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Key leaders from around the world are present at the United Nations this week to discuss critical issues; one of the most pressing is Syria. How did we get to this point with half the Syrian population (almost 12 million) displaced and under-populated but huge areas of Syria now controlled by ISIS, Al Qaeda (Nusra) and other fanatical fundamentalist groups?

Hillary Clinton’s 2014 book Hard Choices reveals important information about the first years of the Syrian conflict and how we got where we are today.  Clinton’s account conveys the perception, priorities and bias at the top level of the Obama Administration. …

They have not heeded our calls to be transparent about what the negotiating framework is and what they are prepared to sacrifice.

— Andrew Thompson, NDP candidate, Toronto, September 26, 2015

The very fact that Stephen Harper is still in with a chance come the Canadian election is a summary of political survival and grand deception. The recent debates have seen him come back from the dead and showing signs of considerable life. His treatment of the Syrian refugee situation has proven miserly and calculating. Like his counterparts in the Commonwealth (Australia and the UK), taking in …

The task for Israeli pupils: to foil an imminent terror attack on their school. But if they are to succeed, they must first find the clues using key words they have been learning in Arabic. Arabic lesson plans for Israel’s Jewish schoolchildren have a strange focus.

Those matriculating in the language can rarely hold a conversation in Arabic. And almost none of the hundreds of teachers introducing Jewish children to Israel’s second language are native speakers, even though one in five of the population belong to the country’s Palestinian minority.

The reason, says Yonatan Mendel, a researcher at the Van Leer Institute …

Peace in Yemen will continue to be elusive unless the United Nations shifts its mission from sponsoring an inter-Yemeni dialogue to mediating ceasefire negotiations between the actual warring parties, namely Saudi Arabia & allies and the de facto representatives of Yemenis who are fighting to defend their country’s territorial integrity and independent free will, i.e., the Huthi-Saleh & allies.

Convening its 70th session while celebrating its 70th anniversary this year, the United Nations is unlikely to reconsider its stand on Yemen, but it must do, at least to provide a face-saving exit strategy for Saudi Arabia if not to stop …

Like many cities in the mountainous central region of Costa Rica, Palmares sits in a valley.  A valley of many valleys extending like an unbroken emerald necklace in ever increasing altitudes from the temperate southeast to the higher northwest elevations.

Cities, proudly distinct yet unmistakably interwoven with deep senses of community and the shared being of a people who know their own history, their place in it and each other’s interdependent role in life’s unfolding.  This is the foundational energy grounding a nation, unique in a region beset with the horrors of colonialism, neocolonialism and the resource extraction and human immiseration …

Beneath a three-column headline in my local newspaper was a barely-edited press release.

That’s not unusual. With the downsizing of newsrooms, there’s more room for wire service soft features and press releases. But this one caught my attention.

SystemCare Health in New Jersey promoted a graduate of a college in my town to the lofty position of Senior Director of Doctivity.

I checked the dictionary—“Doctivity” didn’t exist. I checked WebMD, the website for amateurs to learn the meaning of unpronounceable medical terms—and how to recognize their symptoms and treatments. Nothing there.

That left SystemCare Health’s website, which spewed a barrage of buzzwords and useless …

So the British government’s response to climate change is to go nuclear. The Hinkley Point nuclear power station is to be built jointly by Chinese companies and the French state-owned energy company EDF. The cost of building the plant is estimated to be £25bn. For the deal to go ahead the UK has to provide a guarantee worth £2bn. In addition the government has to provide EDF with a guaranteed price of electricity generated at twice today’s price for 35 years. This project is fundamentally flawed for the following reasons:

First, this station is very expensive and it will …

There is a refugee crisis in Europe going on right now. It is, above all, a humanitarian crisis. The issue at stake should be how to take in the refugees. We should be working out the details of the political response from the European Union and the United States. Instead, we’re talking about if we should take in the refugees, and indeed, if the refugees are a threat to Western Civilization. My view is that at the heart of this inaction is a worldview about the place of the so-called West that fundamentally misconstrues the nature of the world we …

The Internet has outgrown the common law of defamation, and new regulations to protect the Internet, free speech and the freedom to speak anonymously have been abused by cyber-bullies and cyber-stalkers, who have used this new medium to dispense their bullying in a greater distribution among more people. In my latest novel, I thought it may be interesting to examine the possibility of an Internet bully or cyber mob hiring a hit man anonymously through the Internet. I thought that this would be a unique idea, but, upon delving into the macabre world of the Dark Net, I …

Does the purpose of our lives change with age; does the life of a thirty-something have more point to it, than, say, a fifty-year-old, a sixty-year-old; indeed is there any real ‘point’ to either, and how would we discover what it is?

To many of us ‘The Cow’ is the best pub in London. On a quiet balmy Wednesday in June, I met a fellow middle-aged man for a beer, a bite, and, much to my surprise, what turned out to be some searching existential chatter. What, my friend asked – after a beer or two – is the point to …

The mass media, with usual exceptions, have allowed themselves to be pulled down to the level of the political circus. If the Republican Party’s early primary campaigns for the presidential nomination had an elephant and a clown car, Ringling Brothers would be in trouble. It is hard for the Republican presidential candidates to resist temptation, defined by hyping an entertainment circus led by the chief circus barker – Donald Trump of gambling casino fame.

Sixteen candidates, after inexplicably excluding Mark Everson, the former IRS commissioner under George W. Bush and the first to announce, are hurling epithets, war-mongering bravados, and assorted …

For well over three years, heavy doses of propaganda have created a myth about a purported steel cylinder for testing explosives located on a site at Iran’s Parchin military testing reservation. Iran was refusing to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to inspect the site while it sought to hide its past nuclear weapons-related work, according to that storyline.

Now Iran has agreed to allow the IAEA to visit the site at Parchin and environmental samples have already been collected at the site. However, the politically charged tale of the bomb test chamber of Parchin is beginning to unravel. IAEA …

My fellow revolutionaries, internationalists, and travelers on the road to social justice,

I’m writing this letter to praise the legacy of a great man, and to remind you of how much we owe to his selfless efforts.  A phrase is etched into his monument and mausoleum in Santa Clara, Cuba beneath his towering, south facing sculpture.  He signed all personal correspondence with those same immortal words:  “Hasta la Victoria Siempre”.  Until Victory, Always.

Dr. Ernesto “Che” Guevara de la Serna, the consummate, quintessential revolutionary.  The man who bravely fought and fearlessly died attempting to precipitate a world-wide revolution against the formidable forces of neo-colonialism and imperialism.  Che!  His quest was carried out in the name of love, but …

Resistance is the cure for Indigenous suicides. There is nothing “wrong” with Indigenous individuals that was not caused by the relentless violence of ongoing colonization, and therefore the treatment of the fatal condition of dispossession and oppression is to right that basic wrong. That, and an anti-capitalist campaign that will set the humanistic balance of pre-capitalist, or pre-Columbian, economics back in place.

So writes the very qualified lead author of Dying To Please You: Indigenous Suicide in Contemporary Canada (Theytus Books, 2015) Dr. Roland Chrisjohn (co-author: Shaunessy M. McKay), Onyota’a:ka of the …

Some nuclear advocates suggest that wildlife thrives in the highly-radioactive Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, animals like it, and not only that, a little radiation for anybody and everybody is harmless and maybe good, not bad. This may seem like a senseless argument to tackle were it not for the persistence of positive-plus commentary by nuke lovers. The public domain deserves better, more studied, more crucial answers.

Fortunately, as well as unfortunately, the world has two major real life archetypes of radiation’s impact on the ecosystem: Chernobyl and Fukushima.  Chernobyl is a sealed-off 30klm restricted zone for the past 30 years because of …