Mainstream media takes on the bad news on life expectancy barely mention international comparisons — notably ignoring China and Cuba — and neglect the political and economic context of the drop, writes WT WHITNEY Jr.

Former Die Linke co-chair Sahra Wagenknecht, among the German Left Party’s most famous politicians, has accused the government of causing a “social and economic catastrophe” through its sanctions on Russia.

U.S. government programs for migrants who cross the country’s southern border are punitive and disjointed.

Two hundred years ago, on July 8, 1822, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned. He was less than a month short of thirty.

Hundreds of IPCC scientists provide the United Nations periodically with reports on adverse impacts of climate change. The most recent report, issued in February, details rising seas, terrible droughts, atypical weather events, thawing permafrost, dying forests, and massive displacement of populations.

The cruder U.S. methods for destroying Cuba’s revolutionary government—military attacks, bombings of hotels and a fully-loaded airplane, violent attacks on officials, biological warfare—did not work. Nor has economic blockade, which of course continues. A more subtle approach also exists. Like the blockade, its purpose is to cause despair and then dissent.

The world lost a trailblazing thinker and feminist this week. Professor and social activist Gloria Jean Watkins, better known by her pen name bell hooks, passed away at the age of 69.

Every thuggish movement needs its cover of respectability and even scholarly, theoretical pillars.

It’s bad enough to imagine blame and scenarios of dread, as if from science fiction, but add in the presently feeble response to dire threats and we’re in a funk. If tools were available, we’d get a lift. Marc Brodine’s book Green Strategy, reviewed here, is about tools.