to find fault in America’s obsession with guns. Instead, he posited prayer being the only solution to the crisis of mass shootings “We must return to the only lasting source of[Read More…]
Violence against labor is as old as capital dominating labor. The tool – violence – is older than the rise of capitalism. Capitalism has sharpened the tool: made it more threatening, made it more mischievous, and, at times, has made it appear non-violent. A recent ILO report, Experience of Violence and Harassment at Work: A Global First Survey(Geneva: ILO, 2022,[Read More…]
The labor from which capital is formed is the surplus labor of the worker, and from labor itself the process of capital formation continues unabated. But it is suitable for the labor that creates capital. It also involves struggle as there is no reward. Intertwined with the above relationship between labor and capital is the history of Labor Day, which[Read More…]
US$2.24 trillion is a mighty amount. It’s also a sickening figure when considering the object of this exercise. The flickering tease of war, the promise of bloodshed and an increasingly large butcher’s bill, are inevitable suggestions from such a figure. The scenes are also clear: well-paid suits dazed by theories of the next war; policy wonks jabbering over mock war[Read More…]
The latest wave of violence in Sudan, in the form of two generals leading the army and para-military forces in a highly destructive, completely avoidable and non-rational clash (which has already involved warplanes dropping bombs and heavy anti-aircraft firing), has quickly led to a large number of deaths and displaced people. This is happening in a country where nearly one-third[Read More…]
Being an anti empire, anti war Socialist this writer has had countless inner dilemmas concerning the Jackass party. As far as their counterparts, the Republicans, well, they are as close to diabolical ( evil?) as can be. It seems forever that I have asked myself why in the hell do these people never ‘ Get it’? Just answered my own[Read More…]
However described, the shabby treatment of Julian Assange never ceases to startle. While he continues to suffer in Belmarsh prison awaiting the torments of an interminable legal process, more material is coming out showing the way he was spied upon while staying at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Of late, the Spanish daily El País has been keeping up its[Read More…]
Nuclear war is unthinkable, but also uncontrollable once a spark is lit. There’s no turning back once that big misstep occurs. Indeed, the film Dr. Strangelove (Director Stanley Kubrick, 1964 Columbia Pictures) is all about what could happen if the wrong person pushes the wrong buttons, as US Air Force General Jack Ripper (George C. Scott) sends his bomber wing[Read More…]
It’s a very funny thing. In the US, the provision of services in such industries as security and intelligence is outsourced in a sprawling complex of contractors and subcontractors. In Australia, the entire military and security establishment is outsourced to Washington’s former mandarins, many of them earning a pile in consultancy fees. This, perhaps, is what Australia’s Defence Minister Richard[Read More…]
Attorney Frank Bibeau found a way to legally protect nature by suing the state of Minnesota in the name of manoomin, or wild rice, sacred to the Ojibwe people. The United States was founded on the declaration that all people are inherently endowed by their Creator with the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but what about the rest[Read More…]
De-dollarization could become a reality as a BRICS alternative to the dollar could enjoy high prospects for success, said a former White House adviser. A report by Business Insider — The dollar’s dominance would face a threat unlike any other from a BRICS currency, former White House economist says, April 26, 2023 — said: Joseph Sullivan, who served as a[Read More…]
The entirely avoidable, artificial enmity between Saudi Arabia and Iran has hopefully come to an end as a result of the accord reached with the help of China. All three involved countries have authoritarian regimes, but despite this the accord should be widely welcomed. There are several strong reasons for this. First and foremost is the fact that the prospects[Read More…]
As my birthday approaches, I grow more and more anxious because a professional organization of trained terrorists that calls itself an army wants me to be one of them. And if I say no, a prison sentence will be the result. As a soon-to-be 18-year-old Israeli high school student, enlistment is the only thing waiting for me after I finish[Read More…]
Towards understanding the Impulse of Time, Nature of Things, Peace and Conflict Resolution Are we witnessing a time when most exemplary vigilance is subject to unthinkable surprises? We, the People, We, the Humanity realize that horrors of wars, forced displacement of several millions of people and human sufferings and pains coming out of the raging war between Russia, Ukraine and[Read More…]
From the ashes of a world war that killed 80 million people and reduced great cities to smoking rubble, America rose like a Titan of Greek legend, unharmed and armed with extraordinary military and economic power, to govern the globe. During four years of combat against the Axis leaders in Berlin and Tokyo that raged across the planet, America’s wartime commanders —[Read More…]
The World Bank says nearly 80% (560 million) of the 700 million people who were pushed into extreme poverty in 2020 due to COVID policies were from India. Globally, extreme poverty levels increased by 9.3 per cent in 2020. In 2022, it was estimated that a quarter of a billion people across the world would be pushed into absolute poverty in[Read More…]
Chinese President Xi Jinping and his Ukrainian counterpart, Vladimir Zelensky, have spoken over the phone, in their first official conversation since Moscow launched its military operation in Ukraine more than a year ago. Media reports said: Xi told Zelensky that “dialogue and negotiations are only viable way out.” “China will neither watch the fire from the other side, nor add[Read More…]
by Manolo De Los Santos and Kate Gonzales It’s a hot and crowded Tuesday morning in the Yoruba Cultural Center in Havana, and the air sticks to the skin. You can hear the fluttering of paper as people fan themselves, and a surprise blackout takes out the sound system with a flicker of the lights. And yet, 150 young organizers from[Read More…]
While the mass slaughtering of, and slaughter by, soldiers, is always a touchy subject of commemoration, a tension has existed between those who did the fighting, and those who ordered it. Comfortably secure in furnished rooms and battle props, planners would, as they still do, draw up the blueprints, concoct the strategy, and give the orders. In Australia, politicians should[Read More…]
by Rev. Graylan Scott Hagler and Ariel Gold Tucker Carlson got fired! Many liberals are celebrating, calling it a reckoning — a win for racial justice and decency. With this bombshell revelation, some might even believe that Fox News has finally gotten religion and seen the error of its ways. It’s better late than never, they say. Salvation is always[Read More…]
It’s not often that conservative lobbyists beat the drum for increased environmental oversight and regulation. But that’s what happened this month when the far-right Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), through its legal arm, filed a brief in federal court demanding that the Department of Homeland Security conduct an extensive environmental impact study examining, of all things, immigration policy. In a press[Read More…]
2023 marks the 75th anniversary of the launch of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948. Unfortunately in 1948 inhumanity prevailed with the launch of Apartheid in South Africa by the newly-elected neo-Nazi Afrikaaner National Party, and of genocidal Apartheid Israel in Palestine by the neo-Nazi Zionist settler-colonialists who murderously depopulated Palestine of over half of its Indigenous[Read More…]
Communists and revolutionary democrats should salute in the National Democratic Front of the Philippines on the historic occasion of the 50th anniversary on April 24th.Homage should be paid to Jose Ma. Sison, Benito Tiamzon, Wilma Austria, Fidel V. Agcaoili, Antonio Zumel, Julius Giron, as well as other key leaders of the Party and the NDFP, as well as peace consultants[Read More…]
The fact that big brands don’t source garments directly makes it harder to investigate exploitative labor practices. On April 24, 2013, a multistory garment factory complex in Bangladesh called Rana Plaza collapsed, killing more than 1,000 workers and injuring another 2,500. It remains the worst accident in the history of the apparel industry and one of the deadliest industrial accidents in the[Read More…]
The recently concluded LIV Tournament in Adelaide was a matter of bread, circuses and golf. It was something of a triumph for the chief sponsor: the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and, more notably, the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Critics, and criticism about the regime and the blood spattered House of Saud, were generally forgotten. This vulgar display of denial[Read More…]
Global military expenditure increased by 3.7 % in 2022 and reached a new record high of $2,240 billion, with the three largest spenders being the U.S., China and Russia, according to new data published on Monday by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). The U.S. remains the world’s biggest military spender with its military expenditure having reached $877 billion[Read More…]
January 30, 2022. Update added April 23, 2023 Like all the nations of the Horn of Africa that abut the Red Sea, the main passageway for the transit of Middle Eastern oil, Sudan has been a prize desired by many imperialist nations. (For a background summary of the region, see this.) For 75 years, there has been a large leftist[Read More…]
A government with many secrets is not a democracy What are we to think when governments make every effort to keep their actions secret from their own citizens? We can only conclude that although they may call themselves democracies, such governments are in fact oligarchies or dictatorships. In a democracy, the citizens must control the actions of their government.[Read More…]
High and increasing levels of distress and stress in the USA point to the need for integrating internal and external reforms. According to a Federal Reserve Report of 2018 on the economic well-being of US households about 40% of adults in the country would not be able to meet a $400 emergency with cash, saving or even a credit card[Read More…]
I was born on July 20, 1944, amid a vast global conflict already known as World War II. Though it ended with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 before I could say much more than “Mama” or “Dada,” in some strange fashion, I grew up at war. Living in New York City, I was near no[Read More…]
Today April 22 2023, is the 53rd ‘Earth Day’, which was first held on April 22, 1970. Earth Day is celebrated to demonstrate support to environmental protection. LIVING IN HARMONY & MINDFULNESS May we be receptive to the wisdom of nature and the knowledge that if her laws are obeyed, our lands and people will flourish May we bring back[Read More…]
Whoever sabotaged the Nord Stream pipelines likely had access to fast-moving underwater drones, one of Denmark’s most “experienced navy divers” told Bloomberg on Thursday. NATO forces trained with these unmanned underwater vehicles near the blast site prior to the explosions. The diver said that “finding the pipelines without precise coordinates or tracking technology, then transporting and placing the explosives, would have challenged diver-saboteur,” in[Read More…]
Western sanctions against Russia have accelerated the move away from the U.S. dollar worldwide, Stephen Jen, the CEO of London-based asset management company Eurizon, warned on Tuesday. The dollar’s share in global reserves fell ten times faster last year than over the past two decades, Jen said, as cited by Bloomberg. The process began as some countries started to look[Read More…]
The terrible 9/11 attacks led the USA military and foreign policy establishment to launch a prolonged series of military actions in many countries with the stated aim of curbing terrorism and terror. These have been collectively called the war on terror or terrorism, the global war on terror and the 9/11 wars. Although there have been criticisms and debates linked[Read More…]
The BRICS – Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa – is expected to increase their share of the global economy to nearly 35% by 2028, Bloomberg reported on Monday. According to Bloomberg’s calculations based on the latest International Monetary Fund (IMF) data, this year, the BRICS countries will contribute 32.1% of the world’s growth, compared to the Group of[Read More…]
Today, a fifth (278 million) of the African population are undernourished, and 55 million of that continent’s children under the age of five are stunted due to severe malnutrition. In 2021, an Oxfam review of IMF COVID-19 loans showed that 33 African countries were encouraged to pursue austerity policies. Oxfam and Development Finance International also revealed that 43 out of 55 African Union member[Read More…]
Cometh the new platform, cometh new actions in law, the fragile litigant ever ready to dash off a writ to those with (preferably) deep pockets. And so, it transpires that artificial intelligence (AI) platforms, for all the genius behind their creation, are up for legal scrutiny and judicial redress. Certainly, some private citizens are getting rather ticked off about what[Read More…]
Instead, an independent foreign policy is desperately needed—and gaining support. Recently, the United States has been followed by a number of European countries in supporting a cold war policy toward Russia and China. This has created increasing problems in Europe—bringing a major war to the continent, creating serious economic difficulties, and intensifying a decline in living standards. In this context,[Read More…]
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies Leaked document predicts a “protracted war beyond 2023.” Image credit: Newsweek The U.S. corporate media’s first response to the leaking of secret documents about the war in Ukraine was to throw some mud in the water, declare “nothing to see here,” and cover it as a depoliticized crime story about a 21-year-old[Read More…]
China will become the biggest driver of global growth over the next five years and will contribute double what the U.S. adds, according to the International Monetary Fund. Based on Bloomberg calculations from data in the IMF’s World Economic Outlook (A Rocky Recovery, April 2023, https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/Issues/2023/04/11/world-economic-outlook-april-2023) released last week, China’s slice of global gross domestic product expansion will be at 22.6%, India’s[Read More…]
Politically correct racist (PC racist) Australia ignores a shocking reality: while 60% of Australians rightly support a Constitutionally-enshrined Recognition and Voice for Indigenous Australians, pro-Zionist MPs are advocating adoption by Australia’s 43 universities of the anti-Semitic International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Definition of anti-Semitism that threatens the freedom of speech of academics and students in relation to the human rights[Read More…]
80 years ago the world witnessed one of the most heroic uprisings in the history of the world. Manifesting the spirit of liberation from tyranny, courage scaled heights almost unparalleled in rebellion of a persecuted community On the eve of Passover 1943 — the nineteenth of April — a group of several hundred poorly armed young Jews lit the spark of[Read More…]
It’s sure to be a blood-soaked spring in Ukraine. Russia’s winter offensive fell far short of Vladimir Putin’s objectives, leaving little doubt that the West’s conveyor belt of weaponry has aided Ukraine’s defenses. Cease-fire negotiations have never truly begun, while NATO has only strengthened its forces thanks to Finland’s new membership (with Sweden soon likely to follow). Still, tens of thousands of[Read More…]
If anyone was expecting a new tilt, a shine of novelty, a flash of independence from Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong’s address to the National Press Club on April 17, they were bound to be disappointed. The anti-China hawks, talons polished, got their fill. The US State Department would not be disturbed. The Pentagon could rest easy. The toadyish musings[Read More…]
In mid-April, the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs released its Diplomatic Bluebook 2023, its most important guidebook on international affairs. Japan’s foreign minister, Yoshimasa Hayashi, wrote the foreword, which begins: “The world is now at a turning point in history.” This phrase is key to understanding the Japanese approach to the war in Ukraine. Hours after Russian forces entered Ukraine, the[Read More…]
The role of the U.S. dollar as the world reserve currency may actually diminish due to the U.S. using its leverage on the global financial system to pursue its geopolitical goals through sanctions, Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen has admitted. However, no other currency is ready to replace it, she reckoned. Yellen was asked during an interview on Sunday[Read More…]
As I write the Sudanese Air Force is bombing Sudan’s capital city of Khartoum, an act of desperation really, because the war launched by the CIA backed coup attempt is not going very well for the coupsters. Reliable reports from Sudan say over 75% of the country is under the control of “opposition” fighters of the Rapid Strike Forces (RSF)[Read More…]
Emmanuel Macron’s recent visit to China did not quite go according to plan, though much depends on what was planned to begin with. In one sense, the French President was consistent, riding the hobbyhorse of Europe’s strategic autonomy, one hived off from the US imperium and free of Chinese influence. Europe’s third-way autonomy would be a mighty thing for the[Read More…]
If a big problem with the potential of causing major disruption gets resolved in a series of steps without causing major disruption, then this is good news for the world. In recent months this has been happening in the context of the international currency system. We must welcome this, but at the same remain cautious. The overwhelming position of the[Read More…]
For years, US intelligence officials could hold their allies, notably the British, in contempt for leaking like sinking vessels and harbouring such espionage luminaries as the Cambridge Five. The whirligig of time has returned the favour with the latest leak from the US Department of Defense. They pose a question pregnant with relevance: Do Washington’s allies have any reason to[Read More…]
Robert Frost’s poem In 1923, Robert Frost wrote a short poem entitled “Fire and Ice”. Here is the poem: Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say[Read More…]
Why is the Pentagon budget so high? On March 13th, the Biden administration unveiled its $842 billion military budget request for 2024, the largest ask (in today’s dollars) since the peaks of the Afghan and Iraq wars. And mind you, that’s before the hawks in Congress get their hands on it. Last year, they added $35 billion to the administration’s request and,[Read More…]
Who would have expected that the BRICS nations could rise as the potential rival of the G7 countries, the World Bank and the IMF combined? But that once seemingly distant possibility now has real prospects which could change the political equilibrium of world politics. BRICS is an acronym for Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. It was supposedly coined[Read More…]
Disturbing events in recent months have led to a deepening divide of the world between two fast consolidating power blocks, one led by the US and the NATO and the other by China and Russia. Nothing could be more disturbing for a world already faced by life-threatening problems—instead of getting together for united world action to resolve the most serious[Read More…]
Brazilian President Lula da Silva said on Saturday: The U.S. and its allies should focus on promoting peace instead of fueling the Ukraine conflict by arming Kiev. Lula has concluded a state visit to China, his country’s primary trading partner. “The united States needs to stop encouraging war and start talking about peace,” Lula told reporters in Beijing. “The European Union needs[Read More…]
21 year old American Air National Guard member Jack Teixeira has been arrested and charged in the US District Court in Boston for leaking highly classified intelligence documents of the US defence force concerning the NATO-led war in Ukraine. These documents have come to be known across international media as the “Pentagon leaks”. The top brass of the US military[Read More…]
Europe is passing through difficult times when, due to a complex of factors, several uncomfortable issues which could remain under the carpet in normal times are getting blown up in such ways that these cannot be ignored but at the same the leadership is finding it difficult to face them in a decisive way. Of course the news headlines here[Read More…]
Peal Harbor Surprise Japanese Attack on the US Pacific Fleet and European Colonial Forces in Asia – Germany, Italy and other Axis Countries Declare War on the United States hol On December 7th, 1941, As Hitler’s military forces, well armed, thanks to the massive investments and joint venturings of major American industrialists, were besieging Moscow and Leningrad and ‘exterminating’ communists and Jews throughout[Read More…]
Dag Hammarskjöld, the tragic second United Nations secretary general, once said the organization “was created not to lead mankind to heaven but to save humanity from hell.” Of course, this depends very much on what kind of hell you had in mind. The fallout from Adolf Hitler’s extermination camps must have dominated Hammarskjöld’s world during his tenure from 1953 until[Read More…]
French President Emmanuel Macron’s recent remarks to journalists on his way home from China visit about the three-way relationship between China, Europe and the U.S. did more to rile his EU partners. This incident is a show of condition within the EU and future possibilities. An AFP report — Macron’s China remarks exasperate EU allies, April 13, 2023 — said:[Read More…]
Activists took to the streets today in front of the Japanese Consulate to commemorate the 12th anniversary of the second worst nuclear power accident in history demanding the Japanese government not allow the Tokyo Electric Power Company’s (TEPCO) to dump radioactive water from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station into the Pacific Ocean. They also called for “NO Nukes” for[Read More…]
After more than 20 years of losing wars, recruiting for the U.S. Army is now officially a mess. Last year, that service fell short of its goal by 15,000 recruits, or a quarter of its target. Despite reports of better numbers in the first months of this year, Army officials doubt they will achieve their objective this time around either. The commanding general at Fort Jackson,[Read More…]
The South African Communist Party (SACP), in an April statement, asserted that the timing of the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) arrest warrant issued against Russian President Vladimir Putin, issued just before Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Russia in March, indicated a political motivation and historical inconsistency. “Unfortunately, imperialist powers continue to manipulate this multilateral institution and use it for[Read More…]
The struggles of Russian weapons manufacturers have added to historic shifts in the global arms market. On March 21, 2023, India’s air force confirmed that a major Russian arms delivery would not occur, citing Russia’s logistical challenges stemming from its war in Ukraine. It has served as the latest example of Russia’s inability to complete weapons deals with India since the conflict began in[Read More…]
Will the New Development Bank and the Contingent Reserve Arrangement be able to fulfill their original mission with the arrival of the new bank president Dilma Rousseff? The first event of President Lula da Silva’s long-awaited visit to China in mid-April 2023 is the official swearing-in ceremony of Dilma Rousseff as president of the New Development Bank (popularly known as the BRICS[Read More…]
There is increasing concern all over the world regarding the increasing and widespread use of economic and related sanctions by some of the richest and most powerful countries, led by the USA and other NATO member countries, taking undue advantage of their extraordinary privileged position in financial matters. This concern is reflected in several resolutions passed by international bodies, including[Read More…]
I wonder how many of you reading this agree with the above? In order to best fit this narrative you have to be someone who dismisses this current economic, financial and political system. Everywhere I look I see how corporate driven America is owned by the Super Rich. By Super Rich I must categorize it as those who are at[Read More…]
Hon’ble Members, The logo of the G20 meet in India has a message of ‘one earth, one family, one future’. Lofty idea indeed but pray could LGBTQIA community be permitted to marry and have a small family of their own before they think of becoming part of the one world family. Under India’s Presidency the G-20 Summit 2023 must resolve[Read More…]
BRICS countries — Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa — have surpassed the Group of Seven (G7) in terms of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) based on Purchasing Power Parity (PPP), data published by the UK-based economic research firm Acorn Macro Consulting shows. The G7 club of industrialized countries consists of the U.S., Canada, the UK, France, Italy, Germany, and Japan.[Read More…]
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies On April 4, 2023, Finland officially became the 31st member of the NATO military alliance. The 830-mile border between Finland and Russia is now by far the longest border between any NATO country and Russia, which otherwise borders only Norway, Latvia, Estonia, and short stretches of the Polish and Lithuanian borders where[Read More…]
On April 3 a resolution condemning sanctions being imposed increasingly on many countries was approved by 33 votes to 13 in the United Nations Human Rights Council. While the countries which voted against this condemnation included the USA and its well-known European allies, the countries which voted for condemning sanction regimes represented a much greater part of the world and[Read More…]
“It is time,” President Biden announced in April 2021, “to end the forever war” that started with the invasion of Afghanistan soon after the tragic terror attacks on this country on September 11, 2001. Indeed, that August, amid chaos and disaster, the president did finally pull the last remaining U.S. forces out of that country. A year and a half later, it’s[Read More…]
Western Mainstream media (MSM) are reporting the Israeli police violence against worshippers in the Al-Aqsa Mosque, token rocket responses by Palestinians, and horrendously disproportionate Israeli bombing of Gaza, Lebanon and Syria. While the West rightly condemns the Russian invasion and occupation of 20% of Ukraine, it fervently supports genocidally racist Zionazi Apartheid Israel that in 2023 is violently attacking 5[Read More…]
Succeeding administrations have a chronic habit of blaming their predecessors. The Biden administration has been most particular on the issue, taking every chance to attack former President Donald Trump for the ills of his tenure. But the effort to almost exclusively lay blame at Trump’s door for the US fiasco in Afghanistan was a rich one indeed, given the failings[Read More…]
Donald Trump is currently being charged with 34 felonies The State of New York, under the leadership of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg Jr., has arrested the former president, finger-printed him, and charged him with 34 counts of falsifying business records in the first degree, in violation of Penal Law §175. Trump’s major crimes The crimes for which he[Read More…]
Ten days after the 1973 coup against the Popular Unity (UP) government of President Salvador Allende, the military opened the Río Chico concentration camp on Dawson Island, located in the Strait of Magellan, near the southern tip of Chile. The island had served as an extermination camp by a Catholic order between 1891 and 1911 to confine the Selk’nam and Kawésqar peoples, who[Read More…]
Militarization of society is happening today with great haste, not least reinforced by the war in Ukraine. People are caught up in the war and forced to choose sides. Speaking out against armaments is difficult, if not impossible, when there is a threatening enemy on your doorstep. But that is not the case in Denmark. Security experts have stated that[Read More…]
NASA: “Without ozone, the Sun’s intense UV radiation would sterilize the Earth’s surface.” It was 36 years ago in panic mode when the world came together like never before unanimously agreeing to ratify The Montreal Protocol, banning CFCs. This was done to protect ozone (O3), which is a widely-dispersed layer of molecules at 10-30 miles in the stratosphere that shields[Read More…]
All available evidence regarding the present situation in Ukraine appears to suggest that the best course of action here would be to have an unconditional ceasefire as early as possible, to be followed by an internationally supported, large-scale reconstruction and rehabilitation program as well as talks with Russia to settle all contentious issue and try to secure durable peace as[Read More…]
Source: AI’s answer to AI on www.craiyon.com + human input, i.e. the author Germany has a problematic relationship with morality. On the one hand, it is home to moral philosophers such as Kant with his categorical imperatives, as well as Hegel’s slightly more upmarket concept of Sittlichkeit. Yet on the other hand, Germany is also the country that carried out[Read More…]
I’m not a TikTok person. I’m too old. But when I finally ventured onto that popular but much-maligned app, which traffics in short videos and hot takes, I was surprised to find many videos about the Doomsday Clock. It’s nothing like a conventional timepiece, of course. It’s meant to show how close humanity has come to nuclear Armageddon — to[Read More…]
As Russian troops continue their assault on Ukraine, Western countries persist in invoking international law, imposing crippling sanctions against Russian leaders and entities while publicly supporting Ukrainian armed resistance and opening their borders with open arms to refugees. However, we see such support utterly absent for people enduring Israel’s illegal occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem as well[Read More…]
A state actor’s involvement in the blast of the Nord Stream pipelines last year is the “absolute main scenario”, said the Swedish prosecutor investigating the attack. A Reuters report — State actor involvement in Nord Stream pipeline attacks is ‘main scenario’, says Swedish investigator, April 6, 2023, — said: A state actor’s involvement in the blast of the Nord Stream[Read More…]
[The following is excerpted from David Barsamian’s recent interview with Noam Chomsky at AlternativeRadio.org.] David Barsamian: On March 20th, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its latest report. The new IPCC assessment from senior scientists warned that there’s little time to lose in tackling the climate crisis. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said, “The rate of temperature rise in[Read More…]
The giant pharmaceutical company Johnson &Johnson has recently proposed paying $ 8.9 billion dollars to settle thousands of legal cases relating to severe health problems including ovarian cancer being caused by its talcum powder products in North America. Health problems caused by talcum powder to small children have been a matter of concern for doctors for a much longer period[Read More…]
According to veteran journalist Seymour Hersh, the mainstream media’s yarn about a pro-Ukrainian group that chartered a yacht named Andromeda to destroy the Nord Stream pipelines was so absurd and childish that one would suspect it was made intentionally to reinforce the truth. On April 5, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh took to Substack again to analyze the Western media’s[Read More…]
The National Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (NGLHRC) gained a historic win at the Kenyan Supreme Court on February 24, 2023. It was finally able to register as an official nongovernmental organization (NGO), after a 10-year legal battle in a country where homosexuality is outlawed. However, the LGBTQ+ community’s celebrations were cut short by a wave of backlash. A day later,[Read More…]
It is already at least two last decades worldwide recognized that soft power became an extremely significant instrument in both politics and diplomacy in the hands of many states but especially those whom we can call as great powers as they are the most influential on global politics and international relations. However, the crucial question arises: What are the focal[Read More…]
As an informed citizen who has disdain for the Two Party/One Party Scam, I have spun towards the ‘ Lesser of ‘ party if only to save my nation from a fascist assault. Yes, it has always been there staring me in the eyes, but since the Trump swamp it has gone off the radar. This current Republican Party is[Read More…]
Today, 4 April 2023, Finland — which is only 507 miles away from Russia’s central command center, The Kremlin in Moscow — has joined America’s NATO military alliance against Russia, and so becomes an allowable location for the U.S. to place its nuclear missiles, which would then be within just a 7-minute blitz striking distance away from instantaneously annihilating Russia’s[Read More…]
Gustavo Petro doesn’t just want to transform his own country; he wants to change the world. The new leader of Colombia, who took office last August, is targeting what he calls his nation’s “economy of death.” That means pivoting away from oil, natural gas, coal, and narcotics toward more sustainable economic activities. Given that oil and coal make up half his[Read More…]
“Every government is run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.” I.F. Stone The US Congress and Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, have what can only be regarded as a testy relationship. Its various members have advocated and condoned his farcical prosecution, demanded his lifelong incarceration, even assassination, taking issue with his appetite for publishing unsavoury, classified[Read More…]
The phrase ‘fake news’ continues to be deployed routinely in US politics. In a polarized political atmosphere, both Republicans and Democrats distrust media organizations affiliated with opposing parties. This means that most of what is uttered or written by CNN is ‘fake news’ for Republicans, and much of what appears in Republicans-affiliated media is ‘fake news’ for Democrats. The phrase[Read More…]
This year marks the halfway point—eight years in and eight years out—of the UN Sustainable Development Goals to end poverty and reduce inequalities. Yet we are a long way off from these commitments, and multiple crises—now known as ‘polycrisis’—such as conflict, disaster and extreme poverty are converging on low income and lower-middle income countries, necessitating systemic change in our poverty[Read More…]
Irrespective of the negative campaign which United States and its allies seem to have been engaged in against China and Russia, several developments suggest that this hasn’t succeeded in turning more countries against the two. Uncle Sam has all the reasons to be totally dissatisfied by this. The diplomatic era when even a minor signal from Washington seemed sufficient to[Read More…]
Understanding soft power in politics and diplomacy French Emperor Napoleon I, was convinced that only two powers existed in the world: the sword and the mind. Sword can prevail over the mind in a short time but in the long run, he believed that the mind would beat the sword. As the mind is mightier than the sword is[Read More…]
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God. – Matthew 5:9 In a brilliant Op-Ed published in the New York Times, the Quincy Institute’s Trita Parsi explained how China, with help from Iraq, was able to mediate and resolve the deeply-rooted conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia,[Read More…]
Collateral damage? Deserving and worthy of their punishment? The exclusion and banishment of Russian and Belarusian athletes has become the acceptable prejudice of many governments and a slew of sporting bodies. After the invasion of Ukraine in February last year, a number banded together to find ways to punish Russia, and those of its ally, Belarus. Pitifully, and weakly, athletes[Read More…]
It would be wrong to view the restoration of relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran as something that happened suddenly. Since the Iranian Revolution of 1979, ties between the two important Muslim neighbours have been strained. For the Saudi elite the Revolution was not only anti-monarchical but also a boost to the Shia sect within Islam. For the Iranian revolutionaries,[Read More…]
“After 78 years, it is now time for U.S. soldiers to go home. All other allies left Germany a long time ago”, said Die Linke MP Sevim Dağdelen on the floor of Germany’s parliament, the Bundestag. “The US nuclear weapons must go”, she added, in a March 31 parliamentary event on the 75th anniversary of the Marshall Plan. Berlin must break with[Read More…]
In another move that is deliberately raising tensions with China, Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen held a series of high-level meetings in New York on Wednesday and Thursday with American politicians and representatives. The trip to the US is being held under the guise of a “transit” by Tsai as she proceeds to visit Guatemala and Belize in central America—two of[Read More…]
Four well-known facts about super-power rivalry make it extremely dangerous; at the same time there is an X factor that can increase the danger much more, take it to an entirely new and high level. First let us briefly mention the four well-known facts. Superpower rivalry has become much worse in very recent times and rival power blocks are being[Read More…]
For seven years now former Marine and anti-gun violence activist Jamal Johnson has undertaken a three week 140-mile walk from Philadelphia to Washington, DC to participate in the annual Stop Killing Us (SKU) campaign and intergenerational rally. “Every step I take is a step in the right directions” is how Johnson affirmatively surmises his long between the two cities. In[Read More…]
U.S. Army General Mark Milley, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, has commented on problems in stockpile of U.S. ammunitions and prospect of Ukraine winning the war this year. An AP report — Milley: US has long way to go to build munitions stockpile” (March 30, 2023) — said: The U.S. military “has a long ways to go”[Read More…]
“The hell of human suffering, evil and oppression is paved with good intentions. The men who have most injured and oppressed humanity, who have most deeply sinned against it, were according to their standards and their conscience good men; what was bad in them, what wrought moral evil and cruelty, treason to truth and progress, was not at all in[Read More…]
The sham that is the Assange affair, a scandal of monumental proportions connived in by the AUKUS powers, shows no signs of abating. Prior to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese assuming office in Australia, he insisted that the matter dealing with the WikiLeaks publisher would be finally resolved. It had, he asserted, been going on for too long. Since then, it[Read More…]
A look at sub-imperialism and multipolarity in Brazil historically and into the future. Galeano Names the Problem In the Open Veins of Latin America Eduardo Galeano described an 1870 genocidal war of regime change waged on Paraguay by a Triple Alliance of its neighbors, Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil, on behalf of British imperialism. The target, nationalist president Solano Lopez, died in battle.[Read More…]
In Warsaw last February, President Joe Biden condemned the lawless Russian invasion of Ukraine: “The idea that over 100,000 forces would invade another country—since World War II, nothing like that has happened.” One month later marked the 20th anniversary of the greatest U.S. foreign policy debacle since Vietnam: America’s “war of choice” against Iraq, with 130,000 U.S. soldiers invading the country to[Read More…]
Imagine the uproar if China or Russia—or any other country for that matter—said it aimed to exercise military control over land, sea, air, and space to protect its interests and investments. This amazingly has been the stated United States policy since 1997. Full spectrum dominance, as the doctrine is known, is the reason the United States behaves the way that[Read More…]
Establishment of the International Criminal Court In 1998, in Rome, representatives of 120 countries signed a statute establishing an International Criminal Court (ICC), with jurisdiction over the crime of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and the crime of aggression. Four years were to pass before the necessary ratifications were gathered, but by Thursday, April 11, 2002, 66 nations had[Read More…]
by Marcy Winograd and Wei Yu As the Pentagon steps up its war games in the Asia Pacific, Defense News reports the US Army has a logistical problem with waging a future war against China: too much equipment to haul from “fort to port”–and too many ports in the Pacific, from which a cyber-space advanced adversary like China might disrupt[Read More…]
No sooner had Trump been indicted by a grand jury in New York than activist Nadine Seiler was outside the White House with her large homemade banner announcing it to the world. This morning she stationed herself in front of the building expressing her joy with many other enthusiastic visitors and tourists enjoying the moment. Seiler may be remembered for[Read More…]
Concern over Russia’s potential use of nuclear weapons has been a constant feature of the Ukraine war. But Moscow has several ways to complicate Washington’s global nuclear outlook. On March 20, 2023, the British government confirmed it would supply Ukrainian forces with tank shells made with depleted uranium, which can “penetrate tanks and armor more easily due to its density and other physical properties.”[Read More…]
Among the wreckage the riots that have convulsed Paris may leave in their wake include President Emmanuel Macron’s pension reform; Macron’s ability to effectively govern for the next four years; and, quite possibly, the Fifth Republic itself. As The New York Times reported in March, protesters have been heard chanting, “Paris Rise Up…We decapitated Louis XVI. We will do it again, Macron.” But[Read More…]
The Western Mainstream media (MSM) are extensively covering the massive Israeli protests against threats to judicial independence by the new extreme right wing Netanyahu government. However the pro-Zionist, pro-Apartheid Israel and hence pro-Apartheid Western MSM maintain the obscene myth of asserted Israeli democracy and overwhelmingly ignore the gross abuse of the human rights of 16 million Exiled, Occupied and Israeli[Read More…]
by Wei Yu, Nuvpreet Kalra and Melissa Garriga Last Thursday, a Congressional hearing took place where the TikTok CEO was grilled for five hours on the grounds of “security concerns.” This was days after the FBI and DOJ launched an investigation on the Chinese-owned American company. Isn’t it ironic that while the US government is putting TikTok under the magnifying[Read More…]
Here’s something we seldom focus on when it comes to war, American-style, even during the just-passed 20th anniversary of our disastrous invasion of Iraq: many more soldiers survive armed conflict than die from it. This has been especially so during this country’s twenty-first-century War on Terror, which is still playing out in all too many lands globally. And here’s something to add to that reality: even though[Read More…]
![USS Ronald Reagan leads the Ronald Reagan Strike group during a photo exercise for Valiant Shield 2018. [Photo: U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Erwin Miciano]](https://cdn.countercurrents.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/USS-Ronald-Reagan-200x150.webp "Targeting China, US Navy to purchase 100 new ships 390")
Speaking at a hearing of the Senate Appropriations defense subcommittee Tuesday, the US Navy’s operations chief said the United States Navy is currently building 56 new warships and has contracted the building of 76 more, as part of a massive military buildup in preparation for conflict with China. “We have 56 ships under construction and another 76 that are under contract,”[Read More…]
Who is guilty of the war? In October 2023 it will be fifty years since the Yom Kippur war occurred. This war is known as the Fourth Arab-Israeli War or by Arabs as the October War. It was the last great direct clash between Arab nations and Israel.[1] The results of the war, as well, influenced the process of radicalization[Read More…]
by Florence Foo, Si Cheng, and Taciana Santiago The Memphis Zoo has the blood of giant panda LeLe on its hands. Zoo officials disregarded multiple pleas from our organization, Panda Voices, and our partner organization, In Defense of Animals, to look into the health condition of the 24-year-old male giant panda based on a video taken by a zoo camera[Read More…]
At least 40 refugees were killed in a fire that broke out Monday night in a crowded detention center in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez. The deadly blaze, which left 28 more hospitalized in serious condition, erupted during a protest by refugees from Central and South America, who had learned they were to be deported from Ciudad Juarez[Read More…]
Source: author and craiyon.com Perhaps more than many other countries, Germany is inextricably linked to anti-Semitism. And, yet it still struggles with anti-Semitism. This is not only demonstrated by historical facts but also in today’s anti-Semitism in Germany. A recent book on anti-Semitism published by Germany’s Reclam-Press puts the spotlight onto this. Like Penguin, Germany’s Reclam has made literature accessible[Read More…]
March 24 marked 47 years since the US-backed military coup overthrew the left-wing government of President Isabel Martínez de Perón in Argentina (July 1974-March 1976), and triggered off the bloodiest dictatorship in the history of the country. During the seven years and nine months of military dictatorship (March 1976-December 1983), Argentine security forces, along with right-wing death squads, executed anyone[Read More…]
Being the scapegoat of tribal lore cast out with the heavy weight of sins remains a popular political motif. Supposedly noble soldiers, by way of example, are punished for not adhering to the rules of war. In breaching the codes of killing and the protocols of acceptable murder, they are banished from a realm supposedly wrapped in law. In doing[Read More…]
Outside of the Department of Justice during a late afternoon demonstration, protesters from a broad range of ideologies and coalitions called for solidarity with the ‘Stop Cop City’ movement in Atlanta. The demonstrators are trying to provoke the Department of Justice (DOJ) into acting to fully investigate and prevent further abuses against environmental activists by the Georgia police and legal[Read More…]
Milk made from plants is entering the public consciousness (and stomachs) in coffee shops across the globe. While plant-based milk has been around for centuries, the market is undergoing a modern-day surge. The industry has soared to a market value of $20 billion. Consumers in all age brackets are contributing, but the rise is in large part fueled by eco-minded and racially diverse young people,[Read More…]
“In my seventy-plus years from 1946 to now, the chorus of fear-mongering bullshit has never ceased – only grown louder. The joke is on us. Ha Ha Ha.” – Oliver Stone, Chasing the Light Perhaps silence is the best response to the endless cavalcade of official lies that is United States history. The Internet and digital technology have allowed those lies[Read More…]
A mega transport strike, unseen over decades, halted Germany. With the largest strike over decades, Airports, train stations and bus stations across Germany were at a standstill on Monday. The strike is the result of demands for wage hikes issued by several major trade unions. As Europe’s biggest economy reels from inflation, Germany has been brought to a standstill by[Read More…]
March 27, 2023 – The Fellowship of Reconciliation, the oldest interfaith peace organization in the United States, established in 1915, is horrified at the senseless loss of seven lives – three children and four adults, including the 28-year-old shooter – today in Nashville, Tennessee. It is sinful that guns receive more protection in our country and are considered more sacred[Read More…]
In view of the recent geopolitical upheavals, and particularly the war in Ukraine, it does not make sense (and does not promise much success) to build a new global security architecture based on the logic of a bipolar confrontation for several reasons… Firstly, a principal prerequisite for success of a confrontational “conflict strategy”—a far-reaching identity of interests with politically aligned[Read More…]
The final exchange, caught on camera between visiting Chinese President Xi Jinping and his Russian host and counterpart, Vladimir Putin, sums up the current geopolitical conflict, still in its nascent stages, between the United States and its Western allies on the one hand, and Russia, China and their allies, on the other. Xi was leaving the Kremlin following a three-day[Read More…]
The “Doomsday” clock has been advanced further due to the ongoing Ukraine war, which in reality, is a war between Russia and the US-led West and their collaborators elsewhere. Ukraine has now been promised advanced warplanes by some of the NATO countries. If it escalates further the Russian threat of using strategic nuclear weapons might not be ruled out altogether.[Read More…]
Nuclear stakes are rising around Ukraine. In response to UK’s plan to supply depleted uranium munitions to Ukraine, Putin has announced deploying of tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus. Moreover, the U.S. has already deployed nuclear weapons in NATO countries around Russia, Media reports said: The EU will respond with further sanctions if Belarus presses ahead with hosting Russian nuclear weapons[Read More…]
Should they be taking them? Ukraine is desperate for any bit of warring materiel its armed forces can lay their hands on, but depleted uranium shells would surely not be a model example of use. And yet, the UK, in an act of killing with kindness, is happy to fork them out to aid the cause against the Russians, despite[Read More…]
During this past week on the 20th anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq and the ensuing war one fundamental question on many people’s minds is how it all started. For those who were either too young to remember, or those who were not paying attention at the time or who were not yet born the answer is pivotal in[Read More…]
After the cold war shadow of several decades, the best hopes of ending superpower rivalry appeared around the early 1990s. The assurances given to Gorbachev by top western leaders appeared (deceptively, as it later turned out) to lead in this direction. China, it appeared, could not just live with the increasingly globalized world but prosper in it. United Nations agencies[Read More…]
On March 13th, the Pentagon rolled out its proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2024. The results were — or at least should have been — stunning, even by the standards of a department that’s used to getting what it wants when it wants it. The new Pentagon budget would come in at $842 billion. That’s the highest level requested since World[Read More…]
For most of human history justice and peace have been the biggest concerns, the most important issues determining welfare and safety of our world. Those who understood this, and they were always a thoughtful and honest minority, therefore decided to work for justice and peace. The most thoughtful among them also understood the close linkages between peace and justice and[Read More…]
Serbians could only forget the aggression unleashed by the U.S.-led NATO in 1999 if their country ceases to exist, President Aleksandar Vucic warned on Friday. He was marking the 24th anniversary of the military bloc’s bombing campaign of the then Yugoslavia. Media reports said: Vucic added that the U.S. and its allies have yet to answer for their attacks, which[Read More…]
U.S. President Joe Biden ordered the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines because he was unhappy with the level of support provided by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to Ukraine in its conflict with Russia, veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has claimed. Hersh first accused Washington of destroying the key European energy route in an article released in February, and made[Read More…]
The Russia-Ukraine war is unlikely to end on the battlefield and will instead come to a conclusion at a negotiating table, predicts a top U.S. general. A Business Insider report — Top U.S. general says it will be really hard and cost a lot of ‘blood and treasure’ for Ukraine to ‘kick out every single Russian’ invader, March 21, 2023, https://www.businessinsider.com/costs-ukraine-blood-treasure-kick-russia-invaders-out-us-general-2023-3[Read More…]
The disintegration of the Soviet Union left the Middle East bereft of any alternatives to US leadership. Washington, a prisoner of American Exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny – the mythical doctrine used by the US to expand and extend its dominion, never proved itself up to the leadership role. The US foreign policy was and remains nothing but a true manifestation[Read More…]
A new report by the EPA’s internal watchdog has exposed Trump administration appointees that meddled in the agency’s science to weaken “the toxicity assessment of PFASs.” If not for the Biden administration, which discovered this egregious complicity by political appointees and the chemical industry to weaken standards of toxicity, Americans would be unnecessarily exposed to dangerous chemicals beyond the abhorrent[Read More…]
It was a sight to behold and took the wind out of the bellicose sails of the AUKUS cheer squad. Here, at the National Press Club in the Australian capital, was a Labor luminary, former Prime Minister of Australia and statesman, keen to weigh in with characteristic sharpness and dripping venom. Paul Keating’s target: the militaristic lunacy that has characterised[Read More…]
On March 16, 2023, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced—during his visit to Niger—that the United States government will provide $150 million in aid to the Sahel region of Africa. This money, Blinken said, “will help provide life-saving support to refugees, asylum seekers, and others impacted by conflict and food insecurity in the region.” The next day, UNICEF issued a press[Read More…]
The Nazis loved to prime the pump with their rituals to keep the ‘ natives’ hyped up. They had their mass rallies with hundreds of thousands attending. They had those brown storm trooper and black SS uniforms… the more the merrier. The Russians had ‘ Mother Russia’, so the Germans, being a male dominated autocracy, used the easy to say[Read More…]
It’s a zero-sum situation. The rich are robbing the poor to swell their coffers – and their bellies. In April 2022, Oxfam reported a terrifying prospect of more than a quarter of a billion people falling into extreme levels of poverty in 2022 alone. In its January 2021 report ‘The Inequality Virus’, it also stated that the wealth of the world’s billionaires increased[Read More…]
A Few Facts https://www.commondreams.org/news/un-report-drinking-water https://countercurrents.org/2023/03/accelerating-change-on-united-nations-world-water-day-2023/?swcfpc=1 In its home-page on World Water Day, 2021, the United Nations pointed out the following facts: Today, 1 in 3 people live without safe drinking water. By 2050, up to 5.7 billion people could be living in areas where water is scarce for at least one month a year. Climate-resilient water supply and sanitation could[Read More…]
Over three million demonstrators took to the streets across the country in what some security sources described as an “insurrection” against the government in Paris. French authorities struggled on Thursday to suppress the protests against President Emmanuel Macron’s pension reform. According to the French Interior Ministry, over one million people participated in demonstrations against the pension reform bill across France,[Read More…]
Representative Ihan Omar (D-MN) on March 23 hosted a press conference this morning on Capitol Hill to introduce a resolution combating Islamophobia across the country and around the world. Also lending their support for the amendment were Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-FL); Robert McCaw, Director of Government Affairs at The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR); Human Rights First Executive Vice President[Read More…]
Indulge me for a moment. This is how “The Prophecy” in my 1962 high school yearbook began. It was written by some of my classmates in the year we graduated from Friends Seminary in New York City. “Being an historian, I am jotting down these notes out of habit, but what I saw and experienced two days ago I am sure[Read More…]
On September 25, 2022, Cuba passed one of the world’s most progressive codes on families. All in one go, the small island nation legalized same-sex marriage, defined and upheld the rights of children, the disabled, caregivers, and the elderly, and redefined “family” along ties of affinity rather than blood. This opens the concept of “family” to include nontraditional forms of familial relations,[Read More…]
Seymour Hersh, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist, has claimed the U.S. intentionally provided false stories to the media to cover up Washington’s involvement in the destruction of Russia’s Nord Stream pipelines. In a post on his Substack blog on Wednesday, the veteran reporter claims the CIA was tasked with preparing a cover story – in collaboration with Berin’s BND intelligence service – to[Read More…]
[The Russian invasion of Ukraine started in February 2022. With the aim of over-viewing what happened from the beginning of the war, to reflect on the role of NATO, and to consider possible future scenarios, Marcello Musto conducted a roundtable interview with three internationally well-known scholars from the Marxist tradition: Étienne Balibar, Anniversary Chair of Contemporary European Philosophy at Kingston[Read More…]
Those who have been following events in Ukraine will know of the bloodshed and destruction taking place in that country, especially if they go beyond mainstream media reports. This is not to excuse Russia’s brutal military actions, but it was a wholly avoidable conflict that was largely engineered in Washington by a clique of neoconservatives who have been responsible for igniting situations[Read More…]
This is an abridged version of a speech John Pilger gave in Sydney on March 10 to mark the launch in Australia of Davide Dormino’s sculpture of Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden: “Figures of Courage.” I have known Julian Assange since I first interviewed him in London in 2010. I immediately liked his dry, dark sense of humour,[Read More…]
Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has termed the U.S. as liars. Media reports said: Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, popularly called as AMLO, bristled over his government being accused by the U.S. State Department of human rights abuses, dismissing his country’s neighbors to the north as liars. Speaking at a press briefing on Tuesday in Oaxaca, Mexico, Lopez Obrador responded angrily to[Read More…]
For some time, Washington has been losing its spunk in the Pacific. When it comes to the Pacific Islands, a number have not fallen – at least entirely – for the rhetoric that Beijing is there to take, consume, and dominate all. Nor have such countries been entirely blind to their own sharpened interests. This largely aqueous region, which promises[Read More…]
The New York Times, that paper in which one can reliably find the agenda of the liberal wing of the US ruling class, is sounding increasingly absurd lately. There was the editorial page piece claiming the masks had been proven to useless in preventing the spread of viral infections (NYT 2/21/23). That generated so much pushback that they had to[Read More…]
The scene of Israeli Ambassador, Sharon Bar-Li, along with other Israeli delegates, being escorted out of the opening ceremony of the African Union Summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on February 18, was historic. The very moment that was meant to crown twenty years of Israeli diplomacy on the African continent, in a few seconds, turned to represent Israel’s failure in[Read More…]
In April 1953, newly elected President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a retired five-star Army general who had led the landings on D-Day in France in June 1944, gave his most powerful speech. It would become known as his “Cross of Iron” address. In it, Ike warned of the cost humanity would pay if Cold War competition led to a world dominated by[Read More…]
At a time when India has been given the presidency of G-20, efforts are on to accelerate change on several fronts including the water crises which is listed as Sustainable Goal Number 6—Clean Water and Sanitation. Series of Conferences on various topics and in different states of the country have been planned, some already held and many more yet to come culminating[Read More…]
Georgetown University’s first mosque (masjid) was dedicated on March 18 in honor of Yarrow Mamout, one of the area’s earliest residents. Yarrow was an enslaved West African of the Fulani people who arrived in Annapolis in 1752 at age sixteen and was a slave for forty-four years of the Beall family, first in Annapolis and later in Georgetown. A devout[Read More…]
![The UK Carrier Strike Group 2021, led by HMS Queen Elizabeth aircraft carrier, departing the UK [Credit: Royal Navy/Flickr]](https://cdn.countercurrents.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/AUKUS-200x150.jpg "From Balloons to AUKUS: The War Drive Against China 478")
When will this hate-filled nonsense stop? Surveillance balloons treated like evocations of Satan and his card-carrying followers; other innumerable unidentified phenomena that, nonetheless, remain attributable in origin, despite their designation; and then the issue of spying cranes. In the meantime, there has been much finger pointing on the culprit of COVID-19 and the global pandemic. Behold the China Threat, the[Read More…]
On March 14, 2023 Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese stood side by side with the British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and the US President Joe Biden at a Naval base in San Diego, USA and signed off the next phase of AUKUS deal, where Australia will purchase three nuclear powered submarines. which would be based in Australia. According to the[Read More…]
Invasion of Iraq and Crisis of American capitalism The War of Iraq by the United States is an event that will be inscribed in black letters forever. Hundreds of millions of people in every part of the world revolted to the bloodbath of a merciless military power shattering a small and defenceless country. The invasion of Iraq was an imperialist[Read More…]
The arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for Russian President Vladimir Putin came at an opportune moment. It was, if nothing else, a feeble distraction over the misdeeds and crimes of other leaders current and former. Russia, not being an ICC member country, does not acknowledge that court’s jurisdiction. Nor, for that matter, does the United States, despite the[Read More…]
WASHINGTON (03-20) – Anti-war protesters demonstrated across the country yesterday on the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq and the ensuing war. Across from the White House in Lafayette Square protesters heard speakers condemning America’s “eternal wars” and called for a reduction in the Pentagon budget, an end to the war in Ukraine through negotiations and cautioning against a[Read More…]
Bosley Crowther, chief film critic for the New York Times, didn’t quite know what to make of Dr. Strangelove at the time of its release in January 1964. Stanley Kubrick’s dark antiwar satire was “beyond any question the most shattering sick joke I’ve ever come across,” he wrote. But if the film had its hilarious moments, Crowther found its overall effect distinctly unnerving. What exactly[Read More…]
A prosecutor has broad discretion in the exercise of her or his function. This is recognized in both common law countries in the principle of prosecutorial discretion and in civil law countries as the principle of opportunity. Indeed, even the European Court of Human Rights has acknowledged the principle of prosecutorial discretion in the case of Da Silva v the[Read More…]
When Australia – vassal be thy name – assumed responsibilities for not only throwing money at both US and British shipbuilders, lending up territory and naval facilities for war like a gambling drunk, and essentially asking its officials to commit seppuku for the Imperium, another task was given. While the ditzy and dunderheaded wonders in Canberra would be acquiring submarines[Read More…]
The 20th anniversary of the war criminal US, UK and Australian invasion of Iraq in 2003 will fall on about 20 March 2023. On this occasion mendacious and racist Western media will at best remember the Iraq War as a US policy mistake. However decent people will remember the carnage. From 1990 onwards Iraqi deaths from US-imposed violence and deprivation[Read More…]
I would like to thank the International Manifesto Group for hosting this event, and for inviting me to say a few words about the relevance of that heroic experiment in socialist democracy which took place 152 years ago. My discussion of the Paris Commune’s relevance, and of the relevance of Marx and Engels’s reflections on it, will revolve around three[Read More…]
As though the havoc created by GM crops was not adequate, several experimental efforts relating to genetically modified or engineered animals are bringing a wide range of new risks and uncertainties. These include health hazards relating to transfer of diseases from genetically engineered animals to normal animals as well as to human beings. In addition there are the additional risks[Read More…]
About a hundred years back there were about a million black, or African-American, farmers in the USA, today they have decreased to just around 45,000. This is one of the steepest declines suffered by any ethnic group anywhere in farming. Yet this has not received the attention that was deserved, and as a result remedial actions too have been neglected.[Read More…]
The peace movement did a great many things right in the first decade of this millennium, some of which we’ve forgotten. It also fell short in many ways. I want to highlight the lessons I think we’ve most failed to learn and suggest how we might benefit from them today. We formed uncomfortably large coalitions. We brought together war abolitionists[Read More…]
It is evening in Bucharest, the capital of Romania, one of NATO’s easternmost members. I am waiting at the edge of Izvor Park in the city center to meet with a young friend who has fled Ukraine. In the backdrop of the park is the Palace of the Parliament, the brutalist architectural crown jewel of the Ceaușescu era, and the[Read More…]
The recent Australia, U.S., and UK $368 billion deal on buying nuclear submarines has been termed by Paul Keating, a former Australian prime minister, as the “worst deal in all history.” It commits Australia to buy conventionally armed, nuclear-powered submarines that will be delivered in the early 2040s. These will be based on new nuclear reactor designs yet to be developed by the[Read More…]
Thirty-Three Years Since the First Post-WWII “Democratic and Multiparty” Elections in All Six Yugoslav Republics in 1990 and the Background of the Destruction of the Country Preface It will pass 33 years since the first post-WWII “democratic and multiparty” elections in all six Yugoslav republics in 1990. Next year, however, not only that this country did not exist anymore[Read More…]
If the biggest single source of world-level ecological ruin is to be identified, this is most likely to be related to wars, preparations for wars, conflicts, weapons and sabotage. Of course the most direct cost of war and weapons in the form of loss of human life is extremely sad, but at the same time the severity of the much[Read More…]
In 1937, the American folklorist Alan Lomax invited Louisiana folksinger Huddie Ledbetter (better known as Lead Belly) to record some of his songs for the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Lead Belly and his wife Martha searched in vain for a place to spend a few nights nearby. But they were Black and no hotel would give them shelter, nor would any[Read More…]
Pulitzer-prize winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh made waves again Tuesday night as he excoriated the Biden administration and lambasted mainstream media coverage of the Nord Stream bombing, the Russiagate story, and the Democrat Party’s love of war at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. Media reports said: In a wide-ranging discussion, journalist Seymour Hersh doubled down on his explosive[Read More…]
The clerical leadership in Iran has tried hard to prevent its demise, as is popularly demanded in recent months by Iranians inside and outside Iran. To continue their Islamic rule, the clerics have tried hard to preserve the Islamic Hejab, which has been widely demanded during the past six months by Iranian women to be abolished. Now, the beginning of[Read More…]
They want to Arrest Imran Khan and Destabilize the Country Is Pakistani politics is a game of deception, betrayal and dishonesty to the national interest? Pakistan’s trajectory of current affairs unfolds a self-destructive political endemic and cynicism to grab power by any means – fair or foul – the current political governance of 10 parties have no legitimacy whatsoever to[Read More…]
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies March 19th marks the 20th anniversary of the U.S. and British invasion of Iraq. This seminal event in the short history of the 21st century not only continues to plague Iraqi society to this day, but it also looms large over the current crisis in Ukraine, making it impossible for most of[Read More…]
Is China really on the verge of invading the island of Taiwan, as so many top American officials seem to believe? If the answer is “yes” and the U.S. intervenes on Taiwan’s side — as President Biden has sworn it would — we could find ourselves in a major-power conflict, possibly even a nuclear one, in the not-too-distant future. Even if confined[Read More…]
History is filled with failed planners and plans, threats thought of that did not eventuate, and threats unthought of that found their way into the books. The AUKUS agreement is an attempt to inflate a threat by developing a number of fictional capabilities in an effort to combat an inflated adversary. The checklist of imminent failure for this security pact[Read More…]
Those who have an insatiable appetite for war seldom heed the wreckage they have left behind. The extraordinary March 10, 2023 announcement that China’s top diplomat, Mr. Wang Yi, helped broker a rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran suggests that major powers can benefit from believing that, as Albert Camus once put it, “words are more powerful than munitions.” This[Read More…]
Ban Ki-Moon, Helen Clark, Joyce Banda, Joseph Stiglitz, Winnie Byanyima join scores of leaders in open letter three years into the COVID-19 pandemic. Inequity of vaccine rollout led to one preventable COVID-19 death every 24 seconds in first year of vaccination alone. Governments must embed equity and human rights in pandemic preparedness and response after COVID-19 left “a scar on[Read More…]
In an anti-government demonstration on Saturday, thousands of Czechs joined protest march in Prague. Protesters decried falling living standards and rising prices, and their government’s continued military support of Ukraine. Media reports said: Organized by the right-wing Law, Respect, Expertise party (PRO), the rally saw demonstrators wave Czech flags and placards demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Petr Fiala’s government.[Read More…]
A German newspaper has debunked the Nord Stream sabotage stories by other Anglo-U.S. media. German center-right newspaper Bild has insisted that the mainstream media story that the Nord Stream pipelines were destroyed by a team of six operating from the Andromeda, a 15-meter chartered yacht, is becoming increasingly dubious. Earlier this week, The New York Times and Die Zeit claimed[Read More…]
Before the financial collapse come the aggressive anti-regulation lobbyists. These are often of the same ilk: loathing anything resembling oversight, restriction, reporting and monitoring. They are incarnations of the frontier, symbolically toting guns and slaying the natives, seeking wealth beyond paper jottings, compliance and bureaucratic tedium. The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), for a period of time the preferred[Read More…]
Several hundred concerned human rights, pro-Palestinian activists and Zionists demonstrated outside of the Grand Hyatt Hotel in downtown Washington on the evening of March 12 to protest the presence of Israel’s pro-settlement, far-right nationalist, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, whose recent comments called for the annihilation of the small Palestinian village of Huwara. The village located near Nablus on the occupied[Read More…]
My long-dead father used to say, “Every human being deserves to taste a piece of cake.” Though at the time his words meant little to me, as I grew older I realized both what they meant, symbolically speaking, and the grim reality they disguised so charmingly. That saying of his arose from a basic reality of our lives then —[Read More…]
Is it true that “every” American Hindu politician faces “bigoted attacks”? “Outside forces have done things,” complained (now former) Michigan State Representative Padma Kuppa in a July 2022 interview with the Hindu American Foundation (HAF) about her experience running for office. “A man by the name of Pieter Friedrich published an advertisement with lots of propaganda about where my money[Read More…]
The Iran-Saudi Arabia rapprochement has wide reactions. An NBC report — What does the Iran-Saudi Arabia truce mean for Washington’s standing on the global stage? (March 11, 2023, NBCNews.com) — said: As some world leaders hailed the restoration of ties between long-standing enemies Iran and Saudi Arabia, there were growing fears in Washington that the deal could help spell the end[Read More…]
As is the case of long wars, the warring parties and their affiliated media in the Russia-Ukraine conflict have painted each other using uncompromising language, making it nearly impossible to offer an unbiased view of the ongoing tragedy that has killed, wounded and expelled millions. While it is understandable that wars of such horror and near complete disregard of the[Read More…]
In a significant development, Iran and Saudi Arabia have agreed to restore ties. China has mediated in the deal. The two countries will also resume the security cooperation agreement signed in 2001. China’s role in mediating the agreement is a major diplomatic win for the rising power. The news came Friday night attracting worldwide attention, and is seen as a[Read More…]
Ever so rarely, the human species can reach accord and agreement on some topic seemingly contentious and divergent. Such occasions tend to be rarer than hen’s teeth, but the UN High Seas Treaty was one of them. It took over two decades of agonising, stuttering negotiations to draft an agreement and went someway to suggest that the “common heritage of[Read More…]
News reports emerging from Germany and the United States claim that a pro-Ukrainian group was behind the blowing up of the Nord Stream gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea in September 2022. German daily newspaper Die Zeit, public broadcasters ARD and SWR, and the ARD political magazine Kontraste reported in March 2023 that investigators were able to reconstruct how the pipelines[Read More…]
by Vijay Prashad and Katie Halper After a highly acclaimed run in North America, Roger Waters will take his “This Is Not a Drill” tour across Europe. The long journey includes shows in Germany, with the final concert in the country originally planned to take place in Frankfurt on May 28. On February 24, however, Frankfurt’s city council and the Hessian state government announced the[Read More…]
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…]
Women’s Day A few days ago, on Woman’s Day, an article called our attention to the plight of Iranian women, who are fighting for their freedom and civil rights against the oppressive religions government of Iran. Here is the link: https://truthout.org/articles/this-international-womens-day-iranian-feminists-are-at-the-front-lines/ Iran, Past and Present Here is a link to my book, “Iran, Past and Present”. https://eacpe.org/content/uploads/2022/12/Iran-Past-and-Present-by-John-Scales-Avery.pdf My father went[Read More…]
Who remembers anymore that, in 2003, we were Vladimir Putin? Today, our cable and social-media news feeds are blanketed with denunciations of the president of the Russian Federation for his lawless and brutal invasion of Ukraine. When Secretary of State Antony Blinken met briefly with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in New Delhi on March 2nd, he told him in no uncertain terms,[Read More…]
Stories and claims on the blowing up of parts of the Nord Stream gas pipelines is creating a lot of confusion. Claims Of Ukrainian Link To Nord Stream Sabotage Hypothetical, Says Germany Germany’s defense minister Boris Pistorius has dodged a question about how the Nord Stream sabotage case could influence Western military aid for Kiev if it turns out that[Read More…]
The gas pipeline Nord Stream blast has created diversified opinions and assessments. The sabotage of the Nord Stream delivering Russian gas to Europe was a good thing, Polish President Andrzej Duda told CNN on Wednesday. The destruction of the pipelines freed the continent from Russia’s “dominance” plans, the Polish leader claimed, adding that it ended the European nation’s dependence on[Read More…]
“The men who have most injured and oppressed humanity, who have most deeply sinned against it, were according to their standards and their conscience, good men; what was bad in them, what wrought moral evil and cruelty, treason to truth and progress, was not at all their intentions, in their purpose, in their personal character, but in their opinions.” Robert[Read More…]
It was the morning of March 19th, 2003 and this writer was up early. I was eating a bowl of Cheerios as I turned on the boob tube. I can remember vividly the evening before when I was able to watch a Canadian Cable News channel. The news anchor was explaining how all the many groups throughout the entire planet[Read More…]
The Cuban socialist healthcare system is internationally recognized as one of the best in the world.1 It is innovative, preventative, people-oriented, comprehensive, community-centered, internationalist, and, of course, de-commodified—treating healthcare as a human right, not a profitable commodity. However, in spite of its extraordinary successes, the United States’ sixty-year long blockade has tremendously detrimental effects on Cuban life in general, and their[Read More…]
Diligently, obediently and with a degree of dangerous imbecility, a number of Australian media outlets are manufacturing a consensus for war with a country that has never been a natural, historical enemy, nor sought to be. But as Australia remains the satellite of a Sino-suspicious US imperium, its officials and their dutiful advocates in the press seem obligated to pave[Read More…]
The Russian government on Monday has branded Soros-funded Transparency International (TI) as “undesirable,” effectively banning it from operating in the country. The TI once blocked calls to help NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013. An AP report said: The Russian prosecutor’s office charged that while “formally acting as an organization fighting corruption around the world, it interferes in the internal[Read More…]
“The jaws of power are always open to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing.” John Adams, (1735-1826) The Nuremberg Principles According to the Nuremberg Principles, the citizens of a country have a responsibility for the crimes that their governments commit. But to prevent these crimes, the[Read More…]
Dear President Biden, My name is Olivia DiNucci and I am the anti-war activist who interrupted your dinner in DC the other night. You, the most powerful man in the world, were sitting right in front of me. Normal people like me don’t often have access to people like you and I couldn’t resist addressing you knowing we are in[Read More…]
Academic free speech is under great threat in Australia (and elsewhere) from authoritarian university managers of corporatized universities, state and federal governments, secret government, foreign governments (notably the US and Apartheid Israel and their lobbyists), mendacious oligopoly Mainstream media, and lack of a Bill of Rights guaranteeing free speech. Back in 2001 I gave a paper entitled “Current Academic Censorship[Read More…]
WASHINGTON – A large and colorfully dressed crowd of Ethiopian Orthodox Christians peacefully demonstrated on March 5 at the White House led by religious leaders calling upon President Biden, the US and the world to intervene on their behalf in an ongoing systematic campaign of oppression and intimidation against their religion by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s Prosperity Party. Abiy is[Read More…]
Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the ‘Pentagon Papers’ that revealed the U.S.’s covert attempts to ramp up conflict in Vietnam since the 1940s, has warned of the possibility of nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia. In a parting message to other activists, he made the warning. In the message Daniel Ellsberg has announced that he has terminal pancreatic cancer. “On[Read More…]
WASHINGTON (03-04) – Women’s Rights activists descended upon the Philippine Embassy on March 4 during a march calling for major reforms for the country. The march was held after the first day of a political conference sponsored by the International Women’s Alliance, an anti-imperialist alliance of grassroots women’s organizations, institutions and individuals who are calling for reforms. Carrying large[Read More…]
In 2015, according to the talking points being floated by former South Carolina governor and Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley and her team, she alone heroically removed the Confederate flag that flew on the grounds of the state capitol and so healed racial wounds. She implied as much right after it happened, again at the 2020 Republican National Convention, and in[Read More…]
For many centuries, the powerful have helped control their working poor by elevating some of the oppressed to wield the whip. The Romans had the Vigiles, poor men and often ex-slaves who patrolled the streets and fought fires; the Nazis had the Judenrat to carry out their orders in Jewish communities: southern US slave owners knew the advantages of[Read More…]
America’a aggressive military-industrial complex It appears that the military-industrial complex has complete control of the government of the United States, which recently voted to give the Pentagon roughly a trillion dollars of the tax-payers money. This was done by cutting back on social programs which would have helped poor working families. Recently Joan Roelofs published a book entitled “The Trillion[Read More…]
WASHINGTON (03-04) – Today marked the closing ceremony at the National Building Museum where the shocking and profoundly sad Gun Violence National Memorial Project has been on display since April 2021. With its closing, future exhibitions are now being planned to take place around the country while those involved in its creation are lobbying for a permanent National Gun Violence[Read More…]
Over the last week or so, Australian politicians and representatives of the university sector got busy pressing flesh in India, hoping to open avenues that have largely remained aspirational. It was timed to coincide with G20 talks in New Delhi, which has seen a flurry of contentious meetings traversing security, economics and education, all taking place in the shadow of[Read More…]
Officially the death toll in the two February 6 earthquakes centered in Kahramanmaraş, which created devastation in both Turkey and Syria, has reached to 53,000 people. There are 45,089 confirmed fatalities in Turkey and 8,476 in Syria. The actual death toll is thought to be much higher, including those who have not been pulled from the rubble, those who have[Read More…]
Russia no longer perceives the U.S. and its allies as reliable trade partners and will not allow itself to be dependent on them, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told a conference in India on Friday. “We will not rely on any partner in the West anymore. We will not allow them to blow up the pipelines again,” he said in[Read More…]
by Medea Benjamin, Marcy Winograd and Wei Yu There’s something irrational about President Biden’s knee-jerk dismissal of China’s 12-point peace proposal titled “China’s Position on the Political Settlement of the Ukraine Crisis.” “Not rational” is how Biden described the plan that calls for de-escalation toward a ceasefire, respect for national sovereignty, establishment of humanitarian corridors and resumption of peace talks.[Read More…]
While the world has been distracted, even amused, by the diplomatic tussle around China’s recent high-altitude balloon flights across North America, there are signs that Beijing and Washington are preparing for something so much more serious: armed conflict over Taiwan. Reviewing recent developments in the Asia-Pacific region raises a tried-and-true historical lesson that bears repeating at this dangerous moment in[Read More…]
Europe is passing through critical times when a lot of caution as well determination is needed to avoid the possibility of large scale destruction. Hence this is a time for all those committed to a future of peace for Europe and for world to unite, setting aside all relatively less significant differences for the time being, to ensure that the[Read More…]
Intellectuals do not have a monopoly on culture, on values, or on truth, much less on the meanings attributed to any one of these “domains of the spirit,” as they used to be termed. But intellectuals should also not shrink from denouncing what they see as destructive of culture, values, and truth, notably when such destruction claims to be carried[Read More…]
In Europe, North America and a few other countries that feed themselves with information from the western media, it can have escaped no one’s attention that we are actually on the march towards World War III. The similarities with the 1930s are terrifying: Multiple fronts of military activity are opening up; one in Ukraine and two more on the way[Read More…]
The increasingly shabby treatment of former US marine Daniel Edmund Duggan by Australian authorities in the service of their US masters has again shown that the Australian passport is not quite worth the material it’s printed on. In January this year, Sydney’s Downing Centre Local Court heard that Australian Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus accepted a request from the US before Christmas[Read More…]
On February 27th it was the 90th anniversary of the fall of the Reichstag, which paved the path to the complete monopoly of German fascism, giving bourgeois democracy a shattering blow. Ninety years ago, on January 30, 1933, President Paul von Hindenburg appointed the leader of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), Adolf Hitler, as chancellor of the German[Read More…]
The Wall Street Journal called China’s slowdown “disappointing.” But for the environment, it is welcome news. On January 17, 2023, China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) announced that the country’s population fell in 2022 by 850,000 people from 2021, which was the first population decline witnessed by the country in six decades. This has mostly resulted from low birth rates stemming from the imposition[Read More…]
In 1946, Albert Einstein shot off a telegram to several hundred American leaders and politicians warning that the “unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.” Einstein’s forecast remains prescient. Nuclear calamity still knocks. Even prior to Vladimir Putin’s bloody invasion of Ukraine, the threat of a nuclear[Read More…]
In a disgraceful act of political and artistic censorship, the Frankfurt municipal administration, known as the Magistrat, decided on Friday to ban Roger Waters’ concert scheduled for May 28. The Magistrat, led by a coalition of the Social Democrats, Greens, and Free Democrats, who are in a coalition at the federal level, and the pro-EU Volt party, instructed the Frankfurt[Read More…]
When the history of these times is written, the last 15 months or so from November 2021 to January 2023 will form a very tragic part of its pages. This has been the time of the most irresponsible abandonment of their most crucial responsibilities by world leadership, leading to a sharp, perhaps unprecedented, escalation of dangers and risks for the[Read More…]
Wherever we live in this world, whatever business we are in, our first priority is to take care of our life-giving ecosystem and the biodiversity that sustains us. Nothing else on earth matters as much as taking care of our planet. We have been and are still causing, through our actions, acid rain, smog in our cities, environmental pollution and[Read More…]
The acclaimed Palestinian writers Susan Abulhawa and Mohammed El-Kurd were invited to the Adelaide Writers Festival but have encountered a storm of false defamation from Zionists, pro-Zionist Mainstream media and pro-Zionist politicians. Abulhawa has also been falsely defamed for her sensible views on the Ukraine War. The eminent anti-racist Jewish Australian Festival Director Louise Adler is standing firm against this[Read More…]
Over the last few weeks, February 24, 2023 was the most observed day on geopolitical stage. The famous, and posing as dignified, MSM ceaselessly predicted and propagated: Russia is going to begin a new offensive on February 24, 2023 in Ukraine. But there was nothing like that. A year has passed since Russia began its Special Military Operation in Ukraine.[Read More…]
The latest official statistics of ‘Youth Risk Behavior Survey’ (YRBS), USA, 2011-2021 released recently by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, (CDC), USA, have revealed truly alarming levels of distress among US youth. From a distance youth of other countries perceive life of youth in USA to be a life of joy and fun in a prosperous land free[Read More…]
Rallies against the U.S.-led NATO bloc, the EU, supply of weapons to Ukraine and anti-war have been held across France, and in Italy and Germany. At protest sites, demonstrators defaced and tore down NATO and EU flags. Berlin Tens of thousands of Germans braved the elements to attend the Uprising for Peace, a massive rally organized by Die Linke (Left[Read More…]
To residents of Memphis’s resource-poor, predominantly nonwhite neighborhoods, the Scorpions were easy to spot. The plainclothes patrols were known for driving their unmarked Dodge Chargers through the streets, often all too recklessly, sowing fear as they went, spitting venom from their windows, jumping out with guns drawn at the slightest sign of an infraction. On the night of January 7th, Tyre Nichols was two minutes from[Read More…]
Promising to return once a month, the group “Mothers on the March,” who have actively engaged for the past decade through weekly vigils in protesting police killings and brutality of Black and Brown people by police, held their first demonstration February 24 outside of the Israeli Consulate, calling attention to the injustice for killings of Palestinians in Israel and the[Read More…]
At the G20 meeting in Bengaluru, India, the United States arrived with a simple brief. U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said at the February 2023 summit that the G20 countries must condemn Russia for its invasion of Ukraine and they must adhere to U.S. sanctions against Russia. However, it became clear that India, the chair of the G20, was not willing to[Read More…]
In October 2022, about eight months after the war in Ukraine started, the University of Cambridge in the UK harmonized surveys conducted in 137 countries about their attitudes towards the West and towards Russia and China. The findings in the study, while not free of a margin of error, are robust enough to take seriously. These are: For the 6.3 billion[Read More…]
Protests are continuing in Peru even 11 weeks after the ‘coup’ of December 7, 2022, dislodging President Pedro Castillo and putting him under arrest. Formally elected president Pedro Castillo was in office for a short period: 28 July 2021 – 7 December 2022. Newspaper La Republica, which belongs to one of the two biggest media houses, ran two headlines carried[Read More…]
Imperialism and colonialism One of the focal historical features of the western (West European) civilization was and is imperialistic colonization followed by the brutal social, economic, political, financial, etc. exploitation of the local peoples and their cultures. By some academic understanding and formal definition, imperialism is a process of extending a nation-state’s power by territorial occupation or by forming political,[Read More…]
As the war in Ukraine completes a year, different scenarios are being painted by different media. There can be no denial about the large-scale destruction of life, resources and environment, despite pacifist movements, despite the reality of climate change, despite the huge suffering of people. There were those who tried to continue in Ukraine, not just as soldiers but as[Read More…]
China’s foreign ministry has published its proposal for political settlement of the crisis in Ukraine on its website on Friday. Media reports said: China’s 12-point settlement plan includes a call for de-escalation and ceasefire. The document says: “All sides should show rationality and restraint, avoid fuelling tensions or taking steps to aggravate the conflict, avert further escalation and prevent the[Read More…]
Though it has been argued that the so-called American dream is long dead, Nikki Haley is proof that the dream is still alive. Unfortunately, the ‘dream’ is hers alone. Until recently, a close confidante of former US President Donald Trump and his pro-Israel circle, Haley wants to be the next United States president. On February 14, she officially declared her[Read More…]
by Katrina vanden Heuvel and James W. Carden As 2023 unfolds, we fear that American policy will continue to be characterized by both mission creep and the absence of any sort of diplomatic engagement with Russia. Throughout the course of the war, the Biden administration has slowly, steadily, even stealthily increased America’s involvement. Calls from Kiev for more and more weapons[Read More…]
War of words and display of cosmetic diplomacy by either or both President Joe Biden and/or President Vladimir Putin is least likely to help either USA or Russia win the Ukraine-war which has formally lasted for around a year. Ukraine-war in the hope of ensuring surrender/defeat of Russia, at present, probably bears greater importance for Biden on his domestic turf.[Read More…]
During a Veterans Day celebration in my small Maryland community, a teacher clicked through a slideshow of smiling men and women in military uniforms. “Girls and boys, can anyone tell me what courage is?” she asked the crowd, mostly children from local elementary schools, including my two young kids. A boy raised his hand. “Not being scared?” he asked. The[Read More…]
High levels of global debt are likely to turn what could be a controllable shift from expansion to contraction into a blowout of unfulfilled expectations and obligations, leading to widespread suffering. An enormous debt bomb threatens the U.S. federal government and the nation’s financial system unless warring politicians can agree on a plan to defuse it. However, there are even[Read More…]
Why Norway? In Seymour Hersh’s account of the Biden Administration’s decision to destroy the Nord Stream pipelines, why did much of the secret planning and training for the operation take place in Norway? And why were highly skilled seamen and technicians from the Norwegian Navy involved? These questions have been put forward by Pulitzer winning journalist Seymour Hersh in his “From[Read More…]
Bioenergy is often seen as a more environmentally-friendly alternative to other forms of energy generation. But the truth is that it can actually be quite harmful to the environment. Bioenergy has a dark side: It contributes to air pollution. Biomass, or bioenergy, creates energy by burning living materials like plants and trees. The wood pellet industry uses trees to make[Read More…]
When the Earth is shaken to her utmost convulsion And the[Read More…]
On September 23, 1973 Pablo Neruda, one of the greatest poets ever and a Nobel laureate, breathed his last. This was just 12 days after the US-assisted military coup in Chile on September 11 1973 which also resulted in the highly tragic and widely mourned death of one of the most sincere and democratic leaders of Latin America—President Salvador Allende—who[Read More…]
In an address to the Federal Assembly on February 21, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that Russia would suspend its participation in the 2011 New START nuclear arms controls treaty. The treaty, which provided for a 50 percent reduction of the number of strategic nuclear missile launchers and a bilateral inspections regime, was the last remaining arms control treaty that[Read More…]
On February 9, 2023, around 100 armed men drove to Dembo, Burkina Faso, on motorcycles and in pickup trucks. They opened fire on a militia group called Volunteers for the Defense of the Homeland (VDP), which works with the Burkinabé military to protect the areas of northwest Burkina Faso near its border with Mali. These men killed seven members of the VDP. Three days[Read More…]
“The United States will provide Ukraine with a new $500 million infusion of aid to help the government in Kyiv continue paying salaries, pensions and providing services, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said Thursday. Yellen detailed the assistance following her meeting Wednesday with Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal and Finance Minister Sergiy Marchenko, saying it was necessary to help their government[Read More…]
On February 7, a funeral was held in the northern Syrian town of Jinderis. It was one of numerous such funerals to be held on that day across Syria and Türkiye, following a devastating earthquake that killed and injured thousands. Each one of these funerals represented two seemingly opposite notions: collective grief and collective hope. The Jinderis funeral was a[Read More…]
When news first emerged over explosions endured by the Nord Stream pipelines, known collectively as Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2, an army of guessers was mobilised. The accusation that Russia had done it seemed counterintuitive, given that the Russian state company Gazprom is a majority shareholder of Nord Stream 1 and sole owner of Nord Stream 2. But[Read More…]
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies With the Ukraine war now reaching its one-year mark on February 24, the Russians have not achieved a military victory but neither has the West achieved its goals on the economic front. When Russia invaded Ukraine, the United States and its European allies vowed to impose crippling sanctions that would bring Russia[Read More…]
It is understood by all that at least two sides are required in a war scenario. One side must be waging war on another side. It is not required that the aggressed side fight back. To surrender to a warmaker, however, means coming under the suzerainty of the warmaker. That is almost always anathema to a people since people cherish[Read More…]
Can there be any question that we’re in a mad — and loud — new age of McCarthyism? Thank you, Kevin! And don’t forget the wildly over-the-top members of the so-called Freedom Caucus and their Republican associates, including that charmer, lyin’ George Santos, Jewish-space-laser-and-white-balloon-carrying Marjorie Taylor Greene, and — once again running for president — the man who never lost, Donald Trump-em-all. I’d like to say it[Read More…]
On Monday, US President Joe Biden arrived in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, pledging the United States’ commitment to the war with Russia for “as long as it takes.” The visit by the “commander in chief” to the front solidifies the conflict not only as an American war but as the defining and preeminent focus of the Biden administration. Coming[Read More…]
Marvin Gaye said it best in his hit song ( written by him) : Whoa, oh, mercy mercy me Oh, things ain’t what they used to be, no no Where did all the blue skies go? Poison is the wind that blows from the North and South and East Whoa mercy, mercy me Oh, things ain’t what they used to[Read More…]
Hundreds of protesters gathered in Washington, DC Sunday for the ‘March Against the War Machine’ rally, with a number of prominent speakers from across the political spectrum of U.S. calling on the U.S. government to end its military support of Ukraine in favor of diplomacy, and slashing the Pentagon budget to address numerous domestic issues. The anti-war event held at[Read More…]
As the nuclear “Doomsday Clock” inches towards midnight, peace, anti-war and Climate Crisis activists took the streets today across the country to protest their “Rage against the War Machine” demanding substantive de-escalation of the Russian-Ukraine war and calling for “Not one penny for war in Ukraine” while emphatically calling for substantive changes to reverse the climate crisis. Participants in the[Read More…]
It is true that economic growth – meaning rising GDP – is one of the key indicators of rising prosperity in a society though as the Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz also reminds that “Maximising GDP is not same as maximising wellbeing” puts to question the merit of overemphasis that are often put to GDP as the marker of ‘development’ in[Read More…]
The predecessor of todays African Union, the Organization for African Unity, OAU, was launched in 1963 with the glorious goal of uniting Africans to help liberate the continent from colonialism. Unfortunately, despite the dreams of Kwame Nkrumah, Sekou Ture and others, reality quickly showed its face and the dream turned out to be a fantasy. Why do I say this?[Read More…]
The Common Agenda that stemmed from the commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations Organization identified the following 12 action goals: (1) Leave no one behind; (2) Protect our planet; (3) Promote peace and prevent conflicts; (4) Abide by international law and ensure justice; (5) Place women and girls at the centre; (6) Build trust; (7)[Read More…]
In all societies and social groups, there are rules not only about what can be said but in fact what can be thought. In the West, this has strong tones in the professional world, in which some things are so sacrosanct as to be verboten. The more unsayable a thing is deemed to be, the more it needs to be[Read More…]
Australia’s Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) provides excellent globally-oriented TV and radio services to Australia, and particularly to exceptionally multicultural Australia. However SBS has succumbed to foreign and local Zionist pressure and suspended renowned Arab journalist Essam Al Ghalid for unexceptional tweets made 10 years ago which offended local Zionists and a foreign, pro-Israel, Israel-promoting and Zionist media monitoring website called[Read More…]
Perhaps the greatest crime that Julian Assange committed in the eyes of both Democratic and Republican governments was this: he dared to tell the American people some of the terrible things their government had done. The first time I was asked to comment publicly on Julian Assange and Wikileaks was on MSNBC in April 2010. Wikileaks had just released the Collateral Murder video. The[Read More…]
There is reason to be alarmed by the recent China balloon. However, that reason is not the alleged China aggression but the very calculated aggression towards China by the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations. This hate and the manufactured reasons for it have been layering on for years. We’ve seen this playbook. It’s the same game plan that led[Read More…]
My title comes from a 19th century author whose name does not matter nor would it mean much if I mentioned him. It’s an old truth that has not changed a bit over the centuries. I think, however, it would be more linguistically accurate to say that most people want to be deceived, for the world, the earth doesn’t give a[Read More…]
Seymour Hersh, the famous investigative journalist, has slammed U.S.’s alleged involvement in bombing the Nord Stream gas lines as one of the “dumbest” decisions taken in years, warning that the move will have “horrific” consequences for Europeans and further undercut the already “supremely useless” NATO alliance. Speaking to Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman for an interview on Wednesday, Hersh outlined his recent report on[Read More…]
The cover-up by the U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media of Seymour Hersh’s blockbuster self-published February 8th investigative-news report that Joe Biden himself had ordered the destruction of the Nord Stream gas pipelines, wasn’t only the virtually total blackout of it that was engaged in by almost all ‘news’-media in The West — their failing to report that Hersh had issued any such news-report[Read More…]
Being an early adopter of solar technology has given me personal insight into some of the practical limitations and difficulties of the energy transition. In 2022, I authored two articles expressing doubts about society’s transition from fossil fuels to renewable solar and wind power. In this final article in the series, I’ll explain why my conclusions are based on experience as well as[Read More…]
In January 2023, after five police officers killed Tyre Nichols, President Joe Biden quickly issued a statement calling on protesters to stay nonviolent. “As Americans grieve, the Department of Justice conducts its investigation, and state authorities continue their work, I join Tyre’s family in calling for peaceful protest,” said Biden. “Outrage is understandable, but violence is never acceptable. Violence is destructive and against[Read More…]
The protests of the Peruvian people staged against the dictatorial government of Dina Boluarte have been taking place for more than a month and, in recent days; have taken on more intensive and generalised form. Road blocks and important demonstrations in several regions of the country have been routine, like in Puno, Arequipa, Junín, Cusco and Apurímac. The unanimous cry[Read More…]
It is not farfetched to make the point that delivery systems capable of deploying nuclear weapons will lead to them carrying those very same weapons. Whatever the promises made by governments that such delivery systems will not carry such loads, stifling secrecy over such arrangements can only stir doubt. That is the problem facing the AUKUS alliance which makes Australia[Read More…]
There is increasing concern that the world is not on track to resolve climate change as well as about a dozen or so other serious, inter-related environmental problems that threaten to disrupt the life-nurturing conditions of our planet. Corrective actions should not be delayed much longer. Most environmental problems arise in the process of creating certain goods and services. In[Read More…]
The Illegality of NATO: Violation of the UN Charter and the Nuremberg Principles In recent years, participation in NATO has made European countries accomplices in US efforts to achieve global hegemony by means of military force, in violation of international law, and especially in violation of the UN Charter, the Nuremberg Principles. Former UN Assistant Secretary General Hans Christof von[Read More…]
For a whole year, Israel has struggled in its attempts to articulate a clear and decisive position regarding the Russia-Ukraine war. The reason behind the seemingly confused Israeli position is that it stands to lose, regardless of the outcome. But is Israel a neutral party? Israel is home to a population of almost one million Russian-speaking citizens, one-third of them[Read More…]
The US is a far bigger threat to Canadian sovereignty and democracy than China but you’d never know it from following the dominant media. In recent days a CIA-linked firm got the federal government to stop research with a Chinese university, a State Department funded group convinced parliament to criticize China and the Pentagon’s panic over a balloon prompted Global[Read More…]
Things are getting rather bizarre at the US Northern Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). Its increasingly prominent commanding chief, one General Glen VanHerck, has abandoned any initial sense of frankness in discussing the destruction of an alleged Chinese surveillance balloon on February 4. Since that disproportionately violent event, more public relations than sense, three other objects[Read More…]
Legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh claimed on Saturday that his latest exposure report that suggests the CIA was responsible for the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines in September, was not a hard story to find. It was obvious that there was more to the issue than was being reported by most media outlets, Hersh said. In his first interview, (Radio War[Read More…]
On the weekend encompassing Friday 14 February to Sunday 16 February 2003 in Australia, coordinated mass protests against the impending Iraq War occurred around the world in over 600 cities. This global mass protest was described as the largest protest event in human history. According to the BBC 6-10 million people protested in a total of about 60 countries. In[Read More…]
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies Fresh graves at a cemetery near Bakhmut, December 2022. – Photo credit: Reuters In a recent column, military analyst William Astore wrote, “[Congressman] George Santos is a symptom of a much larger disease: a lack of honor, a lack of shame, in America. Honor, truth, integrity, simply don’t seem to matter, or[Read More…]
by Noam Chomsky and Vijay Prashad Cuba, a country of 11 million people, has been under an illegal embargo by the United States government for over six decades. Despite this embargo, Cuba’s people have been able to transcend the indignities of hunger, ill health, and illiteracy, all three being social plagues that continue to trouble much of the world. Due[Read More…]
Inside the beating heart of many students and a large number of learners lies an inner cheat. To get passing grades, every effort will be made to do the least to achieve the most. Efforts to subvert the central class examination are the stuff of legend: discreetly written notes on hands, palms and other body parts; secreted pieces of paper;[Read More…]
One definition of revelation is: A surprisingly and previously unknown fact, especially one that is made in a dramatic way. This is what many of my fellow working stiffs need to reach: A revelation on how screwed we all have been! Not since the ‘ Gilded Age’ ( 1870s – 1900 approximately) have we seen the Super Rich running roughshod[Read More…]
Hundreds of thousands of people joined in rallies in Spain and France on issues of healthcare and pension reform. Madrid Media reports said: Around 250,000 people marched through the streets of Madrid on Sunday demanding that the Spanish government increase the country’s health care budget, improve working conditions and expand the staff. “Today in Madrid we are standing up again[Read More…]
A quarter of a million people have signed an online petition urging German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to stop increasing the flow of weapons to Ukraine and to push for a peaceful resolution of the conflict instead. The petition, started on change.org by German politician Sahra Wagenknecht and journalist Alice Schwarzer, accrued over 250,000 signatures about two days since its creation. Ukraine Is[Read More…]
Though it was clear that Burkina Faso was eventually going to follow in the footsteps of Mali and the Central African Republic (CAR), Ouagadougou’s decision to break military ties with France was not as simple as media sound bites want us to believe. The conventional wisdom is that these countries are walking away from their former colonial master, France, to[Read More…]
2011-12 was a very sad year for Somalia. As hunger related to drought and other factors was worsening, a famine situation was not declared officially till very late and relief supplies were delayed. The result was that a large number of people perished in famine deaths even before famine was officially declared. A total of as many as 260,000 people[Read More…]
The International Movement for a Just World (JUST) urges the American, British, Australian, Canadian, Swiss and some European Union and Arab League governments to lift the unjust, immoral sanctions against Syria in order to lessen the immense sufferings of the people caused by the massive earthquake of 6th February 2023. A number of local groups including the Syrian Red Crescent[Read More…]
The Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said on Friday that Washington owed the world an explanation, following the publication of journalist Seymour Hersh’s report, claiming the U.S. was behind the September 2022 attack on the Nord Stream gas pipelines. Media reports said: “We have noted the reports,” Mao Ning said, responding to a question from Dragon TV. She added that the[Read More…]
A PROPER DEGREE OF GRATITUDE & THANKS IS DUE SEYMOUR HERSH The recent revelations of investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, Pulitzer Prize Winner for his reportage on the infamous My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War, has just broken the colossal true story of how America took out Russia’s Nord Stream I & II LNG Pipelines. Hersh’s account now affords all[Read More…]
The people of Ukraine have suffered enormous distress during the last one year. Clearly it is time to consider carefully the various options and select the safest one involving the least possibilities of further distress and risks. From all available evidence the safest possible path from the point of view of the people of Ukraine appears to be a three[Read More…]
The exposure has been denied by the Empire. But does anyone believe the denial? Not today, none. People across the world have come across such denials many times, and each time all the denials turned out as lies. The latest denial is related to the incident of explosion in the Nord Stream pipelines. Seymour Hersh, the famous journalist, found: The[Read More…]
A new-old ghost is hovering over Europe—war. The most violent continent in the world in terms of the number of deaths caused by warfare during the last 100 years (not to go back any further and include the deaths suffered by Europe during religious wars and the deaths inflicted by Europeans on peoples subjected to colonialism) is heading for a[Read More…]
A slice of president Joe Biden’s State of the Union address that calls for closer analysis: Putin’s invasion has been a test for the ages. A test for America. A test for the world. Would we stand for the most basic of principles? Would we stand for sovereignty? Would we stand for the right of people to live free from[Read More…]
There is nothing Gautam Adani will not do for money. In this sense, he is admirably dedicated to greed, so much so he has become its foremost caricature worthy of permanent enthronement. Mark this man’s name in the scriptures of eternity: There was nothing he did not do for the filthy lucre. For the unfamiliar reader, the $218 billion Adani[Read More…]
Bryan Pfaffenberger and his stock are continuing the Western traditions of confusing or at the least misunderstanding the life in South Asia, its various nations and cultures, as also the values, and make much ado about the ‘Fourth World Colonialism’.1 We are to encounter many apparitions which the myth-making of the Western scholarship has unleashed in the conceptual forms of[Read More…]
Even before the terrible damage caused by earthquake in Syria and Turkey, there was a strong case for ending sanctions against Syria as the existing sanctions imposed by the USA and its close allies, continuing for several years, had already accentuated the humanitarian crisis greatly in Syria. Now in the post-earthquake situation, it would be nothing short of a crime[Read More…]