Lawyer For Paramilitaries and Drug Traffickers Promises "Iron Fist" Policy That Has Repeatedly Failed
by Michael K. Smith / August 14th, 2026
If Abelardo de la Espriella’s first four days are any indication of what his entire term will be like, we are in for some very dark comedy over the next four years. Here are eight highlights from his inauspicious beginning.
(1) On Inauguration Day a clip of him looking like a fool marching in place and saluting during military honors went viral after it was seen to have his own military officers looking at him with a look of bewilderment as to what on earth he thought he was doing. Meanwhile, the U.S. State Department revealed that Colombia will receive a …
This summer, students marched through Delhi, India, in cockroach masks. The masks were a response to India’s Chief Justice Surya Kant calling the country’s unemployed youth ‘cockroaches’. India’s youth reclaimed the insult, naming their movement the Cockroach Janta Party. After a medical entrance examination was leaked, a wave of students committed suicide and Indian educator and activist Sonam Wangchuk went on a twenty-six-day hunger strike. These events culminated in the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan on 25 July – the first …
Rick Hillier’s new bank job highlights the tightening ties between finance and militarism.
On August 10 Canada’s Chief of the Defence Staff from 2005 to 2008 was made Strategic Defence Advisor for the National Bank of Canada. According to the country’s sixth biggest bank, Canada’s former top soldier “will provide strategic advice on defence-related trends and contribute insights on issues affecting Canada’s resilience, security, advanced manufacturing, aerospace and the defence industrial base.”
Alongside most of Canada’s other banks, National Bank recently became a member of the Canadian Association of Defence and Security …
While critiques of Indian agriculture have long focused on the crisis of commercial cash crops and the corporatisation of wheat and paddy procurement, this focus creates a significant oversight. By treating the state-backed mandi system as the universal standard, such analyses overlook the reality of the vast majority of smallholders—those growing pulses, millets and rain-fed crops who were never integrated into formal MSP procurement to begin with.
Consider the micro-farm in the foothills of Uttarakhand. A family tends a modest plot: a dozen goats, backyard poultry supplying fresh eggs and a handful …
There are no exits anymore from the MADD — Mutually Assured Destruction of Decency
by Paul Haeder / August 13th, 2026
Sure, another memoir: In her memoir Cleanup on Aisle Five, author and journalist Ann Larson does not publicly name the specific grocery chain she worked for. Instead, she deliberately anonymizes the large Utah-based grocery chain by referring to it simply as “The Grocery Store” (TGS) to protect the identities of her former co-workers and focus on broader systemic industry issues….
Under cover of night, the US military kidnapped the lawful Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife and National Assembly deputy Cilia Flores on January 3, 2026. Collateral damage included over 100 fatalities of civilians and Cuban and Venezuelan guards.
This unprovoked surprise attack flagrantly violated international law. The hegemon acted in full expectation that it could operate with impunity. Even the neighboring left-leaning governments of Brazil and Colombia offered only mild rebukes. Then Venezuelan Foreign Minister Yván Gil …
As their private jets descend on Toronto to promote a billionairist agenda will environmentalists confront Carney’s ecocidal CEO summit?
In a highly offensive article headlined “The 24 hours that could change Canada’s economic trajectory”, the Globe and Mail reported on the “heavy hitters soon to land their private jets in Toronto.” Saturday’s Report on Business should have described them as “heavy emitters”.
The CEOs and investment fund managers coming to Toronto in mid-September represent those disproportionately responsible for greenhouse gas emissions and overconsumption. According to Oxfam, the richest 0.1% …
In 2009, former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez severed ties between Venezuela and Israel, but this week, the government of Interim President Delcy Rodriguez announced that Venezuela had restored diplomatic relations with the genocidal Israeli entity.
This decision follows a series of major concessions by the Venezuelan government to the Trump regime.
What does all of this mean for the future of Venezuela? Has Delcy Rodriguez abandoned the Bolivarian resolution led by Hugo Chavez?
Dimitri Lascaris speaks with historian and author, Vijay Prashad, about the stunning turn in Venezuelan politics.
Pete Hegseth’s Department of War is building America’s largest Quantum Computing project right here on the Southside of Chicago, to the detriment of not only our city but the world at large. Governor Pritzker has lauded the venture capital project as an unprecedented opportunity to make Illinois the “Silicon Valley of quantum development.” With whose consent? On whose land? And on whose dime?
When examining the backers of the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park (IQMP), it is difficult to rationalize this $9 billion project as anything but an accelerative altar to militarism. Alongside federal backing from DARPA, …
Nothing inspires confidence in the silliness of the human species than its efforts to understand the workings of others. This, at least, makes an improvement from wanting to biblically subjugate, enslave and eat members of the animal kingdom. But when efforts are made to understand what the domestic cat (surely an oxymoronic category) is up to, humankind is bound to come up short.
The issue of imposing curfews upon cats as if they were disobedient, wandering children is one such symptom. While the feral cat is an apparatus of mass killing when it comes to wildlife, Felis catus, that oddly named …
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies / August 13th, 2026
According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the United States spent $21 trillion on its military between 2001 and 2024 (in constant 2024 dollars), equal to the combined military spending of the next eighteen countries. Iran barely made that list at all, spending only 2% of what the US did, and SIPRI estimated Iran’s 2025 military budget at only $7.5 billion. So how is Iran holding its own against the multi-trillion-dollar US war machine?
A critical difference between the US war on Iran and previous US and allied bombing campaigns against Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and …
The idea that a US-led West and its brand of ‘freedom and democracy’ are best has dominated international relations since at least the end of World War II. Its crescendo was the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, which led Fukuyama to proclaim, ‘the end of history’. But not very long after, by the turn of the century, the assumption had started to become so threadbare and the prejudices, falsehoods, and bad consequences so obvious that even the (brainwashed) likes of me began – politely – to question …
As if regurgitating the Covid 19 pandemic required another round of national debate to settle the question of safety and effectiveness of vaccine injections, the FDA has recently approved a new Moderna mRNA-based flu shot (mFlusiva) specifically marketed for the elderly (over 50) population.
It was that senior population which suffered more Covid 19 deaths than any other segment of citizenry: during 2020 81% of deaths were over 65, in 2022 92% of fatalities were seniors and between 2022 – 2024 81.3% of …
Most politicians pledge to work for the working class, or sometimes for working families, a less Marxist-sounding label. Meanwhile, scholars struggle to define the category. I won’t assess the political posturing or adjudicate definitional disputes, but my work experience—spanning six decades and a wide variety of jobs—illustrates why the claims of working-class authenticity that are prized in today’s politics are so fraught.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., speaks with ABC’s Jonathan Karl on August 9, 2026.
Many Democratic Party candidates emerging on what one might call the populist left are finding success in primaries across the country. But most of them have a shared liability: they were fully on board with the worst excesses and abuses of the “peak wokeness” that emerged in the wake of George Floyd’s 2020 killing, enduring and contaminating most of our institutions for several years after.
Most of these successful candidates are quite young …
In September of 2025, during a Saturday vigil in Stockholm’s Odenplan Square, Isak Hernández, age nine, asked if he could recite a poem he wrote. Deeply troubled by images he saw, day and night, from Gaza, he resolved not to be silent. “Their lives are not numbers,” Isak declared. “Their dreams are not ashes.” His refrain repeated: “I won’t be silent,” and he begged the world, “Listen to me.”
Isabella Lundgren, a Swedish jazz vocalist, heard Isak deliver his poem. She felt his words had reverberated throughout Sweden. No one could possibly turn away. …
“Politicians,” the vituperative satirist Auberon Waugh observed, “can forgive almost anything in the way of abuse; they can forgive subversion, revolution, being contradicted, exposed as liars, even ridiculed, but they can never forgive being ignored.” An exception to this appropriate rule might be the Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who is desperately wishing to be ignored, at least regarding an interview he need never have done.
Despite presiding over a formidable majority in the House of Representatives and facing a Coalition opposition awaiting immolation at the next election, Albanese has managed to contract that every-politician’s disease: the gaffe. However secure they …
“Choice” is not only a central concept in charter school discourse but a persistent source of disinformation. Neoliberals and privatizers glorify and embrace “free market” education, usually under the banner of “school-choice.” But such a notion of “choice” intentionally confounds two disparate notions of “choice.”
“Choice” in the most basic and straightforward sense of the word is simply the act of selecting something from a list of alternatives. It is something people have been doing every day for centuries. But “choice” also has philosophical, political, economic, historical, and moral dimensions. “Choice” does not exist as an abstract freedom; it is rooted …
A chatter about fresh elections is starting to rumble again in the shady corridors of (first) the US White House and (about 15-20 minutes later) Caracas’ Miraflores presidential palace.
The Orange President, Donald Trump, has mentioned them; the Crazy Cuban, Marco Rubio, has commented; and even the marionette siblings, Delcy and Jorge Rodriguez, have uttered the words.
Unsurprisingly, all claim the “time isn’t right” (when is the time ever right for a comfortably positioned status quo to ask the struggling people if they …
Agrarian thought argues that rural life offers richer meaning than the alienation of urban industrial existence because it is grounded in nature, human labor, and interdependence. At its heart lies a commitment to decentralization: land should belong to those who work and depend on it, rather than to corporations or states.
While agrarianism advocates decentralization and local autonomy, the modern development narrative emerges from top-down policies prioritizing corporate interests. This ‘development’ often ignores or erases local traditions and knowledge, weakening agricultural systems rooted in community and sustainability. It does this for profit, control and so-called efficiency.
That grand old thing is getting on a bit. Still significant and still functioning wearily, the United Nations Refugee Convention of 1951 has suffered abuse, subversion and neglect from state parties. At times, it is only honored in the breach. At other times, it is not honored at all. After three-quarters of a century, it is easy to forget the hot ideal that streaks through the document: that it contains, as Christopher Bentram aptly remarks, “a kind of substitute citizenship” for those who have left their country of origin and find their bonds “broken by the threat of prosecution.” …
There is a certain dark comedy in watching Washington indict former Cuban President Raúl Castro for allegedly killing civilians over Caribbean waters after the United States bombed boats and killed civilians in Caribbean waters. Progressive commentators like Ryan Grim and Julia Conley at Common Dreams quickly noted the irony after Miami prosecutors indicted the 94-year-old on one count of conspiracy to kill U.S. nationals, four counts of murder, and two counts of aircraft destruction. The charges stemmed from a February 24, 1996 confrontation in which Cuban fighter jets destroyed two Brothers to the Rescue aircraft as they either approached or …
The uncertainty puts hundreds of CNN journalists in limbo and marks a potential pivot point in antitrust cases.
by Dina Demetrius / August 10th, 2026
An antitrust lawsuit by twelve Democratic states’ Attorneys General against the Paramount Skydance–Warner Bros. Discovery merger, valued at $111 billion, promises to be the most high-stakes—and potentially industry-changing—case in generations.
Paramount and state AGs struck an agreement on July 24 to bypass the legal wranglings of court injunctions in favor of going directly to a full trial. The outcome would determine whether a tech scion—Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison—backed by his billionaire father, Oracle founder and Trump ally Larry Ellison, and three Gulf sovereign wealth funds, will control a significant portion of the global entertainment and news industries, or if states …
Statistics suggest that our current Supreme Court justices have some of the highest IQs in America. It seems fair to conclude, then, that six of them knew exactly what they were doing when they effectively put for-sale signs on the executive and legislative branches of the U.S. government—on the presidency, on the Senate, on the House of Representatives.
The deciding six were Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Alito, Barrett, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Thomas. Definitely and positively, all six realized the message they were sending to candidates and their big-money organizational contributors: You can do whatever you want; the campaign spending limits …
It has just been revealed that the 5 biggest US tech companies have $1.65 trillion in hidden debt. Those companies are Meta (Facebook), Oracle, Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet (Google). And that’s just the secret debt, not the debt they publicly admit to. That means the hidden debt of 5 US tech companies is larger than the GDP of over 170 countries around the world.
In a single week in July 2026, 18,000 new cases of chickenpox, ectoparasitic infestations, and impetigo were recorded by the United Nations in Gaza. The deliberate exposure of a population to conditions that facilitate the spread of infectious disease can constitute a means of extermination and, in the context of genocidal intent, an act of genocide. Our latest visual captures genocide by attrition, which “occurs when a group is stripped of its human rights, political, civil and economic. This leads to deprivation of conditions essential for maintaining health, thereby producing mass death.”
In March 2026, a six-year-old girl named Maria Paula was processed for deportation at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas. Before her family was removed to Colombia, immigration agents threatened physical restraint, leaving behind their medication and personal belongings.1CBS News, “Children Held Like Criminals Inside ICE Detention Center” (May 2026). To the state apparatus, the psychological fallout of this interaction was not an administrative failure. It was a calculated asset.
In the language of contemporary statecraft, the trauma of a child is a highly efficient policy instrument.
According to data compiled by the Brookings Institution and The Marshall …
