[Source: fakty.com.ua]
Fedor Shandor, Ukraine’s ambassador to Hungary, sparked an international scandal in March 2026 by posting a photo featuring a Hungarian flag riddled with bullet holes. In the photo, the diplomat poses in camouflage alongside the controversial Ukrainian Armed Forces commander Robert Brovdi (call sign: Magyar).
In modern Hungary, displaying the Hungarian flag with a hole in the center is associated with the memory of the suppression of the uprising and is unequivocally interpreted as a sign of …
I was born in the south-east of England 17 years after the end of the Second World War, the most destructive conflict in human history. As a child, the 17-year gap seemed a lifetime; as a 64-year-old, it seems like the immediate aftermath. Everyone had fought in the war: your teacher, newsagent, headmaster, dentist, doctor. I met stereotypically mustachioed friends of my dad who had fought in Spitfires in the skies directly overhead. Or they had flown …
Depending on which historical sources you care to consult, the Pope has been a figure of obloquy, ridicule, and abomination. This mediator between the terrestrial and the divine was always set for the battering. Martin Luther’s violent Protestant split from the body of the Catholic Church was merely one aspect of attacking the occupants of that office. Acrimonious disputes between the secular arm of the State and Church power have also figured. In the 11th century, Pope Gregory VII famously battled the Holy Roman Emperor, King Henry IV, in the Investiture Controversy over who had the power to appoint bishops.
Nothing about this dystopia feels natural. We all sense it deep in our marrow. We all know something has gone terribly wrong.
If you lived in an alternate reality without wars or poverty, where everyone had enough, and governments did what was in the interests of the people and the ecosystem, it would never occur to you that there was anything odd about it. It would feel completely normal. Things would be more or less how you’d expect them to be.
You can’t say the same about the present status quo. The whole thing instinctively scans as weird and counterintuitive. The more …
I am not a believer in spiritual prophecy, but prediction is no more than deduction from facts, and more accurate, in my opinion. In our current global circumstances, the facts support some pretty nasty consequences that can be the subject of prophecy as well. Israel’s April 8, 2026, massive bombing of Beirut and other parts of Lebanon by an estimated 50 aircraft in the space of less than 20 minutes is the most obvious recent example, costing hundreds of civilian deaths and thousands of injuries, many of them permanent. It must have seemed like an apocalypse to those affected, as …
“Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. It’s very simple.”
— Donald Trump, 17 April 2026
The Second Biggest Mistake
The second biggest mistake connected to the United States-Israel war of choice against Iran occurred much before the current warring. The mistake was Ayatollah Khamenei issuing and steadfastly adhering to his fatwa against Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon.
It raises a what if question. What if there had been no fatwa against Iran developing a nuclear weapon and that Iran had developed a nuclear weapon?
Peculiarly, if Iran had developed a nuclear weapon, it is highly …
For the past few weeks the news has been filled with articles about the replacement of public control of Indianapolis Public Schools (IPS) with a top-down “board” comprised of unelected pro-privatization forces that will oversee both public schools and privately-operated charter schools in the city.
Such boards, commissions, and entities are nothing new when it comes to education; they exist in many states. They are mainly mechanisms that override democratic arrangements in order to accelerate the privatization and corporatization of education under the veneer of high ideals. The public has no …
The US government under Donald Trump has twice used disingenuous negotiations with Iran to provide cover for attacking it, in June 2025 and again before launching the current war in February. Now it is trying to do so for a third time.
On April 8, the US and Iran began a two-week ceasefire, after Trump accepted a ten-point peace plan drawn up by Iran as “a workable basis on which to negotiate.” But Vice President Vance and US negotiators rejected Iran’s plan out of hand at talks in Pakistan …
China Military Bugle, an official media account under the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) News Media Center, posted a video on social media on Saturday, showing drone-captured footage of how the PLA Eastern Theater Command (ETC) deployed naval and air forces to monitor the movement of a Japanese destroyer transiting the Taiwan Straits a day prior.
On Friday, the Japanese destroyer JS Ikazuchi transited the Taiwan Straits, leading to denouncement and opposition from Chinese authorities.
According to Senior Colonel Xu Chenghua, spokesperson of the PLA Eastern Theater Command, the transition of the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force (SDF) vessel, which took place from …
The American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and its allies have long been considered one of the strongest lobbies in Washington, exercising outsized influence, especially on U.S. policies toward Israel and the Middle East. Recently, its purported muscle has come under question, and votes in Congress the last two days show why, or at least that there is a stark partisan divide.
For all the hundreds of millions of dollars AIPAC and its allies have given to Democrats, they got exactly fourteen votes from Democrats in the House of Representatives and Senate the last two days …
Women and men all over the world are, for the first time in such large numbers, frontally challenging the male-dominator/female-dominated human relations model that is the foundation of a dominator worldview. At the same time the idea. . . of seeing the ‘the other’ as ‘the enemy’ is also being challenged. There is, most significantly, a growing awareness that the emerging higher consciousness of our global ‘partnership’ is integrally related to a fundamental reexamination and transformation of the roles of both women and men.”
Small Is Beautiful’s seemingly boundless appeal lies in its central theme: self-determination for local communities facing external mandates.
— Nate Seltenrich, Sonoma Magazine
In the heart of Sonoma Valley, in a region repeatedly scarred by catastrophic wildfire, a small rural community finds itself on the front lines of a battle that echoes far beyond its borders. Small Is Beautiful: The Quest to Save the Valley of the Moon, produced and directed by Carolyn M. Scott, is a gripping short documentary that chronicles the fight to stop a massive luxury development planned for the former Sonoma Developmental Center (SDC) — a state-owned property — …
The Italian weekly L’Espresso titled its latest edition “L’Abuso” or “The Abuse,” illustrating the cover with a photo of an armed Israeli settler sneering at a Palestinian woman with a frightened expression and filming her with his cell phone camera. The photographer, Pietro Masturzo, said the photo captured the first day of the olive harvest season in Hebron in the West Bank. Thousands of Palestinians were prevented from accessing their land due to intensified settler violence. On the day this photo was taken, 20 …
A curing system that heals by name, but disseminates malice silent.
This does not mean failure, but a trend.
The country experienced one of the worst public health crises in Taunsa Sharif and Ratodera. Parents took them to get regularly treated, because of fever, because of weakness, because of the common ailment. And most went away with something much worse. The condition of HIV which was later diagnosed in hundreds of children was life altering as they did not choose the condition, nor did they understand it. Enquiries were made into dangerous injection, re-imbursement syringes, …
One of the hallmarks of the mature adult is her ability to delay gratification. Among other things, it signifies self-control, emotional maturity, and a willingness and ability to think about, and plan for, the long-term future. Qualities that are essential to good strategic planning.
To the extent that we can attribute such traits to national governments, even the casual empiricism afforded by a Western mainstream media that bends over backwards to glorify one side’s behaviour cannot gloss over the wide gulf in strategic management capability between the principal combatants in the Iran war.
The character and …
Even as President Trump suggests that the war with Iran is “very close to over’ which he predicted multiple times in the past, the tentative ceasefire continues as Trump asserts a military blockage of the Strait of Hormuz against Iran.
Trump’s use of the term blockade is considered an act of war sealing off a location to prevent goods or people from entering or leaving, where one party prevents the entry or exit from or to a defined areas. Blockades are regulated by international law and require advance warning to neutral states. It is not considered a flippant term …
Be wary of a company – any company – who exerts moral muscle as they create software and digital platforms that are injurious and simultaneously lauded for curing that injury. Be especially wary of Anthropic. With sagacious loftiness, it warns of the disabling dangers of the artificial intelligence (AI) frontier. Principled, it tells the Trump administration it will not partake in creating AI software that aids mass surveillance, a move that earned it an order of excommunication as a “supply chain risk”. It then goes on to create Claude Mythos Preview, a seemingly dystopian model that will, …
Gayan Prageet (Sri Lanka), What are You Trying to Hide?, 2015.
On 20 March 2026, Sri Lankan President Anura Kumara Dissanayake made a startling revelation in parliament. He revealed that the government had declined a United States request to land two aircraft armed with anti-ship missiles at the Mattala airport in the south of the country. The president stated that the government turned down the US request to maintain Sri Lanka’s neutrality in the ongoing war on Iran.
President Dissanayake’s statement received significant attention in international media. …
So many people around the world are working toward peace. They want the US/Israel to stop bombing Iran and killing innocent people. They want Israel’s genocide of Gaza to end. They want to hinder Israel’s new genocide in Lebanon. They want the US not to kidnap President Maduro. They want the US not to lay siege to Cuba until its people starve.
All of those wishes or demands are lame. Sorry to say it like it is, but peace is boring and …
Nell Bernstein’s new book is called In Our Future We Are Free: The Dismantling of the Youth Prison. It tells us that in the United States in 2000 the number of young people held inside locked buildings was 108,800 and in 2022 it was 27,600. At least two-thirds of youth prisons and jails have been shut down. This is an enormous, dramatic, positive development in an era when most people imagine that the closest thing to good news out there is a stretch of 8 hours without any social media posts from Trump.
The United States has been at war with Iran, by one means or another, since 1979. Why? Because, in the words of Jeffrey Sachs, “Iran escaped from U.S. global hegemony.” Today, the war continues, but now we are existing within the mental delusions of Donald Trump, a psychopath who was convinced by Netanyahu that an easy victory over Iran was at hand.
During the recent negotiations in Islamabad, Netanyahu was openly bragging about talking to Vance, and we know that after April 22nd, Israel will attempt to sabotage the two-week truce. Trump must prevent it because this time Iran won’t wait, …
Supporting Independent Journalism in the Public Interest
by Mickey Huff / April 15th, 2026
Fifty years ago, Carl Jensen founded Project Censored because he knew that journalism was the lifeblood of democracy. He argued that the news media, despite its increasingly corporate and commercial nature, can have a positive influence on the world, especially when it operates ethically and independently in the public interest. He encouraged journalism programs at colleges across the country to turn out “more muckrakers and fewer buck-takers
Jensen championed the independent reporting of his contemporaries in his work with Project Censored, earning him accolades from luminaries such as I.F. Stone and …
Reflections on Two Big Ideas from Cedric Johnson’s After Black Lives Matter
by Joseph G. Ramsey / April 15th, 2026
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.
– Leonard Cohen, “Anthem” O Blacksmith’s Hammer, How hot and hard must you pound To change this cold wind?
– Richard Wright, Haiku #195
Cedric Johnson’s dogma-busting intervention and sweeping conjunctural analysis After Black Lives Matter (ABLM) concludes with a broad call to “Abolish the Conditions,” outlining what he calls an “abolition of a different sort” (341). Different, that is, from the abolitionism prominent in recent years that aims to straightaway …
by John Perry and Roger D. Harris / April 15th, 2026
Why are many Latin American countries shutting down nonprofit organizations? Amnesty International claims it has the answer: in every case, it’s part of a drive to restrict human rights and “tear up the social fabric.”
Amnesty’s new 95-page report (in Spanish, with an English summary), criticizes governments across the political spectrum for attacking what it calls “civil society organizations.” But Amnesty ignores the history of many such organizations and therefore why governments might be justified in closing them.
Here we focus on the report’s deficiencies in relation to Nicaragua, Venezuela (two NGOs interviewed in each) and Cuba (none).
Sitting down to lunch on his grandparents’ Ontario farm with relatives he had worked with that morning, the sweaty kid realized he had played a small part in raising everything on the table—beef, chicken, potatoes, carrots, and a few other items the farm had produced so far that season.
Rees remembers the moment as thrilling. “You know the expression, ‘You are what you eat’? As …
Letter to the Senate and the House Majority and Minority Leaders
by Bandy X. Lee / April 15th, 2026
I wish to thank all those who have worked tremendously hard to try to get out my message to the four living former commanders-in-chief that Donald Trump must be removed from his access to nuclear weapons and his command of the planet’s most powerful military for mental health reasons—please continue to do so! In the meantime, economist and influential advisor of governments Jeffrey Sachs has helped me to send the same message to Congress (this is in addition to our statement of medical concerns that the U.S. Senate requested):
