In Islam, one whole month of Ramzan is devoted to fasting. The Islamic calendar is lunar, thus shorter than the solar year by 10 to 11 days; thus Ramadan comes in every season.
If you believe Donald Trump might invade, you should be calling for Canada to withdraw from NATO. The alliance won’t defend Canada, has enabled US interference, and gobbles up resources.
During a recent meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, US President Donald Trump questioned the border and Canadian sovereignty. He said, “if you look at a map, they drew an artificial line right through it, between Canada and the U.S. … somebody did it a long time ago, many many decades ago, and (it) makes no sense.” Trump also repeatedly said …
As Democrats decry the Trump Administration’s national security lapse, the United States is engaged in an actual killing campaign
by Kathy Kelly / March 31st, 2025
Members of the Fifteenth Street Meeting of Friends and the New York Catholic Worker gather for a weekly vigil against the bombing of Yemen in New York City on February 3, 2024
Since March 15, the United States has launched strikes on more than forty locations across Yemen in an ongoing attack against members of the Houthi movement, which has carried …
The convulsions wracking the American body politic inescapably impact the nation’s foreign relations. For the United States today is in a condition that defies all conventional categories. Its leader(s) are abnormal, its government is abnormal, its conduct is abnormal – and, perhaps, its society itself is abnormal. Donald Trump is a malignant narcissist compounded by extreme megalomania; Elon Musk, his Co-President, is also a megalomanic neo-Fascist with Nazi affinities – a Hitler salute is a Hitler salute is a Hitler salute.1Last week, Musk’s daughter affirmed in a public statement that her father indeed was making the Nazi salute. Just a few …
Imagine if Russia or China had suggested a deal with this content and these intentions, depriving Ukraine of its sovereignty
by Jan Oberg / March 29th, 2025
This is posted on Sebastian Sas’ important YouTube Channel with no less than 120,000 subscribers. His succinct analysis is based on an article published by the NED, EU and NATO-supported Ukraine-based newspaper, European Pravda.
I hope you are half as shocked as Sas — and I — are. Because, remember that this war, this destruction of Ukraine has been caused by the Russia-NATO conflict — that is, by the Obama administration’s regime change in Kiev in 2014, the US-led NATO’s expansion and the US/Western pumping of arms into Ukraine.
Now, Ukraine is destined to be paying for generations …
Will History Repeat Itself with the April 5 Protests?
by Roger D. Harris / March 29th, 2025
“The economy is great! You can go home to watch TV now. The 1%,” Oakland Occupy satire, November 2, 2011.
Like the proverbial spark that ignited a prairie fire, the Occupy movement that began on September 17, 2011, in New York City went viral. Rallying around the slogan, “We are the 99%,” the movement initially mobilized large numbers of what might be called the newly dispossessed. They were looking for remedies to a neoliberal order which was not working for them.
Elements of this same constituency of the dispossessed today are in the …
As a result of three years of the war, Ukraine faced a massive demographic crisis. According to various estimates, mass migration, a high rate of premature mortality and a sharp decline in birth rates have led to a huge population decline from 41 to 30 million people. Over 2024 the number of the Ukrainians, who died, exceeded the amount of those, who were born, threefold. Experts from the Institute for Demography and Life Quality Problems of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, has …
Comparing any political system to Hitler’s Nazi regime is a tricky business and often overstated. One shouldn’t diminish the horrors of the Holocaust or overstate current political conditions. Nevertheless, the lessons gleaned from the Nazi’s Gleichschaltung project are worthy of consideration.
Gleichschaltung is the German word for bringing society into line with a specific political agenda. In the two-+ months since taking the White House, Donald Trump and his wingman Elon Musk’s moves are eerily reminiscent of Hitler’s …
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is waging a war on many fronts. He has ended the tense ceasefire with Hamas in Gaza in spectacularly bloody fashion and resumed bombing of Hezbollah positions in southern Lebanon. Missiles fired at Israel from the Houthi rebels in Yemen also risk seeing a further widening of hostilities.
Domestically, he has been conducting a bruising, even thuggish campaign against Israeli institutions and their representatives, an effort that is impossible to divorce from his ongoing trial for corruption. He has, for instance, busied himself with removing the …
Frans Verbeeck – The Mocking of Human Follies (detail)
Super storms of wind, rain, and fire rage across the planet.
For eons, before us, wind scattered seeds and the world was fructified. Rain the great thirst of life and cleansed, warmed and illuminated.
Yet now the elements admonish us for humankind’s planet-poisoning folly. Men, shallow ones, claim, industry created civilization; the poetic voice of nature is now poised to …
The Utility of 'Terrorism' versus 'Warfare', from Ground Zero to Gaza
by Seth Meldon / March 28th, 2025
No person can calculate the greatness of the evil to transform the citizens of a peaceful, industrious republic into a band of furious soldiers; and yet the unhappy policy of nations is to cultivate a martial spirit that they may appear grand, powerful, and terrific, when in fact they are kindling flames that will eventually burn them up root and branch.
— David Low Dodge, American activist and theologian, War Inconsistent with the Religion of Jesus Christ (1815)
The term “terrorism” has long assumed a role in political discourse just as useful for its slippery definition as it is for its geopolitical utility. …
There are many contrasts between the 35th president, John F. Kennedy, and the 45th and 47th president, Donald J. Trump. One extreme example is regarding U.S. policy toward Israel.
JFK and Israel/Palestine
Unknown to many people today, JFK supported Palestinian rights and sought a sustainable peace in the region.
In 1960, when JFK was campaigning to be president, he spoke at the convention of the Zionists of America. In his speech, Kennedy was complimentary about Israel but frankly said, “I cannot believe that Israel has any real desire to remain indefinitely a garrison state surrounded by fear and hate.” That warning, issued …
Trump Administration allies, along with their bipartisan co-conspirators in Congress, are actively undermining and rendering useless the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. This week alone, they have repeatedly defamed our women’s peace organization, claiming we are funded by or take orders from foreign governments or groups like Hamas. The false accusations, given under oath, that claim CODEPINK and other organizations are funded by a foreign government are laying the groundwork for shutting down civil society organizations – and not just ours. CODEPINK is in Congress every single day, calling for peace, elevating the popular demands of the American people, …
To this day, she’s remembered as one of the first anti-colonial revolutionaries in Africa. After you’ve read this story of Kimpa Vita, you’ll never forget her name, her commitment to her people, and her uncompromising valor.
Kimpa Vita was just a teenager when she began to challenge the powers that ruled her world.
Born in 1684 in the Kingdom of Kongo, Kimpa Vita grew up in the growing shadow of colonial devastation. Once a mighty African kingdom, the Kongo her people once knew had been torn apart by European encroachment and the …
I want to recommend three new books about abolishing police and prisons. And I want to recommend multi-issue abolitionism beyond those two institutions.
What else would I abolish? Well, a list might start with war, fossil fuels, militaries, prisons, nuclear energy, police, nuclear weaponry, campaign bribery, health insurance companies, the death penalty, the livestock industry, Wall Street, borders, poverty, the NSA, the CIA, the United States Senate, Fox News, MSNBC, the Star Spangled Banner, the cyber truck. I could go on. Lists will vary around the world.
By abolitionism I mean, primarily, persuading masses of people of the superiority of a new …
Preserve this video of street-boy demeanor Trump Regime arrogance. It can be interpreted as an indeed creative declaration of war on Denmark/Greenland.
Vice-president JD Vance’s 59 seconds speech about the “fun” in Greenland that he wants to join in marks the beginning of an occupation of Greenland by that US, which Denmark’s governments since 1948 have blindly …
The Left and Right take the same reality-based view of the world but respond to it in different moral terms. Liberals, on the other hand, live in an alternate universe – of pure make-believe.
Sometimes it helps to pare things back to their essentials, especially when complexity is being exploited not to illuminate but to confuse. So here is my short, complete idiot’s guide to world affairs:
There are two reality-based understandings of what we call “world affairs”, or sometimes “foreign news”.
No trials. No hearings. No rights. Just indefinite detention and secret deportations.
This is the fate that awaits every one of us, not just immigrants (legal or otherwise), if the government’s war on the Constitution remains unchecked.
More than two decades after the U.S. government in its post-9/11 frenzy transported individuals, some of whom had not been charged let alone convicted of a crime, to CIA black sites (secret detention centers located outside the U.S. authorized to torture detainees) as a means of sidestepping legal …
We live in a 24/7 media society of the spectacle where brainwashing is cunning and relentless, and the consuming public is consumed with thoughts and perceptions filtered through electronic media according to the needs and lies of corporate state power.
This propaganda comes in two forms: covert and overt. The latter, and most effective form, comes with a large dose of truth offered rapid-fire by celebrated, authoritative voices via prominent media. The truth is sprinkled with subtle messages that render it sterile. This has long been the case, but it is even more so in the age of images on …
For the next few weeks, the buzzword in US debates on the liberal/left about economics and ecology will be “abundance” after the release of the book with that title by Ezra Klein (New York Times) and Derek Thompson (The Atlantic magazine).
The book poses politically relevant questions: Have policies favored by Democrats and others on the political left impeded innovation with unnecessary red tape for building projects? Can regulatory reform and revitalized public investment bring technological progress that can solve problems in housing, infrastructure, energy, and agriculture? The book says yes to both.
Those debates have short-term political implications but are largely irrelevant …
Adolescence (2025) is a new British crime drama series written by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham, and directed by Philip Barantini.
It is a murder story centred on a 13-year-old schoolboy Jamie Miller who is arrested and accused of knifing to death a female classmate the previous night. Jamie protests his innocence to his dad, Eddie Miller, a man who is shocked and bewildered by the sudden events he is swept up in.
Jamie is initially held for questioning at the police station but is then sent to a Secure Training Centre while …
Yesterday, in the US Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on global threats with the five heads of intelligence agencies of the US government, Senator Tom Cotton, accused on national TV a group I have worked with for over 20 years, CODEPINK: Women for Peace, of being funded by the Communist Party of China.
During the hearing CODEPINK activist Tighe Barry stood up following the presentation of the Director of National Security Tulsi Gabbard’s lengthy statement about global threats to US national security and yelled ‘Stop Funding Israel,’ since neither Intelligence Committee Chair Tom Cotton and Vice Chair Mark …
Bad ideas do not necessarily die; they retire to museums of failure and folly, awaiting to be revived by the next proponent who should know better. The Iron Dome shield vision of US President Donald Trump, intended to intercept and destroy incoming missiles and other malicious aerial objects, seems much like a previous dotty one advanced by President Ronald Reagan, known rather blandly as the Strategic Defense Initiative.
In its current iteration, it is inspired by the Israeli “Iron Dome” multilayered defensive shield, a matter that raised an immediate problem, given the trademark ownership of the name by the Israeli firm …
Who will save the Palestinians from genocide? Nobody.
Who will save Americans from moral, political, economic, and social decay? Nobody.
Uncontrolled criminals prance around Gaza and West Bank neighborhoods, shooting whom they want, destroying what they don’t want, stealing whatever pleases them. The locals can’t interfere and the authorities have been told to protect the criminals from harm. Alarmed citizens in foreign neighborhoods organize to halt the criminality and are accused of illegal activity against the criminals, who are portrayed as victims. The appointed U.S. representative to the United Nations, previously a New York congressional representative, designates students who fought courageously to …
US Elites want South Korea to be a “dictatorship for democracy”
Morse Tan, a high ranking former US State Dept. official, recently let the cat out of the bag on the US ruling elite position on South Korea’s Martial Law. He declared that “Yoon declared Martial Law to preserve South Korea’s Democracy.” Having previously labeled South Korea a model democracy, this is a No-Scotsman-move taken to absurdity.
Now, Tan is not a current US government official, buthe is an indicator of what the US national security state is thinking, in particular, what its neocon wing is thinking. Tan also …
