Latest articles
by Binoy Kampmark / March 22nd, 2025
There is much talk in this age of heaving tech behemoths about the digital town square, where views can be aired with confidence, impunity and, at stages, disconcerting stupidity. Tech moguls such as Elon Musk are the loudest proponents of the view, claiming that “it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital square”.
The guardians of this square are, however, a fickle lot, managing the distribution of licenses (they can cancel them at any point, just as quickly as they can reinstate them – take Donald Trump as an example). They can also …
by Gary Olson / March 22nd, 2025
In the United States, for more than a hundred years, the ruling class interests tirelessly propagated anti-communism among the populace, until it became more like a religious orthodoxy.
— Michael Parenti, “Left Anticommunism”
I will argue below that the liberal Russia-phobic meltdown over Ukraine is because allowing a truthful dialogue would reveal that it was a proxy war against Russia, provoked by the United States. This, in turn, would risk a political identity crisis among those for whom belief in “The Russia Threat” has been a touchstone of their political identity. What are the consequences when one’s deepest …
by Rom Cretu / March 22nd, 2025
In the last decade, there has been a growing concern about a democratic deficit in Europe, while the liberal mainstream has replaced all other forms of thinking from the socio-political landscape. Moldova — where pressure on the opposition and independent media increases every year, and the ruling party always has the last word on all political issues — is not an exception.
Since Maia Sandu’s Party of Action and Solidarity (PAS) came to power in 2021, political pluralism and freedom of speech in the country have essentially ceased to exist. Against the backdrop of rapidly rising prices and poverty levels, the …
by Eros Salvatore / March 22nd, 2025
The dead and wounded lay scattered around the street. One man, with a fist-sized black hole in his stomach, lay still in a state of shock. Nearby, a shirtless teenage boy in a pool of blood screamed in pain. Further away another man was unconscious, his right leg seared off just below the knee and placed next to him by a good samaritan. Civilians moved around frantically, shouting in panic and unsure of what to do.
“This is a video I took yesterday when a bomb exploded in Deir Al-Balah,” nineteen-year-old Mohammed Kassab told me. “All my thoughts and dreams are …
by Robert Hunziker / March 22nd, 2025
A new discovery of methane leaks in Antarctica could be a game-changer and potential near-term threat that’s difficult to characterize without sounding overly negative. Of course, situations like this that appear threatening to civilization, or life as we know it, are difficult to believe and accept as something the will really happen, which is understandable because nothing in human history compares to the risk attendant to the dreaded runaway greenhouse effect. So, there’s nothing in human history to compare it to.
Nevertheless, there are scientists who believe we are living on borrowed …
Darkness (invisible) "The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper."
by Phil Rockstroh / March 21st, 2025
John Martin (1789-1854), Pandemonium (1823-27)
No light, but rather darkness visible
Served only to discover sights of woe
— John Milton, Paradise Lost
I wrote the following shortly after the birth of my son, now age 12:
When questioned by the youth of future generations, those born into the world created by our myopic choices, about how you responded when the earth was burning, will you reply that you went to the mall, sat in public places staring at a glowing electronic box, engaged in cretinous palaver about the private lives of sub-cretinous celebrities and the …
Even Anti-Communist Zealots in Miami Don’t Like It
by Steve Ellner / March 21st, 2025
During his first term, President Donald Trump exerted a “maximum pressure” campaign against perceived U.S. adversaries in Latin America and elsewhere. Among other hardline policies, he levelled crippling sanctions against Venezuela—leading, ironically, to a mass exodus of Venezuelans to the United States—and reversed former President Barack Obama’s rapprochement with Cuba. But just how committed is Trump to fighting communism in Latin America at this particular moment—in Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua? Today, it’s anyone’s guess.
Trump’s recent threats against Panama, Canada, and Greenland, on top of his clash with Ukrainian President …
by Jonathan Cook / March 21st, 2025
Sympathy for Israeli former captive Eli Sharabi must not obscure the bigger picture: he has allowed himself to be recruited to Israel’s propaganda campaign for genocide.
Israel has found a captive recently released from Gaza willing to regurgitate some of its most nonsensical talking points on the stage of the United Nations. Predictably, those talking points are already being exploited to justify Israel intensifying its slaughter of Palestinian children in Gaza – and further bully the United Nations into even greater timidity.
Eli Sharabi has every …
by Eric Zuesse / March 21st, 2025
Here is a case that so richly displays the thorough-going corruptness of the U.S. Government so that to document it in its structural details — as will be done here — is to prove beyond any reasonable doubt that the U.S. is, in fact, a dictatorship (controlled by a Deep State consisting not of its bureaucracy but of its billionaires), not at all a democracy, regardless of what the U.S. Constitution says; and it also displays how flagrantly our Constitution is routinely being violated by this Government, which, consequently, now must be seriously doubted as to this Government’s very legitimacy:
Donald …
by Allen Forrest / March 21st, 2025
How to stop media mind control.
by Greg Godels / March 21st, 2025
It is cruelly fitting that one of the acknowledged cradles of civilization is now a showroom for the cruelties, irrationalities, and injustices of the modern capitalist world.
At various times, Syria was part of the lands that were widely admired for their enlightened governance, tolerance, and economic development.
Today, Syria is a wasteland, divided into parcels, and occupied by alien forces that show no regard for the country’s legacy or the unity and well-being of its people.
After four hundred years of reasonably stable, tolerant, and peaceable existence under Ottoman rule, the people of …
by Binoy Kampmark / March 21st, 2025
If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your only option. This is proving very much to be the case with the resumption of savagely lethal strikes on Gaza by the Israeli Air Force on March 19. In a matter of hours, over 400 Palestinians were slaughtered. The resumption of the attacks by Israel terminated a fragile, often qualified cease-fire that had seen the first phase hold, for the most part, through March. Attempts to negotiate the freeing of the surviving Israeli hostages, and further Palestinian prisoners, and concluding the conflict with a lasting ceasefire and the withdrawal of …
Murdered by the State of Louisiana March 18, 2025
by Bill Quigley / March 20th, 2025
Three hours before he was to be murdered by the State of Louisiana, Jessie Hoffman greeted me with a strong handshake and an embrace. He stared deep into my eyes and thanked me for coming. We discussed his son, also named Jessie, and how proud he has made his dad.
Also visiting were three of the many lawyers who had been fighting for his life, Cecelia Trenticosta Kappel of the Loyola Center for Social Justice, Samantha Bosalavage Pourciau of the Promise of Justice Initiative, and Sarah Ottinger, who had been representing Jessie Hoffman for 19 years. I …
by Visualizing Palestine / March 20th, 2025
The ceasefire did not exist. What we had was a slowing down of killings, and now that too will continue at its former speed.
—Samah Sabawi
As Israel ramps up its attacks on Gaza, our latest visual exposes how the U.S. and Israel never really wanted a ceasefire. They worked together for months to block international efforts to end the genocide, all while the U.S. continued to supply Israel with weapons. Even after the ceasefire was announced, Israel continued to kill hundreds of Palestinians and block humanitarian aid, committing more than 1,000 violations of …
Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu has been detained on charges of corruption and alleged terror links, with his party calling it a “coup”
by RT / March 20th, 2025
Anyone who is offended by a child sharing their lived experiences of survival can choose not to watch the BBC Gaza documentary. But do not deny innocent children – who have experienced unimaginable grief and loss – the right to tell their stories
by Sylvia Monkhouse / March 20th, 2025
Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone is a harrowing account of life in Gaza as seen through the eyes of Palestinian children. It provides a rare window into young lives devastated by months of relentless bombings, displacements, and unspeakable horrors.
It aired on 17 February on BBC Two, but was swiftly removed from iPlayer four days later, following fierce lobbying from pro-Israel voices. The reasons given for its removal? Well, they simply don’t add up.
The main objection was that the father of Abdullah, the 13-year-old narrator, is the deputy minister of agriculture in Gaza’s Hamas-run government. But like it or not, it’s …
Beyond the Law
by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / March 19th, 2025
by Caitlin Johnstone / March 19th, 2025
by Allen Forrest / March 19th, 2025
It always planned to reboot the genocide
by Jonathan Cook / March 19th, 2025
What excuses has Israel given for renewing the genocide:
1. Israel says it is trying to force Hamas to release the captives in Gaza.
Yet, as we know from those already released, the indiscriminate bombing of Gaza only increases the chances the captives will be killed. There is no plausible scenario in which dropping US-supplied 2,000lb bombs across Gaza makes any Israeli held in the enclave safer or brings them home sooner.
In any case, there was a known and easy way for …
by Visualizing Palestine / March 19th, 2025
Monday night, Israel killed more than 400 Palestinians in a massacre intended to destroy the ceasefire for good. This is not the first time that Israel has tried to upend the agreement. Over the last two months, Israel has killed hundreds of Palestinians, blocked aid shipments, and refused to participate in talks on the next phase of the ceasefire.
This is the sixth time we update this visual with figures on Israel’s wanton destruction of Gaza and genocide against Palestinians since October 2023. We used data from the …
by Dan Lieberman / March 19th, 2025
Sufficiently gruesome to learn of the casualties in the Ukraine/Russo war. More gruesome to learn that the statistics don’t reflect actuality and are only another weapon ─ humiliate the opponent and have the public believe the enemy ignores the deaths of its soldiers.
The Kyiv Independent (?), Friday, March 14, 2025, “General Staff: Russia has lost 891,660 troops in Ukraine since Feb. 24, 2022.” In January 2025, Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense estimated that 430,790 Russian troops were killed in 2024 alone.
The International Institute for Strategic Studies (ISSS) is less sanguine: “…as of early January 2025, the IISS estimates that …
by Yves Engler / March 19th, 2025
The NDP’s belated call to scrap the F-35 contract is a damning comment on Jagmeet Singh’s leadership. This cautious response to a rapidly shifting political terrain also includes an outrageous sop to the military industrial complex.
On February 25 I asked the NDP leader if he’d reconsider paying tens of billions of dollars to a US arms giant for offensive fighter jets as part of his stated desire to take a hardline in response to Donald Trump’s threats. Singh spent over a minute responding to my question but …
by Binoy Kampmark / March 18th, 2025
The influencer might be defined as a modern, junked cretin of arrested moral and ethical capacity – with specific skills. Such an individual, for instance, is often able to use technological platforms with aptitude for two mundane purposes: to manipulate the gullible and rake in the cash. The essence of this effort lies in the technology. Drone drumming feeds, instant imaging, updates on the guff and drivel of a visit (probably false) to some venue or location, a product’s claimed merits (almost certainly false) and some scientific proposition (absolutely false).
Sam Jones, who claims to be such an influencer, and a …
And Wish I Had More Resignations to Give!
by Ann Wright / March 18th, 2025
Twenty-two years ago, on March 19, 2003, I resigned from the US Department of State. I was the Deputy chief of mission at the US Embassy in UlaanBaatar, Mongolia and the third U.S. government employee to resign in opposition to the U.S. war on Iraq. I resigned on the day the Bush administration began the 10-year U.S. war on Iraq, March 19, 2003.
Twenty-two years later, I don’t regret my decision one bit.
President Bush, like the presidents before and after him, lied. His specific lie was about the reason for the U.S. to attack and kill hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.
In …
by David Penner / March 18th, 2025
As transpired in Weimar Germany, cataclysmic times invariably induce great suffering, yet they can also serve as inspiration for poignant and moving works of art. What follows is a discussion of six works of insightful and intellectually nuanced contemporary American cinema which explore this distressing age in all its viciousness and depravity, while engaging the anguish of the individual struggling to survive amidst a maelstrom of unprecedented corporate pillage and political and socio-economic chaos.
While I have tried to limit them as much as possible, these reviews may contain spoilers.
The East, directed by Zal Batmanglij; starring Brit Marling, Alexander Skarsgård, …
by Paul Haeder / March 18th, 2025
[photo: The billionaire and now Trump adviser grew up amid the collapse of white rule, attending an all-white school and then a more liberal one]
The good news is that young people are resisting the giant knives of 10 million cuts deployed by a South African seemingly pro-apartheid fellow with his dodgy DOGE.
We have multiple prong crises in the United States, and that unelected “death by 10 million cuts” Musk is just the tip of the spear in this next iteration of a dying Empire.
Yes, think …
by Helen Yaffe / March 18th, 2025
On February 25, US secretary of state Marco Rubio announced restrictions on visas for both government officials in Cuba and any others worldwide who are “complicit” with the island nation’s overseas medical-assistance programs. A US State Department statement clarified that the sanction extends to “current and former” officials and the “immediate family of such persons.” This action, the seventh measure targeting Cuba in one month, has international consequences; for decades tens of thousands of Cuban medical professionals have been posted in around sixty countries, far more than the World …
by Allen Forrest / March 18th, 2025
Denis G. Rancourt, PhD, and Joseph Hickey, PhD, “Quantitative evaluation of whether the Nobel-Prize-winning COVID-19 vaccine actually saved millions of lives,” 08 October 2023.
Fantastic statements that the Nobel-Prize-winning COVID-19 vaccines saved millions (and tens of millions) of lives are based on the theoretical scenarios of Watson et al. (2022), published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases. Watson et al. (2022) theoretically inferred massive mortality reductions distributed globally, occurring solely during vaccine rollouts. We calculated the quantitative consequences of Watson et al. (2022)’s low-value (14.4 million lives saved) theoretical scenario on all-cause …
by Ted Glick / March 17th, 2025
The attempted deportation of Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, met with dramatic and widespread resistance, is one of the first, high profile, specifically targeted repressive acts by the Trump regime, but it won’t be the last. There is no question about their intention to create a permanently repressive and dictatorial government, a government of, by and for the overwhelmingly white and male billionaire elite and those sucking up to them for their own personal gain.
Fortunately, this is not a popular government. Polls taken a few days ago by CNN, Reuters and Quinnipiac put Trump’s favorable ratings at an average of 44% …
