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The prison rape scandal in Israel; is there a defect, an effect of this on domestic policy that Netanyahu’s administration refuses to condemn what every other government in the world condemns, the forcible race rape of a helpless victim? This is a this is a major domestic issue in Israel, a major domestic story.

The US, under Trump, is unapologetically an empire operating without pretense. International law is for losers. A newly minted War Department, deploying the most lethal killing machine in world history, need not hide behind the sham of promoting democracy.

Recall that in 2023, Trump boasted: “When I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse. We would have taken it over; we would have gotten all that oil.” As CEO of the capitalist bloc, Trump’s mission is not about to be restrained by respect for sovereignty. There is only one inviolate global sovereign; all others are subalterns.

Venezuela – with our oil under …

My friends claim that I am irreverent to the Olympian gods. My interests I am told are unduly focused on ghosts, bogies and pillar cults. I prefer savage disorders, Dionysian origins, the tearing of wild bulls to the ordered and stately ceremonial of Panathenaic processions….The gods who once mirrored human unity with nature came to mirror human individuality. The Olympians, in their triumph of humanity kicked down the ladder from earth to heaven by which they arose….The Olympias seemed like a bouquet of cut flowers whose bloom is brief because they …

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Trump’s gunboat diplomacy in the Caribbean grabs the headlines, while quieter moves to destabilize other progressive Latin American governments go unnoticed by corporate media. A key case is a plot that would create chaos enabling a neoliberal candidate to be declared victor, with Washington’s connivance, in Honduras’s elections on November 30.

At stake is four more years of progressive government or – otherwise – returning to the neoliberalism that prevailed after the US-backed military coup in 2009. The electoral defeat of progressive parties in Ecuador and Bolivia earlier this year, and the uncertain chances of progressive candidate Jeannette Jara …

Scientists have come to call the first 6-8 months of the COVID pandemic “The Anthropause.” During this time, industrial fossil fuel pollution plummeted and for the very first time in history, world-wide emissions were reduced enough to halt climate change. In The Edge of Nature, Oscar-nominated, Emmy-winning director Josh Fox (Gasland, Awake, A Dream from Standing Rock, and How to Let Go of the World and Love All the Things Climate Can’t Change) isolates himself in a one-room cabin in the woods as he struggles with the physical and neurological effects of Long COVID and ruminates on man’s relationship with …

George Orwell at the BBC

The resignations of Tim Davie, BBC director general, and Deborah Turness, BBC head of news, after an intense, right-wing campaign led by the Daily Telegraph reveals much about the state of British ‘mainstream’ media.

Before we discuss the latest scandal, consider first some relevant facts about BBC coverage of the Middle East. In June 2025, a devastating indictment of BBC ‘impartiality’ was published by the Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM) in the form of a detailed report into the BBC’s coverage of Israel and Gaza. The …

Every year, around 8 million tons of plastic waste finds its way into the world’s oceans. Some of this plastic takes centuries to break down. For the plastic that drifts to the coast of Zhejiang, China, a new opportunity presents itself. Here it is collected, brought ashore and given a second life thanks to the “Blue Circle”. With nature’s generosity in mind, a growing number of people is choosing to stand with the ocean.

The morning carried a different scent…
One that I had been waiting two years to smell.
The weapons of war had finally fallen silent,
as a ceasefire draped the land.
— from The Scent of Life by Maryam Hasanat, Gaza author and refugee
On October 8th, 2025 the Occupation and the Occupied agreed to a permanent ceasefire. It’s the first step in a peace process that has been going on for generations.

There is a military axiom that if your positions are encircled by far superior forces, you will inevitably be annihilated,  unless you break out. I have been a member of our labor movement and left wing since I got out of high school in 1979. For every one of those 46 years our labor movement has been under heavy attack, and at the end of every year we were smaller and more exhausted than when it began. This year will be …

For decades, Washington has sold the world a deadly lie: that “regime change” brings freedom, that U.S. bombs and blockades can somehow deliver democracy. But every country that has lived through this euphemism knows the truth—it instead brings death, dismemberment, and despair. Now that the same playbook is being dusted off for Venezuela, the parallels with Iraq and other U.S. interventions are an ominous warning of what could follow.
As a U.S. armada gathers off Venezuela, a U.S. special operations aviation unit aboard one of the warships has been …

There is a peculiar, and telling, absurdity to the coverage of the Trump Administration’s agreement between Israel and Hamas. After entering office, this administration faithfully continued the efforts of its predecessor by providing the means Israel requires to conduct its genocidal campaign in Gaza. One could therefore be forgiven for thinking that leveraging this support to—at least temporarily—reduce the level of violence shouldn’t be considered praiseworthy. I hope this doesn’t sound hopelessly utopian, but I aspire to a state of affairs where withholding participation in mass murder is expected conduct, not something perceived to merit praise. Instead, the temporary suspension …

It began with a revelation in The Telegraph on November 3. The paper had seen an internal memo in the BBC pointing to editing on its October 2024 Panorama programme of two parts of US President Donald Trump’s speech in January 2021. The sin was not in the editing but its liberal manner, suggesting that Trump had explicitly incited the Capitol Hill riots of January 6. Through spliced footage, Trump is initially shown promising to walk with his supporters to the Capitol where he would “fight like hell” when he had said he would walk with them “to …

This article analyzes the emergence of Nayib Bukele as a political figure in El Salvador from a Marxist materialist perspective. Bukele’s ascent is the result of both the failure of capitalist neoliberalist policies and the lack of a working-class struggle instrument. The author concludes that the only alternative lies in constructing a democratic political movement to confront the authoritarian and populist discourse taking shape in El Salvador.

Like several countries around the world, El Salvador is experiencing an onslaught of extreme right-wing policies. The current government of Nayib Bukele rules the country …

But Trump, Kushner, Witkoff, Blair just don’t get it. And neither do those world leaders who signed up to Trump’s phony ‘Declaration for Enduring Peace and Prosperity’.

Last week a Conservative MP in Westminster submitted a string of written Parliamentary questions about the UK’s recognition of Palestinian statehood:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, whether she plans to withdraw recognition of the State of Palestine in the event that Hamas break any conditions of that recognition.

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, whether the UK will support Palestinian membership of the United …

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Why trust these gold-seeking buffoons of questionable expertise? Overpaid as they are by gullible clients who really ought to know better, consultancy firms are now getting paid for work done by non-humans, conventionally called “generative artificial intelligence”. Occupying some kind of purgatorial space of amoral pursuit, these vague, private sector entities offer services that could (and should) just as easily be done within government or a firm at a fraction of the cost. Increasingly, the next confidence trick is taking hold: automation using large language models.

First, let’s consider why companies such as McKinsey, Bain & Company, and Boston Consulting Group …