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Western accusations of doping by Chinese swimmers threaten to exacerbate China-US tensions, undermine the World Anti Doping Agency (WADA) and seriously harm the upcoming Paris Olympics.

The controversy was ignited by investigation reports at the New York Times and  German TV broadcaster ARD.  These media outlets suggest there has been a cover-up of a mass doping incident among Chinese top swimmers with connivance of  the Chinese Anti Doping Agency (CHINADA) and complicity from the World Anti Doping Agency (WADA).  This story served as red meat to the hyper aggressive leader of the US Anti Doping Agency (USADA), Travis Tygart.  …

I find it rather difficult to make it clear to my children why we are not eligible, for from one point of view it isn’t quite clear to me.

X, “The Jew and the Club,” The Atlantic, October 1924.

It must surely make certain ethnic and religious groups reflect, notably those languishing in minority status for decades, if not centuries.  There was a time when the rental advertisements in London had such caustic couplings as “Irish and Blacks need not apply.”  Oxbridge bursaries and scholarships, in all their variety, reveal a tapestry of personal prejudice and lively bigotry.  In terms of …

Despite being described in some circles as such, the latest vote in the United Nations General Assembly on Palestine’s status is hardly extraordinary.  For one, it does not vest the Palestinian territories with statehood but burnishes its credentials to join the club.  It pushes those scrappy, desperate entities so despoiled and abused into deeper involvement with the processes at the UN itself.  Palestinian non-observer status, granted in 2012, has left it mute in international affairs.

The May 10 resolution is seen, according to a summary from the UN, as an improvement, an “upgrade” to “the rights of the State of …

With an important US presidential election — we are told — only months away, but one posing two repugnant, disheartening choices, it may be a good time to explore where we are and how we got here.
What we can agree is that most of us, when asked, believe that things are going badly: an October, 2023 AP-NORC poll finds that 78% of those polled responded that “the country is going in the wrong direction;” a January Morning Consult poll concludes that less than a third of those responding “say the country is headed in the right direction; a recent …

The spirit of the Constitution, drafted by men who chafed against the heavy-handed tyranny of an imperial ruler, would suggest that one’s home is a fortress, safe from almost every kind of intrusion.

Unfortunately, a collective assault by the government’s cabal of legislators, litigators, judges and militarized police has all but succeeded in reducing that fortress—and the Fourth Amendment alongside it—to a crumbling pile of rubble.

We are no longer safe in our homes, not from the menace of a government and its army of Peeping Toms who are waging war on the last stronghold of privacy left to us as a …

“Politics,” as the harsh, albeit successful German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck claimed, “is the art of the possible, the attainable – the art of the next best.”  To that hould be added the stark awareness of being prudent, gingerly wise, appropriately cautious.  Mind how you go in avoiding any foolishness on the way.

Going after the motley press and news outlets while claiming to be a card-carrying member of the democracy club is far from prudent and more than a touch foolish, bound to make the critics croak and other fellow members decry.  And this is exactly what has happened in …

The International Criminal Court is a dusty jewel, a creation of heat, tension and manufacture in the international community.  Various elements have gone into its creation.  As with any international institution which draws its legitimacy from nation states and the like, its detractors are many, the invective against it frequent.  Some 124 countries have signed the Rome Charter of 1998 that gives the body its authority and jurisdictional force, but no one is foolish enough to think that its reach can ever be anything but tempered by political consideration and self-interest.

Be it issuing a problematic arrest warrant for Russian President …

Mass graves, the criminalization of dissent, systematic slaughter glorified as self-defense, resisting students making history. Yes, the current nightmare does seem reminiscent of 1968, the year kaleidoscopic change burst forth seemingly everywhere at once.

On January 31, the beginning of Tet, eighty-thousand Vietnamese troops issued Washington a formal eviction notice, attacking all the major cities and towns of colonial South Vietnam. Blasting through the walls of the U.S. Embassy compound, they killed two military police and holding off a helicopter assault for seven hours. Government employees arrived at work to find corpses twisted over the ornamental shrubbery and pools of blood …

In his 2021 annual threat assessment, the director-general of ASIO, the Australian domestic intelligence service, pointed to an active spy ring operating in the country, or what he chose to call a “nest of spies”.  The obvious conclusion drawn by information-starved pundits was that the nest was filled with the eggs and fledglings of Chinese intelligence or Russian troublemakers.  How awkward then, for the revelations to be focused on another country, one Australia is ingratiatingly disposed to in its efforts to keep China in its place.

At the start of this month, a number of anonymous security sources revealed …

The compromised former top boss of the Australian civil service has the lick and smell of belligerence.  Begrudgingly conceding error and when in office, a bully and meddler in party politics, an incessant advocate of threats visible and invisible, Mike Pezzulo switches into a warmonger’s gear with ease.

The former secretary of the Department of Home Affairs was sacked last November after revelations that he had used WhatsApp to communicate with abandon with former New South Wales Liberal Party deputy director Scott Briggs.  Those messages, unearthed in a joint investigation by The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and 60 Minutes, confirmed …

Have you heard the story of why we celebrate May Day?

In Chicago in 1886 police murdered two people at a general strike for an 8 hour work day. A rally for revenge on May 4thled to a riot when a bomb was thrown at the police. Several cops and protesters were killed in the ensuing gunfire and many more were injured.

The state then began rounding up known dissidents and sentenced most of them to death even though many of those arrested weren’t even there.

For over a century anarchists around the world have been avenging the Haymarket Martyrs through strikes, pickets …

“Nearly nineteen thousand (19,000) weather stations have notched record high temperatures since Jan. 1.” (Source: “Earth’s Record Hot Streak Might be a Sign of a New Climate Era”, The Washington Post, April 19, 2024).

A blistering start to the 2024 year is breaking all-time global temperature records of 2023 and bringing to the forefront a looming threat of Wet Bulb temperature concerns.

Even though summer ‘24 has not officially begun for the Northern Hemisphere (solstice June 20th), according to DW News (German public broadcast network) d/d April 25th, 2024, “Extreme Heat in Southeast Asia Leads to School Closures”:

Hundreds of millions of people …

(Full article …)

This week we would like to recommend to you a Chinese song from 1967 called Bravely March On, Arab People! (奋勇前进，阿拉伯人民) in support of the pan-Arab movement.

If you don’t have a lot of time, this is what you should know:

For China, Iran’s attack on Israel was “an act of self-defense”
The West’s new narrative against China: overcapacity
China exceeds its 5% GDP growth target in first quarter
Historic “peace trip” by former Taiwanese leader Ma Ying-jeou

For China, Iran’s attack was “an act of self-defense”

In the context of the genocide that Israel is perpetrating on the …

The proven danger of two million Gazans, blasted from their homes and struggling to find survival, is being overshadowed by unproven “safety concerns” for a relatively few Jewish college students who argue they are harmed by careless words and show no physical injuries. News reports reveal malicious intent and media complicity — divert the protests against genocide to a non-existent anti-Semitism and impede the effectiveness of the campus demonstrations by citing “safety concerns.” Generate hate of the campus demonstrators and disguise the malice by falsely accusing them of hate, the Zionist Modus operandi from its inception — hide the truth …

The flotilla cargo ship in Istanbul (Photo credit: Medea Benjamin)
Two gutsy activists from the Twin Cities flew to Istanbul, Turkey April 17 to join over three-hundred others from about 40 countries on an eleven-hundred mile voyage across the Mediterranean Sea to raise awareness and bring lifesaving aid to Gaza.

Vietnam Vet and member of Veterans For Peace (VFP) Barry Riesch was nervous about signing on with the Freedom Flotilla Coalition (FFC), but felt he should try to do something for the vast majority of Gazans lacking medical care and being …