• UN votes against US’ Xinjiang proposal
• Xinjiang exports to more than 80 countries
• US policy of semiconductor “chokehold”
• China moved from 34th to 11th position in the Global Innovation Index
As a prince, the new British monarch developed some curious attitudes to architecture. He also proved to be a dedicated meddler behind building projects he did not like. Combined, this led to a number of interventions that cast a shadow over his accession to the throne. What will Charles III do when it comes to the next grand building proposal to interrupt the London skyline?
On the evening of May 30, 1984, the then Prince Charles told leading architects assembled at Hampton Court to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Royal Institute of British Architects how exactly he felt about …
President John F. Kennedy created the national fallout shelter system in 1961. Within two years, the five boroughs of New York City were home to about 18,000 officially designated shelters.
This designation process was as faith-based as any religion I’ve ever encountered!
Local “civil defense agents” would survey a building to decide if it could survive (!) a nuclear explosion. Any building deemed indestructible would receive a government-issued placard (see my photo above) to be mounted outside to guide anyone who happened to be fleeing from World War III.
Canada’s obsession with NATO is escalating the conflict in Ukraine and increasing the possibility of nuclear confrontation.
During a press conference with her US counterpart last week foreign affairs minister Melanie Joly said Canada supported fast tracking Ukraine into NATO. If that transpired, alliance members would be treaty bound to invoke Article 5 of the NATO charter, which commits member states to consider an armed attack against one member an attack against all. It could lead to a formal declaration of war with Russia, which would greatly increase the odds of a nuclear exchange.
In July, 2006, Israel bombed Lebanon. The news released fury and anguish in me that was beyond words. I visualized innocent, helpless babies swimming in their blood as bombs blasted away their lives. I struggled to grasp the needless, wanton destruction of lives, homes, futures, and dreams. Why? Why had the decision been made to do this? Who made it? Who benefited? These questions exploded in my mind. I was driven to put on canvas what I couldn’t write on paper.
What appeared was a larger-than-life furious woman holding a dead …
Below the elevated platform at the Astoria Boulevard/Hoyt Avenue N train station, my neighborhood plays host to Columbus Square — which is actually shaped like a warped triangle. Let Manhattan have its mundane Columbus Circle, we in Queens are far more geometrically sophisticated. It’s a square triangle for us.
Naturally, a statue of Christopher Columbus adorns this triangular square. As you can see from the photo above, the city has given the bare minimum effort to protect this particular monument from being, um… canceled.
Anyway, if one were to believe sculptor Angelo Racioppi’s …
Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar had so much money that he literally could not spend it fast enough. He and the Medellín cartel he started dominated the cocaine trade in the 1980s. By then, he was earning about $420 million per week.
Storing piles of cash in fields and warehouses, he’d write off 10 percent of it each year (that’s more than $2 billion) accepting that it would inevitably be lost, destroyed by the elements, or eaten by rats.
Of his many palatial homes, the King of Cocaine’s favorite was a $63 million/7,000-acre …
Wilfried Balima (Burkina Faso), Les Trois Camarades (‘The Three Comrades’), 2018.
On 30 September 2022, Captain Ibrahim Traoré led a section of the Burkina Faso military to depose Lieutenant Colonel Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba, who had seized power in a coup d’état in January. The second coup was swift, with brief clashes in Burkina Faso’s capital of Ouagadougou at the president’s residence, Kosyam Palace, and at Camp Baba Sy, the military …
Demographic angst is a terrifying thing, especially to leaders concerned about poor returns from horizontal folk dancing. Viktor Orbán of Hungary is particularly apprehensive that precious Hungarian blood is not being propagated, facing dilution, if not disappearance, from hordes of swarthy immigrants from the Middle East and Africa.
In Italy, the country’s imminent first female prime minister is much of that same view. Giorgia Meloni speaks about being a “woman, mother [and] Christian” with messianic purpose: to defend “God, country and family”. The stress is on mother virtue rather than female rights, the latter only being relevant when it comes …
Children of my Gaza refugee camp were rarely afraid of monsters but of Israeli soldiers. This is all that we talked about before going to bed. Unlike imaginary monsters in the closet or under the bed, Israeli soldiers are real, and they could show up any minute – at the door, on the roof or, as was often the case, right in the middle of the house.
The recent tragic death of a 7-year-old, Rayan Suliman, a Palestinian boy from the village of Tuqu near Bethlehem, in the occupied West Bank, stirred up so many memories. The little boy with olive …
A year ago, October 16, the long arm of US extra-territorial judicial overreach abducted Alex Saab and threw him into prison in Miami, where the Venezuelan diplomat has languished ever since.
The official narrative is that Saab had bilked the Venezuelans in a “vast corruption network” and the US as the world’s self-appointed cop was simply enforcing good business practices. However, commentary by Washington insiders corroborates that Saab’s “crime” was trying to obtain humanitarian supplies in legal international trade but in circumvention of the illegal US sanctions on Venezuela.
by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / October 12th, 2022
You know, when police start becoming their own executioners, where’s it gonna end? Pretty soon, you’ll start executing people for jaywalking, and executing people for traffic violations. Then you end up executing your neighbor ‘cause his dog pisses on your lawn.
— “Dirty Harry” Callahan, Magnum Force
When I say that warrior cops—hyped up on their own authority and the power of the badge—have not made America any safer or freer, I am not disrespecting any of the fine, decent, lawful police officers who take seriously their oath of office to serve and …
Tensions are heating up between the United States and Saudi Arabia after Riyadh-led OPEC and allied oil producing countries announced a big output cut, defying Washington’s pressure.
US Secretary of state, Antony Blinken, says the government is working closely with Congress to review alternatives regarding ties with Saudi Arabia. That’s a day after the 23 countries, together known as OPEC-Plus agreed to reduce the output by 2-million barrels per day from the coming November.
Oil producers insisted they want to boost the crude market already reeling from the global economic crisis. But the decision came amid soaring energy prices. Washington …
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies / October 11th, 2022
Attack on Kerch Strait Bridge linking Crimea and Russia Credit: Getty Images
On March 11, 2022, President Biden reassured the American public and the world that the United States and its NATO allies were not at war with Russia. “We will not fight a war with Russia in Ukraine,” said Biden. “Direct conflict between NATO and Russia is World War III, something we must strive to prevent.”
It is widely acknowledged that U.S. and NATO officers are now fully involved in Ukraine’s operational war planning, …
Much like individual change, societal developments happen gradually, often painfully; even when sudden shifts take place, seemingly ‘out of the blue’, they are the result of an accumulation of incremental steps – the last straw on the camel’s back as it were. Small developments may slip by unnoticed, major events scream out and demand our attention. Take man-made global warming – going on for 70 years or so, ignored for most of that time, until one July, when, in 40°C heat people collapse, crops are wiped out, water is rationed and drought blights the land.
Aside from his genuine passion for the environment, Monbiot’s position on every major issue chimes precisely with that of his employer, the Guardian. He is not his own man. He’s owned
by Jonathan Cook / October 11th, 2022
Guardian columnist George Monbiot is, by his own admission, a very busy man. Dedicated as he is to issues such as soil loss, he has yet to find the time to throw his weight behind the campaign to free Julian Assange.
When thousands of supporters poured into London from all over the world at the weekend to besiege the British Parliament, creating a human chain around it, Monbiot, like his newspaper the Guardian, ignored the event.
The media mainly lie about Julian Assange’s case by ommitting information, helping to disappear him from public view. They did that this weekend by ignoring the many thousands who turned out to besiege Parliament with a human chain.
He’s the former Penn State assistant football coach and pedophilic monster who started a foundation, The Second Mile, in order to gain sexual access to prepubescent boys, hundreds of whom he molested, until eight heroic ones stepped forward to tell a jury about their ordeals in 2012, resulting in the sixty-eight-year-old Sandusky’s thirty-to-sixty-year prison term.
If you recall anything else about the case, it is probably the wrenching story of the ten-year-old “little boy in the shower,” who, on February 9, 2001, was seen being raped by Sandusky in a Penn State athletic facility. For some reason …
We exchanged sideways glances. It was a dubious claim, and the old judge we were talking to followed it with a glaring non sequitur.
“I think he killed himself,” insisted 76-year-old former judge Alexander Nemer. “I mean, look at the photos. Part of the man’s head is missing. Something blew it off. There’s a picture of a cat licking the inside of his skull when he’s there on the garage floor. I would generally say something took the top of his head off.”
Ignoring the disturbing image this statement conjured, Texas Public Radio …
Events continue to unfold at a quickening pace. Facing an alarming escalation in tensions around the world, we asked Cynthia McKinney for her current thoughts.
Cynthia McKinney is an American politician and assistant professor at North South University, Bangladesh. As a member of the Democratic Party, she served six terms in the United States House of Representatives, as the first African American woman ever elected to represent Georgia. She was also the first Member of Congress to demand an investigation of the events of 9/11 and the first to file articles of …
by Kathy Kelly and Nick Mottern / October 10th, 2022
Awaiting discharge from a hospital in Cairo, Adel Al Manthari, a Yemeni civilian, faces months of physical therapy and mounting medical bills following three surgeries since 2018, when a U.S. weaponized drone killed four of his cousins and left him mangled, burnt and barely alive, bedridden to this day.
On October 7th, President Biden announced, through Administration officials briefing the press, a new policy regulating U.S. drone attacks, purportedly intended to reduce the numbers of civilian casualties from the attacks.
Absent from the briefings was any mention of regret or compensation for the thousands of civilians like Adel and his family whose …
“The next few days will be crucial for his general health,” the lawyer, who married Assange in March, told reporters, adding “He is now locked in his cell for 24 hours a day.” Assange became sick on Friday with a cough and fever and was given …
Someone needs to explain to me why wanting clean drinking water makes you an activist, and why proposing to destroy water with chemical warfare doesnt make a corporation a terrorist.
–Winona LaDuke, “Canadian Oil Companies Trample on Our Rights” by Winona LaDuke, progressive.org. June 18, 2013.
Water is life. We are the people who live by the water. Pray by these waters. Travel by the waters. Eat and drink from these waters. We are related to those who live in the water. To poison the waters is to show disrespect for creation. To honor and protect the waters is our responsibility …
Introductory annotation by Patrice Greanville, editor of the Greanville Post:
As we could reliably predict, the Western media are self-righteously denouncing Moscow and rending their garments in an orgy of hypocrisy over what they frame as an act of “depraved terror”. Unfortunately, the hundreds of millions in the captive audience have nowhere to turn (or know how) to find out the truth and the proper historical context for the Ukraine war, the first thing the Western media suppressed even before the war formally began last February.
It must be noted …
On the latest slimed path Julian Assange has been made to trod, a few things have presented themselves. The rusty sword of Damocles may be suspended above him (he, we are informed, has contracted COVID-19), but there are those, in the meantime, willing to defend him with decent conviction against his dispatch to the United States, where he is certain to perish.
From the side of decent conviction and steadfastness came the October 8 protests across a number of cities, attended by thousands. A human chain numbering some 7,000 persons formed around the Houses of Parliament in London demanding …
Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s prime minister, grabbed the global limelight a few years ago, making headlines by stating she wanted to put “kindness” into politics. In 2019, Foreign Policy, a publication closely associated with the Atlantic Council and the US State Department, published the article ‘The Kindness Quotient’, a glowing promotion of Ardern.
The strategic marketing of Ardern in various publications has focused on her likeability, pro-environment stance, compassionate values and collaborative nature. To further appeal to liberal sentiments, she was said to represent everything Trump is not.
Ardern belongs to a set of global leaders who were groomed for their …
A few years after WW I, the poet T.S. Eliot opened his famous poem “The Wasteland” with these words: “April is the cruelest month … “ I think he may be wrong, for this October may be the cruelest month of all, followed by November. Unprecedented. You can hear the clicking and grating of spades if your antennae are attuned.
We are on the brink of ominous events created by the U.S. war against Russia. Yet so many people prefer to turn away and swallow the lies that the U.S. wants peace and not war and is the aggrieved party in …
