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Last year, I asked Amnesty International for its position on US economic sanctions against Venezuela. I also asked Amnesty’s position on the threats US officials have made against Venezuela’s government, including open encouragement of Venezuela’s military to perpetrate a coup. Last year, Amnesty replied that it took “no position” on US economic sanctions. Regarding US Read more…
At the beginning of February 2019, the two leading nuclear powers took an official step toward resumption of the nuclear arms race. On February 1, the U.S. government, charging Russian violations of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, announced that it would pull out of the agreement and develop new intermediate-range missiles banned by it. Read more…
Use of the term ‘Populism’ is a deliberately vague misdiagnosis of our world’s problems. It lumps all change that might threaten the status quo as the same chaos, the danger of populism. Every politician must be elected by popular vote, so to diagnose some as populist is meaningless. It is to spook the very idea Read more…
Ever since the U.S. atomic bombings of Japanese cities in August 1945, a specter has haunted the world―the specter of nuclear annihilation. The latest report from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, issued on January 24, reminds us that the prospect of nuclear catastrophe remains all too real. Citing the extraordinary danger of nuclear disaster, Read more…
By Tapani Lausti David Edwards & David Cromwell, Propaganda Blitz: How the Corporate Media Distort Reality. Foreword by John Pilger. Pluto Press 2018. The heated debate about fake news supposedly separates “real journalists” from writers who try to confuse people’s views about what is really happening in the world. If only it was that simple. Read more…
This Reuters article says “The Maduro regime is illegitimate and the United States will work diligently to restore a real democracy to that country,” Pompeo told reporters in Abu Dhabi, where he is on a tour of Middle East countries. ” [emphasis added] The Onion might have simply changed “countries” above to “dictatorships” or, Read more…
Something about the connection among “seats” and “votes” at the Spanish Congress. Scroll to “results” and look at the distribution of seats, in relation to the votes at the Spanish general election held in 2015: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Spanish_general_election Unless the data in the English Wikipedia are wrong, which rarely happens, the results are even more frightening: x Read more…
Bill Blum passed away early last month in Virginia. Many Z Net readers will know his canonical book, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since WWII, or remember his regular newsletter Anti-Empire Report. My first contact with Bill came in 1995 when I wrote him about something he had written on the Cold War. Read more…
According to numerous reports, the world’s billionaires keep increasing in number and, especially, in wealth. In March 2018, Forbes reported that it had identified 2,208 billionaires from 72 countries and territories. Collectively, this group was worth $9.1 trillion, an increase in wealth of 18 percent since the preceding year. Americans led the way with a Read more…
The Social Institutions and Gender index (SIGI) was first launched in 2009, and then updated in 2012 and 2014. The fourth edition of the SIGI was launched in December 2018. The index uses these four dimensions to measure the institutional effects on gender parity: Discrimination in the family Restricted physical integrity Restricted access to productive Read more…