Hours after a 6.1 earthquake rippled across western Mexico (I didn’t feel it), I turned on the tube to witness a milestone event unfolding hundreds of miles away in the Zocalo, the central plaza of Mexico City. As thousands filled the historic space on January 12, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, Mexico’s first woman president, was preparing to Read more
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Courtesy of Mizue Aizeki
Social justice activist Mizue Aizeki worked for years at the Immigrant Defense Project in New York City. There, she challenged the criminalization of city residents in what came to be known as the “police-to-deportation pipeline.” After the 9/11 attacks, these New Yorkers were increasingly targeted by the newly created Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Agents […]
Image by Planet Volumes.
Although any country that challenges domination by United States corporate or military power will inevitably be the target of a sustained demonization campaign, the lies consistently issued in a torrent against Venezuela are beyond the usual level of invective. Venezuela is the most lied-about country in the corporate press of the Global North, especially in U.S. corporate media outlets. That Venezuela has sought to align its economy to benefit its own people, instituting an impressive array of social services, health programs and political structures to facilitate grassroots participation, has drawn the consistent ire of U.S. authorities. An unrelenting cascade of lies is necessary to generate public support for the unrelenting campaign targeting the Bolivarian Revolution.
US delegation led by Anthony Blinken meeting with Netanyahu and his war cabinet. Photo: US State Department.
+ On December 15, an Israeli missile struck the third floor of a UNRWA school in al Mawasi camp outside Khan Younis, killing more than a dozen Palestinians on site and severely injuring many more who were taken to the emergency room at Nasser Hospital. At least 18 Palestinians injured in the blast died in […]
As students worldwide head back to school this fall, in Gaza, there are no schools left. The U.N. considers the systemic obliteration of the education system by the Israeli military to be a “scholasticide” — all universities, over 80% of schools, the Central Archives of Gaza, and at least 13 libraries have been destroyed, as of April 2024, in Israel’s relentless bombing campaign. Almost 10,000 students are dead and 16,000 wounded, many killed in attacks on schools being used as sites of refuge.
Academics and university administrators in Gaza released an open letter asking for solidarity and resistance from the rest of the world: “We call upon our colleagues in the homeland and internationally to support our steadfast attempts to defend and preserve our universities for the sake of the future of our people, and our ability to remain on our Palestinian land in Gaza. We built these universities from tents. And from tents, with the support of our friends, we will rebuild them once again.”
As a graduate student, an aspiring professor, and the child of a Jewish academic, I take this call for solidarity seriously. Where and how do we learn ideologies of resistance, radicalism, and revolution? Once we have inherited a radical idea, what do we do with it? And how do we choose what ideas not to inherit? More
Image by Alex Shuper
This quotation usually attributed to Thomas Jefferson, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,” is a watchword that investigative reporter Greg Palast lives by. Since the contested 2000 presidential election, Palast’s voting vigil has probed America’s electoral system and abuses of it. The journalistic detective chronicled purported purging of mostly Black citizens from Florida’s voter rolls in his landmark 2002 book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and a 2016 documentary version updated for the Trump era with the same title. Now this steadfast watchdog of voters’ rights is back with a new nonfiction cinematic inquiry wherein the reportorial gumshoe is vigilant about Vigilantes Inc.: America’s New Vote Suppression Hitmen, and Georgia is on Palast’s mind.
Last week, the Department of Energy, which oversees the aging nuclear site in Hanford, Washington, reported that a tank containing high-level radioactive waste was leaking. This is currently the third tank we know of that’s releasing deadly nuclear waste into the soil above the groundwater that feeds the nearby Columbia River. This is not a new problem for Hanford, which has 177 of these huge underground tanks that contain 55 million gallons of radioactive leftovers from the US’s nuclear weapons operation. These waste tanks were only supposed to hold up twenty-thirty years, and we’re now going on six decades. Below is an excerpt from my book Atomic Days, which details the site’s sordid history and its extremely problematic future. Sadly, leaks at Hanford are nothing new, nor are the lies surrounding them. It’s a looming nuclear danger that’s bubbling in our own backyard, and I’m scared. You should be too. More
Image by Javier Miranda.
Fredric Jameson is no longer here to remind us that imagining the end of the world is easier than imagining the end of capitalism, but the just concluded COP29 climate summit has refreshed our memory. Although securing profits is the primary goal of fossil fuel corporations along with the governments that love them, and the […]
Palestinians gather amid the ruins of a residential complex bombed by the Israelis in December. (Screengrab from video posted to X.)
Someone said recently that AI might know more about the history of the First World War than all human historians put together but that he knew more than AI because he had read the poetry of Wilfred Owen. Here therefore is a look at today’s main conflicts through the prism of these conflicts’ poetry. For […]
Kamal Adwan Hospital workers, doctors, and staff are being forcibly evicted from the grounds of the hospital by IDF soldiers. (Screengrab from a video posted to X.)
Under brutal siege for weeks, Israeli forces raided Kamal Adwan Hospital, the last functioning hospital in North Gaza, on Friday, clearing out its staff and patients and setting parts of the bomb-battered building on fire. The raid followed airstrikes on buildings adjacent to the hospital that killed at least 50 people, including five medical workers. […]
