The public, according to incessant government polling and monitoring of the public mood through focus groups and mass data has confirmed that the nation is quickly being ‘traumatised‘ by the UK’s experience of the pandemic.

In October 2016 the UK government ran a national pandemic flu exercise. It was codenamed Exercise Cygnus. The report of its findings was not made publicly available, as part of the general antipathy towards the NHS in general by the Conservative party. But the then chief medical officer Sally Davies commented on what she had learnt from it in December 2016. The public will now pay with their lives for deliberate government inaction and total disregard towards their primary function – to protect us all.

Last week 36,000 Bedouin–all of them Israeli citizens–discovered that their state is about to make them refugees in their own country, driving them into holding camps. These Israelis, it seems, are the wrong kind.

The latest report about kidnappings, rendition, ‘black sites’ and torture is a remarkable piece of investigative work. It provides us with nothing less than a litany of shocking evidence and testimony and at 403 pages it makes for truly grim reading. This article is made up of a very brief set of extracts from the just-released  CIA Torture Unredacted report.

To help this movement win, we should ask why others lost. We should ask, for example, why Occupy, despite the energy and sacrifices of so many, came to an end, while the institutions it confronted remain intact.

What characterizes American government today is not so much dysfunctional politics as it is ruthlessly contrived governance carried out behind the entertaining, distracting and disingenuous curtain of political theatre. And what political theatre it is, diabolically Shakespearean at times, full of sound and fury, yet in the end, signifying nothing.

The Jewish Labour Movement likes to date its origins to the Poale Zion organisation, which was founded in 1903. A socialist society, Poale Zion affiliated itself not only with the British Labour party but also with a wide range of anti-Palestinian Zionist organisations such as the World Zionist Organisation and the Israeli Labour party.

It’s some achievement to get me sympathising with Mark Zuckerberg. But denunciations from a powerful combination of a parliamentary committee in the UK and self-appointed watchdogs of the new media like the Guardian almost managed it. – Jonathan Cook

Capitalism as we know it is over. So suggests a new report commissioned by a group of scientists appointed by the UN Secretary-General. The main reason? We’re transitioning rapidly to a radically different global economy, due to our increasingly unsustainable exploitation of the planet’s environmental resources.

In my last blog post I argued that power in our societies resides in structure, ideology and narratives–supporting what we might loosely term our current “neoliberal order”–rather than in individuals.

The October 16 issue of NY Review of Books has an article by Janine di Giovanni titled “Why Assad and Russia Target the White Helmets”. The article exemplifies how western media promotes the White Helmets uncritically and attacks those who challenge the myth.

A key meeting of cabinet members from the U.S.-led Five Eyes (UK, U.S., Aus, Can, NZ) global spying network was held in Australia in late August, which went totally unreported by the mainstream media, mainly because Britain’s representative used the cloak of Brexit to disguise it, ironically via social media.

It has become way too easy to lockdown this nation.

Before the violence that started mid-April, Nicaragua had been the most peaceful, safest, and by far the most progressive country in Central America. Now that a semblance of peace has been restored in Nicaragua, the U.S. government continues its campaign for regime change joined by some who formerly supported Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega and his Sandinista party.

Around a dozen thugs attack Bookmarks in central London and threaten to return.

Britain is doing Washington’s dirty work and given the heavily increased ‘political chatter’ on Assange’s fate–it is quite likely the British government is looking for public reaction to be muted enough to simply arrest him, go through the motions and send Assange to certain solitary confinement on death row.

Political memories are short, but just 15 years after Iraq was destroyed and the chain reaction sent most of the Arab world back to the dark ages, it is now “treason” to question the word of the Western intelligence agencies, which deliberately and knowingly produced a fabric of lies on Iraqi WMD to justify that destruction.

Our planet and our children’s futures depend on us liberating ourselves, seeing the ghosts in the machine for what they truly are. We have to begin rebuilding our societies on the basis that we share a common humanity. That other humans are not our enemies, only those who wish to enslave us to their power.

There was a day when the world realised they’d had enough of America. It wasn’t when America turned it back on the Herculean effort to sign the world up to the Paris Climate Agreement or TTIP or America’s continuous support for Israel’s murderous actions in Gaza or various other deals that took years to iron out and negotiate that have since been trashed. It was a moment we knew was going to happen but least expected to prove so important.

Should the media include positive editorial content secretly paid for by major corporations, as London’s Evening Standard newspaper has begun doing, according to new revelations?