A recent statement made by the outgoing French Ambassador to the US regarding the nature of Israeli apartheid accentuates a larger ailment that has afflicted the European Union foreign policy.
The EU is simply gutless when it comes to confronting Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine.
Ambassador Gerard Araud was, of course, right when he told the US magazine, The Atlantic, that Israel is already an apartheid state.
Noting the “disproportion of power” between Israel and the Palestinians, Araud said, “The strongest (meaning Israel) may conclude that they have no interest to make concessions.”
And since Israel “won’t make (Palestinians) citizens of Israel … …
Sri Lanka, Easter Sunday, 21 April 2019: More than half a dozen bomb blasts shook the country killing from 250 to more than 350 people. Depending on who counts, the death toll varies. The devastation took place in several catholic churches and luxury hotels. Other explosions, including from – what they say – are suicide bombers, have since killed another several dozens of people. Many are children, women – christian worshippers. Why the luxury hotels? Western (Christian) tourists?
Yesterday, another explosion ripped through a suspicious building, killing 18, including children and women. Again, they, the ‘authorities’, say suicide bombers, who didn’t …
She deserves better
In Indonesia, both presidential candidates have declared victory, just a few days after the elections that were held on 17th April, 2019. Both of them are pro-business, both Muslim, and both insist that the Communist Party should continue to be banned. Neither of them is even thinking about stopping their country from committing one of the bloodiest genocides on earth, that in West Papua; or ending the unbridled plunder and environmental disaster on the third largest island in the world, Borneo (in Indonesia known as …
The world is in the throes of an extinction crisis unlike any throughout paleoclimate history, aka: the Sixth Mass Extinction, keeping in mind that the normal “background rate” for extinction is 1-to-5 species gone per year. But, what if it’s five (5) every 24 hours?
Answer: It’s a lot more than that.
The current worldwide extinction rate is more than 1,000xs the normal background rate, or, in the simplest of terms, instead of 1-to-5 species extinct per year, it’s alarmingly somewhere between 25-to-250 (maybe more) species of plant, insect, bird, and mammal extinct every 24 hours.
US global power in the Trump period reflects the continuities and changes which are unfolding rapidly and deeply throughout the world and which are affecting the position of Washington.
Assessing the dynamics of US global power is a complex problem which requires examining multiple dimensions.
We will proceed by:
(1) Conceptualizing the principles which dictate empire building, specifically the power bases and the dynamic changes in relations and structures which shape the present and future position of the …
If Pete Seeger were still with us, how would he be celebrating his 100th birthday? Probably by chopping wood.
On May 3rd, 1919, Pete Seeger was born. Many people in the more musical regions of my social circles are currently celebrating his life, for the occasion of what would have been his 100th birthday, had he lived past the age of 94. Among people I know, so much has already been said about Pete, that I’m hesitant to say any more. But on …
Celebrating a life well connected through the process of death, mourning, memorializing
by Paul Haeder / May 1st, 2019
It was impressive, the number of people this 66 year old fellow touched: a father figure, a friend, a guide, a mentor, a guidepost, a brother, and a giver.
The service was held in Portland Sat. 4/27 and hundreds showed up at the Quaker church. I was asked to say some things about the man, my friend, and I had already written a poem of dedication to him, but I had to let a more simple-and-unfolding-of-our-collective-emotions sort of poem lead me.
I had just spent the night before in some forest land 10 miles north of White Salmon, WA, with Mt. Hood …
May Day is one of the most important days to the exploited people. Michael D. Yates, director of Monthly Review Press and former Associate Editor of Monthly Review magazine, focuses on US labor and its movement in the following interview from April 2019 by Farooque Chowdhury. Professor Michael Yates, whose academic fields are labor economics and the relationship between capital and labor, also discusses labor’s new initiatives at grass roots level, defying and contesting “official” labor leadership. ***** Farooque Chowdhury: You have been closely associated with labor in the United States for more than 30 years. You …
A new report has uncovered 36 code-named US military operations in Africa. This comes after last year’s news that US special forces were operating in west Africa’s Niger. Maurice Carney, executive director of Friends of the Congo, joins RT America’s Manila Chan to unpack the news.
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / April 30th, 2019
We are still writing to you from the Venezuelan Embassy in Washington, DC where we are here as the Embassy Protection Collective with the full permission of the Venezuelan government. We have the grave responsibility to hold this space from takeover by the opposition, which would happen with the assistance of US law enforcement, until the Venezuelan government can complete negotiations with the United States over the status of their respective embassies.
What hangs in the balance is the possibility of a peaceful and orderly resolution to the end of …
On March 7, the Inter Press Service (IPS) published my article, “Eight Years on, Fukushima Still Poses Health Risks for Children,” and I am very gratified to learn that it was the second most popular article published in IPS News that week. It also appears that many readers were surprised to learn that removal of the irradiated cores from the three crippled nuclear reactors at Fukushima would take at least forty years.
This revelation reminds me of my conversation with the late Dr. Hans-Peter Durr, former Director of the Max Plunch Institute of Germany, when the Fukushima accident occurred …
A new report on April 25 by a respected think tank has estimated that US sanctions imposed on Venezuela in August 2017 have caused around 40,000 deaths. This atrocity has been almost entirely blanked by the British ‘mainstream’ media, including BBC News. Additional sanctions imposed in January 2019 are likely to lead to tens of thousands of further deaths.
OSU chemist, students study carcinogens in Superfund Sites already cleaned up
by Paul Haeder / April 30th, 2019
Note: I enjoy intersecting with scientists who are associated with universities that are now struggling to keep afloat, for many reasons to include the rise of the admin class, deanlets, non-academic departments, states lowering the matching rate to pay for faculty, presidents of universities making way too much money but throwing more at the athletic departments; and, alas, these vibrant and fully-packed schools — supposedly the smartest and brightest — have continuously sold out by taking bribe money from major corporations to shunt true research away from the capitalists’ intended and unintended crimes of their engines of profit.
Graffiti opposing US imperialism in Venezuela. Photo credit: Aljazeera.comPresident Donald Trump and the likes of the New York Times might seem like strange bedfellows but they have found common cause in seeking regime change in Venezuela, a country that poses no threat to the United States but sits on the world’s largest proven oil reserves. Trump administration sanctions have already killed tens of thousands of Venezuelans while U.S. media outlets drum up support for a possible military intervention to replace the socialists in …
For years now I have made it clear that I consider the environmental outlook for this planet very, very bleak.
I have written repeatedly that I believe only a massive, rapid, internationally-coordinated and mandatory program to transform the world economy – involving a fast phase-out of fossil fuels, a ban on the manufacture of most plastics, radical restrictions on industrial agriculture and meat production/consumption, a stop to world deforestation, a shift to regional economies not dependent on worldwide shipping, and much more – that only such a fundamental restructuring of the world’s economic systems might have a chance of preventing probable …
In February 2010, the Indian government placed an indefinite moratorium on the commercial release of Bt brinjal. Prior to this decision, numerous independent scientists from India and abroad had pointed out safety concerns regarding Bt brinjal based on data and reports in the biosafety dossier that Mahyco, the crop developer, had submitted to the regulators.
The then Minister of the Ministry of Environment and Forests Jairam Ramesh instituted a unique four-month scientific enquiry and public hearings. His decision to reject the commercialisation of Bt brinjal was supported by advice he received from several renowned international scientists. Their collective appraisals demonstrated …
More writers, commentators, and researchers are increasingly reminding the public that a large number of democrats at all levels of government have long supported and promoted privately-operated charter schools that annually siphon billions of public dollars from thousands of over-tested and vilified public schools.
The oft-repeated myth that the privatization and destruction of public education has always largely been “a Republican thing” or “a right-wing thing” is slowly dissolving. It was always a fairytale. Just like the widely-rejected No Child Left Behind Act, and its much-worse successor, the Every Student Succeeds Act, nonprofit and for-profit charter schools continue to have bipartisan …
Ed Lehman is a Canadian Communist, and a comrade of mine. I don’t say such things often or lightly, especially about Westerners. But he became my comrade, and we struggled shoulder to shoulder, for five days. Not in the South American wilderness, not in Afghanistan or Syria, but in Regina, a small Canadian city, the capital of the province of Saskatchewan.
I admit, before being invited there, I knew close to nothing about Regina. I did not even know how to pronounce it, correctly. But one day, an email arrived, and I was invited to become a keynote speaker at the Peace Conference …
by The Real News Network (TRNN) / April 28th, 2019
A deep dive into the details of the political economy that allows law enforcement to defeat civilian reform efforts, and what can be done to change it.
Values, values and more values. Another dreary dish added to the smorgasbord of Democratic hopefuls for the White House. This one is a bit cured and worn, smoked by history. Biden, having performed the role of Vice President for Barack Obama and senator for Delaware, is making his third attempt to not so much gallop as crawl into the US executive.
That said, there was initial promise, a teaser sent out to media outlets that the venue of his launch on Wednesday would be Charlottesville, Virginia. Memories of August 2017, with the death of protestor Heather Heyer at the white-supremacist riot, …
Review of The Coming of the American Behemoth: The Origins of Fascism in the United States, 1920–1940 by Michael Joseph Roberto
by Chris Wright / April 26th, 2019
Fascism is usually thought of as a quintessentially and almost exclusively European phenomenon, as having begun with Mussolini, culminated with Hitler, and been eradicated in World War II. The U.S., in particular, is thought to have been largely immune to it, given the absence of mass movements similar to Nazism or Italian Fascism. But there exists a different narrative, or at least there did in the 1930s, before it was buried under an avalanche of patriotic American propaganda and liberal historiography. According to this alternative understanding, the U.S. was falling victim to fascism already in the 1920s—though a different sort …
A few weeks ago, days before the release of his first nonfiction book, White, Bret Easton Ellis was ambushed—or “punked,” as he later put it—by the New Yorker. In an interview that reads like a cross-examination, “Q and A” specialist Isaac Chotiner bombards the Glamorama author (that, not American Psycho, is his best novel) with questions about his views on Donald Trump, making his derision known with surly demands and sarcastic responses to Ellis’ rather feeble efforts to explain himself. “Tell me what you meant.” …
While Justin Trudeau’s government embraces repressive Middle East monarchies, they want us to believe their campaign to oust Venezuela’s government is motivated by support for democracy and human rights.
On a tour of the Middle East last week Defence Minister Harjit Singh Sajjan met his United Arab Emirates counterpart Mohammed bin Ahmed Al Bowardi in Abu Dhabi. According to Emirates News Agency, Canadian and UAE officials discussed “cooperation in the military and defence sectors” at a time when the oil rich nation plays a key role in the horrendous violence in Yemen.
The Trudeau government is promoting arm sales to …
The question is not are we going to fail. The question is how?
— Stephen Jenkinson, author and storyteller.
Water, glaciers, oceans, food, forests and fires – all of these things are part of global warming under the magnifying glass of Dahr Jamail in his book The End of Ice.
Jamail is a first class hunter-gatherer of information. It is not just finding and reading scientific papers. It is climbing the mountains; it is meeting with and listening to the indigenous people living on the edge of disaster; it …
Dennis A. Muilenburg
Chairman, President, and
Chief Executive Officer
The Boeing Company
100 North Riverside
Chicago, IL 60606
Dear Mr. Muilenburg:
On April 4, 2019 you somewhat belatedly released a statement that “We at Boeing are sorry for the lives lost in the recent 737 MAX accidents.” You added that a preliminary investigation made it “apparent that in both flights” the MCAS “activated in response to erroneous angle of attack information.”
Your acknowledgement of the problems with the 737 MAX somehow escaped inclusion in your messages to shareholders, the capital markets, and the Securities and Exchange Commission. It is now stunningly clear that your overly optimistic outlook on …
Whenever, in ordinary circumstances, the subject of violence comes up, most people throw up their hands in horror and comment along the lines that it is ‘in our genes’, ‘nothing can be done about it’ or other words that reflect the powerlessness that most people feel around violence.
It is true that violence is virtually ubiquitous, has a near-infinite variety of manifestations and, at its most grotesque (as nuclear war or run-away climate catastrophe), even threatens human extinction in the near-term.
Nevertheless, anyone who pays attention to the subject of violence in any detail soon discovers that plenty of people are interested …
Recently, a certain political concept has been resurrected that warrants interrogation. The notion of a ‘red-brown’ alliance has been thrown around so ubiquitously as a form of political slander that any substantive meaning to the term has been evacuated. Rather than accurately designating any associations that may exist between the left and far right, the idea of a ‘red-brown’ coalition, or ‘querfront’ (cross-front in German), is a generic abstraction cited to mischaracterize a perceived convergence of political opposites. In many respects, it is a stand-in for a similar hypothesis used by liberals?—?that of ‘horseshoe theory’, or the impression that the …
I grew up on a bicycle. At least once I learned to ride. Somehow or other I didn’t manage to do that until the age of ten. But starting then, the bicycle became the ticket to freedom and independence, as well as another way to appreciate the natural world and get a lot of exercise.
For many people who grew up in suburbs similar to the one I grew up in, what I’m describing will be familiar. Looking at it …
Paris, 15 April 2019 — The heart of France is on fire. An inferno rocked France. Notre Dame, cultural icon of France and UNESCO declared World Heritage, was burning. The flames devastated the wooden roof and the spire. They caused, at first sight, only light damage on the 12th century cathedral’s structure and historic treasures, as most of the latter were either removed for the ongoing renovation, or were removed just in time by firefighters. Some damage to religious artifacts may have been caused by the enormous amounts of water used by the 500 firemen who dozed the blaze which took …
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / April 25th, 2019
Embassy protectors pack the Hugo Chavez library for an event with John Kiriakou (Photo by Margaret Flowers)
Washington, DC – Thursday, April 25, the day activists anticipated the Secret Service might evict them from the Venezuelan embassy, turned into a day of growing support for and attention to the embassy protection efforts. Activists are making it clear that they are in the embassy with the permission of the foreign ministry. In fact, on Wednesday night, Carlos Ron, the Vice Minister for Foreign Affairs for Venezuela, sent a video message to the …
