Latest articles
by Dan Glazebrook / October 3rd, 2015
Europe needs to fascisise its policies, because if it doesn’t — fascism will grow. This was the message from Frans Timmerman, Vice-President of the European Commission following last week’s fraught negotiations over the so-called refugee crisis. “We have to patrol our borders better”, he told reporters on Thursday. “If we’re not able to tackle this issue, if we’re not able to find sustainable solutions, you will see a surge of the extreme right across the European continent.”
Sustainable solutions are, of course, available, and always have been; namely 1) stop destabilising Africa and the Middle East: which means, precisely, stop …
Palestinian minority in Israel worried by top cop’s twin-track as interrogator for secret police and hardline settler
by Jonathan Cook / October 3rd, 2015
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu parachuted in a new police chief last week after the government’s previous candidates were thwarted by controversy.
Roni Alsheikh has officially been brought in as a new broom to sweep away a culture of corruption and sex scandals that has plagued the Israeli police for years.
The first choice for police commander, Gal Hirsch, a former army general, had to be dropped last month after it emerged that the FBI had passed on suspicions about his arms-dealing company.
Another hopeful, Benzi Sau, who served as acting police commander over the summer, drew a storm …
by Binoy Kampmark / October 3rd, 2015
Normalised mass violence has become the unmentioned subject of US school syllabi. Teachers’ meetings and academic retreats must be getting longer and more perturbed: How do those in a university setting cope with an armed assailant who will take a dozen lives in a short span, and then perish?
Twenty-four hour reporting loves such phenomena. It is crack violence for whoring reporting. It seemed most appropriate that the 10 deaths, repeated aerial shots of provincial Umpqua Community College, police and control centres, should be run around the clock on Oregon, even as Russian bombings of supposed ISIL sites in Syria were …
by Yves Engler / October 2nd, 2015
Last week former defence minister Jason Kenney said if re-elected the Conservatives would significantly expand Canada’s special forces. Kenney said they would add 665 members to the Canadian Armed Forces Special Operations Command (CANSOFCOM) over the next seven years.
Why? What do these “special forces” do? Who decides when and where to deploy them? For what purpose? These are all questions left unanswered (and not even asked in the mainstream media).
What we do know is that since the mid-2000s Canada’s special forces have steadily expanded to 1,900 members. In 2006 the military launched CANSOFCOM to oversee JTF2, …
by Ralph Nader / October 2nd, 2015
Next year, the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) will celebrate its 50th anniversary as one of the finest laws our Congress has ever passed. It is a vital investigative tool for exposing government and corporate wrongdoing.
The FOIA was championed by Congressman John E. Moss (D-CA), who strove to “guarantee the right of every citizen to know the facts of his Government.” Moss, with whom I worked closely as an outside citizen advocate, said that “without the fullest possible access to Government information, it is impossible to gain the knowledge necessary to discharge the responsibilities of citizenship.”
All fifty states have …
by Andrey Fomine / October 1st, 2015
Contrary to the expectations of many experts who were predicting a “second Munich” from Vladimir Putin in New York, the Russian president made no grandiose proclamations during his address to the UN General Assembly. In fact, he was outwardly far milder than one might have imagined. By comparison, Obama’s emotional speech, which was replete with strident but unsubstantiated claims, seemed sad, and occasionally even comical. For example, there was a passage about the ouster of Assad, but then less than a day later the US position flip-flopped …
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by Jonik / September 30th, 2015
by John Pilger / September 30th, 2015
George Orwell said, “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” [This quotation is not verified. — DV Ed]
These are dark times, in which the propaganda of deceit touches all our lives. It is as if political reality has been privatised and illusion legitimised. The information age is a media age. We have politics by media; censorship by media; war by media; retribution by media; diversion by media – a surreal assembly line of clichés and false assumptions.
Wondrous technology has become both our friend and our enemy. Every time we turn on a …
by Jack Balkwill / September 30th, 2015
Some would say I was a lost man in a lost world
You could say I lost my faith in the people on TV
You could say I’d lost my belief in our politicians
They all seemed like game show hosts to me
— Sting, “If I Ever Lose My Faith in You” from the 1993 album ‘Ten Summoner’s Tales”
Saturday morning, CNN’s Carol Costello, microphone in hand, asked a girl in the Philadelphia audience awaiting the arrival of the Pope if she was concerned that the Pope might be a socialist.
It never ceases to amaze me that anyone still believes the mainstream press …
by John R. Hall / September 30th, 2015
“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”
My best guess is that the Christian Crusades of nine centuries ago, the genocide carried out against the rightful residents of the Western Hemisphere which began five centuries ago, and the ongoing history of imperialist wars for profit have all been justified, in large part, by these few words from the Holy Bible. I know that dominion over …
What Is There to Celebrate?
by Ramzy Baroud / September 30th, 2015
It has been recently announced that Arab ‘media experts’ plan to ‘celebrate’ Arab Media Day on April 21, 2016. The theme for the first day, of what is meant to be an annual tradition, is: “The Role of the (Arab) Media in Combatting Terrorism”.
The mockery is surely multi-faceted. One is the clearly politicized choice of the theme of the proposed event. The term ‘terrorism’ is a political one, and is rarely applied to violence committed by Arab regimes: it only applies to their detractors.
Another is the fact that the committee of ‘experts’ which made the decision was, itself, …
by Lesley Docksey / September 30th, 2015
How the British right-wing media (that’s almost all of it these days) must have anticipated Jeremy Corbyn’s speech to Labour’s Annual Conference. After all the sniping and sneering, the attempts at character assassination, the dredging up of something he said 30 years ago and the universal hands held up in horror because he didn’t sing ‘God Save the Queen’ (nor, if you study photos of the event, did some others), here was their chance to really put the boot in.
Since Corbyn was so convincingly elected Labour’s leader, the press has been full of articles saying he was ‘unelectable’ …
by Arthur D. Robbins / September 30th, 2015
A president of the United States would never operate outside the law, ignore the U.S. Constitution and the courts, shut down the presses, imprison his domestic adversaries or turn his guns on his own people. Well, Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president did of all of that and, curiously, has been turned into a national hero for his troubles. Lincoln ignored his closest advisors and the temper of the times to engage in the bloodiest war in American history, a war that could easily have been avoided. Single handedly Lincoln terrorized the entire nation. So let us take notice. What happened …
by Mateo Pimentel / September 30th, 2015
For a number of decades, corporate entities have made financial investments in expatriating workers. Such investments are supposed to cover monetary compensation, skill development, and the toil that future assignments might entail. Due to overseas business interests, professional researchers have had to acknowledge “reentry” — the repatriation phase of international assignment — since at least the 1960s. Ultimately, though, it has been the expatriation phase of international assignment, and not reentry, that has received the lion’s share of scholarly attention. ((Storti, C. The Art of Coming Home, Yarmouth, ME: Intercultural Press, (1997).)) Moreover, available research suggests that international assignees (workers …
by Robert Hunziker / September 30th, 2015
The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant No. 2 nuclear reactor fuel is missing from the core containment vessel. ((Up to 100% of No. 2 Reactor Fuel May Have Melted, NHK World News, September 25, 2015.))
Where did it go? Nobody knows.
Not only that but the “learning curve” for a nuclear meltdown is as fresh as the event itself because “the world has never seen anything like this,” Never.
Utilizing cosmic ray muon radiography with nuclear emulsion, researchers from Nagoya University peered inside the reactors at Fukushima. The nuclear fuel in reactor core No. 5 was clearly visible via the muon process. However, …
Petition to UK Parliament: A Few Reasons Why
by Felicity Arbuthnot / September 29th, 2015
The word genocide comes to mind.
— Weapons expert Dai Williams, letter to Tony Blair warning of consequences of Iraq action, 13th October 2002
On Saturday, September 26, Ahmed Mahdi Al Faqi was arrested and delivered to the International Criminal Court at The Hague. He is charged with war crimes, the deliberate destruction of religious or historical monuments in Mali and especially the irreplaceable ancient shrines of Timbuktu, in 2012.
The ICC’s Chief Prosecutor, Fatou Nesouda described the destruction in Timbuktu as “a callous assault on the dignity and identity of entire populations and their religious and historical roots.”
Timbuktu City is a …
Hillary Clinton in Her Own Words
by Rick Sterling / September 29th, 2015
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. …
Part 3: Mom, Is It War Yet?
by T.P. Wilkinson / September 29th, 2015
Falsehood and delusion are allowed in no case whatever: But, as in the exercise of all the virtues, there is an œconomy of truth. It is a sort of temperance, by which a man speaks truth with measure that he may speak it the longer.
— Edmund Burke, Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796)
Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.
— Mark Twain, Following the Equator (1897)
The conditions of the Transvaal ordinance … cannot in the opinion of His Majesty’s Government be classified as slavery; at least, that word in its full sense could not be applied …
Playing the Fool
by Binoy Kampmark / September 29th, 2015
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 …
by Kenneth Eade / September 29th, 2015
Speaking as an attorney and an author who has researched the subject thoroughly for my novel Unreasonable Force, the Black Lives Matter movement has done a lot to generate awareness in the last two years about how blacks are treated differently by our society in general, and by the police in particular. However, the roots of police violence go far deeper than just our historic racism. It is an epidemic that has grown to unacceptable proportions because our society has become desensitized to war and violence, and the police have become militarized and identify African Americans as targets.
There has been much controversy discounting …
Close ties mean Israeli pupils are being raised to be ‘good soldiers’ rather than good citizens
by Jonathan Cook / September 28th, 2015
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 …
by subMedia / September 28th, 2015
by Nicola Nasser / September 28th, 2015
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 …
by Kenneth Eade / September 28th, 2015
I’ve got good news for everybody! Guess what? Climate change is not a hoax! But here’s the other news-despite all the scientific studies, IPCC reports, the Lima convention, President Obama’s public statements, and even a proclamation from the Pope himself, it’s official – the United States Senate has decided that climate change is not caused by us! Yes, the esteemed body of bought and paid for elected officials voted 98-1 in favor of an amendment stating that “Climate change is not a hoax,” but refused to vote for a proposed amendment that it is caused mostly by human activity….
A Marxist Travelogue
by Anthony Tarrant / September 27th, 2015
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 …
by James Hoover / September 27th, 2015
To presuppose is to assume truth without any proof. In this way, you can establish your own orthodoxy. Even in 1943, George Orwell, the author of Animal Farm and 1984, recognized this in countries under the protection of freedom, like England. In a proposed forward to Animal Farm he noted that “censorship in England is largely voluntary,” further explaining that a “genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.”
Open societies must practice more subtle and sophisticated mechanisms to establish and maintain what Orwell called “smelly little …
by Walter Brasch / September 27th, 2015
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 …
September 25 was the 12th anniversary of his death
by Edward C. Corrigan / September 27th, 2015
Edward Said was an amazing individual and an incredible speaker, writer and academic. He is gone, but the power of his ideas lives on. I was fortunate to meet Edward Said on a few occasions.
Photo by Sonja Karkar
There is a bit of a story about how I first met Edward Said. After Canadian’s Concerned for the Middle East (CCME) was refused ratification by the University of Western Ontario Student Council in December 1982 a number of academics at UWO sought to bring a few speakers …
by Adnan Al-Daini / September 27th, 2015
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 …
by Vladimir Kozin / September 26th, 2015
In this final week before Vladimir Putin addresses the UN General Assembly, there has been a flurry of contact between Washington and Moscow. And by that I don’t just mean the September 18 telephone call between the defense ministers of Russia and the US. Russia’s beefed up military presence in Syria has clearly sparked a whole series of informal consultations, the culmination of which should be a meeting between the leaders of Russia and the United States on the sidelines of the General Assembly. The key topics during their talks will undoubtedly be the refugee crisis and the …
