THIS WEEK IN

Julie Wark The Wrongs of the Rights

Ed Rampell Get Rid of the Commies: A Blacklisted Boyhood

Gaza Diary

US China Policy: Too Late, Too Little to Offer

BY Melvin Goodman

Biden and his national security team believe they can “contain” China; they can’t. The U.S.-China relationship is important in all policy areas: political, economic, environmental, and military. The United States and China have the two largest economies in the world, and are the world’s two greatest emitters of greenhouse gasses. China leads the world in the production of solar cells and panels, lithium-ion batteries, and electric vehicles; the United States is far behind in these areas and the promotion of increased tariffs on these items will not help the deteriorating environmental situation. The environmental challenge cannot be resolved without Sino-American cooperation. More

“Está Cabrón”: An End-of-Year Reflection on a World at the Crossroads

BY Todd Miller

When I first meet the fisherman Gerardo Delgado, he is sitting in his boat, surrounded by pelicans, off the shore of Lake Toronto, in central south Chihuahua, Mexico. Perhaps the pelicans are waiting for Delgado to toss a fillet, but his catch is, yet again, meager. In the last couple of years, it’s been hard to make a living from fishing on the lake. I am with another fisherman, Alonso Montañes, and we approach Delgado on a motorboat. More

Hell and High Water: the Year in Climate Chaos

BY Jeffrey St. Clair

2024 will be the warmest year on record, the year warming topped 1.5 degrees Celsius. It’s the year the US set new oil and gas production records, surpassing Saudi Arabia and Russia. It’s a year that saw the US re-elect a climate denier who vows to double US oil production over these record levels, assuming that’s even possible. It’s a year that saw two of the most destructive hurricanes in US history roar back-to-back across the Gulf Coast. It’s the year the temperatures in the Atlantic basin shattered records, the Arctic Ocean went ice-free, and the Atlantic Current continued to collapse. It’s the year a tropical cyclone demolished the French colony of Mayotte, killing as many as 10,000 people. It’s the year the UN climate conference, held in the oil city of Baku, failed to reach an agreement on phasing out fossil fuels and committed to providing less than a third of the annual climate funding needed for developing nations to transition from fossil fuels. It’s the year when CO2 levels hit 425.01 PPM, nearly 3 PPM more than last year’s record high. It’s the year when wildfires in Canada burned all year long. More

Did Putin Make a Deal Over Syria?

BY Dan Glazebrook

Although Russia might have found it difficult to commit large numbers of its own troops to Syria, it could certainly have subsidised the salaries of Syrian army soldiers, which could well have gone some way to mitigating the mundane bread-and-butter defections and passivity within the Syrian army. It chose not to do so, presumably for a reason. More