In late June, Kenyan President William Ruto backtracked on a tax-hiking finance bill after protests left at least 20 people dead and more than 150 injured when police opened fire with live ammunition.
According to Patrick Gathara of The New Humanitarian, the youth-led protests were triggered by a range of proposed new taxes that will increase the financial burden on families already struggling with rising prices.
In response to the ongoing nationwide protests that led up to the aforementioned incident, Ruto said he would withdraw the bill as “members of the public insist on the need for us to make more concessions. The …
The figures have been stalled for months. The goal is to minimise Israel’s barbarism, while lulling western publics into a false sense of complacency
by Jonathan Cook / July 31st, 2024
The death toll in Gaza is way too low by every imaginable metric. We need to be stressing this – all the more so when Israel’s apologists are vigorously engaged in a disinformation campaign to suggest that the figures are inflated.
On 6 May, 7 months into Israel’s slaughter, there were reported to be 34,735 dead. That was an average of 4,960 Palestinians killed each month.
Today, nearly three months on, the reported death toll stands at 39,400 – or an increase of 4,665.
“The media is lying to you about the Venezuelan election,” begins
BreakThrough News reporter about what is undeniably another US-sponsored coup to try and overthrow the Venezuelan people’s desire as expressed through an election.
Swimming, or dipping, in faecal polluted waters is not unusual. The spirit longs for purity in the staining aqua, and the body keeps pace with it. The Ganges, for instance, features sacred rites and ceremonies defiant of science. In an aqueous body of lingering corpses, thickening pollutants and full flowing faeces, foolhardy believers can find spirituality.
Such foolhardiness has also found itself in Paris 2024, the occasion of the XXXIII Summer Olympiad. Since 1923, the River Seine’s toxicity had become the stuff of legend. Over five decades, the famous river received untreated sewage.
With the award of the Olympics came the intention …
It is a point verging on the trite: an arms corporation suspected of engaging in corrupt practices, spoiling dignitaries and officials and undermining the body politic. But one such corporation is France’s Thales defence group, which saw raids on their offices in France, the Netherlands and Spain on June 26 and June 28. The prosecutors are keen to pursue charges ranging from standard corruption and attempts to influence foreign officials to instances of criminal association and money laundering.
It is clear in this that even the French republic, despite having a narcotics grade addiction to the international arms industry, thought …
Yesterday Venezuelans voted for Nicolás Maduro to continue as president. The election highlights one of Justin Trudeau’s most embarrassing foreign policy failures and a lesson on media and government propaganda.
According to Venezuela’s National Electoral Council, Maduro received 51% of the vote. His main challenger, Edmundo Gonzalez, garnered 44% while 59% of eligible voters cast ballots.
Without presenting any evidence, the opposition cried foul. But they’ve done so after basically every election loss over the past 20 years (though not their wins).
The vote is the first presidential poll since a brazen Canadian-backed campaign to oust Maduro. In a bid to elicit “regime …
July 29, 2024, Caracas, Venezuela. Shortly before midnight, the president of the National Electoral Council (CNE), Elvis Amoroso, announced the re-election of Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro. Like the proverbial boy who cried wolf, the US-backed and funded opposition cried fraud.
Maduro won with 51.2% of the vote. His nearest rival, the US-backed candidate Edmundo Gonzalez trailed by 7%.
While the US corporate press refers to the “opposition” as if it were a unified bloc, eight other names appeared on the ballot. Unlike the US, where most of the electorate is polarized around two …
There’s no mention of their duty to the people in the oath of office that members of Congress take. It says they will support and defend the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic. Maybe, in some regard, defending the Constitution would mean doing their job: representing the people that elected them. But today, the architect of the genocide against the Palestinian people walked in and out of the “people’s house” to a standing ovation. He was given more time with our lawmakers than any of us will ever get in …
Forget a 10-month genocide in Gaza. Only when Israel can exploit the deaths of Syrians living under its military occupation are we supposed to start worrying about the "consequences"
by Jonathan Cook / July 28th, 2024
BBC coverage of the attack on a football pitch in the Golan Heights on Saturday has been intentionally misleading.
The BBC’s evening news entirely ignored the fact that those killed by the blast are a dozen Syrians, not Israeli citizens, and that for decades the surviving Syrian population in the Golan, most of them Druze, has been forced to live unwillingly under an Israeli military occupation.
I suppose mention of this context might complicate the story Israel and the BBC wish to tell – and risk reminding viewers that Israel is a belligerent …
Another entertainingly corrupt sporting event has just started in Paris, opening with a barge packed ceremony on the Seine. Thousands of simpering commentators, paid-up media gawkers and bored influencers have been ready with their computers, phones and confected dreams. As always, the Olympics throws up the question about how far the host city has managed to come through on the issue of facilities, infrastructure and organisation. Few would have doubted that Paris has the facilities, but there was always going to be grumbling about the choice of opening, mode of execution and, most importantly, the cost both financial and social.
It is interesting to compare the secret ballot election of an EU president to the process to determine the president of Russia. Yet many EU and NATO leaders (e.g., Lithuania’s president Gitanas Nauseda and US president Joe Biden) deride president Vladimir Putin as a “dictator” — albeit an elected dictator.
Rwanda has become a curiosity as an African state. The mere mention of its name tugs the memory: colonial tragedy, ethnic violence, genocide. Then comes stable rule, for the most part. It is assured, iron fisted, and corporate. Since being elected in April 2000, the country has known one leader.
Paul Kagame has kept matters running as smoothly much like a well-oiled corporate machine, aided by his Rwandan Patriotic Front. At times, he treats his country as such. His model of economic inspiration is no less the city state of authoritarian Singapore, while such think tanks as the Heritage Foundation have …
One of the defining characteristics of the current crisis is the speed at which contradictory social, political and ideological dynamics can change with contradictions shifting from primary to secondary, antagonistic to non-antagonist and conflicts of interests, as well as struggles among the capitalist oligarchy producing new intra-bourgeois class alignments.
The replacement of Joe Biden as the presidential nominee of the Democrat party was a dramatic demonstration that the lords of capital are the only segment of the U.S. population with real agency. The fact that select oligarchs, in this case, the cabal that actually runs the Democrat party, can remove …
I assure the children that Ahmad is fine, that he’s coming back soon, but to live through this war, the constant displacement, the bombing and also have to fight to know where your husband is, not to hear his voice, is like a war within the war.
Horrific testimonies continue to emerge from Palestinian civilians captured by Israeli forces in Gaza and taken to Sde Teiman, Israel’s makeshift torture facility.
Our latest visual illustrates the testimony of Fadi Bakr, a law student from Gaza City, who was captured by …
The legal ruling by the world’s highest court obliges western states not just to end their persecution of the boycott movement but to take up that cause as their own
by Jonathan Cook / July 25th, 2024
Don’t be fooled. The ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on 19 July that Israel’s occupation of Palestine is unlawful is earth-shattering. Israel is a rogue state, according to the world’s highest court.
For that reason, the judgment will be studiously ignored by the cabal of western states and their medias that for decades have so successfully run cover for Israel.
Doubters need only watch the reception Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu receives during his visit to the United States this week.
José Clemente Orozco (Mexico), The Epic of American Civilisation, 1932–1934.
In his inaugural presidential address on 20 January 2017, Donald Trump used a powerful phrase to describe the situation in the United States: ‘American carnage’. In 1941, seventy-six years before this speech, Henry Luce wrote an article in Life magazine about the ‘American century’ and the promise of US leadership to be ‘the dynamic centre of ever-widening spheres of enterprise’. During the period between these two proclamations, the United States went through …
Among the subjects of instruction in schools are the local language, spoken and written; the techniques of computation, arithmetic and algebra or geometry; the principles of the physical world, chemistry and physics; and the story of the country in which the school is located—unless it is a colony in which case the story of the country that rules it. That story and its episodes is what is commonly known as history. Sometimes it is taught generally. At some point a distinction may be made between local or national history and the …
Palestinians walk along a street covered with stagnant wastewater near tents sheltering displaced people in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza Strip, 22 July. Omar Ashtawy APA images)
As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu traveled to Washington, where he will deliver a speech to Congress on Wednesday, the Israeli military massacred Palestinians throughout Gaza and forced a new wave of mass displacement in the south of the territory.
The World Health Organization meanwhile warned that there was a high risk of the polio virus spreading within and beyond …
In my youth I studied for many years as a classically trained oboist, and one day during the Yeltsin years whilst watching the squirrels in Washington Square Park it suddenly dawned on me that the stereotype of the classical musician being an elitist snob had an element of truth to it, and that there was something fundamentally wrong about the fact that most of us lived in a bubble utterly indifferent to catastrophic political and socio-economic problems. This revelation inculcated me with an understanding that the artist has a moral obligation to not turn away in the face of injustice, …
Palestinians inspect the damage following a raid by Israeli forces in the Tulkarm refugee camp in the northern occupied West Bank on 23 July ( Mohammed Nasser APA images)
The Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority held a secret meeting with American and Israeli officials in Tel Aviv earlier this month to conspire on “day after” plans in Gaza that would involve the collaborative body in reopening the Rafah crossing with Egypt.
“Egypt wants personnel from the Palestinian Authority to operate the crossing,” Axiosreported. The crossing, when …
A revelation — in order to liberate Palestinians from a century of oppression and prevent their genocide, Jews must liberate themselves from centuries of conditioning that trained them to pose as perpetual victims while victimizing others. This is happening and too slowly; progressive Jews are wrestling with reacting to Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people without crippling the Jewish community. Almost entirely anti-Zionist in the 19th century, Zionist advances have enticed the Jewish community to split between Zionists and anti-Zionists. The former have gained control of a community that never had a higher hierarchy. Jew is preceded by an adjective …
Just when I thought things could not possibly get more shockingly totalitarian in New Normal Germany, where I’m being prosecuted in criminal court (for the second time) for tweeting, the German authorities have gone and surprised me again. No, they haven’t established an actual Nazi-style People’s Court (pictured above) yet, and, of course, there is absolutely no similarity between the current German justice system, which is totally fair and democratic and a paragon of impartial justice and the rule of law, and The People’s Court of Berlin during the Nazi …
The first chapter of Agamben’s The State of Exception (U. of Chicago, 2005) presents a brief outline of the history of the state of exception, including concrete examples from Nazi Germany, the U.S. (the Civil War and after 9/11), France, Switzerland, Italy, and England, roughly in that order. He explains that World War I was a “laboratory for testing and honing” systems for establishing states of exception, and that there was a “gradual expansion of the executive’s powers during the two world wars.” He quotes Walter Benjamin writing in 1942, that “the state of exception… has become the rule.”
Having been endorsed as the only viable candidate to battle Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential elections, Joe Biden was subsequently browbeaten and harried into leaving the way open for another candidate. It involved some movement of political furniture, but nothing more.
The process resulting in Biden’s decision had increasingly bulked over the last two months. With each day, another Democratic figure would come out to suggest he pass the torch to another appropriate appointee of the establishment. Whispers became roars. Former President Barack Obama, whose deputy Biden had been, also joined the camp of dissent. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi …
