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The rank odour of opportunity seems to have presented itself to Australia’s Albanese government. To balance its apparently principled promise to recognise Palestinian statehood come the 80th United Nations General Assembly next month, it seemed only fair that some firm measure be taken against another Islamic outfit to balance the ledger. The Israelis were watching closely, and a sense of concern had started to bubble along the diplomatic channel that Canberra was proving wobbly. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had made his views felt: “History will remember Albanese for what he is: A weak politician who betrayed Israel and …

Our churches seem quite unconcerned about saving the Christian presence in the Holy Land.

They have watched the horror in Gaza day after day for nearly 23 months and the brutal military occupation of the Holy Land for over 7 decades. They surely know about Israel’s Zionist-driven ambition to destroy the lives of the Palestinian people and seize their homeland, “the very place where Jesus Christ walked upon the earth and where walls now separate families and the children of God — Christian, Muslim and Jew — in a deepening cycle of violence, humiliation and despair”.

It is 20 years since the …

Like the Virgin Mary, Rawan Aljuaidi speaks with dignity, each word chaste and carefully chosen; only facts and intention are allowed when spoken.

Can you do a story about my infant son, Aboud? He suffers from malnutrition.

I’ve known Rawan for almost eighteen months, and this is the first time she’s asked me to write a story for her. Most refugees beg for help, pleading as if their lives depend on it. Maybe that’s because their lives do depend on it. But Rawan waits patiently like an elder, even though she’s only twenty-eight years old. And that’s fitting, because our online fundraising …

The recent Putin–Trump spectacle drew a thousand journalists to Alaska, culminating in an overhyped meeting with European leaders and President Zelensky at the White House. And for what? Nothing happened.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration deployed the National Guard in Washington, D.C., followed days later by FBI raids on the home of John Bolton, his former national security adviser and one of his fiercest critics.

The drama continued when Federal Judge Kathleen M. Williams issued a preliminary injunction on August 21, 2025, halting the expansion of the controversial “Alligator Alcatraz” immigration detention facility and ordering its operations wound down.

These headlines all share a …

U.S. envoy Thomas Barrack urges Lebanese journalists to be “civilized,” “kind,” and “tolerant,” rather than “animalistic.” The irony is impossible to miss. Anyone familiar with the history of U.S. involvement in the Middle East will understand the depth of the hypocrisy.

Mr. Barrack implies that the “problem with the region”—the “chaos”— stems from Middle Easterners’ supposed lack of civilization, or worse, their allegedly subhuman nature. In truth, “the chaos” has been actively manufactured by the United States: sponsoring terrorism, violating sovereignty, propping up dictators, bombing cities and infrastructure, killing civilians, and plundering resources—just as it has done elsewhere in the world.

It …

A man looks at newspapers front pages the day after presidential and legislative elections in La Paz, Bolivia

At the general election on August 17 2025, Bolivia’s right wing scored a greater electoral and political victory than expected, bringing 20 years of MAS-IPSP government to an end.

Christian Democrat (PDC) candidate Rodrigo Paz Pereira surprisingly won the first round with a robust 31.32 per cent, followed closely by hard-right candidate “Tuto” Quiroga with 27.35 per cent. Another right-wing candidate, Samuel Doria (Unity), came third with 20.63 per cent, with yet another right-wing candidate, Manfred Reyes Villa (APB, Autonomy …

They didn’t act like people and they didn’t act like actors.  It’s hard to explain.

–  J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

With all the hullabaloo about President Donald Trump’s “peace” gestures toward Russia over Ukraine and the resetting of U.S.-Russia bi-lateral relations, it is worth remembering the “pivot to Asia” announced by the Obama administration in 2011 and the coup d’état it carried out in Ukraine in 2014.  For those who might not remember, I would recommend two films: John Pilger’s The Coming War on China and Oliver Stone’s …

Several people have been writing recently about the use the Israeli military has been making of Bulldozers of Mass Destruction (BMDs) in its erasure campaign in Gaza. On Tuesday, Haaretz published a wide-reaching investigation into the topic by Hagai Amit. It starts like this:

In the week that has passed since I began working on this story – until the time you are reading it – hundreds of pieces of heavy engineering equipment from Israel have demolished hundreds, if not thousands, of homes in the Gaza Strip, with the …

(Full article …)

In late August 1968, one of the largest military protests in American history took place at Fort Hood in Central Texas. You’ve never heard of it.

Why?

The year before, on April 4, 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke out for the first time against the Vietnam War. He was assassinated one year to the day later. Just three weeks after MLK was assassinated, World Heavyweight Boxing Champion Mohammad Ali appeared in Houston, Texas, before a Vietnam War draft board. He was called for induction four times, but refused to answer his summons. …

With the usual qualifier that I could be entirely wrong, my sense is that both the Alaska Summit and Monday’s meeting at the White House were reality checks. They revealed that Putin was finally able to convince the “collective Trump” (Gilbert Doctorow’s term), that the war in Ukraine did not begin with the Russian invasion of February 2022 but with the February 2014 Maidan coup in Kiev that overthrew the democratically elected Ukrainian president Victor Yanukovych. It was part of the neocon’s grand strategy of using Ukraine in a proxy war to bleed Russia before taking on China.¹Thomas I. …

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Have you read “The Case for Military Intervention to Stop the Gaza Genocide“? I don’t mind promoting it to you, since I agree with most of it (and also consider most of it to do absolutely nothing to advance any case for military intervention to stop the Gaza genocide).

The enormous problem we face is not the people who care enough and are desperate enough to make this misguided proposal. The enormous problem is the usual one: corrupt, evil, malfunctioning, and sadistic governments abetted by great masses of people too busy, distracted, ignorant, or uncaring to try …

History shows that famines are, for the most part, engineered. Be it through carelessness, selfishness or plain malice on the part of officialdom, creating the circumstances under which a population expires to hunger is a matter of construction. As the economist and Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen so powerfully showed in Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (1981), the focus on the cause of famines should be less on the food supply and more on the economic, social and political factors surrounding them. Food prices might severely spike. Food distribution systems can fail. Certain groups in …

Is Russia an agent of destabilization in Africa or a lifeline for nations seeking sovereignty? In this second installment of our extended conversation with Dr. Gerald Horne, we challenge Western historical narratives and explore the hard truths behind Africa’s security challenges, the transition from the Wagner Group to the Africa Corps, and the shared grievances that are drawing Moscow and the continent closer.

AFRICOM Watch Bulletin spoke with Professor Gerald Horne for a special two-part exploration of the Russia-Africa relationship. Professor Horne holds the John J. and Rebecca Moores Chair of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston. …

Ever since childhood they’d called me Champion. In school, at work, in the gym, just about everybody would greet me as Champion. (Even our mood-disordered vicar, who wouldn’t call anybody by first name or nickname even if his life depended on it, brought himself to address me Mr. Champion every so often.)

Frankly, the only rationale for this exaggerated cognomen was that while the other centipedes had one hundred legs, I sported one hundred and one. This relatively small advantage was enough to catapult me into living legend, and the moniker clung like an Olympic gold or a Nobel Prize.

My …

Democrats are politically flummoxed by the flurry of regressive proposals and policies daily manufactured by the Trump administration. Party leadership has been reduced to a reactionary political presence, simply reacting to Trump’s initiatives. Weakened and disoriented, the party seems incapable of effectively challenging Trump’s disingenuous populism. It does not forcefully attack his many vulnerabilities. Democratic party leaders, moreover, refuse to embrace a comprehensive program of fundamental social, economic and environmental projects and guarantees that are both popular and a genuine alternative vision of America.

The beleaguered Social Security Administration offers an enormous opportunity to weaken Trump’s political strength. Ostensibly driven by …