Ben-Gvir agitating for ethnic cleansing in the West Bank
In my youth, I was induced, and there was not a countervailing assertion proffered, that Zionism was both a citadel of mind and of landscape, that as a Jew Israel was my true place of sanctuary in a world that might tolerate me on sight one moment and shove me into a deathcamp-bound cattle …
Above photo: Activists tell Congress to stop applying unilateral coercive measures and lift the blockade on Cuba
Washington, DC — This spring constituents and grassroots organizations have been raising awareness in Congress and in public forums of the harms caused by Unilateral Coercive Measures (UCMs or “sanctions”). Sanctions have become the “go-to” foreign policy tool of the United States government, now impacting a quarter of the global economy and one-third of the world’s population. These measures cause an average of 564,000 deaths around the world annually—comparable to the toll from …
He can hardly be blamed for being given the brief by his Prime Minister. King Charles III is in the United States on a repair job, playing diplomatic handyman and mender for Sir Keir Starmer and the US-UK alliance so long regarded as special. On the occasion of the 250th anniversary of American independence, it was easy to forget that the British, despite losing its American colonies, gained some vengeance through the exploits of Major General Robert Ross, who, on August 14, 1814, burned down the White House, the …
In the last few days, I’ve seen three separate instances of generative AI being used to promote propaganda for US-Israeli war agendas, which are worth paying attention to.
Firstly, an Israel-based company called Generative AI for Good has been creating deepfakes of supposedly real women who say they were sexually assaulted by government forces in Iran.
“An Israel-based AI firm, Generative AI for Good, claims to be using deepfake technologies for positive ends. ‘Positive’ appears to mean creating deepfake videos to help the illegal US-Israel war on Iran.
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“Generative AI for Good claims that it uses AI to ‘help survivors testify safely — in their …
Intellectual giants are in painfully short supply in the Trump administration, but if there was anyone who might lay claim to cerebral weight of any sort, Elbridge Colby might be one of them. Self-styled as a China hawk, the US Under Secretary of War for Policy must privately be bemused by the changeling that has become US foreign policy, one now latched onto, yet again, the issues of the Middle East and the shaking tail that is Israel. President Donald Trump, the man who promised to end wars and terminate the state of permanent conflict the US has found itself in for …
We worked with animator Amjad Jarrar and audio artist Iyas Horani to animate “Colonial Violence and Reproductive Injustice in the West Bank.” This visual, which we launched with our partner MIFTAH (the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy) in January 2025, examines the colonial roots of reproductive injustice in the West Bank. It complements MIFTAH’s Women of Palestine series, which highlights multiple gender-specific impacts of Israeli settler colonialism on Palestinian women….
As World Press Freedom Day (May 3) nears, it’s a good time to step back and assess how journalists and news outlets are faring in our current media climate.
President Donald Trump came back to the White House and picked up right where he left off, insulting and attacking the press on an almost daily basis, suing media outlets, and taking a number of concrete actions to restrict press freedom. Against this backdrop, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) will release its 2026 World Press Freedom Index on April 30.
Every year, RSF scores and ranks 180 countries and territories based on their level of …
World-renowned neurosurgeon Professor Charlie Teo is facing the prospect of a permanent ban from practising medicine in Australia — a move that could have major consequences for patients and the country’s healthcare system. In this exclusive report, Charlie Teo reveals how ongoing investigations and audits by the NSW Health Care Complaints Commission could end his career on home soil, despite his continued performance of complex brain surgeries overseas. The controversial surgeon has been under strict conditions since 2023 following findings of “unsatisfactory professional conduct” linked to two high-risk tumour operations. Teo claims the latest scrutiny …
It would be strategically wise for Iran not to wait longer to retaliate against Israel’s continuing gross violations of the truce on the Lebanese and Palestinian fronts of the war that was initiated by Israel and the US in Southwest Asia, AKA the Middle East. Iran warned the US on April 8th that the truce – agreed the day before – applied equally to all fronts or none, not just Iran, and that they and their allies in the Axis of Resistance (Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, and Yemen) would respond collectively, immediately, and in force along all fronts. Israel’s current massive …
The first charter school law in the U.S. was passed in Minnesota in 1991. The first charter school in the country, City Academy High School, opened in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1992. Since then charter school laws have been passed in 47 states, Washington DC, Puerto Rico, and Guam.
Over the past 34 years many charter schools have failed and closed in Minnesota. According to a 2025 article titled “More Minnesota charter schools are facing possible termination,” “In 2024 [alone], nine charter schools closed, the most ever. But records show another …
Not much good comes from war. Qualifying exceptions, however, can be found. The United Nations, tarnished, libelled and mocked for being simultaneously ineffectual and intrusive, was the mediating entity for international relations that grew from the calamities of the Second World War. Without that somewhat frail body, it is hard to imagine how the patchwork of human rights, however uneven, could have been stitched. The Iran War, and the consequential choking of the Strait of Hormuz by Tehran and Washington respectively have also had an unintended, meliorating effect. If the pressing …
I. The First Law of Human Existence
Long before nations rose or religions shaped doctrine, humanity lived by a simple truth: life carries inherent worth. Every people, every lineage, every ancestral memory held some version of this understanding. It was not carved into stone or written in books; it was woven into existence itself.
The commandment not to kill predates scripture. It predates the moral systems we later built. It is a boundary embedded in the structure of life — a limit that protects the fragile order of creation. To cross it is not merely to break a rule; it is to …
The tyranny of the Ayatollahs, subjugation of women, and the lack of political freedom in Iran disturb and engage the world. These serious problems deserve attention, but they are neither the only issues that define the Islamic Republic nor unique in a world of numerous oppressive governments. Focusing on Iran’s domestic policies, much of which a hostile press distorts, and ignoring a brave Iran, a nation that has placed itself in difficulties to help the oppressed Palestinians in their struggle with the “democratic” and genocidal Israel, sidetracks a key component of the mechanism that liberates the world from those who …
For many socialists and revolutionaries for a long time, the “working class” has been seen as THE revolutionary group. Karl Marx in the 1840s was among the first to identify the working class as a key sector, particularly the industrial working class which was growing in numbers in the mid-1800s as the industrial revolution advanced in Europe and elsewhere. Marx saw this sector of the population as the key revolutionary sector for several reasons.
First, industry was concentrating large numbers of people, by the hundreds and thousands, into factories where the workers …
0:00 Where Does the Iran War Go From Here? 10:13 Iran’s Growing Power Since the War Began 14:37 Where Does the Hatred Towards Iran Come From? 24:37 The Nuclear Weapon Lie Surrounding Iran 32:51 The Greater Israel Project …
More than fifty years ago, after reports of government abuse that the CIA was illegally collecting information about political activities of American citizens, the Senate created a Select Senate Commission in1975 which became known as the Church Committee named after its Chair, Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho).
An earlier 1972 Supreme Court Decision that warrantless electronic surveillance constituted a Fourth Amendment violation contributed to a decade of questioning whether the country’s intelligence activities were Constitutional – those concerns may still be relevant.
The Church committee investigated intelligence abuses and covert action of the CIA, …
Orientation Who’s in and who’s out? One of the major controversies within the Neopagan movement is whether a tradition should draw from the country of its birth or whether Neopagans should be eclectic, drawing from many traditions throughout the pagan world. Those who are purists attempt to practice the ancient traditions of for example, the Egyptians, the Greeks or the Italians. However, in what is called the “Northern tradition” organizations like Folkish Heathens and Asatru Folk Assembly draw from Viking, Nordic and German traditions. Some of these organizations insist that only white people …
The current failing effort to make Iran out to be a major threat to world peace starts the clock at 1979 in its propaganda effort to justify U.S. aggression against Tehran, which deliberately overlooks the events of 1953, when a joint U.S.-British effort overthrew the then secular Iranian government in order to take over the country’s oil industry.
Much like John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen, who successfully plotted the U.S. coup against him, Mohammad Mossadegh (Time’s Man-of-the-Year in 1952) came from an affluent background, welcomed the principles of capitalist democracy, and loathed Marxism. What set the three men on …
The large-scale US airstrike on Venezuela was unprecedented in modern history. The surprise attack forcibly kidnapped President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, First Combatant Cilia Flores, from Fort Tiuna on the outskirts of Caracas. The US killed over 100 people in the early morning hours of January 3, 2026, including reportedly some civilians in the neighboring Ciudad Tiuna social housing complex.
We visited Ciudad Tiuna 50 days after the US bombing to hear the resident’s accounts. We were the second “solidarity brigade” to visit …
They have kept their strategy of cultural and institutional vandalism generously broad in recent campaigns against their adversaries. It therefore came as something of a surprise that much febrile fuss was made about this month’s antics of an IDF soldier photographed attacking a statue of Jesus in southern Lebanon on the edge of Debel with a sledgehammer. Instead of its usual qualifications, haughty denials and coarse justifications, the Israel military accepted the veracity of the image and viewed the act “with great severity and emphasises that the soldier’s conduct is wholly inconsistent with the values expected of its …
Every so often, a paper comes along that does more than add another data point. It forces you to reconsider the assumptions sitting quietly underneath modern medical practice. This newly published study in Molecular Psychiatry is one of those papers.
This large U.S. study of over 6 million pregnancies found that commonly prescribed medications that interfere with cholesterol synthesis during pregnancy were associated with a roughly 47 percent increased risk of autism in offspring.
Roughly 11 percent of pregnant women were prescribed at least one of …
It may be impossible for a functioning mind, a rationally thinking person to understand how the world, the entire planet of 195 countries allowed Israel’s brutal genocide against Palestinian children and its families to occur on a daily basis, consistently for more than two years.
Specifically, equally puzzling to grasp how the American public returned to its shallow material world, to avoid the painful reality that it was a US President, the one who campaigned and was elected as a Peace President who created an appalling dilemma. That same President supplied Israel …
A coalition of veterans groups gathered in the nation’s capitol on Monday to express their deep opposition to the U.S. war on Iran. One hundred and thirty (130) veterans and military family members held a solemn, disciplined protest in the Capitol rotunda demanding that the Trump administration end its illegal war on Iran and that Congress stop funding the war.
The veterans, many of whom served in Iraq and Afghanistan, conducted a flag folding ceremony and played Taps on a bugle in honor of the 13 service members who have already …
I’m not sharing knowledge. I’m sharing encounters with absences of knowledge. It starts with the recognition of the categorical illusion of positive or conclusive knowledge — not the illusion of all knowledge, but the illusion of ever being able to know anything in a final form.
Science itself was built on this categorical realization that its theories do not lead to conclusive knowledge. However, even science seems to have lost sight of this initiating insight.
Or, as I said in an earlier essay:”This is what bothers me about the debate between evolution and creationism. Creationists criticize science as ‘mere theory.’ And science …
The purpose of HR 2289, currently being considered in the U.S. Congress, is to remove all local control over the rollout of 5G cell towers. There are many reasons that unregulated 5G (which stands for 5th generation) will bring devastation. It will greatly increase the risk of out of control fires, and cause very adverse health impacts, for which there is extensive documentation,
Overloading Utility Poles Causes High Risk of Wildfires
Unless you have been paying very close attention to the rollout of these small cells (short for cell towers), you may not be aware that they can allow for small-refrigerator-size cabinets of …
The inter-webs are abuzz with what Julian Casablancas and the Strokes did at the end of their final performance at Coachella a couple days ago. In the moment, in front of a bleary-eyed crowd of mostly 23-year-olds experimenting with unnamed drugs, it’s possible it felt like trying to educate a family of potato bugs on the theoretical quantum vacuum fluctuations near the event horizon of a black hole. But then the performance went viral.
The Strokes showed us how a pop culture platform can be used …
Sheelasha Rajbhandari (Nepal), Agony of the New Bed, 2023.
In the first general elections held since the Gen Z protests rocked Nepali society, the four-year-old Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP), led by rapper-turned-politician Balendra Shah, won a two-thirds majority. The left parties, on the other hand, suffered a major defeat, with the former ruling Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist–Leninist) or – CPN-UML – winning only 9 out of 165 seats in the House of Representatives. The Nepal Communist Party – a newly formed merger of over …
The Earth is in a fine mess, but human beings sealed in laboratories full of energy and vigour, attached to screens, and running tests about conditions in space, have another reason to cheer. Between April 1 and April 11, the Artemis II undertook a flyby of the Moon and returned safely. News bulletins, life stream feeds and podcasts afforded it saturating room and coverage. This was the first Moon mission with a crew in over five decades. Cue, then, for the grand claims, the exaggerated hopes, the silliness of it all.
Absurdly, the effort is being heralded as a collective …
