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Illustration: Chen Xia/GT

On Monday, China Coast Guard’s Daishan vessel formation conducted routine law-enforcement patrols in accordance with the law in the waters east of China’s Taiwan island, directly targeting the illegal collusion between Japan and the Philippines. China made it clear that this was a necessary operation in response to the announcement by Japan and the Philippines on their own, to begin talks on maritime delimitation in the waters east of China’s Taiwan island, which seriously infringed upon China’s territorial sovereignty and maritime rights and …

As someone who lives in Canada but has visited Venezuela seven times and written extensively on the Bolivarian Revolution, I do not have a fixed, original position on the current situation. Strange? I would rather defer to two experts who live in Venezuela.

Firstly, Cira Pascual Marquina is a popular educator at the Pluriversidad Patria Grande in Venezuela, the educational initiative of the El Panal Commune. She is also a member of the International Communal Democracy Network. With Chris Gilbert, Pascual Marquina is co-author of several books on Venezuela, including Venezuela, the Present as Struggle: Voices from the Bolivarian Revolution (Monthly …

It sounds like an acute sewerage burst, but as much political commentary rests on the tired cliché, we see the language of liquid velocity apply to parties that suddenly emerge in the polls as portentously relevant to watchers and news cyclists. They “surge” away, giving hacks and pundits room to fill in column space while scraping psephologists can pack consultancy briefs and newsletters with apparently scientific information about the permanently transient.

Of late, those electoral quarriers at Redbridge Group have been doing much to add building material to One Nation’s momentum. First came a poll in May which …

One can never accuse the Australian political palate of being too demanding, let alone attentive. When it comes to matters of defense, that palate is happy to be deceived, remaining credulous to the notion that it is sensitive to good taste and observant of flavors. When it comes to alliances, this is especially so. As for the AUKUS agreement, it was clear that the Australian establishment was simply incapable of tasting anything other than the rancid or putrid. Of the three participating countries in this doomed ménage à trois – the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia – it …

Why would the government cover up news of UFOs?

Saucer as depicted in the sci-fi tv series The Invaders.These are always occasions of anticipation and even celebration for the tinfoil hatters and those keen to spot the internal plot, the thriving fifth column and anything that could risk being seen as ordinary. The human mind is obsessed by the need for a rounded explanation. In place of that arises a form of mysticism, even superstition. What cannot be explained must be otherworldly. Few better tests for this proposition can be found in the discussion about unidentified objects …

Malala at the Marxist school in Swat Valley
A girl locked out of school by force and a girl pushed out by neglect lose the same future.
When Malala Yousafzai stood before the United Nations in 2013 and declared that “one child, one teacher, one book and one pen can change the world,” much of the world imagined Afghanistan. The image seemed to fit easily. Afghanistan had already become a global symbol of women barred from schools and public life under militant rule. Yet …

Listen HERE to the INTERVIEW, to air June 17 on 91.7 FM, KYAQ (dot) org!

We talked for an hour on my radio show. Andony Melathopoulos, Associate Professor Pollinator Health Extension, Department of Horticulture | Oregon State University….

There are ages when humanity loses its ability to tell the difference between truth and spectacle, wisdom and noise, justice and performance. Ours is such an age. Discernment — once a basic civic and spiritual discipline — has withered under the weight of distraction, propaganda, and the relentless hunger for entertainment. We no longer ask whether something is true. We ask whether it is trending.

Discernment requires patience, humility, and moral clarity. But we live in a time that rewards speed, certainty, and outrage. And so the human mind, once capable of depth, now skims the surface of everything. We react …

While eyes remain peeled on Israel’s increasingly violent and expanding campaign in Lebanon, the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is proving ever more predatory with the Gaza Strip. With aggrandizing impunity, more territory is being acquired for familiar reasons: Hamas is on the run and needs to be crushed further (the organisation is proving oddly resilient and contradictory to Israeli objectives here); Palestinian autonomy, even in so small an area, would be a future threat to Israel unless heavily invigilated and policed; and, well, there is that old desire to ethnically cleanse the territory.

Speaking at a conference on May …

The New York Times attempted to ‘balance’ Nicholas Kristof’s documentation of the systematic rape of Palestinians by Israeli forces with yet another unverified rape ‘investigation’ claiming that Hamas had weaponized sexual violence on October 7. It was written by the paper’s pro-Israel Jerusalem-based reporter, Isabel Kershner.
Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times Op-ed piece titled The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians, published on May 11, was based on documentation and grueling victim testimonies of rapes that Palestinians have experienced at the hands of Israeli security forces. Brutal and sadistic acts of sexual torture are described in a piece …

Chancellor Merz,

When I wrote an open letter to you a half year ago, I urged Germany to pursue diplomacy with Russia rather than the normalization of war. Six months later, the situation in Europe is dramatically worse. Europe and Russia are slipping into open war. And in that drift, Chancellor, your responsibility is singular. No European leader — not in Paris, not in Warsaw, not in Rome — holds the position that Germany holds, or has the power that you personally hold, to interrupt this catastrophe. Will you try for peace?

You yourself, with Prime Minister Meloni and President Macron, called …

Although they are “public schools” on paper, in reality charter schools are private businesses that siphon billions of dollars a year from traditional public schools. These traditional public schools educate about 88% of the nation’s youth and are typically under-funded and vilified by the rich and their political and media representatives.

Over the last 30+ years, numerous court cases, thousands of news articles, and hundreds of scholarly papers and books have shown that charter schools also regularly oppose public accountability and transparency. Not surprisingly, the charter school sector is constantly plagued …

Every society reveals its true character in the way it treats its children. A nation may boast of power, wealth, or technological brilliance, but if its young grow up in fear, hunger, or neglect, its moral foundation is already compromised. A global order that pours trillions into weapons while millions of children lack food, shelter, or safety is not simply misguided — it is ethically disfigured. (Readers should confirm political information with trusted sources.)

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the United States spent $916 billion on its military in 2023 — more than the next ten countries …

Abdullah Öcalan

Among the many horrors unleashed by the current regime in the U.S., little has been written about its impacts on the extraordinary social and political experiment that was underway in Eastern Syria, in the area of Rojova. Even though Rojova has been essentially dismantled due to Trump’s policies in the region, I think more of us need to understand what they attempted, as it could provide a model for the future, once the authoritarian project has …