Latest articles
by CGTN / March 30th, 2024
In 2023, China achieved a strong 5.2 percent GDP growth rate, leading major global economies and driving worldwide economic growth, despite facing a complex and severe economic landscape. Yet, what challenges lie ahead for China’s enduring economic growth? In the special edition of The Hub, Wang Guan talks to Jeffrey Sachs, professor and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University. “The U.S. is trying to put sticks to the spokes,” he said, adding that the main headwinds China is facing are U.S.-imposed problems, including high tariffs and technology bans. He also highlighted China’s leadership in technology and …
Palestinian numbers do not count
by Dan Lieberman / March 30th, 2024
According to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), a war by Israelis against the Palestinian population for more than 75 years has become a global war against the Jews.
“The Global War on the Jews, Anti-Semitism surges, even in the West, which shows why Israel exists,“ by The Editorial Board WSJ, Oct. 30, 2023.
The disturbing fact of the past month is that Jews are under attack not only in Israel and not only by Hamas. The weeks since the barbaric Oct. 7 Hamas invasion of Israel have witnessed physical assaults on Jews the world over, including in the U.S. and Europe. This …
by Iftekhar Sayeed / March 30th, 2024
The physical organisation of the Bengalee is feeble even to effeminacy. He lives in a constant vapour bath. His pursuits are sedentary, his limbs delicate, his movements languid. During many ages he has been trampled upon by men of bolder and more hardy breeds. Courage, independence, veracity, are qualities to which his constitution and his situation are equally unfavourable. His mind bears a singular analogy to his body. It is weak even to helplessness for purposes of manly resistance…
— Macaulay (1841)
Chhayanaut, the premier cultural institution of the country, employs what one scholar of fascism, Roger Griffin, has termed palingenesis, …
by Greg Godels / March 30th, 2024
Inflation is a scourge on those cursed with living under the capitalist order. It especially punishes those least able to weather the pain of constantly falling behind rising prices and expanding debt.
Inflation harms nearly all working people whose income growth trails the rise in prices, including those with union contracts that bridge periods of rapid price increases.
Small businesses suffer because of their inability to match supplier increases with price hikes of their own. Also, they are more likely to be locked into a cycle of incurring greater and greater …
by Allen Forrest / March 30th, 2024
How questions of science are not settled.
by Binoy Kampmark / March 29th, 2024
Rarely has the International Court of Justice been so constantly exercised by one topic during a short span of time. On January 26, the World Court, considering a filing made the previous December by South Africa, accepted Pretoria’s argument that the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was applicable to the conflict in so far as Israel was bound to observe it in its military operations against Hamas in Gaza. (The judges will determine, in due course, whether Israel’s actions in Gaza meet the genocidal threshold.) By 15-2, the judges noted that “the catastrophic …
by Graham Peebles / March 29th, 2024
The Ethiopia of Abiy Ahmed and his Prosperity Party, is a dark and frightening place, where anyone challenging the government are at risk of violence and arrest.
People from the Amhara ethnic group are particularly targeted; killing of Amhara men, women and children is a daily occurrence in what constitutes a genocidal campaign of hate
Uniformed thugs, federal and regional, as well as Oromo militia (Oromo Liberation Army or Shene), carry out the killings. Drones hover in the skies; faceless messengers of death used to slaughter Amhara civilians in the streets as they …
Memoir of a Toronto icon
by Eric Walberg / March 29th, 2024
Haroon Siddiqui’s 2023 memoir, My Name is Not Harry, is a dazzling journey through Indian Sufism, pre-partition Muslim-Hindu harmony, the horrors of partition, a leap across the ocean to the middle of nowhere (sorry, Brandon Manitoba), finally finding his home at the Toronto Star, from whence, back to central Asia (Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India during the tumultuous 1979+), hobnobbing with media and political stars, stopping for heart surgery, all the time building and defending his new multicultural faith, adding his own distinct, Muslim flavour to what it …
Motion by two Cambridge churchmen to Ely Synod requiring Bishops to issue a more robust condemnation of Israel's violations of international humanitarian law was passed 23 for, 15 against.
by Stuart Littlewood / March 29th, 2024
Are we seeing, at last, the beginnings of a revolution in the Anglican Church against its leaders’ cowardice over Israel’s genocide of Muslims and Christians in the Holy Land?
On 31 October the Church of England House of Bishops issued a statement on Israel’s genocide against Palestinians which two clergymen in Cambridge found”profoundly inadequate as a response to the indiscriminate devastation already being inflicted upon the defenceless civilian population of Gaza”.
On 13 December and again on 13 February the bishops had delivered stronger statements, but “these still fall far short of what is needed. Four months on from their first intervention, …
No antifascist savior of democracy!
by Charles Pierce / March 29th, 2024
Joe Biden and other Democrat politicians portray the upcoming Presidential election as a choice between fascism and democracy. But Genocide Joe and most Congressional Democrats, like most Congressional Republicans, operate with an unadmitted mindset: that democratic rights are only for some people, and that oppressive fascistic rule is appropriate for certain others.
Biden et al evade the facts of Israeli persecution of Palestinians. For them: Israeli lives (seen as white) matter, Palestinian lives (seen as other) don’t. In fact, the Zionist state entitles Jewish Israelis to liberal civil rights such that they generally cannot be jailed without a fair hearing in …
by Allen Forrest / March 29th, 2024
by Robert Hunziker / March 29th, 2024
Will carbon capture technology bail society out of the latest version of greenhouse gas emissions, CO2 suddenly doubling its rate of increase when compared to the past decade, in breathtaking fashion, thus overheating the ocean and the Arctic and Antarctica and hammering Greenland?
The relationship between greenhouse gas emissions and carbon capture technology is best seen as a metaphor of athletes in the Olympic games: Team Emissions is setting world records in the 100-meter dash; Team Carbon Capture is still training for the 10,000-meter marathon.
Direct Air Capture (DAC) and Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) fall far short of meeting timelines as …
by Binoy Kampmark / March 28th, 2024
The curved course of the ubiquitous banana has often been the peel of empire, its sweetness masking a sharp, bitter legacy. Arab conquerors introduced it to the African continent as they cultivated a slave market. European imperialism did the same to the Americas via the Canary Islands, insinuating the luscious fruit into markets of solid exploitation and guaranteed returns. In time, demand for bananas grew. Cheap capital cushioned it.
Corporation power and secondary colonisation, exercised through such ruthless entities as the United Fruit Company (now the jauntily labelled Chiquita), continued the legacy, collaborating with corrupt elites while exerting control over large …
by Vijay Prashad / March 28th, 2024
Nabil Anani (Palestine), In Pursuit of Utopia #1, 2020.
On 15 February 2024, Jared Kushner (Donald Trump’s son-in-law and former senior advisor during his presidency) sat down for a long conversation with Professor Tarek Masoud at Harvard University. During this discussion, Kushner talked about ‘Gaza’s waterfront property’, which, he said, could be ‘very valuable’. ‘If I was Israel’, he continued, ‘I would just bulldoze something in the Negev [desert], I would try to move people [from Gaza] in there… [G]oing in and finishing the job would be …
by Allen Forrest / March 28th, 2024
by Sean Reynolds / March 28th, 2024
Photo credit: Behind Enemy Lines
Photo caption: U.S. Marine and Afghan War veteran Zachary Kern burns his medals and a paper flag at anti-genocide “Cancel the DNC” rally 3/22/24 in Chicago.
In his March 24th opinion piece for the Times, David Brooks agrees with a “broad consensus atop the Democratic Party” (is there room for such breadth on the peak of that lofty mountain?) saying that Israel has the right to defend its apartheid regime by killing, banishing or imprisoning not only Gaza’s entire military but its entire …
Myth-busting documentary finally breaks the stranglehold of Israel and its western media acolytes over the story of what happened on 7 October
by Jonathan Cook / March 28th, 2024
For weeks, as Gaza was battered with bombs and the body count in the tiny enclave rose inexorably, western publics had little choice but to rely on Israel’s word for what happened on 7 October. Some 1,150 Israelis were killed during an unprecedented attack on Israeli communities and military posts next to Gaza.
Beheaded babies, a pregnant woman with her womb cut open and the foetus stabbed, children put in ovens, hundreds of people burned alive, mutilation of corpses, a systematic campaign of indescribably savage rapes and acts of necrophilia.
Western …
by B.J. Sabri / March 27th, 2024
Previously, Part 6, I stated that weakening, cancelling Russia’s presence in the world, planning to partition it, or even destroying it has been a fixed U.S. objective. I also stated that U.S. anti-Russian hostility predates the events in Ukraine by decades. For that purpose, I gave two examples out of four. The following are the other two.
Example 3: Under the headline: Revelations from the Russian Archives, The Library of Congress outlines U.S. stance toward Russia in clear terms. I’m citing here two consecutive paragraphs.
Paragraph A: “The United States government was initially hostile to the Soviet …
by Allen Forrest / March 27th, 2024
Inseparable on mass media
by Paul Larudee / March 27th, 2024
The future always surprises us to some degree. But we make plans, anyway, based on our projections, and we adjust them when our predictions are at least partially wrong, which they always are, because they make assumptions based upon things that we take for granted, such as our health and that meteors and tsunamis will not disrupt those plans. Bearing that in mind, I will make some predictions for the immediate future of Gaza and Israel, and their relationships with the rest of the world. I’m sorry if it is not a happy picture.
First, I predict with sadness and disgust that …
by Binoy Kampmark / March 27th, 2024
The UN Security Council presents one of the great contradictions of power in the international system. On the one hand vested with enormous latitude in order to preserve international peace and security, it remains checked, limited and, it can be argued, crippled by an all too regular use of the veto by members of the permanent five powers (US, Russia, China, the United Kingdom and France).
When it comes to the bleeding and crushing of human life in Gaza by the Israeli Defence Forces (32,300 dead Palestinians and rising), resolutions demanding a cease fire of a conflict that began with …
by Binoy Kampmark / March 26th, 2024
What is it about British justice that has a certain rankness to it, notably when it comes to dealing with political charges? The record is not good, and the ongoing sadistic carnival that is the prosecution (and persecution) of Julian Assange continues to provide meat for the table.
Those supporting the WikiLeaks publisher, who faces extradition to the United States even as he remains scandalously confined and refused bail in Belmarsh Prison, had hoped for a clear decision from the UK High Court on March 26. Either they would reject leave to appeal the totality of his case, thereby setting the …
by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / March 26th, 2024
When exposing a crime is treated as committing a crime, you are being ruled by criminals.
In the current governmental climate, obeying one’s conscience and speaking truth to the power of the police state can easily render you an “enemy of the state.”
The government’s list of so-called “enemies of the state” is growing by the day.
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is merely one of the most visible victims of the police state’s war on dissidents and whistleblowers.
Five years ago, on April 11, 2019, police arrested Assange for daring to access and disclose military documents that portray the U.S. government and …
In the next few days, after this story gets published, I will either save a pregnant woman and her child’s life or I will fail.
by Eros Salvatore / March 26th, 2024
May’s family
Latifa Najjar superimposes hearts over the faces of her children’s online photographs in the classic mother’s move to protect them. But, unfortunately, her children are in a Rafah refugee camp, and it’s the middle of the Israeli-Gaza war. So she’s unknowingly saving me from missing their beautiful faces, if I learn one day they’ve been murdered by bombs or famine. Exterminated by the bad luck of being born in Gaza, a country stripped not only of its housing and masjids (mosques), but food, water, and medical care. A …
The US has had years to clarify its intention to give Assange a fair trial but refuses to do so. The UK court’s latest ruling is yet more collusion in his show trial
by Jonathan Cook / March 26th, 2024
The interminable and abhorrent saga of Julian Assange’s incarceration for the crime of journalism continues. And once again, the headline news is a lie, one designed both to buy our passivity and to buy more time for the British and US establishments to keep the Wikileaks founder permanently disappeared from view.
The Guardian – which has a mammoth, undeclared conflict of interest in its coverage of the extradition proceedings against Assange (you can read about that here and here) – headlined the ruling by the UK High Court today as a “temporary reprieve” for Assange. …
Permanent government vs. the People
by T.P. Wilkinson / March 26th, 2024
President Kennedy was furious at the CIA for having misled him. Waiting several months before he compelled CIA Director Allen Dulles to resign, Kennedy told him, “Under a parliamentary system of government it is I who would be leaving. But under our system it is you who must go.”
Thus John F. Kennedy defended the illusion that the Anglophile dominated US government had transcended its British aristocratic-monarchical roots. Allen Dulles resigned from his office as Director of Central Intelligence to preside over the committee that would disprove Kennedy‘s naive belief in an …
by Myles Hoenig / March 26th, 2024
What more can one say about the genocide in Gaza that hasn’t already been said? Special thanks to Ali Abunimah, Max Blumenthal, even Pierce Morgan, and others who break through the legacy media bubble and report what’s happening on the ground and the real history, not a sanitized, Hollywood version of it, like the movie Exodus.
Disclosure: I grew up in the late 50s, early 60s with Zionism as much a part of my childhood as going to shul and being Bar Mitzvah’d. As a teenager I joined a social-political group called …
by Yves Engler / March 26th, 2024
Once again, the accusation of antisemitism was weaponized to trump both common sense and support for the victims of Israel’s murderous rampage.
Last week prominent Quebec cartoonist Serge Chapleau caricatured Benjamin Netanyahu as a vampire. The cartoon published in La Presse reads “Nosfenyahou, en route to Rafah.”
The pro-Israel and genocide lobby immediately condemned the caricature of Israel’s prime minister. So did NDP MP Alexandre Boulerice and others.
In my opinion there’s nothing antisemitic about the cartoon and Chapleau should be celebrated for using his mainstream platform to challenge Israel’s holocaust in Gaza. Even more, his refusal to apologize for a cartoon that was …
by Binoy Kampmark / March 25th, 2024
Two British ministers, the UK Foreign Secretary David Cameron and Defence Secretary Grant Shapps, paid a visit to Australia recently as part of the AUKMIN (Australia-United Kingdom Ministerial Consultations) talks. It showed, yet again, that Australia’s government loves being mugged. Stomped on. Mowed over. Beaten.
It was mugged, from the outset, in its unconditional surrender to the US military industrial complex with the AUKUS security agreement. It was mugged in throwing money (that of the Australian taxpayer) at the US submarine industry, which is lagging in its production schedule for both the Virginia-class boats and new designs such as the Columbia …
by Edward Curtin / March 25th, 2024
Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a spate of books and articles extolling the word “soul” became the rage in the United States. Soul became the chic word. It popped up everywhere. Everything seemed to acquire soul – cars, toasters, underwear, cats’ pajamas, assorted crap, kitsch, etc. Soul sold styles from boots to bras to bibelots from The New York Times to O Magazine.
The vogue in soul talk spread to every domain as everyone was commodified and capital was financialized. While political, economic, and ecological reality spun out of regular people’s control and they felt unable to …