Archive | Newswire

I admit upfront that this is a hard newsletter to read. It is about debt. There is a bloodless quality to the way that we talk about the debt of the poorer nations. There is nothing poetic here. The numbers are alienating, their outcome shocking.

The balance of nature is not the same today as in Pleistocene times, but it is still there: a complex, precise, and highly integrated system of relationships between living things which cannot safely be ignored any more than the law of gravity can be defied with impunity by a [person] perched on the edge of a cliff. The balance of nature is not a status quo; it is fluid, ever shifting, in a constant state of adjustment. [Humans], too, [are] part of this balance.

The virus risks plunging Bangladesh into social, economic, and political turmoil—not to mention the public health crisis.

Only minutes after news broke that Governor Cuomo had asked Bill Gates and his foundation to help “reimagine” education in New York, parent groups responded with a loud NO!

We must acquire the elasticity of mind to look beyond isms…and learn to walk with Gandhi, Ambedkar and Marx for a true politics of liberation

Iran has delivered a devastating blow to the ego of the Trump administration, puncturing it beyond repair, by its announcement Sunday that mosques will start reopening in low-risk areas of the country from May 5. 

While much of the corporate press has blamed Russia and China for the sudden failure of multiple longstanding nuclear treaties, experts put the blame on squarely on the Trump administration.

Venezuelan officials reported that a group of mercenaries attempted to invade the country on Sunday but were stopped by the country’s army and police.

With nearly everyone trapped at home for the fiftieth anniversary of the first Earth Day, Michael Moore released a film that picks apart the U.S. environmental movement as it may have looked ten years ago, and then misleadingly presents it as breaking news.

Sub-Saharan Africa is facing its greatest crisis in generations. The continent thus far has been less affected by the pandemic than other parts of the world. But the impact of the global economic crisis is already enormous.

Government responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have put into sharp relief their true nature. This is perhaps no more evident than when we compare Bolivia and Venezuela.

CNN should note that accepting a 60–70% infection rate means accepting a million deaths or more, assuming a fatality rate of 0.5%—which may be a conservative estimate.

The article seeks to re-emphasise that as capitalism exploits society and nature for its own expanded reproduction, it cannot but revolutionise the productive forces, in terms of science and technology. On the other hand, however, it also creates fetters to the realisation of the ­potential that it creates, by making it a slave to the logic of profit.

As experts try to model the true number of coronavirus deaths, and some random ‘surveillance’ studies have suggested that–at least in some badly hit areas–the number of confirmed coronavirus cases might be many multiples of the official count, the FT has published its latest attempt at trying to ‘model’ the true coronavirus death toll.

More than 1,450 men and women in white lab coats from Cuba’s Henry Reeve Contingent have traveled to 22 nations in Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa and the Middle East to battle the pandemic.

In the absence of strong support measures by governments across the world, the estimated loss of mostly informal jobs would result in rising poverty, starvation and inequality, an ILO report says.

“You really are the men and women who do everything eh, you people!” That was the reaction of an 88-year-old patient when she received a phone call from one of our Medicine for the People (MPLP) volunteer workers or staff in mid-March.

The Russian-Chinese entente emerged as one of the most significant templates of international politics in the recent period since the hugely consequential developments in Ukraine in 2014 that led to western sanctions against Moscow, which in turn galvanised the latter’s ‘pivot to Asia’. 

Tova Charles & Zai Sadler performing “Hair” at Write About Now Poetry.

The speaker is too poor to move to a different region, so they can only move slightly farther away from an inevitable problem.