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The Election of Pope Leo XIV

White Smoke and Speculation

The occasion of electing another Pope was a spectacle in time and, in many ways, outside it. It was the one rare occasion in the twenty-first century where ancient ceremony, the old boy network – many presumptive virgins – along with festive dressing up, were seen with admiration rather than suspicion. Feminists were nowhere to be heard. Women knew their place; the phallocrats were in charge. Secret processes and factions, unscrutinised by media or any temporal body, could take place in secure, deliberative seclusion. Reverential followers of unquestioning loyalty turned up to the square of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome …

Beyond Socialist Purity

From Beatific Otherworldliness to Messy Transitions

Orientation
International political economy at a crossroads

As most of you know the world economy is peppered with fault lines. On one hand we have the rising in the East of a new economic block, the BRICS nations and their friends. On the other hand, in the West we have a rapidly declining Yankeedom and its European vassals on. What are socialists in the West to do with this malestream, this great turning point? Is it not clear whether to support BRICS or not? After all, the BRICS countries have only one clear socialist country and two countries that are …

AI is a Perfect Storm Threatening Humanity

©  Getty Images/XH4D

The global economy was already navigating a minefield of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA) when US President Donald J. Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs reverberated across international markets. This aggressive escalation of trade barriers, including a mélange of sudden rate hikes, retaliatory measures, and rhetorical brinkmanship, didn’t just amplify the chaos; it ignited the specter of a full-blown economic firestorm.

Volatility unleashed

The moment the tariffs were announced, markets convulsed. Stock indices plummeted, erasing $2.1 trillion in global market …

Small Party Candidates

What the voter needs to know about small party candidates dedicated to the people.

Abortion Abolitionists All-Out Campaign to Ban Mifepristone

Rolling Thunder

Operation Rolling Thunder was a sustained U.S. bombing campaign over Vietnam. The Rolling Thunder Revue was a 1975–76 madcap concert tour headed by Bob Dylan, featuring  extraordinary musicians and collaborators. Now, there’s a new “Rolling Thunder”; a maximalist anti-abortion campaign aimed at pressuring the Trump administration, the FDA, Congress and the courts to ban the use of mifepristone. To …

America’s Great Brain Drain

A few years ago, no one would have imagined that one of the biggest democracies in the world would cancel research programs under the pretext that the word ‘diversity’ was in this program.

— French President Emmanuel Macron, Choose Europe for Science Event/Paris, May 5, 2025

America’s shores are experiencing a huge sucking sound as one of the biggest brain drains of modern history hits the country’s best, smartest, heading for Europe on grants, as smiles abound across the pond. European leaders are pinching themselves, unable to believe such good fortune falling into their laps, thanks to the Trump administration “freezing” government …

Missouri Puts Profits Over People’s Lives with New ICL Facility

A Dangerous Legacy

Early this year, as snow froze into sheets of solid ice, covering the ground for weeks, almost 20% of St. Louis Public School students were unhoused. Meanwhile, in warm town halls, former city Mayor Tishaura Jones praised a proposed new hazardous chemical facility, displaying the city’s economic priorities. St. Louis’s northside has long been subjected to the environmental effects of militarization, from the radiation secretly sprayed on residents of Pruitt Igoe and Northside communities in the 1950s, to the dumped cancer-causing Manhattan Project radioactive waste that poisoned …

The Great Reset

Who is the Great Reset great for?

The Crimes of Anthony Fauci

Is incarceration just a matter of time?

Listen now · 8:03

Never forget the evil done to the United States when Biden pardoned an accomplice to mass murder deeply involved in both the creation of the COVID-19 virus and bio-weapons development. Speculations surround his most likely profiteering from the various “pandemics” over the years, and the sudden jump in his family net worth after leaving Federal employment.

To quote:

“A pardon for ANY OFFENSES AGAINST THE UNITED STATES.”

Think about that. The actual text of the pardon reads:

I, JOSEPH …

The Explosive Israeli Bomb

The nuclear deterrent that is not designed to deter

When the United States sent the B-29 Super fortress bomber, Enola Gay, to drop “Little Boy” on an unwary Hiroshima and usher in the nuclear age, its administration neglected to plan for a major concern; how to prevent nuclear proliferation. Granted, America could not deter the Soviet Union and China from developing nuclear capabilities and did not want British and French allies from feeling deprived. The word “deterrent” guided who could develop an arsenal of mass destruction. Nuclear weapon balance would deter aggression between nuclear equipped nations.

The nuclear powered nations, with the United States in the lead, had …

Can a Charter School Not Be a Private Entity?

Despite endless insistence by privatizers that charter schools are public schools, many people spontaneously think that charter schools are not public schools.

Much of the public does not automatically see charter schools as public schools proper. They are viewed as being different from public schools and put in a separate category than public schools.

When asked what they think a charter school is, the average person often says something like: “I’m not really sure, aren’t they some sort of private school, I really don’t know, but I have heard of them, they seem …

Gatsby Meets Nietzsche on the Train to Town

“Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.” – T.S. Eliot, The Four Quartets

“You can’t repeat the past,” says Nick Carraway to Jay Gatsby in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, which was published one hundred years ago this spring.

Gatsby responds incredulously, “Can’t repeat the past? Why of course you can!”

This often …

Bratty Royal: Prince Harry and Bespoke Security Protection

It has been unedifying, and, it should be said, far from noble. But being unedifying has become something of a day specialty for Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, notably when giving interviews from commodious abodes in California. On taking a step down from the subsidised duties that characterise his position, the disgruntled Royal fled the stable and made for the United States. He had found love with Meghan Markle, but it proved to be that sort of noisy, declarative love that Buckingham Palace loathes, and his relatives generally try to sedate.

The latest tremor of narcissistic display on the Duke’s part …

Why the Republican Party Is Trying to Cut Healthcare to the Poor

On May 7, the AP headlined “House GOP backing off some Medicaid cuts as report shows millions of people would lose health care,” and reported:

House Republicans appear to be backing off some, but not all, of the steep reductions to the Medicaid program as part of their big tax breaks bill, as they run into resistance from more centrist GOP lawmakers opposed to ending nearly-free health care coverage for their constituents back home.

This is as a new report out Wednesday from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that millions …

Main-Streeting Hate and Bigotry in Trump’s America

The Patriot Front

India: Evicted Tribe Re-occupies Their Homes inside Famous Tiger Reserve

We Were So Close

Jenu Kuruba families begin their long-awaited re-occupation of their ancestral homes inside the Nagarhole National Park. They carried photos of loved ones who had died after the village was evicted, so they too can return to the forest. ©Sartaz Ali Barkat/ Survival

A group of Indigenous people who were evicted from their ancestral village in Nagarhole Tiger Reserve in south India 40 years ago have returned to their former homes.

It’s believed to be the first time Indigenous people in India have asserted their rights in this …

Truth Telling

Lies of the lover.

Culturicide in Gaza

The French National Library must oppose the systematic destruction of Palestinian heritage

We are cultural sector employees, in solidarity with the Palestinian people. On March 8, 2025, we sent an open letter to the president of the National Library of France (BnF) and to the Minister of Culture regarding their silence in the face of both the destruction of heritage and the massacre of human lives in Gaza, thus raising questions about culturicide.

The BnF’s colonial bias was denounced, particularly in its cultural programming and in its collaborations with Israeli institutions.

To this day, as the genocide perpetrated by the colonial State of Israel continues, neither the BnF nor the ministry has responded.

Source:

The Extermination of the Palestinian People and Theft of Their Homeland

Why are the supposedly Christian governments of the West helping a glaringly evil regime such as Israel to do this?

Thought I’d share with you an attempt to hold my MP to account for Westminster’s shameful complicity in Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people. The talking-points may help if you’re about to do the same with your MP or senator.

Israel: after 19 months of non-stop genocide where do you stand Mr Cooper?

ku.tnemailrapnull@pm.repooc.nhoj

Dear Mr Cooper,

In your communications to me in February and October last year some remarks were misleading and sounded as if penned by Israel’s propaganda scribblers in Tel Aviv. Given your journalistic background it was hoped you would sniff out and reject such disinformation. With the situation in Gaza …

Starvation in Gaza is so bad even the BBC is covering it – and reporting it all wrong

The BBC’s role is not to keep viewers informed. It’s to persuade them a clear crime against humanity by Israel is, in fact, highly complicated geopolitics they cannot hope to understand

You can tell how bad levels of starvation now are in Gaza, as the population there begins the third month of a complete aid blockade by Israel, because last night the BBC finally dedicated a serious chunk of its main news programme, the News at Ten, to the issue.

But while upsetting footage of a skin-and-bones, five-month-old baby was shown, most of the segment was, of course, dedicated to confusing …

Incognizant

When people do understand science and do not practice requisite skepticism.

Expulsion and Occupation: Israel’s Proposed Gaza Plan

Killing civilians wholesale, starving them to convince those unaffected to change course, and shepherding whole populations like livestock into conditions of further misery would all qualify as heinous crimes in international law.  When it comes to Israel’s war in Gaza, this approach is seen as necessary politics, unalloyed by the restraints of humanitarianism.  When confronted with these harsh realities on the ground, unequivocal denials follow: This is not happening in Gaza; no one is starving. And if that were the case, blame those misguided savages in Hamas.

As the conflict chugs along in pools of blood and bountiful gore, the confused …

Now is the Time for All Anti-Imperialists and All Justice-Loving People to Stand Unequivocally in Defense of Burkina Faso

It is no surprise to the Black Alliance for Peace’s (BAP) Africa Team and U.S. Out of Africa Network (USOAN) that aggression is stepping up against the countries in the anti-imperialist Alliance of Sahel States. This was reflected in the flagrantly baseless accusations against Burkina Faso’s leader Ibrahim Traoré. On April 3, 2025, U.S. AFRICOM Commander Michael Langley testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee and claimed without evidence that interim President Traoré is misusing the country’s gold mineral wealth in exchange for protection. Langley provided no details on how these supposed exchanges are carried out or from …

Martial Law Disguised as Law and Order: The Oldest Trick in the Authoritarian Playbook

A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty.

—James Madison

We are being frog-marched into tyranny at the end of a loaded gun. Or rather, hundreds of thousands of loaded guns.

Let’s not mince words: President Trump’s April 28 executive order is the oldest trick in the authoritarian playbook: martial law masquerading as law and order.

Officially titled “Strengthening and Unleashing America’s Law Enforcement to Pursue Criminals and Protect Innocent Citizens,” this order is a “heil Hitler” wrapped in the goosestepping, despotic trappings of national security.

Don’t be fooled by Trump’s tough-on-crime rhetoric, cloaked in patriotic language …

How Israel Embroils Other Countries in its Crimes of Genocide against the Palestinians

Israel is very adept at drawing attention away from itself and onto other countries as it carries out its genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. In a recent incident, when the ‘Conscience’, an aid boat attempting to reach the starving people of Gaza, was hit by drones (likely fired by Israel) a mile out of Maltese international waters, all attention descended upon the Maltese authorities.

The vessel was flying the flag of the Pacific Island of Palau; however, prior to the drone hit, Palau withdrew the registration, leaving the crew vulnerable to accusations of being without official papers. Israel had also made …

Big Pharma’s Upside

What is the argument for continuing with medical procedures as usual despite damning reports about such procedures?

Refashioned History: Liberal Catastrophes and Labor Triumphs

Footnote content. The dust had barely settled on the Australian federal election on May 3 before the hagiographers, mythmakers and revisionists got to work. If history is seen as a set of agreed upon facts, there was a rapidly growing consensus that Labor’s imposing victory had been the result of a superb campaign, sparkling in its faultlessness.

This did not quite match pre-election remarks and assessments. The government of Anthony Albanese had been markedly unconvincing, marked by dithering, short sightedness and a lack of conviction. It had, rather inexplicably, made the conservative Coalition led by that cruel, simian looking automaton Peter …

Human Rights Watch Outflanks Trump

Liberal NGO Pushes for Harsher Venezuela Sanctions

It’s been over 100 days since Donald Trump’s return to the presidency. Most NGOs to the left of the Heritage Foundation are alarmed about his confrontational international posture and related erosion of the rule of law.

Human Rights Watch (HRW), a supposedly liberal organization, is also concerned. But their problem is that the president hasn’t gone far enough – at least in the case of Venezuela. HRW’s latest report on Venezuela calls for intensified illegal measures that cause misery and death, outflanking Trump from the right.

Ignoring the US hybrid war

At issue for HRW is last July’s Venezuelan presidential election …

Escalating Think Tanks


On 2 May Foreign Affairs published an article, “Will China Escalate?: Despite Short-Term Stability, the Risk of Military Crisis Is Rising,” by Tong Zhao, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP).

There are many claims made in the article by Tony Zhao who seemingly looks at China, a 5000-year old Asian civilization, through a western lens (similar to the western-centric analysis made by John Mearsheimer).

Zhao asserts that Beijing views itself vis-à-vis the United States as in a “strategic stalemate.”

Comment: What exactly is …

The Non-explosive Iranian Bomb

The non-existent Iranian bomb has lesser importance to the existing bombs that threaten the world. United States (US) demands that Iran promise to halt pursuit of nuclear weapons and ballistic missile developments distract from the real intent of US actions — deter other nations from establishing more friendly relations with Iran and prevent them from gaining a correct perspective on the causes of the Middle East crises.

The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) created a potential for extensive political, economic, and social engagements of the international community with Iran. The investments would lead to attachments, friendships, and alliances …