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The ghosts of thousands of Palestinian children crushed by Israeli bombs loomed over this year’s Auschwitz commemorations
An entirely mendacious message lay at the heart of this week’s coverage by the BBC of the 80th Holocaust Remembrance Day commemorations.

The British state broadcaster asserted throughout the day that the voices of the few remaining survivors of the Nazi extermination programme were still being heard “loud and clear” in western capitals. Those survivors – now in their 80s and 90s – warned that the …

Amid its beautiful and quite vales of Parachinar lying between the two neighbouring countries, Pakistan, the echoing of muffled screams can be heard far too often as families lose their dear ones to sectarian terrorism. Once surrounded by the natural beauty and orderly with friendly neighbours and kin folk, this town can now boast about appearing to be hell on earth—the manifestation of an entrenched conflict that has taken so many lives. It is not a story of just a small town named Parachinar but also a testimony of hatred between …

This year’s Doomsday Clock Statement landed like a damp squib in a Trump-swamped corporate news cycle on January 28th. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists only moved the hands of the Clock forward by one second, from 90 seconds up to 89 seconds to midnight, which must have come as a relief to the few members of the public who heard about it.
But this minimal advance in the hands of the Clock was a strange and misleading top-line for the Bulletin’s actual Doomsday Clock Statement, which was brimming with …

In 1945 civilians from the German village of Hurlach were marched into the midst of the horrors of newly liberated Kaufering 6, a sub-camp of Dachau. As they moved from the crisp spring air into the zone of stench and death and disease they protested that they did not know that this horror existed. Could it be true that people living in the midst of 11 such subcamps, 11 such sites of oppression and misery, did not understand what was happening to their fellow humans on their very doorstep? Could it be true of other Germans? The answer is that …

No, this is not about the ocean or surfboards. It’s about the current economic and cultural climate we are living in. While the Democratic Party turned a mostly deaf ear to the ills of our working stiffs… for decades, their adversaries, the Republican Wolves, have always tried to ratchet the pump. Trump 2 wants, as the Brits say, to go the ‘ Full Monty’ and make America a totally feudal state. When we have less than 10% of private sector workers in unions ( actually at around 6%) the **** is about to hit the fan! Legislating anti terrorism laws …

This is what militaries do during coups: you capture the major targets, with government buildings high on the list, and you take over communications and other systems.

— Ruth Ben-Ghiat, historian on fascism and authoritarian leaders

How something is done is just as important as why something is done.

To suggest that the ends justify the means is to launch oneself down a moral, ethical and legal rabbit hole that leaves us in a totalitarian bind.

We are already halfway down that road.

Whatever the justifications for discarding, even temporarily, the constitutional framework and protocols that have long served as the foundations for our …

Will the world ever be free of the menace of nuclear annihilation?

There was a promising start along these lines during the late twentieth century, when―pressed by a popular upsurge against nuclear weapons―the nations of the world adopted a succession of nuclear arms control and disarmament agreements.  Starting with the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963, these agreements helped curb the nuclear arms race and prevent nuclear war.

But the tide gradually turned during the final years of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first.  As international conflict heightened and the nuclear disarmament movement waned, additional nations …

It has had a rebarbative, blighting effect across the entire aviation industry.  The Ryanair model, for want of a better term, prides itself on minimal, no-frills service for eye popping prices.  The Irish-based low-cost carrier was intended to revolutionise European air travel by offering a budget option for the eager and easy holiday maker.  In time, this seemingly attractive option has become a handy model to emulate by more traditional airlines, who have become mere shadows of themselves. National carriers, in other words, are now shameful replicas of budget airlines, with one exception: prices have been kept high and, post …

After decades of a prostate cancer epidemic and a refusal to screen Black men, who suffer a 60% higher incidence than White men, the highest in the industrialized world, physicians are now advocating refusal to screen ALL men.

The American Cancer Society writes, “Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men in the US. It’s also the second leading cause of cancer death.  About 1 in 8 men will get prostate cancer in their lifetime.”  Knowing these facts about the cancer epidemic, The American Family Physician (AFP) has just published an editorial that calls on physicians to STOP …

Roger D. Harris views wanted poster for González at the Caracas airport. Photo: Roger Harris.

The first thing greeting me as I disembarked from my flight in Caracas was a wanted poster for one Edmundo González Urrutia. The reward was $100,000. Not to be outdone, the US had slapped a $25 million bounty on the head of President Maduro and lesser amounts on other Venezuelan leaders.

Both González and the …

Waking up, day after day, and seeing continuous disasters visited upon the Palestinian people forecasts a day of facing the light at an increasingly dark level. It is impossible to be unaware of the genocide; yet an entire nation reinforces it. The American people are disposed to the sufferings its government inflicts upon others.

Election of an authoritarian to the highest office, who appoints cabinet positions with qualifications that require little experience in government affairs and extensive experience in extramarital affairs, completes the mystification. Elise Stefanik, selected as America’s representative to the United Nations, agrees to the proposition that …

Rotem and Osama with rosesAs Rotem Levin tossed a grenade into the middle of a Palestinian village in the West Bank, he didn’t realize his life would change forever.

“I thought I was fulfilling my duty to my country,” he told me over video chat. “I had never questioned what I had been raised to believe.”

Rotem wore a pink and gray vertically striped linen shirt and his hair was short enough to make it look like his head had been recently shaved. He looked like the Jews in the …

Last week, a Chinese startup, DeepSeek, released R1, a large-language model rivaling ChatGPT, that is already unraveling the U.S. tech world. The open-source model performs just as well, if not better, than its American counterparts.
The shock comes mainly from the extremely low cost with which the model was trained. R1 cost just $5.6 million to train. Meanwhile, OpenAI spent at least $540 million to train ChatGPT in 2022 last year alone and plans to spend over $500 billion in the next four years. Meanwhile, Meta revealed it plans to…

A widely known caution advises people not to put all their eggs in one basket.

An exemplar is Canada. Has Canada put too many of its eggs in its basket of trade with the United States?

Of course, Canada’s trade is not completely reliant on the United States, but it has cast its lot so much into the American camp that it has cut off or damaged opportunities to diversify its trade. As the junior partner, population-wise, in the trade partnership, Canada’s sovereignty and national dignity are being impugned in full view of …

They are trying to elevate France recognizing Josephine Baker as a hero, yet, Amy Goodman has the ability — and whatever else is going on with the Black journalist she interviews, French journalist Rokhaya Diallo — to sidestep the tribal and religious and historical and intellectual identity of this French monster, Éric Zemmour (above image).

He’s Jewish and he openly uses his Jewishness as a cuddle to get where he is today — …