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Note: This article was being completed just before the attack on a Jewish holiday celebration at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia.

A previous article ─ The Radical Left Meets the Extreme Right: Allied against Jewish support for Israel ─ remained unfinished. The connection between hostility to apartheid Israel and the strengthening of the extreme right, and to where that strengthening is leading, invites more discussion.

An ominous sign of where it is leading starts with the hypocrisy of the greater Israel. Claiming to be the leader of a liberal democracy, Benjamin Netanyahu played a leading role in motivating the Religious Right …

Washington brands Nicolás Maduro a dictator, celebrates Volodymyr Zelenskyy as democratic, and sponsors María Corina Machado to achieve regime change in Venezuela rather than promote genuine democracy.

Within the narrow spectrum of establishment punditry, “dictator” functions as a term of opprobrium reserved for governments Washington designates as enemies. By this measure, Maduro is cast as the dictator, while Zelenskyy is sanctified as democratic.

Ronald Reagan’s UN ambassador, Jeane Kirkpatrick, wrote about a democracy “double standard” in 1979. A Democrat turned anti-communist neoconservative, she formulated a convenient rhetorical distinction. The so-called Kirkpatrick Doctrine supported “authoritarian” traditional dictatorships and opposed …

In our latest visual, we highlight how the conditions of genocide make it difficult to accurately document the death toll and other aspects of the ongoing Israeli genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. This visual was inspired by various efforts by public health experts to estimate or project the possible death toll in Gaza, prompting important discussions about the limitations of data during an ongoing genocide. While we cannot yet be certain of the true cost of this genocide in terms of Palestinian lives, we can be certain that widely cited figures are a significant underestimate.

…

Read Part 1.

Anthony Hughes was in such a hurry to open and shut the British Government’s case against President Vladimir Putin for the Novichok chemical warfare attack in England in 2018, he failed to tie the top button of his shirt.

This was also a precaution against choking on what Hughes recited as his conclusions to more than seven years of investigations, five months of autopsy, toxicology, and post-mortem pathology, then just 24 days of public hearings,  which he read from a prepared script …

When Alfred Nobel established his peace prize, he was guided by Bertha von Suttner, the most respected peace activist of the 1890s, who was revered by European heads of state and initiated high-level peace conferences.

Nobel formulated three criteria for receiving his peace prize:

The prize shall be awarded to the peace advocate who, during the year, has best fulfilled the requirements

– to have worked for the fraternisation of peoples,

– to have organised peace congresses, and

– to have contributed to the reduction of standing armies.

The last requirement can be clarified in …

From 1980-2008, EU GDP grew 2.7%, the US 3%, and China 9% . Since then, the EU has averaged 1.5%, the US 1.8% and China 7%. In other words, China’s economy has grown 300% faster than Western countries’ and, as they slip out of the top bracket of high income countries, China is entering it.

1990. China’s economy has come to a halt. The Economist

1996. China’s economy will face a hard landing. The Economist

1998. China’s economy’s dangerous period of sluggish growth. The Economist

1999. Likelihood of a hard landing for the …

[A version of this essay was presented to the 4th International Congress on Critical Interventions with Men Who Exercise Violence Against Women in Mexico City on December 6. 2025.]

From social media influencers to academic theorists, preachers and politicians, everyone weighs in on the question of what makes a good man, especially what young men need to do embrace their masculinity.

Here’s a simple, sensible answer: If you want to be a good man, do your best to be a good person.

If your goal is to model a “positive masculinity,” work to develop qualities that everyone—men and women—should …

As all cricket and football followers know, the British are bad losers.  They blame the other side or the umpire; they stampede inside the stadium, then they riot outside.

They believe their cleverness is in getting the media to portray their defeats on the battlefield as feats of heroism. That’s been the British story against Russia from the charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimean War in 1854 to the Novichok operation of 2018. The success of both these stories as wartime propaganda has depended …

President Donald Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 is Operation TIPS on steroids. After 9/11, President George W. Bush proposed a program recruiting ordinary workers — truck drivers, postal workers, utility workers, cable installers — to report “suspicious behavior” to authorities. Critics quickly warned that TIPS resembled a domestic informant network, a kind of “neighbors spying on neighbors” setup reminiscent of East Germany’s Stasi or Soviet-style surveillance.

Operation TIPS (Terrorism Information and Prevention System) was launched with great fanfare: In March 2002, former Johnny Carson …

The United Nations, in turning 80, has been berated, dismissed and libelled. In September, US President Donald Trump took a hearty swipe at the body’s alleged impotence. “What is the purpose of the United Nations?” he posed to gathered world leaders. All it seemed to do was “write a really strongly worded letter and then never follow that letter up. It’s empty words and empty words don’t solve war.” Never once did he consider that many of the wars he has allegedly ended have not so much reached their pacific terminus as having gone into simmering storage.

While harsh …

December 10th, International Human Rights Day, represents one year since the launch of the North-South Project for People(s)-Centered Human Rights. The North-South Project seeks to address the contradiction of the human rights idea being co-opted and instrumentalized as a weapon of white supremacist colonial domination and exploitation. The PCHR frame emerged to counter that. Rooted in the decolonization process, it gives the frame new content that emanates from the values, perspectives and needs of the peoples and nations of the global South that have been subjected to assaults on their humanity since Europeans spilled out of Europe into what …

Multipolarity — the idea that there are more than one decisive economic actors in the global economy — is an important fact. More than anything else, the rise of the People’s Republic of China demonstrates that fact. The size and rate of growth, along with the expansive Belt and Road Initiative, establishes that the PRC functions somewhat independently of the world’s most powerful player in the global market — the US. While the PRC spurns the language of rivalry, characterizing its desired relationship with the US as one of cooperation …

He craves it, and, to some extent, his desire was satisfied. President Donald Trump did get a peace prize. Not the peace prize picked out by self-important Norwegian non-entities, but the inaugural curiosity of FIFA, an organisation famed for opacity, corruption and graft. What the critics missed in all of this was its sheer appositeness.

In a two-hour ceremony held on December 5 at Washington’s Kennedy Center, which included the World Cup draw for participants at next year’s games, Trump was presented with a prize few FIFA officials seem to know existed. Last month, FIFA president Gianni Infantino announced the award, …

On December 8, 2025, the Copenhagen Security Summit convenes at Falkoner Centret in Frederiksberg. With 35 speakers and more than 1,200 participants, it is one of Denmark’s largest gatherings on geopolitics and security. Organised by Danish Industry (DI), Ernst and Young, Poul Schmith (The Chamber Attorney), Danske Bank, and Børsen, the summit features high‑profile figures such as Yulia Navalnaya, Mike Pompeo, and Lars Løkke Rasmussen.

The agenda moves through political framing, corporate responsibility, critical infrastructure resilience, and transatlantic dialogue. Its declared purpose is to explore “the role of business in …

On Thursday, the White House released the new National Security Strategy for the United States. Others may well give it a different read, but here is my quick take:

The document is ghoulish, abhorrent, repetitious, and sometimes incoherent, but I found its honesty refreshing. The mask is torn off sanctimonious bullshit, tall tales about spreading democracy and caring about human rights. The US is “not grounded in traditional political idealism,” but by “America First.” (P.8) A bit of the usual boilerplate is here, but for the most part, the ideological cover is gone.

Dan Caldwell, onetime advisor to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, …