Archive | August, 2021

Survivors of the atomic bombings in Japan have a “profound role” to play in catastrophes such as the coronavirus pandemic, a leading American psychohistorian renowned for his studies of people under stress told Kyodo News in a recent interview.

In this segment of ‘The Watchdog’ video podcast, Lowkey is joined by comedian Aamer Rahman to explain how Australia maintains close political ties to the United Kingdom, with British Home Secretary Pritti Patel seeing the country’s offshore migrant detention centers, referred to by some as “concentration camps” as a model for the U.K. to follow.

The world’s most sophisticated commercially-available spyware may be being abused, according to an investigation by 17 media organisations in ten countries.

The initiative came from Polish Communists seeking to aid compatriots jailed or forced into exile in the Soviet republic.

Bolsonaro’s candidacy was democratic packaging for the long game of the military’s return to government. As they look to defend their position a year out from elections, the situation has escalated.

Erika Takeo from Nicaragua’s Association of Rural Workers (ATC) and Rohan Rice, a writer and campaigner with the Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign explain.

On Saturday, Biden’s half-hearted, last-minute plea for Congress to extend the federal eviction moratorium failed and the measure expired.

Taken together, these form a devastating critique of world renowned Marxist David Harvey’s insistence that the concept and theory of imperialism is not relevant to understand today’s world.

On Wednesday afternoon, Israeli forces shot and killed 11-year-old Mohammed al-Alami in his father’s car, as the family were on their way home from grocery shopping. The next day at Mohammed’s funeral, Israeli soldiers attacked the procession, killing 20-year-old Shawkat Awad.

In 1985, Canada began drug testing the urine of federal prisoners. Prison officials had tried to stop people from smuggling drugs into prisons by banning Christmas presents and even deploying teams of gerbils to sniff out anxious visitors.

One and a half years since the beginning of the pandemic in Brazil, it is possible to better evaluate some of its effects. The most visible immediate aspect of the pandemic has certainly been the sudden suspension of in-person activities and the temporary closure of schools and universities.

A poem in remembrance of Glen Ford, whose untimely death on July 28, 2021, we deeply mourn.

Diverse international groups along with the U.S. State Department have taken notice of Rodrigo Duterte’s record of killings and wanton defiance of universal norms of justice. Duterte’s regime might claim to honor the right to life, liberty, and security of persons guaranteed by the UN Declaration of Human Rights and other Covenants; but its practice consistently defiles those norms. Mass media and internet platforms cannot keep up with the regime’s punitive outrages.

The following essay examines the different reactions to radical and reactionary protest, and situates them in a broader historical context. In doing so, we find that the capitalist state will tolerate reactionary violence to a large extent since it represents no threat to capitalist property relations. In contrast, when faced with radical (and particularly socialist) movements capitalist states engage in much more severe repression.

The 20th century muckraking journalist Upton Sinclair once opined that “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Is fundamental, revolutionary change possible from within a social and economic system so shaken that questions of dual power are not likely to be raised?

This process started in the second half of the 1880s with Friedrich Engels’ editorial interventions on Marx’s manuscripts related to the theme of Capital within his incomplete research programme for a Critique of Political Economy.

Painting itself as a grassroots collective of artists fighting for freedom of expression, the San Isidro Movement has become a key weapon in the U.S. government’s assault on the Cuban revolution.

Umberto Eco’s inventory of proto-fascist characteristics comprised 14 elements. It will not be difficult for us to recognise the variant of many of these in Narendra Modi’s New India.

He becomes the first person ever to be imprisoned on the obscure and vaguely defined charge of “jigsaw identification”.