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It sometimes feels incredible that this time last year, many of us had never even heard of coronavirus. There had been no lockdowns. No lives lost. No economic collapse.
And for many of us, the threat of a pandemic felt like a relic of the last century, something about as menacing as hat pins, phonograph needles, or corsets laced too tightly.
But now the pandemic has come and the danger has shown itself to be very real. COVID-19 hasn’t just revealed to us the limits of …
The lion’s share of today’s Old Bailey proceedings in Julian Assange’s extradition trial was spent on battles over mental health and dire risk. The prosecution continued its attempt to minimise the dangers facing Assange were he to be extradited to the United States for 17 charges under the US Espionage Act and one under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. While the defence has its case on Assange’s fragile mental health well plotted, the prosecution is hoping that witnesses such as Dr Nigel Blackwood, consultant psychiatrist with the National Health Service, will punch holes in …
I am neither a supporter of the Democratic, Republican or Liberal parties. It is obvious to me that our system is corrupt, it functions on behalf of the wealthy and those employed either directly or indirectly by our government and or the military industrial complex.
Voting for either of any of the candidates is a vote to continue the corruption and destruction of our country, planet and the future of future generations.
I suggest that those of you who agree with this statement go to your polling station and write on the ballot, “None of the above” Doing so will allow us …
In Kenya during Al-Shabaab standoff (September 24, 2013)
If the world is upside down the way it is now, wouldn’t we have to turn it over to get it to stand up straight?
— Eduardo Galeano, Upside Down, 1998
For decades, Andre Vltchek, an old-school journalist and artist (but a young man) who traveled the world in search of truth and who always stood up straight, tried to revolve the world and encourage people to revolt against injustice. In this age of arm-chair reporters, he stood out for his boldness …
In April 2020, a month after the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared the pandemic, the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) warned that the numbers of people who lived with acute hunger around the world would double due to COVID-19 by the end of 2020 ‘unless swift action is taken’. A report from the Global Network Against Food Crises – which is comprised by the WFP, the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO), and the European Union …
Starving girl shows impact of Yemen war, ReutersThousands of precious Yemeni children are being starved to death, dying of cholera, or being blown to bits by US made and managed missiles. Can Americans glued to their TV sets, straining to understand what is happening to their country, imagine Trump or Biden in church praying for Yemeni children facing starvation and US missiles?
No, corporate media has reported President Trump as …
We can report that the skies over South East England have been swarming with Spitfires and Hurricanes this month. Is there a war on? Well, yes. In 1991, the historian Howard Zinn described the two targets of Operation Desert Storm:
The American population was bombarded the way the Iraqi population was bombarded. It was a war against us, a war of lies and disinformation and omission of history. That kind of war, overwhelming and devastating, waged here in the
In Kenya during Al-Shabaab standoff
André, my good friend and comrade, is no more.
We worked on several investigative projects together. André’s professional rigor, sharpness of understanding, vision and ability to connecting the dots is exemplary.
We shared some unforgettable moments, when we followed a refugee trail from Bodrum, Turkey to the Greek Island of Kos in the Aegean Sea – onwards to Athens.
I’m deeply shocked and saddened beyond words by André’s sudden passing.
In the night from Monday to Tuesday 22 September, André traveled by chauffeur-driven car with his wife …
Following the script sheet of the previous day, the non sequitur, pop medical view of the prosecution was again in sharp evidence at the Old Bailey. In an effort to make the road for Julian Assange’s extradition to the United States for 17 charges under the US Espionage Act and one under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act smoother, James Lewis QC persisted in attacking suggestions that the WikiLeaks publisher was autistic, or should be treated as such.
The prosecution knows that cases such as that of Lauri Love in 2018 and Gary McKinnon in 2012, …
Stephen Lewis seems to want Palestine to disappear. The latest example in a long history of anti-Palestinian activism is his claim that Canada’s anti-Palestinian voting record at the UN didn’t contribute to its defeat for a seat on the Security Council.
Recently I was forwarded an email that activist Elizabeth Block shared to Independent Jewish Voices’ discussion list in which she challenged Lewis’ omission of Palestine during a recent CBC interview that dealt with Canada’s Security Council defeat. In it Brian Mulroney’s former ambassador to the UN responded, “Dear Elizabeth …
Today, the prosecutors in the Julian Assange case did their show trial predecessors from other legal traditions proud. The ghosts of such figures as Soviet state prosecutor Andrey Vyshinsky, would have approved of the line of questioning taken by James Lewis QC: suggest that Assange, accused of 17 counts of violating the US Espionage Act and one count of conspiracy to commit a computer crime, reads medical literature to exaggerate his condition.
Additionally to the political hook the defence is hanging its case on – political offences being a bar to extradition in the United Kingdom’s …
Palestine can never be truly understood through numbers, because numbers are dehumanizing, impersonal, and, when necessary, can also be contrived to mean something else entirely. Numbers are not meant to tell the story of the human condition, nor should they ever serve as a substitute for emotions.
Indeed, the stories of life, death — and everything in-between — cannot be truly and fully appreciated through charts, figures and numbers. The latter, although useful for many purposes, is a mere numerical depository of data. Anguish, joy, aspirations, defiance, courage, loss, collective …
Unlike their upstart competitor McKinsey, they don’t bother to homogenize their people. They never made their people wear fedoras; they put no premium on the trained-seal avidity McKinsey wants. They acculturate their people slowly, on sailing jaunts, or sprawling banquets, or card games, or benders in stodgy, opulent resorts.
Founded to capitalize on the Great War, they cranked the meat-grinder and went from strength to strength. They needed men of affairs, not visionary gurus, men of sound judgment (and men it was, back then. It was the time of Three Guineas. Women were apt to entertain fantastic notions.) Their ἀρετή was …
The World Wildlife Foundation, in collaboration with the Zoological Society of London, recently issued an eye-popping description of the forces of humanity versus life in nature, the Living Planet Report 2020, but the report should really be entitled the Dying Planet Report 2020 because that’s what’s happening in the real world. Not much remains alive.
The report, released September 10th, describes how the over-exploitation of ecological resources by humanity from 1970 to 2016 has contributed to a 68% plunge in wild vertebrate populations, inclusive of mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and fish.
The report offers a fix-it: “Bending the Curve Initiative,” described in more detail …
The American writer Mark Twain once observed that there were three kinds of lies. Lies, damn lies and statistics. In the 21st century that list might usefully be added to and include lies of omission. The modern mainstream media do not so much write and broadcast actual lies, although it is not difficult to detect actual examples, as lie by omission.
There are multiple examples of this failing, but a few illustrations will suffice to make the point. The first is the charmed life that the State of Israel enjoys in the local media, in all its forms. There are multiple …
Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani has slammed U-S sanctions against his country, saying they are a flagrant violation of the UN charter. In an address to the UN General Assembly, Rouhani said the Iranian nation successfully withstood the U-S maximum pressure campaign. He added, Iran even flourished under the bans while pursuing its role as a pivot of peace and stability. He pointed to some of Iran’s peace efforts in the region and beyond, including combating the Daesh terrorist group, saying such a nation does not deserve sanctions. Rouhani said the U-S sanctions under the pretext …
Each year tens of thousands of Irish-Americans proudly celebrate their heritage on St Patrick Day, yet few are aware of the fate of the Irish in the St Patrick’s Battalion (el Batallón de San Patricio) who chose to fight under their green flag for Mexico against the aggression of the United States in the Mexican-American War of 1846-48 .
How many Americans are fully aware of their country’s land-grab and the illegal annexation of what was Mexican territory. Hollywood glorifies the Texas rebellion but fails to shine a light on the later American invasion of Mexico, a war opposed by many …
Julian Assange is not on trial simply for his liberty and his life. He is fighting for the right of every journalist to do hard-hitting investigative journalism without fear of arrest and extradition to the United States. Assange faces 175 years in a US super-max prison on the basis of claims by Donald Trump’s administration that his exposure of US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan amounts to “espionage”.
The charges against Assange rewrite the meaning of “espionage” in unmistakably dangerous ways. Publishing evidence of state crimes, as Assange’s Wikileaks organisation has done, is covered by both free speech and public …
Today was one of reiteration and expansion. Computer scientist Christian Grothoff of the Bern University of Applied Sciences supplied the relevant chronology on what led to the publication of unredacted US State Department cables, the subject of such concern for the prosecution. This proved a mild taster of what was to come: the alleged deal brokered by Richard Grenell, when US ambassador to Germany, with the Ecuadorean government for the arrest and eviction of Julian Assange from the London embassy in April 2019.
Grothoff, publication and chronology
With three of the 18 counts against Assange trained on …
As Arun Gupta tweeted the other day, “Pardon the catastrophic global warming, we now return you to your regularly scheduled state violence.”
It’s been quite a week here in Oregon. I know there are plenty of other horrors happening in the world. The invisible ones are the worst. Like tens of millions of children in the US going to bed hungry every night in recent weeks, or the tap water in Flint and Gaza continuing to be undrinkable, or the many people every night in Yemen and India dying alone …
So, it appears the War on Populism is building toward an exciting climax. All the proper pieces are in place for a Class-A GloboCap color revolution, and maybe even civil war. You got your unauthorized Putin-Nazi president, your imaginary apocalyptic pandemic, your violent identitarian civil unrest, your heavily-armed politically-polarized populace, your ominous rumblings from military quarters … you couldn’t really ask for much more.
OK, the plot is pretty obvious by now (as it is in all big-budget action spectacles, which is essentially what color …
The polarized nature of American politics often makes it difficult to address fundamental differences between the country’s two main political rivals, Republicans and Democrats. As each side is intent on discrediting the other at every opportunity, unbiased information regarding the two parties’ actual stances on internal and external issues can be difficult to decipher.
Regarding Palestine and Israel, however, both parties’ establishments are quite clear on offering Israel unlimited and unconditional support. The discrepancies in their positions are, at times, quite negligible, even if Democrats, occasionally, attempt to present themselves …
President of the Republic of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko. Image
In 2005 Belarus President Aleksandr Lukashenko was dubbed “the last dictator in Europe” by President George W. Bush’s Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. The name has stuck in the West. The U.S. foreign policy establishments pretend that “dictator” is a dirty word to them. They actually only use it for propaganda purposes.
The U.S. has a long history of cozying up to and backing dictators. The U.S. backed the fascist dictator Francisco Franco from …
Image from Peterborough ExaminerThe world-wide collapsing economies and collapsing ecosystems together create such a catastrophic storm that all versions of buttoning down the hatches and weathering it out simply won’t work. The history of economy has been to tear at the earth until life itself cannot be sustained. The western addiction to profit at any cost has opened the floodgates to massive inequality, poverty and starvation across the globe.
The solution? — a global guaranteed income for all, what some social pioneers are calling a universal basic …
On the occasion of the death of the remarkable, pro-women’s rights US Supreme Court judge but fervent supporter of genocidally racist Zionism, Ruth Bader Ginsburg (RBG), one notes that in her outstanding over 60 year career she was utterly silent about the human rights of Palestinians, and that women and children are 75% of the 14 million sorely oppressed Palestinians, the 7 million Exiled Palestinians, the 8 million Palestinian refugees, …
In 1888, the year before he went insane, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote the following in Twilight of the Idols:
We have got rid of the real world: what world is left? The apparent world perhaps? … But no! Along with the real world we’ve done away with the apparent world as well.
So, if you feel you also may be going insane in the present climate of digital screen life, where real is unreal but realer than real, the apparent is cryptic, and up is down, true is false, and what you see you don’t, it has a history. One hundred and thirty-two …
Be wary of anyone insistent on using the word “streamline” in the context of policy and planning. It suggests a suspicion of sound procedure, due process and keen scrutiny. The streamliner hates accountability, attacks the world of red tape and suggests that barriers be removed. Cut the tape; free the decision maker.
The streamline obsessives tend to see themselves as reformers and pruners of unnecessary waste and delay. In Australian extradition law, for instance, the paring back of protections has been relentless. The enthusiastic embrace of the “no evidence” model of extradition procedure was an example of such crude thinking. It …
It’s the beginning of autumn in the northern hemisphere, a beautiful and refreshing space between the heady days of summer and the chill of winter, a transitional time. And collectively we are living through a time of global transition; a shift from one civilization, colored by certain influencing qualities, to a new time, growing out of the old but infused with a different energy, with distinct unifying qualities and evolving modes of living.
Inherent in this natural movement is the promise of change, but also resistance and tension, resulting in conflict and fragmentation. Ancient divisions are being strengthened, new divisions fermented, …
The poisoning of Alexei Navalny has created intensified support by pro-U.S., and especially pro-NATO, officials in the European Union, to block the nearly completed NordStream 2 natural-gas pipeline from Russia to Germany, and to import into the EU, instead, far costlier U.S. LNG, liquefied natural gas. A very real possibility thus now exists that the poisoning of Navalny will turn out to have been worth many billions of dollars to U.S. frackers, by causing the nearly-completed NordStream 2 to be turned to waste so that fracked U.S. LNG will sell in Europe. The present article will explore the relative likelihood …
