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“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 …

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 …

(Full article …)

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 …

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 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 …

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 …

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 …

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

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 …

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 …

Klaus Scwab is gone and so is WEF alumnus Justin Trudeau. But in comes Mark Carney whose curriculum vitae is displayed on the WEF website as a WEF agenda contributor.

War and the Responsibility to Protect (R2P)

The R2P is one of the most important features of the post-Cold War global politics and international relations (IR) regarding the relations between war and politics, which was formalized in 2005, focusing on when the international community (the UN) must intervene for human protection purposes. The R2P was officially endorsed by the international community by the unanimous decision of the UN General Assembly as a principle at the UN World Summit in 2005. This agreement was regulated in paragraphs 138−140 of the documents of this World Summit. There are three crucial decisions concerning the …

Protesters in Australia urge the government to back South Africa’s court case against Israel. (AAP Photo)Israel maintains its deniability, but is there any doubt that it was behind the drone attack against a ship carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza on May 2, 2025 off the coast of Malta? Israel was delivering a statement to the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and the defenders of human rights everywhere, that Israel will not be denied the territory of Gaza, emptied of the more than 2 million Palestinian inhabitants living …

It has been forty-eight years since Eric Hobsbawm delivered a paper, “Gramsci and Political Theory,” before the Gramsci Conference held on March 5-6, 1977 (Reprinted as an article in Marxism Today, July, 1977).
Hobsbawm, contemplatively, reviews the forty years that had transpired since Antonio Gramsci’s death in 1937 after over a decade in a fascist prison. For the first ten years (1937-1947) Gramsci was virtually unknown outside of Italy, where Communist Party leader Palmiro Togliatti sought to integrate Gramsci-thought into the PCI’s work.

The next decade (1947-1957) found Gramsci’s influence in Italy …

Here is the youtube in which Chris Hedges interviewed, on April 30, the journalist Richard Medhurst about Medhurst’s being punished-without-trial and threatened with up to five years of legal imprisonment of him under Section 12(1a) of the UK’s Terrorism Act 2000 because he had reported honestly about the wars in Syria, Lebanon, and Ukraine. Also because he refuses to tell the police whom his unidentified sources are or give them his passwords so that they could then use his computer, mobile phone, and the other devices that they had seized and impounded …