Latest articles

We all do it. We say something, in the moment when said, sincerely, or perhaps just quasi-sincerely. But when what we’ve said demands action on our part, we flounder. Is this a folly of human interpersonal dialogue– a planned or accidental obsolescence of discourse? Or is it that we contract ourselves to our own voluntary intentions, only to be unable to fulfill our end of the agreement when a summons is made? Whether we can sense it or not, words can be very potent instruments of harm and not just the vehicles for salubrious creations like poetry, literature, and even …

Israel is putting in place the final pieces of a Greater Jewish Jerusalem that will require “ethnically cleansing” tens of thousands of Palestinians from a city their families have lived and worked in for generations, human rights groups have warned.

The pace of physical and demographic changes in the city has accelerated dramatically since Israel began building a steel and concrete barrier through the city’s Palestinian neighbourhoods more than a decade ago, according to the rights groups and Palestinian researchers.

Israel is preparing to cement these changes in law, they note. Two parliamentary bills with widespread backing among government ministers indicate the …

It was another etching in a chronicle of extended violence.  For days, resistance by refugees and asylum seekers against forced removal from the Lombrom Naval Base on Manus Island had taken very public form.  Images of defiance and distress were receiving international attention.  With no electricity, with water supplies destroyed, things were getting dire.

As the weekend dawned, PNG officials were claiming that the remaining 328 men from the base had been moved to new camps in Lorengau.  To these can be added the 50 men or so forcibly removed a day prior.  Journalists from the ABC noted the use of …

The impact of Fukushima Daiichi’s nuclear meltdown extends far and wide, as the hemispheric ecosystem gets hit by tons of radioactive water. Additionally, surreptitiousness surrounds untold death and illness, yet it remains one of the least understood and deceitfully reported episodes of journalism in modern history.

At the same time as Japan passed its totalitarian secrecy act in December 2013, it passed an obstructive Cancer Registration Law, which made it illegal to share medical data or information on radiation-related issues, denying public access to medical records, with violators subject to fines of two million Yen or 5-10 years in prison, a …

For almost two decades, the US pursued a list of ‘enemy countries’ to confront, attack, weaken and overthrow. This imperial quest to overthrow ‘enemy countries’ operated at various levels of intensity, depending on two considerations: the level of priority and the degree of vulnerability for a ‘regime change’ operation.

The criteria for determining an ‘enemy country’ and its place on the list of priority targets in the US quest for greater global dominance, as well as …

Born in Sudan, Asima fled violent conflict in her homeland and sought asylum in Britain. Poorly educated, unemployed and vulnerable, she relies on state benefits, which are conditional and inadequate, to survive.

At the beginning of October her father had a stroke. Thanks to the kindness of a friend who paid her airfare, Asima visited him in Ethiopia. Upon returning to London, she discovered her rent payments had been stopped by the local authority because she’d been abroad longer than the 28-day limit. In fact she was away 30 days, two days over the regulated time.

The effect of this decision is …

Can anyone still doubt that access to a relatively free and open internet is rapidly coming to an end in the west? In China and other autocratic regimes, leaders have simply bent the internet to their will, censoring content that threatens their rule. But in the “democratic” west, it is being done differently. The state does not have to interfere directly – it outsources its dirty work to corporations.

As soon as next month, the net could become the exclusive plaything of the biggest such corporations, determined to squeeze as much profit as possible out of bandwidth. Meanwhile, the tools to …

During the spring of 1999, as part of Voices in the Wilderness’s campaign to end indiscriminately lethal U.S./U.N. economic sanctions against Iraq, the Fellowship of Reconciliation arranged for two Nobel Peace laureates, Adolfo Perez Esquivel and Mairead Maguire, to visit the country. Before their travel, Voices activists helped organize meetings for them with a range of ordinary Iraqis affected by an economic warfare targeting the most vulnerable: the elderly, the sick, and most tragically of all, the children. Perez Esquivel studied the itinerary. His voice and face showed clear disappointment. “Yes,” he said, shaking his head, “but when do we …

There are reasons to be extremely worried about what is happening on the Internet – quite silently.

Worried in terms of freedom of information gathering, respect for Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, worried about democracy, the open society – and more.

There are reasons that you should get very concerned when one of the world’s richest corporate leaders with clear political affiliations and relations to Pentagon and the MIMAC – the Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex begins to play God and decides what you and I shall be able to see on the Internet.

His name is Eric Emerson Schmidt and …

No, really, it isn’t any trouble at all. I’m thrilled that you’re interested, because I love to tell the story of this place; I feel the story is part of its healing quality, you know, and that is why you’re here, why we’re all here. And it wasn’t always like you see it now—by no means! We had to work at it; we really had to create it from nothing, but we did it because we believed in what we were doing, and, you know, when you really believe, the universe makes a way…

I think it helped that we were …

The radiation effects of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant triple meltdowns are felt worldwide, whether lodged in sea life or in humans, it cumulates over time. The impact is now slowly grinding away only to show its true colors at some unpredictable date in the future. That’s how radiation works, slow but assuredly destructive, which serves to identify its risks, meaning, one nuke meltdown has the impact, over decades, of a 1,000 regular industrial accidents, maybe more.

It’s been six years since the triple 100% nuke meltdowns occurred at Fukushima Daiichi (March 11th, 2011), nowadays referred to as “311”. Over …

As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.

— John F. Kennedy

It’s been a hard, heart-wrenching, stomach-churning kind of year filled with violence and ill will.

It’s been a year of hotheads and blowhards and killing sprees and bloodshed and take downs.

It’s been a year in which tyranny took a step forward and freedom got knocked down a few notches.

It’s been a year with an abundance of bad news and a shortage of good news.

It’s been a year of too much hate and too little kindness.

Now we …

We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation.

— Martin Luther King, “Beyond Vietnam”

Yemen, the poorest Arab nation on Earth, is the victim of a savage, illegal war waged by the Saudi Arabian monarchy.  Armed to the teeth with the most sophisticated weapons in the world manufactured and supplied by the merchants of death in the United States, the Saudis are providing another grotesque example of what happens when a powerful nation with modern weapons is unrestrained by law and basic human decency.

Flying hundreds of sorties and targeting the civilian infrastructure—water and …

Investigative journalist Gareth Porter has published two exclusives whose import is far greater than may be immediately apparent. They concern Israel’s bombing in 2007 of a supposed nuclear plant secretly built, according to a self-serving US and Israeli narrative, by Syrian leader Bashar Assad.

Although the attack on the “nuclear reactor” occurred a decade ago, there are pressing lessons to be learnt for those analysing current events in Syria.

Porter’s research indicates very strongly that the building that was bombed could not have been a nuclear reactor – and that was clear to experts at the International Atomic Energy …

Following the devastation of WWII, many survivors of the armed sieges sought refuge in lands that were not their own. Among them were not just the beleaguered, but also the ordained. Here I write not of the papacy, but of an equally powerful cabal of power-holders who envisioned the continual progression of Western-and indeed non-Western, as well- societies towards Edward Bernays’ coveted ideal of a modern democracy. This would be a democracy wherein political power wouldn’t arduously be fought for, but graciously accepted from those who would be convinced to relinquish it to a technocratic ruling class.

Following the legacy of …