For seven years, from the moment Julian Assange first sought refuge in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, they have been telling us we were wrong, that we were paranoid conspiracy theorists. We were told there was no real threat of Assange’s extradition to the United States, that it was all in our fevered imaginations.
For seven years, we have had to listen to a chorus of journalists, politicians and “experts” telling us that Assange was nothing more than a fugitive from justice, and that the British and Swedish legal systems could be relied to handle his case in full accordance with …
In this week’s missive we explore the question: how do you strangle a corporation, when it doesn’t have a neck?
Some of my more regular listeners may be tired of hearing about the fact that the rent on my apartment in Portland, Oregon has more than doubled since I moved to the city twelve years ago. But as President Trump fires half his staff because they’re basically not fascist enough, I must return to the doubling of my rent, because it is the living room elephant. One pollster I …
Photo from Sky News UK
My hero, our hero, our solidarity genius, who made it possible for us all in the whole world to know so much of how, of what and why the evil powers who rule us do against us so that they can make the world in their image of wealth and power. Assange exposed so much of that evil for us all to see. We can not let them take him from us. He is our blood. He is our consciousness.
“EXIT NATO!” was the glaring title on a huge screen greeting the several hundred participants of the Anti-NATO Conference in Florence, Italy, on 7 April 2019. Officially it was called The International Conference on the 70th Anniversary of NATO, sponsored by Global Research of Canada and the International Coalition to Ban Uranium Weapons (ICBUW). I had the privilege to attend this important forum.
Following the EXIT NATO poster, was another huge slide decorating the conference wall proclaiming that NATO, as a reward for all their work for Peace, should be rewarded with the Peace Nobel Prize. No doubt, nuclear armament and …
A tied election can’t mask the fact that Israel has shifted fundamentally to the right – and that Netanyahu is now firmly in the driving seat
by Jonathan Cook / April 11th, 2019
Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party emerged from Tuesday’s Israeli election tied with the Blue and White party, led by Benny Gantz and other high-powered generals. Although each party has 35 seats in the 120-seat parliament, Netanyahu is now firmly in the driving seat.
The small far-right and religious extremist parties that are needed to make up a parliamentary majority lost no time in declaring their support for Netanyahu. That will allow him to establish his fourth consecutive government.
Netanyahu now enjoys the luxury of choosing between a narrow government of these far-right parties, and a right-wing national unity government embracing Gantz. The latter …
The current violence targeting Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails dates back to January 2. It was then that Israel’s Public Security Minister, Gilad Erdan declared that the “party is over.”
“Every so often, infuriating pictures appear of cooking in the terrorist wings. This party is coming to an end,” Erdan was quoted in the Jerusalem Post.
Then, the so-called Erdan’s Committee recommended various measures aimed at ending the alleged “party”, which included placing limits on prisoners’ use of water, banning food preparations in cells, and installing jamming devices to block the alleged use of smuggled cell phones.
Some of it is physical, but there’s more than muscle and mass to consider. Men seem to perceive, process, and react differently than women. A biological base to our differences is obvious, as is the likely interplay of socialization. It’s not necessarily a negative: male specialization has been integral to the survival of our species. Physical strength, aggression, and audacious behavior have enabled males to nurture and protect tribal identity, while concurrently spreading their half of the genetic seed. But it’s not always a positive either: male …
Memories can last forever. This is one of my forevers, still touching me deep after 66 years.
It’s 1953 and I’m 17, a cub sports reporter for the Jamestown (NY) Post-Journal. A close friend breaks into professional baseball down South. The paper sends me off to work up a feature story.
Come with me now to Maryville, Tennessee, to an America I never knew existed. Join me on the bus as I meet Jim Crow—up close and personal, then out the window, in this country I’d never seen before.
I don’t remember the name of the place where it happened. I just remember …
A report alleges tech giant Google manually manipulated special search engine results, blacklisting certain websites. RT America’s Manila Chan turns to investigative journalist Ben Swann to decipher this report.
Everyone’s favorite progressive newspaper, the New York Times, is hard at work making up for those dark days of old when it served as cultural gatekeeper of The Patriarchy. “Since 1851, the New York Times has published thousands of obituaries,” the paper writes on its website. “The vast majority chronicled the lives of men, mostly white ones.” In view of that, the Times has begun to correct the record, one week at a time, by publishing retroactive obituaries of non-men whose lives, and deaths, were ignored by the old guard. The series is called “Overlooked.”
Last October I wrote …
On 4th of April 2019, NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) “celebrated” the 70th Anniversary of its murderous existence. This horror organization was born sort of as a “Rosemary’s Baby”, signed into life in Washington DC, as the North Atlantic Treaty. Its creation was absolutely unethical but also absolutely “legal” — meaning what we, the west, have made the law, a man-made law for war, was applied by the Washington-Pentagon driven NATO. Estimates have it that NATO and its ‘allies’, cronies, proxies and mercenaries killed more than 20 million people since NATO’s existence, basically since the end of WWII. Compare this …
It’s designed to give the US more leg room in the sanction stakes but may end up having its own hemming consequences. The designation by the Trump administration of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a foreign terrorist organisation was meant to expand options for the US while shutting others out. While Trump attempts to defrost matters with North Korea, Iran has played the convenient bug bear.
As President Donald Trump outlined in a statement, “This unprecedented step, led by the Department of State, recognises the reality that Iran is not only a State Sponsor of Terrorism, but that the …
Israel’s election campaign, now in its last days, must be the first in which a sitting Israeli prime minister has sought to win over voters by boasting about how much he insulted a president of the United States.
One of the last campaign videos by Benjamin Netanyahu spliced together media clips of US analysts voicing disbelief back in 2011 at the Israeli prime minister’s public humiliation of Barack Obama.
The ad not only described Netanyahu as “lecturing” Obama, but showed him visibly angering the US president by berating him for chasing “illusions” in his pursuit of peace talks with the Palestinians. It …
Greens are political activists and can be found in every movement for economic, racial and environmental justice as well as peace. They do not organize as Greens but as people who are part of the popular movement. The article below about the week of protests against NATO highlights Greens who participated, often as organizers with other peace and justice activists. There were many more Greens at these events than are mentioned. I apologize to those who are omitted.
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Last week was one of contrast over the issue of …
Six-year-old Kate was playing with her younger brother, each had a Frisbee, which they threw as far as they could. After each round of throws Kate declared that she had ‘won’, having thrown the Frisbee further than her three-year-old sibling. She was the ‘winner’, and by extension, Richard was the loser. They were not playing together any longer, they were competing; Kate had been conditioned into the ideology of competition, presumably by school and her peers, perhaps her parents, and her brother, whether he likes it or not, would shortly join her.
Some years ago the Max-Planck Institute in Germany conducted …
It is no secret that charter schools coast to coast are rife with fraud, waste, corruption, and racketeering. This is closely related to the fact that charter schools annually siphon billions of public dollars from public schools that serve 90% of the nation’s youth, thereby undermining the ability of public schools to educate millions of poor and low-income minority students.
Thousands of investigative reports, news articles, blogs, and scholarly books and articles have over-documented this relentless assault on public education, the economy, society, and the national interest by charter schools. No other sector or institution comes close to the financial malfeasance …
Will 2019 go down in history as the year of insanity? Has hyper hysteria taken over the entire country? Is it no longer possible to make our way through the hazy maze of Political Correctness? Have we gotten to the point where guns are legal but an innocent hug can get you indicted?
Consider this: Thousands are protesting a simple touch on the shoulder, while no one is protesting the nuclear stockpile of weapons that endangers the entire planet.
The political smear campaign against Joe Biden is in high gear. Think about the amount of ink that has been wasted by the Press on this …
People ask: Why should I care about the ocean? Because the ocean is the cornerstone of earth’s life support system, it shapes climate and weather. It holds most of life on earth. Ninety-seven percent earth’s water is there. It’s the blue heart of the planet – we should take care of our heart. It’s what makes life possible for us. We still have a really good chance to make things better than they are. They won’t get better unless we take the action and inspire others to do the same thing. No one is without power. Everybody has the capacity …
The Malaysian government last year expressed a surprise change of heart on a policy long held dear; it would reconsider the death penalty. The case of Muhammad Lukman, sentenced to death in August for the purchase and sharing of medicinal marijuana, did much to stimulate outrage. On October 10th, law minister Liew Vui Keong announced that it would be abolished. Doing so would leave such last bastions as Vietnam, Singapore, Thailand and Indonesia.
In other parts, capital punishment is either continuing its grim dance (in Singapore, usage is on the rise; in Vietnam, it remains consistently high) or getting back …
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / April 7th, 2019
“No to NATO” Protest Washington DC, March 30, 2019 (Photo from UNAC)
This week, the Foreign Ministers of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) countries met in Washington, DC. NATO was greeted with bi-partisan support from Congress and by protesters who held actions and events from Saturday, March 30 through their meeting at the US Department of State on April 4.
US foreign policy is not the fabled “good cop” bringing peace to the world, but rather a policy of domination using military, economic and political power …
“Do you think it is possible that most of Europeans really don’t know about crimes their countries committed all over the world?”
“They don’t know… They don’t want to know… They make sure that they will never know,” I replied.
That Europe and North America have been constructed on hundreds of millions of corpses of, what George Orwell used to call,un-people, is fairly well established and proven fact. But somehow it never …
For starters, it sounds quite contrarian, antiquarian even, in this day and age, to assert one’s “socialism” in the obvious face of History, which changes its make-up several times a decade, anymore: a dab of recession here, a little more war-paint there.
Well, lipstick traces of all possible revolutions notwithstanding, it seems that most advanced Capitalist nations are, in fact, Socialist to a large degree; ironic that a country like China has emerged as an avatar of Capitalism after over half-a-century hatching a billion-plus plots behind its Great Wall of Communism.
The Man-in-the-Street might say: “Communism? Capitalism? It’s all Chinese to me…” …
On 6 April 1994, the Hutu presidents of Rwanda and Burundi, their top military staff and six French crew members were assassinated when surface-to-air missiles shot down the Rwandan presidential jet on approach to Kigali airport. It is now well established that the assassination plot that decapitated the Hutu-led governments was executed by Rwanda’s now president and strongman-for-life, then Major General Paul Kagame, commander of the terrorist Tutsi-Hima army that invaded Rwanda from Uganda.
Now, 25 years later, while Kagame and the Rwanda genocide industry commemorate the 25th anniversary of the so-called 100 days of …
Bowe Bergdahl captured the American imagination in 2009 when he disappeared from what had become his living hell. His battalion commander, Lt Baker, was not only an obnoxious tyrant (handing out Field-Grade Article 15s, just short of a court martial, supposedly for being out of uniform, but in fact for complaining about the mission to a Guardian photo-journalist in a video broadcast), but he had ordered them to build the OB (observation post) Mest on a cemetery, defiling, even defecating on gravestones near the FOB (forward operating base) Sharana.
To understand the enormity of the Boeing 737 Max 8 crashes (Lion Air 610 and Ethiopian Airlines 302) that took a combined total of 346 lives, it is useful to look at past events and anticipate future possible problems.
In 2011, Boeing executives wanted to start a “clean sheet” new narrow body air passenger plane to replace its old 737 design from the nineteen sixties. Shortly thereafter, Boeing’s bosses panicked when American Airlines put in a large order for the competitive Airbus A320neo. Boeing shelved the new design and rushed to put out the 737 Max that, in Business Week’s words, …
A high level source within the Ecuadorian state has told Wikileaks that Julian Assange will be expelled within ‘hours to days.’
— WikiLeaks on Twitter.
The Mueller investigation of an alleged collusion between Donald Trump and Russia to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election has come to its drawn-out end — or not. US monopoly media reported incessantly on the affair, dubbed Russiagate, despite the paucity of evidence.
The monopoly media has apparently learned little from its misreporting of the possession of WMD by the Saddam Hussein government in …
We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity.
— Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Beyond Vietnam.” Riverside Church, April 4, 1967
Dear Chelsea,
Do not lose heart, for as a prisoner of conscience, your inspirational witness sustains so many of your less free brothers and sisters on the outside. Our hearts and hands …
According to corporate journalism, a tidal wave of ‘fake news’ has long been threatening to swamp their wonderful work reporting real news. The ProQuest media database finds fully 805,669 hits for newspaper articles mentioning the term ‘fake news’. The key sources of such fakery are said to be social media, and above all, of course, Russia.
It is a perfect irony, then, that ‘the Mueller report‘, conducted by the US Department of Justice Special Counsel’s Office, headed by former FBI Director Robert Mueller, ‘did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the …
I am, it might reasonably be said, a climate refugee – though a very comfortable one. Escaping the forest fires to run a little cafe in Denmark is hardly a sacrifice. But if the cafe might be a good retirement plan for me, it won’t be for my children – far too soon, the whole country in which Cafe Hellebaek is located will likely be underwater. There is something so powerful about gazing into the distance over a large body of water. Especially when you know …
Seemingly overnight, the Green New Deal has arrived. Given the sorry state of our environment, what possible objections could there be? In this case, plenty – and they all trace back to the Green New Deal’s deeply complex and surreptitious ties to UN Agenda 21.
Those who claim that Agenda 21 amounts to little more than a right-wing rant or is somehow anti-Semitic are at best seriously misinformed. Those who buy into the carefully crafted jargon of Sustainable Development, Smart Growth, Redevelopment and the Green New Deal …
