By Mickey Z. / October 22nd, 2021 The only thing we have to fear⊠(the dude who signed Executive Order 9066) Halloween is an odd holiday. The ostensible concept â as it has evolved to become â is to shock, startle, frighten, petrify, horrify, and/or terrify⊠all while consuming enough high f…
In their classic book on the news media, Manufacturing Consent, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky presented a âpropaganda modelâ of how the major broadcasters and newspapers operate. Whereas the âmainstreamâ media declare that their aim is to educate, inform and entertain the public, their actu…
The best-selling Irish novelist Sally Rooney is openly shunning Israel after recent reports from human rights groups warned that Israel practices apartheid, systematically oppressing Palestinians under its rule. But while Israel risks becoming a pariah among some cultural producers, it is being aggr…
The Israel lobby regularly torments people and seeks to undermine their ability to make a living. While increasing numbers of Canadians are wise to their slander campaigns, some progressives still end up aligning with the bullies who have misused the term anti-Semitism to intimidate and silence. The…
The United States â the land and people â will be a lot better off when the idea of US supremacy is dropped. Toward that end, and toward the goal of a better world, here are ten things for US to understand about Latin America. This piece has a special focus on Nicaragua, a country whose sovereig…
Jaime de Guzman (Philippines), Metamorphosis II, 1970.On 5 October, the United Nations Human Rights Council passed a historic, non-legally binding resolution that ârecognises the right to a safe, clean, healthy, and sustainable environment as a human right that is important for the enjoyment of hu…
By Mickey Z. / October 20th, 2021 (Mickey Z) Last month, I stopped by an anti-mandate rally at Columbus Circle/Central Park for a little while. While I was there, a band played mellow music. Much of the crowd was singing along and dancing as I wandered around taking photos and feeling happy to see s…
The pro-Israel crowd on social media was quick to pounce on award-winning Irish novelist, Sally Rooney, as soon as she declared that she had âchosen not to sell ⊠translation rights of her best-selling novel, âBeautiful World, Where Are Youâ to an Israeli-based publishing houseâ. Expected…
By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies / October 20th, 2021 (Photo: Tom Pennington) In country after country around the world, people are rising up to challenge entrenched, failing neoliberal political and economic systems, with mixed but sometimes promising results. Progressive leaders in th…
Whew, the realities of so many people as part of the walking wounded in high and low places. The landscape in USA, now Canada, UK and parts of Europe, where the Capitalists buff their gold-plated toilets and polish their collection of cars, there are hundreds of millions of people, rudderless, broke…
History is strewn with the broken branches of twisted irony. An individual who found himself entangled in it was the late Colin Powell, who, as a military man, gave a doctrine his name only to forgo it as a diplomat. The Powell Doctrine was one of certitude and caution: do not engage in conflict e…
By John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / October 19th, 2021 ⊠the world is in greater peril from those who tolerate or encourage evil than from those who actually commit it. âAlbert Einstein America is breaking down. This breakdownâtriggered by polarizing circus politics, media-fed mass hyst…
No one can stop him. He can barely stop himself. The former Australian prime minister, Tony Abbott, seems to be everywhere, fighting the poor cause. At the very least, he is everywhere with the press cameras, the niggling concerns, the irritations that make it into the twenty-four-hour news cy…
The fact that Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah has won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature is welcome news, especially as the Swedish Academy is historically known for lacking in diversity, as if intellectual creativity is largely confined to Western intellectual circles. It is premature to sugge…
Vexilla regis prodeunt Inferni â Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: The Inferno Try to look ahead and see if you can see whatâs been coming for decades. Try to climb higher and see the beautiful things that Heaven bears, where we came forth, and once more see the stars and raise a banner of…
In the wake of WMD-liar Curveballâs videotaped confession, Colin Powell was demanding to know why nobody warned him about Curveballâs unreliability. The trouble is, they did. Can you imagine having an opportunity to address the United Nations Security Council about a matter of great global impor…
A cursory glance at the âState of the Worldâ reveals what a mess things are: from the environmental emergency and war to injustice and poverty, a tightly woven man-made mess of interconnected issues, unprecedented in scale. The greatest crisis of all, however, is humanity, and the culture that w…
By Mickey Z. / October 18th, 2021 This one goes out to all of you who still âtrust the science.â Edward Bernays was the nephew of Sigmund Freud. He was a public relations pioneer, one of Americaâs most innovative social engineers, and the author of a 1928 book brazenly entitled Propaganda. I…
Promoters of privately-operated charter schools have continually sought to justify the existence and expansion of charter schools since their inception 30 years ago in Minnesota. In and of itself this is curious because if charter schools are supposedly so successful and so much better than public s…
By Matthew J.L. Ehret / October 17th, 2021 With the expulsion of half of Russianâs diplomatic delegation to NATO, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Dimitry Peskov stated that âNATO is not an instrument of cooperation, not an instrument for interaction; it is a bloc that overall is anti-Russian…
When Japan selected its new prime minister Fumio Kishida on 4 October 2021, there were concerns that his known conservative views did not augur well for Japanâs relationship with China. Thus far, however, those fears appear to have been overly pessimistic. Four days ago on the 50th anniversary o…
It was not for everybody, but the shock advertising tactics of the Australian comedian Dan Ilic made an appropriate point. Australiaâs Prime Minister Scott Morrison, a famed coal hugger, has vacillated about whether to even go to the climate conference in Glasgow. Having himself turned the cou…
By John Philpot and Roger D. Harris / October 15th, 2021 An international Free Alex Saab delegation attended the October 3-7 annual meeting of the African Bar Association in Niamey, Niger. Venezuelan diplomat Alex Saab has been under arrest in Cabo Verde since June 2020 by orders of the US and is fi…
Reporters at major newspapers and magazines are hard to reach by telephone. Today it is increasingly hard to converse with them about timely scoops, leads, gaps in coverage, and corrections to published articles. We started an online webpage: Reporterâs Alert. From time to time, we use Reporter…
By Dongsheng News / October 15th, 2021 This weekâs News on China in 2 minutes. Dongsheng (Eastern Voices) is an international collective of researchers interested in Chinese politics and society. The interest in China is growing everywhere. Yet most of the available news and analysis outside China…