Новости за 17.05.2024

From the Arctic to Antarctica the planet is sagging, dripping, slouching, changing the face of 10,000 years of nature coexisting with humanity side-by-side until only recently as it transforms into an adversarial relationship. Permafrost ranks alongside the Arctic, Antarctica, Greenland, The Great Barrier Reef, and the world’s three largest rainforests as the most important determinates of this changing future. Within permafrost’s confines exist thousands of years of latent ingredients that have the potential to set the world on fire. Читать дальше...

In a long oped on Sunday titled “Biden’s Error in Pausing Military Aid,” Thomas Friedman buys into Israeli propaganda that describes Iran as an “existential threat,” and harshly denigrates President Joe Biden for announcing a pause in U.S. weapons sales to Israel. Friedman is critical of Biden for announcing the pause in the transfer of 3,500 bombs to Israel in an “off-the-cuff-exchange with CNN’s Erin Burnett during a campaign stop in Wisconsin. More

Please, if you can, chip in this Spring Fund Drive, we have almost reached our goal.

“Do you think ‘sit-ins’ at lunch counters, ‘Freedom Buses’ and other demonstrations by Negroes will hurt or help the Negro’s chances of being integrated in the South?” This question was posed by Gallup, a leading polling organization, back in 1961, during the heyday of the Civil Rights Movement. A majority of Americans at the time, More

Sometimes, it’s best not to leave the issue of justice to the judges.  They do what they must: consult the statutes, test the rivers of power, and hope that their ruling will not be subject to appeal.  David McBride, the man who revealed that Australia’s special forces in Afghanistan had dimmed and muddied before exhaustion, More

Will Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. participate in either of the two presidential election debates thus far announced by the Joe Biden and Donald Trump campaigns? How about independents Cornel West and Afroman, Green party candidate Jill Stein, Constitution Party candidate Randall Terry, and whoever receives the Libertarian Party’s nomination over Memorial Day weekend? The answer, More

“Judaism cannot be separated from Israel. Zionism is, simply put, the manifestation of that belief,” stated a recent message from Jewish students at Columbia University. Israel’s politics are closely intertwined with its religious beliefs. Since 2018, Israel legally considers itself a Jewish nation-state with no separation between religion and politics. That explains why Israelis consider More

On September 3, 1964, humanity’s unrelenting quest to tame, civilize, industrialize, and obliterate wild nature crashed into the Wilderness Act, signed into law by President Johnson on that momentous day. This visionary legislation—written primarily by the late Howard Zahniser of the Wilderness Society—created a federal policy to secure for the American people “an enduring resource More

There are multiple differences between antiquity’s economic practices and those of the modern world, and these should be borne in mind when considering the changing context for enterprise through the centuries. Whereas modern business largely operates on credit, in archaic and classical times handicraft workshops were located on basically self-sufficient landed estates, including those of More

California regulators were stunned by their air monitor results in April 1990. Concentrations of a cancer-causing pesticide at schools in Merced County were so high that regulators immediately stopped any use of that pesticide in California. It’s a chemical with an unwieldy name, 1,3-dichloropropene, that you may have never heard about. But there are many reasons why you should be More

“Let them eat cake,” Marie Antoinette once famously said, disdaining the immiseration of peasants in pre-revolutionary France.  Joe Biden didn’t use those exact words last week during his interview with CNN’s Erin Burnett, but his tone-deafness about the suffering of millions of Americans grappling with high food and gas prices and unaffordable rents was palpable. Burnett More

I had a palpable sense of nerves approaching the day I was to travel to Perugia for the International Journalism Festival. I was invited by Kathleen McClellan and Jesselyn Radack of WHISPeR who were invited to present on the impact of leak prosecutions on the free press. I was certainly honored to be asked, but those emotions of More

For the last quarter century, those of us hoping we could slow global warming were anxious to see a quick conversion to electric vehicles (EVs). If we could get most people using electric vehicles, and have the energy coming from clean sources, we could radically reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The problem was that EVs were More

Throughout history, fringe religious Zionist parties have had limited success in achieving the kind of electoral victories that would allow them an actual share in the country’s political decision-making. The impressive number of 17 seats won by Israel’s extremist religious party, Shas, in the 1999 elections, was a watershed moment in the history of these More

The ongoing pro-Palestinian protests at American universities are more than just youthful expressions of speech freedom. Rather they exemplify the informed views of students repulsed by the genocide in Gaza, which they see every day on television and in the social media.  They are motivated by a desire to end the continuing complicity of their More

An acquaintance who hails from the same New Jersey town as I do spends his free weekends crawling through the woods on his stomach as part of a firearms training course, green camouflage paint on his face and a revolver in his hand. He considers this both a way to have fun in his free More

Civilization is a process that progressively codifies the rules and regulations necessary for living together in peace, the process that continually engenders associations and commissions, mechanisms for monitoring and implementation of the norms. The United Nations Charter is the best rules-based order we have, a kind of world constitution that all peoples should recognize and More

In a world of so much bad news, when so many trends seem to be rolling down the wrong track, it can be hard for people who care about the future to keep our heads above water. We’re drowning in it. In the midst of all this, a light shines through, a moral awakening of More

Writers need editors. We send in our manuscript and the editor corrects typos, does fact checks and urges stylistic improvements. There has been much discussion recently of the art world system. To understand contemporary art, you need to consider not only artists, but also art writers (who theorize it), curators (who display it), dealers (who More

Japanese Prime Minister Kishida Fumio’s April 10 speech to the US Congress, following the American custom, began with a joke. The speaker introduced him, the audience gave him a friendly applause, and he said, “Thank you. I never get such nice applause from the Japanese Diet.” The joke was a success: it got a big More

“Modernity is one of the most delicate and vital issues confronting us, the people of non-European countries and Islamic Societies. A more important issue is the relationship between an imposed modernization and genuine civilization. We must discover if modernity as is claimed is a synonym for being civilized, or if it is an altogether different More

Silky Shah, the author of a new book on how many immigrants to the United States are treated by the US government, has worked with the group Detention Watch Network (DWN) for over twenty years.  During that time, the United States has seen five men occupy the White House.  Upon reading Shah’s book, titled Unbuild More

The following is a little piece of hate mail dropped like a psychological dumb bomb into my inbox the other day… Dr. Block — When did you start becoming a self-hating Jew like Larry David, Joy Behar and decades before, Woody Allen? Your CounterPunch commentary reflects self-denial of facts, mostly one most liberal/progressives love to More

Local news has its finger on the pulse of our communities. When city council acts (or acts up), when disaster strikes, when corruption or scandal needs to be scrutinized, local news steps up. From our kids’ sporting events to small town heroes, road construction detours to storm preparedness, they cover stories of interest and importance More

After the spotted owl controversy of the 1980s, the Forest Service lost its social license to log public forests to subsidize the private timber industry. Searching for a new justification for logging, the Forest Service adopted the threat of wildfire as its new excuse for logging. To this end, the federal government has funded this More