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Image credit: Dossier no. 87 ‘The Bandung Spirit’, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, 2025.
Seventy years ago this month, leaders of twenty-nine newly or nearly independent Asian and African nations inaugurated the historic Bandung Conference, embarking on the ‘Freedom Walk’ along Asia-Africa Road to the conference’s Freedom Building (Gedung Merdeka) in Bandung, Indonesia. As a diplomatic performance and collective political action, these leaders walked among the teeming crowds to announce that the peoples of the Third World had stood up after centuries of colonialism.

There was, however, no consensus on the …

There was no excuse for the BBC to follow Israel in treating the head of UNRWA as though he is aligned with terrorism. This kind of craven journalism just makes Israel’s job of genocide easier.
There was yet more shameful reporting by BBC News at Ten last night, with international editor Jeremy Bowen the chief culprit this time.

He prefaced an interview with Philippe Lazzarini, head of United Nations refugee agency UNRWA, with an utterly unwarranted disclaimer – as though he was talking …

Few modern political figures have done more to prompt spontaneous national discussions about the Bill of Rights and constitutional limits on government power than Donald Trump—if only because he tramples on them so frequently.

Indeed, President Trump has become a walking civics lesson.

Consider some of the constitutional principles that Trump can be credited with bringing into the spotlight unintentionally during his time in office.

First Amendment (free speech, press, religion, protest, and assembly): Trump’s repeated confrontations with the First Amendment have transformed free expression into a battleground, making it impossible to ignore the protections it guarantees. From branding the press as “…

What does it mean when something is mandatory?

In February, President Trump said that tariffs would generate so much income that Americans would no longer need to pay income taxes.

The latest plan, according to U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, is to abolish income taxes for people who earn less than $150,000 yearly. That move would affect roughly 75% of workers, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. On its face, this could narrow the wealth gap by boosting disposable income for low- and middle-income households without raising taxes on the wealthy — a politically clever alternative to progressive tax hikes.

Eliminating the burden of income taxes is an exciting proposition, due to savings …

Commercial gimmicks are sometimes impossible to beat off. Their stench and pull follow, even as you look the other way. One occasion is most prominent in this regard.  Nostrils get clogged and eyes get fogged, and the message is this: Remember Mommy.

Mothers’ Day is rarely more than the draw and pull of extracted business and mined guilt. This is the worshipped and leveraged, the human breeder elevated and remembered, if only for one day. It resembles, in some ways, the link between poverty and the church box of charity. Give a few coins and save the child. Your conscience can rest easy.

The day …

From Samori Touré to Thomas Sankara [left], our ancestors chose resistance. Now, we must choose: either we fight for sovereignty, or we remain slaves to neo-colonialism.

— captain Ibrahim Traoré [right], Interview with Radio Omega FM, November 2023

A young, by political standards, military captain, now an acting president has captured widespread admiration in Burkina Faso and across Africa. The legend of Ibrahim Traoré appears to be growing by leaps and bounds.

But to understand from whence captain Traoré comes, one should be cognizant of the young revolutionary Marxist leader captain Thomas Sankara who …

The occasion of electing another Pope was a spectacle in time and, in many ways, outside it. It was the one rare occasion in the twenty-first century where ancient ceremony, the old boy network – many presumptive virgins – along with festive dressing up, were seen with admiration rather than suspicion. Feminists were nowhere to be heard. Women knew their place; the phallocrats were in charge. Secret processes and factions, unscrutinised by media or any temporal body, could take place in secure, deliberative seclusion. Reverential followers of unquestioning loyalty turned up to the square of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome …

©  Getty Images/XH4D

The global economy was already navigating a minefield of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA) when US President Donald J. Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs reverberated across international markets. This aggressive escalation of trade barriers, including a mélange of sudden rate hikes, retaliatory measures, and rhetorical brinkmanship, didn’t just amplify the chaos; it ignited the specter of a full-blown economic firestorm.

Volatility unleashed

The moment the tariffs were announced, markets convulsed. Stock indices plummeted, erasing $2.1 trillion in global market …

Operation Rolling Thunder was a sustained U.S. bombing campaign over Vietnam. The Rolling Thunder Revue was a 1975–76 madcap concert tour headed by Bob Dylan, featuring  extraordinary musicians and collaborators. Now, there’s a new “Rolling Thunder”; a maximalist anti-abortion campaign aimed at pressuring the Trump administration, the FDA, Congress and the courts to ban the use of mifepristone. To …

Early this year, as snow froze into sheets of solid ice, covering the ground for weeks, almost 20% of St. Louis Public School students were unhoused. Meanwhile, in warm town halls, former city Mayor Tishaura Jones praised a proposed new hazardous chemical facility, displaying the city’s economic priorities. St. Louis’s northside has long been subjected to the environmental effects of militarization, from the radiation secretly sprayed on residents of Pruitt Igoe and Northside communities in the 1950s, to the dumped cancer-causing Manhattan Project radioactive waste that poisoned …

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Never forget the evil done to the United States when Biden pardoned an accomplice to mass murder deeply involved in both the creation of the COVID-19 virus and bio-weapons development. Speculations surround his most likely profiteering from the various “pandemics” over the years, and the sudden jump in his family net worth after leaving Federal employment.

To quote:

“A pardon for ANY OFFENSES AGAINST THE UNITED STATES.”

Think about that. The actual text of the pardon reads:

I, JOSEPH …

Despite endless insistence by privatizers that charter schools are public schools, many people spontaneously think that charter schools are not public schools.

Much of the public does not automatically see charter schools as public schools proper. They are viewed as being different from public schools and put in a separate category than public schools.

When asked what they think a charter school is, the average person often says something like: “I’m not really sure, aren’t they some sort of private school, I really don’t know, but I have heard of them, they seem …

It has been unedifying, and, it should be said, far from noble. But being unedifying has become something of a day specialty for Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, notably when giving interviews from commodious abodes in California. On taking a step down from the subsidised duties that characterise his position, the disgruntled Royal fled the stable and made for the United States. He had found love with Meghan Markle, but it proved to be that sort of noisy, declarative love that Buckingham Palace loathes, and his relatives generally try to sedate.

The latest tremor of narcissistic display on the Duke’s part …

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