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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 …

How cool are spies?

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.”

CJPME’s Media Accountability Project (MAP) had two important victories this week against poor reporting on Palestine:

The CBC was forced to issue a country-wide on-air correction after falsely claiming that the illegally-occupied West Bank was “disputed territory.” After CJPME requested a formal review by the Ombuds, CBC aired an on-air correction across Canada, clarifying: “On July 27, World Report ran a story about violence in the occupied West Bank. At one point, it was incorrectly referred to as disputed territory. It should have been referred to as …

Throughout all the news cycles over the years, you can count on a continuity in U.S. government/media propaganda and strategy. Make a time capsule, fill it with today’s news, hide it away, and pull it out in five, ten, or fifteen years, and while many details (tactics) will have changed, the underlying themes will remain. Or do it in reverse.

Assuming the world miraculously escapes a nuclear war of annihilation, when the criminal Donald Trump is long gone from office, replaced by a …

I initially wrote this piece in 2024 during the student uprisings that took place around the United States. The content was focused on Gaza and the people who made up the movement for Palestine in the belly of the beast. I’ve rewritten some of it and replaced Gaza with Cuba. The arguments needed no editing at all.

In March, a delegation traveled to Cuba to bring medical aid to Cubans who were suffering under the fuel blockade imposed on them by the United States of America. In recent months, people and organizations who took part, including my own organization, have been …

Crisis of the West, Crisis of Realism
How do we explain the self-defeating and self-harming policies of Western states?

Europe seems to be happily deindustrializing, the US proxy war in Ukraine is killing hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of Ukrainians—the very people NATO swears it wants to protect—and by now this warfare is close to swapping over into the continent. And what does Europe do? Doubling down on the policies that have been failing them for twelve years—creating a 21st sanctions package (!). No diplomacy in …

Adapted from Wired for Authoritarianism: American Oligarchies and How to Re-Wire America for the People
The reigning narrative of US democracy is based on two widely shared beliefs. The first is that the capitalist system and its free markets ensure freedom and pluralism throughout society. The second is that our constitution and electoral system are forms of political wiring designed to ensure a democratic state. While an important veneer of democracy perpetuates this story, and it sounds intuitively plausible, theoretical, historical and empirical studies suggest that it …

Economic change in India is usually told through statistics. Growth rates, foreign investment, digital payments, infrastructure projects and the expansion of the technology sector all contribute to a narrative of a country ‘developing’ and moving rapidly into the future.

The ideology of ‘development’ aside (see The Agrarian Imagination for a biting critique), critical observers will be aware that statistics can be manipulated and reveal only part of a story. Moreover, they may tell us about economic output while saying little about the everyday realities of the people who produce, transport, sell and consume the goods and services that keep …

Who is programming who when it comes to AI?

Book burning. Book pulping. Book vandalising. It’s all the fashion and, dare one say it, the rage. Libraries are carting them off to the dump. Repositories of memory are being shredded in favour of supposedly more useful digital formats. And now, Anthropic’s hungering for books, not as sources of enlightened knowledge so much as blue raw data for their Language Learning Models, is there for all to see. Acquire the books in question. Give service providers the task of severing their spines. Employ scanners to process the information. Dispatch the paper to be pulped and recycled (awfully good of them). …

Who does AI trust most?

Another trumpeted achievement, another heralded occasion of momentous significance. Or it may be nothing of the sort. US President Donald J. Trump is again on the stage pulling on the strings of history. This time, attention has shifted to whether Hamas and other armed groups in the Gaza Strip will disarm, something conditional on Israel withdrawing its forces from the war-torn enclave. And there, we are presented with the first, insoluble problem.

The latest roadmap published by the US-led Board of Peace is intended to advance the rest of Trump’s 20-point peace plan signed by Hamas and Israel in …

Robert Kagan, veteran warmonger extraordinaire, wants to know what the “utility” would be of admitting that the war on Iraq was “a mistake.” I’m glad he asked.

But “mistake” is not exactly the word. This was a criminal action based on lies that killed over a million people, injured over 4 million people, made homeless over 4 million people, left behind permanent environmental devastation, shattered the rule of law, generated terrorism, impeded global collaboration on non-optional crises, diverted trillions of dollars …

The undeservedly discredited horse is again coming in for criticism as a food filler for items that make nary mention of its presence.  In a world of mass supply, changing of hands, and bewilderingly complex distribution channels, can anyone be sure that the final product is what it’s marked to be? In the food market, this is further compounded by the risk of accretions and additions to processed products en route. Tampering is bound to happen.

To that end, the investigations being conducted in Australia by the program Four Corners might induce something of a yawn. Relying on confidential documents obtained by New …