Worthy and Unworthy: How the Media Reports on Friends and Foes Devan Hawkins
Surviving the Unipolar Era: North Korea's 35 Year Standoff with the United States A.B. Abrams
Palestine Hijacked: How Zionism Forged an Apartheid State from River to Sea Thomas Suárez
Dear Miss Perkins: A Story of Frances Perkinss Efforts to Aid Refugees from Nazi Germany Rebecca Brenner Graham
Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine Scott Horton
Nuclear War: A Scenario Annie Jacobsen
iMind: Artificial and Real Intelligence Mohamed I. Elmasry
Visualizing Palestine: A Chronicle of Colonialism and the Struggle for Liberation Visualizing Palestine
Work of Human Hands: Volume 2 of An Intelligent Family Santang Wei
The Magickal Enchantment of Materialism: Why Marxists Need Neopaganism Paperback Bruce Lerro
Beyond the Law
President Trump’s declaration of war as a justification for using wartime powers to sidestep constitutional protections is indeed a war, but it is a war waged by the president against dissent, against due process, and against the very foundations of our constitutional republic.
This is what it means to weaponize the government.
When the government turns its power against its own people—through surveillance, retaliation, censorship, and intimidation—it ceases to serve the public and instead becomes a weapon of oppression.
According to the Political Dictionary:
This is Trump’s genocide. Trump is just as culpable for what happens in Gaza as Netanyahu. Just as guilty as Biden was during the last administration.
Trump signed off on the reignition of the Gaza holocaust. He spent weeks sabotaging the ceasefire and then gave the thumbs up to the resumption of the genocide. He did this while bombing Yemen and threatening war with Iran for Israel.
I don’t know why …
View Epstein files here (redacted on steroids!)
It always planned to reboot the genocide
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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!
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 …
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, …
[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 …
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 …
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 …
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% …
Managua, Nicaragua — If you asked 100 people in the U.S. or the U.K. to name the country leading gender equity in the Americas, it’s unlikely anyone would correctly answer Nicaragua. This lack of awareness reflects the success of a decades-long imperialist campaign to discredit and undermine Nicaragua’s remarkable achievements since the 1979 revolution.
The U.S has continuously attempted to destroy the Sandinista revolution, from the contra wars, through active support for the 16 years of neo-liberal government, to the 2018 attempted coup, and the current punitive economic sanctions.
In March 2025, during International Women’s Day, a delegation of solidarity …
Accomplished fingers begin to play./Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes,/Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.
– W. B. Yeats, Lapus Lazuli
The old man in the Irish cap sat on a chair on the sidewalk outside his house across from ours. I would usually see him on my way home from school. He would raise his shillelagh to greet me and sometimes played a tune on the penny whistle he kept on his lap. Often he was puffing on a pipe which I could smell even as I kept to my side of the street because he frightened me a bit, …
They say only bad news from Balochistan makes the headlines–Pakistan’s largest and most impoverished province marred in a decades long insurgency. The local newspapers are flooded with the news of people being killed in bomb blasts, target killings and the loss of lives in incidents of terrorism. However, amid this backdrop of turmoil, a problem that is just as terrible is subtly developing: climate change. Its perennial consequences are changing the lives of women and children, particularly in the remote and underprivileged parts of Balochistan.
Noora Ali, 14, was oblivious to the …
The Script of Anxiety
With the Ukraine War and the retreat of the United States from what has routinely been called Europe’s security architecture, states are galloping to whatever point of presumed sanctuary is on offer. The general presumption is that the galloping is done in the same step and rhythm. But Europe, for all the heavy layers of union driven diplomacy, retains its salty differences.
Poland is particularly striking in this regard, having always positioned itself as a defender against the continent’s enemies, perceived or otherwise. This messianic …
But no longer do
The key decision was when Barack Obama finally decided in December 2012 to arm al-Qaeda in Syria so as to bring down Syria’s Government. That culminated a U.S. policy since 1949, which was aimed against Russia and against Palestinians.
It is an established fact that U.S. President Obama, Hillary Clinton, Chuck Hagel, and the rest of Obama’s Administration, were seeking to replace the non-sectarian Assad Government in Syria, by a government that would please the fundamentalist-Sunni, or “Salafist,” Saud family, who own Saudi Arabia. Throughout the U.S.-and-allied media, …
May 18, 2015: Remains of an Eastern Orthodox church after shelling by the Ukrainian Army near Donetsk International Airport. Eastern Ukraine. (Mstyslav Chernov. CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
Special to Consortium News and published there on February 25, 2025
The way to prevent the Ukraine war from being understood is to suppress its history.
A cartoon version has the conflict beginning on Feb. 24, 2022 when Vladimir Putin woke up that morning and decided to invade Ukraine.
There was no other cause, according to this version, other than …
In the film Scrooge, based on Charles Dicken’s classic novel A Christmas Carol, we see Ebenezer Scrooge being paid a visit at his office on Christmas Eve. The men visiting him are looking for donations to help the poor and destitute:
“At this festive season of the year, Mr. Scrooge,” said the [one of the gentlemen], taking up a pen, “it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the Poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common …
What does it indicate when people swallow assertions without demanding evidence?
The time has come for arguably the sporting world’s most famous mafia organisation to select its new chief. The various turf-conscious representatives of the International Olympic Committee will be busy with the task of finding a replacement for Thomas Bach when ballots are cast at Costa Navarino, Greece on March 20.
Seven candidates have made the list. They show little risk of cleaning the body’s spotty image. Juan Antonio Samaranch Jr.’s candidacy is a lovely reminder of his father, who was himself made IOC president in 1980. That Samaranch was not shy about his fascist sympathies, defending, not infrequently, the …
From Flatland to Spaceland Part II
Author Bruce Lerro, Co-Founder and Co-Organizer for Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism
Summary of Part I
In Part I of this article I contrasted sixteen ways in which communist macro-psychology differs from liberal micro-psychology as it is practiced in the United States. I described communist psychology in action in the field of eating habits and the impact of advertising on the public’s emotional life. I discussed the reasons why my readers might have a difficult time appreciating what communist psychology has to offer and I used the science fiction book Flatland …
And are humans railing against anything new?
This year’s annual UN climate conference COP30 with 50,000 expected attendees held in Belém, Brazil is one-upping the past two COPs (UN Conference of the Parties) that were held by, and dictated by, Middle Eastern fossil fuel countries, eye-openers that many eco-minded people, still to this day, cannot stomach. Now, Brazil is set to upstage the oil sheiks by bulldozing tens of thousands of acres of “protected rainforest” to build a 4-lane highway to “help reduce traffic” during the two-week conference. This is not made-up. It is true.
The new highway smack-dab down the middle of thick rainforest is known as …
The Peace In Ukraine Coalition is cautiously optimistic about emerging possibilities for ending the war in Ukraine. It is a good thing that the U.S. and Russia are talking. An end to the hostility between the two nuclear superpowers would bring a sigh of relief to people all over the world.
We do not know if the Trump administration, Russia and Ukraine will be able to achieve a lasting peace in Ukraine. We encourage diplomacy, however, rather than fear it. We want the killing to stop as soon as possible. For three years we have been calling for a ceasefire, negotiations and …
We live in dangerous times, and politicians are happy to be cheerleaders of that supposed fact. They do not care to reassure; they merely care to strike fear into hearts and feed the sort of pernicious despondency that encourages conflict. Hope is not a political currency worth trading. These days, fear is the bankable asset, easily cashed at a moment’s notice.
The March 6 meeting of the Special European Council was a chance for 27 leaders of the European Union to make that point. …
The New York Times yesterday (11 March 2025) headlined: “Trump Intensifies Statehood Threats in Attack on Canada.” What particularly stood out was the sub headline: “The U.S. president on Tuesday reiterated his claims on Canada’s territory as he increased tariffs, threatening to bring the country’s economy to its knees.”
How are Canadians supposed to feel about being threatened? How are Canadians to feel about the indignity of being brought economically to their knees? It calls to mind the invocation of Mexican revolutionary Emilio Zapatista who stated: “It is better to …
