Randa Abdel-FattahBoards of directors are a funny bunch. Often lacking expertise, claiming knowledge they do not have and insight that never illuminates, its members can make the cockup the stuff of legend. Instead of minding their own business and leaving the Adelaide Writers’ Week to take place without incident as part of the 2026 Adelaide Festival, an act of oafish meddling took place. The meddling centred on removing one invited author from the speaking schedule: the Australian-Palestinian writer and academic Randa Abdel-Fattah, who was to discuss her novel …
A television writer named Annie Jacobsen recently tweeted that she’d been “prophetic” when she wrote a real CIA scheme of attacking Venezuela into a fictional program, after which the U.S. government actually attacked Venezuela. Another word would be “propagandistic” — not in the sense of the direct, immediate lie, but in the sense of the long con. While there have been societies that could not imagine murder, and in which one ordinary Hollywood clip could cause trauma, a different sort of damage is done …
No doubt like many others who awoke to the news that President Maduro of Venezuela and his wife, Cilia Flores (a serving member of the Venezuelan National Assembly with a distinguished career in government), had been ‘captured’ or ‘seized’ by the US and were being transported to NYC to stand trial, my initial reaction was one of shock and disbelief. That any state – even a rogue state like the US – would have the gall to act so brazenly in defiance of the UN Charter and international law, and …
Killing Democracy should at bare minimum be a university textbook, distributed to every institution of higher learning in America. Ideally, it would be required reading for every literate citizen of the U.S. Qualitatively, it is on the same level as Howard Zinn’s monumental work, A People’s History of the United States. Like that landmark work, it exposes the realities of American political policy and behavior. Killing Democracy, however, more narrowly delves into America’s odious and destructive meddling in the affairs of other countries. It focuses on the horrible consequences of the …
During my 26 years at the University of Texas at Austin, where I was sometimes accused of politicizing the classroom, I repeated that phrase many times, not as a dodge but because I believed it’s the right goal.
As with many platitudes, the problem isn’t that it’s incorrect but inadequate. Teaching “critical-thinking skills” is at the heart of good teaching, but that phrase doesn’t offer much guidance on …
It usually takes archival digging, the golden gaffe, an ill-considered remark, and occasional spells of candour by those in power, to admit that the United States has, in common with other imperial powers, brutal ambitions. An example of the latter was General Smedley Butler, who, at his death in 1940, had become the most decorated Marine in US history. After retiring from active service, he was frank about his role. Professing to be a “racketeer” and “gangster for capitalism”, he went on to explain how: “I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I …
Chris Hedges just wrote a powerful column on the great ScheerPost site entitled “Grand Illusion.“He calls America, our nation, a dying empire, similar to what transpired in most past empires. He mentions the vast Roman Empire and the 20th-century Nazi Germany. The use of indiscriminate state violence and the attacks and occupations of sovereign nations became as natural as grabbing and crushing a summer evening firefly… just like that.
In a prison, they call those awaiting the executioner ‘ Dead Men Walking’. Well, only a damned fool would not see what this Trump-led government has been doing …
The Western media are doing what they usually do: minimizing and covering up the criminal aggression of the United States.
by Finian Cunningham / January 10th, 2026
The Western media are doing what they usually do: minimizing and covering up the criminal aggression of the United States.
Trump’s blatantly illegal military attack on Venezuela, the kidnapping of its president, the murder of foreign nationals, and theft of the country’s vast oil resources are not being called out for the litany of grave crimes that such actions constitute. The aggression that the U.S. has carried out is the Nuremberg standard of “supreme crime”.
Yet the U.S. and European corporate-controlled news media fail to report or comment on all this. Britain’s BBC …
Japanese PM Sanae Takaichi stunned the world when she declared publicly in the Japanese legislature, that a Taiwan contingency could constitute a “survival threatening situation” that would allow Japanese military intervention in “collective defense”.
Words matter. Especially when they are words with legal force, uttered in an official capacity.
These words are legal terms of art that authorize the aggressive use of the military according to Clause 4 of Japan’s Peace and Security Act of 2015.
Applied to Taiwan, it allows expeditionary military force against China. Since Japan acknowledges the one-China policy in the Sino-Japanese Joint Statement, this would constitute a violation …
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies / January 9th, 2026
As the Senate voted to advance a War Powers Resolution on Venezuela on January 8th, Republican Senator Susan Collins declared that she did not agree with “a sustained engagement “running” Venezuela.”
The world was mystified when President Trump first said that the United States would “run” Venezuela. He has since made it clear that he wants to control Venezuela by imposing a U.S. monopoly on selling its oil to the rest of the world, to trap the Venezuelan government in a subservient relationship with the United States.
Royal commissions are often held to confirm the obvious and squeak for modest change. They offer no binding remedies, have no compellable powers against the government of the day, and can, despite claiming to be independent, be susceptible to interest groups. They are also expensive, laborious, often lengthy, and serve as a pacifying agent, absorbing pressure and enabling the governors of the day to delay action. Scott Prasser, a scholar long versed in the pitfalls of public administration, suggests that such commissions “are most effective when the central problem is a deficit of legitimacy rather than a deficit of information.”
Video created for the Chinese national television, CCTV, 8 January 2026
by Jan Oberg / January 9th, 2026
*****
No Western media has bothered to speak with me, a Danish peace researcher, about the Trump Regime’s Greenland aggression. I also did not expect it, and it speaks volumes about their problems, including self-censorship.
Frankly, it is more effective for opinion formation and intercultural dialogue to reach 100-200 million Chinese who watch morning television and are genuinely curious about the wider world rather than just themselves. In contrast to the general West.
Here is the complete video, with the arguments divided into global, European, and Nordic perspectives.
On the madness of perpetual war and imperialist overreach
by Phil Rockstroh / January 9th, 2026
There is an exact and troubling historical correlation between the Trump administration’s imperialist aggression against Venezuela and Israel’s perpetual crimes against humanity. Both can be traced to a Western settler-colonialist worldview possessed by a sense of insatiable entitlement, and the psychological carnage concomitant to a citizenry given to the brutality inherent to the pursuit of colonialist and/or imperialist agendas.
Whether the collective mode of mind is termed Manifest Destiny or Zionist doctrine, both are manifested in the ethnic cleansing of indigenous people that can be traced back to a European belief system that insists upon its innate (White supremacy-rancid) …
Resignations, Rebellion, and a Right-Wing Rift: Heritage Implodes Over Carlson–Fuentes Affair
Folks—let me have your attention for a moment.
Because I’ve been hearing some rumbling, some grumbling, a downright thundering from deep inside one of Washington’s most conservative policy halls.
Yes sir, trouble.
Trouble with a capital T, and that rhymes with C, that stands for Carlson, and that stands for controversy. (With apologies to Meredith Wilson)
Yes, sir, there’s trouble at the Heritage Foundation—real trouble. How deep the rift runs is still an open question, but one thing’s clear: Heritage, the powerful …
Political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s prediction that we, meaning those who glorify the western world, were at “The End of History and the Last Man,” and that “the rise of Western liberal democracy marked the endpoint of mankind’s ideological evolution,” meaning that Western style “democracy is the final form of government for all nations,” motivated the Western world to rest comfortably and applaud its accomplishment in determining the final course of history. The pundits of the Western world failed to recognize that they, as victors, wrote the history, and the history they were writing did not correspond with the history that …
The US “regime change” operation against Venezuela has been defeated. The Bolivarian Revolution remains firmly in power. Now, Washington’s campaign against the Chavistas attempts to paint Interim President Delcy Rodriguez as compromising on the heritage of Presidents Nicolas Maduro and Hugo Chavez. The Wall Street Journal ran an article Venezuelan Regime’s New Strategy: Appease Trump to Survive, referring to Delcy Rodriguez’ official statement January 4 (below).
The Washington Post on January 6 could state “the Trump administration appears to have quietly settled on Delcy Rodríguez, Nicolás Maduro’s right hand, as the figure it prefers to lead Venezuela after Maduro’s …
Once done, it remains, by nature and fact, irreversible. The precedent of indicting and abducting a serving head of state and his spouse, dropping them into the jurisdiction of another country to face criminal charges of inventive pedigree (narcoterrorism foremost among them), is the stuff of nightmares in international statecraft. With the now former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores facing such charges in New York, other world leaders are doubtless feeling a prevailing gloom. Is there anything stopping US President Donald Trump from deploying the US military and law enforcement agents from nabbing the next sitting …
As part of justifying Donald Trump’s crass imperial aggression in Venezuela, Canadian officials have taken up the mantra of “democracy”.
In one post on the weekend Mark Carney opined about “the democratic will of the Venezuelan people” while in a follow-up statement the prime minister boasted that “Canada has not recognised the illegitimate regime of Maduro since it stole the 2018 election.” But Canadian hostility to the independent, socialist minded government dates to a time when no credible observer questioned the government’s electoral legitimacy.
Ottawa has been hostile to the Venezuelan government for over two decades. The Jean Chretien government wasn’t overly …
The Trump administration is increasingly resembling a government previously abominated by the current US president as entangling, bumbling, and prone to fantasies. President George W. Bush was well versed in baseless existential threats stemming from Mesopotamia, supposedly directed by the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. There was a critical problem in this assessment: in his dry drunk state, Bush was criminally wrong, proposing a doctrine in response to the attack by al-Qaeda on the United States on September 11, 2001 heavy on violence and slim on evidence.
The patchy formulation came to be known as the Bush Doctrine, permitting the United …
We have always lived in a society that hinders mental health care instead of enabling it. Now, this writer is surely not a psychiatrist, but I did spend a night in a Holiday Inn Express. My experiences as a patient of Freudian psychoanalysis 40 years ago taught me, among many things, that ‘The child is father of the man’. What happened to us as little baby boys and girls from birth to the age of six can influence who we become as adults. Keep that in mind folks as you watch the car crash this Trump Cabal is causing.
Charter schools are deregulated private entities that embrace “free market” ideology. They rest firmly on consumerism, competition, and the medieval view that every individual should fend for themselves. Winning and losing are considered normal, healthy, and desirable in this obsolete outlook where “shopping for a school and hoping for the best” replaces the right to education.
These outsourced “schools” have been around since 1991. They make a few people quite rich, are usually more segregated than traditional public schools, and are also well-known for poor accountability, widespread corruption, and high student, teacher, …
The crazy-quilt National Security Strategy released a few weeks back is a patchwork of declarations of intent, admonitions thrown at other countries and ad hominem statements of dubious validity. It lacks coherence or consistency – much less a theme, a central idea, or a concept that gives pattern to its incongruent parts. Clearly, the document is the artless product of an assemblage of authors undisciplined by editorial direction. Yet, many serious analysts claim to see in this disjointed attempt at composing a grand strategy a landmark signaling a fundamental shift in the way the United States sees itself in the realm …
While the secret signals and surveillance facility at Pine Gap in Northern Australia, officially named the Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap (JDFPG) is billed as a joint affair between Australia and the United States, it is nothing of the sort. Just as offices direct the callow intern to make the coffee, Australian officials remain America’s permanent interns, helpful, certainly, but never powerful or given challenging roles. The contempt with which Australians are treated is shown by the level of secrecy that continues to enshroud one of the largest signals intelligence centres …
EU Sanctions against the block’s own citizens and residents are a horrible development toward a totalitarian future. Their extralegal nature is what gives them their force. A proffered explanation.
It has come as a shock to many of us in the alternative media sphere when, on December 15, the EU put the esteemed analyst, political commentator, and former Swiss Army colonel Jacques Baud, on its Russia-Sanctions list. He was one of several newly sanctioned individuals (alongside, for instance, the popular French journalist, …
Fire at Fuerte Tiuna, Venezuela’s largest military complex, is seen from a distance after a series of explosions in Caracas on January 3, 2026. The US military was behind a series of strikes against the Venezuelan capital Caracas on Saturday, which reportedly led to the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, US media reported. Photo: AFP
Launching a military strike against a sovereign country in the name of “law enforcement” and forcibly seizing another country’s president by relying on overwhelming power – this is a scenario so outrageous that …
Maduro isn’t a gunrunner, they’re in Rubio’s backyard sniffing the product. He was betrayed. If you want the oil Donald, you’ll have to invade, despite your bone spurs.
Donald Trump’s plan to smoothly run Venezuela after attacking the sovereign country and capturing its president with his wife has faced a major setback. This was after the Venezuelan armed forces and Nicolas Maduro’s deputy condemned the US invasion of their country and capturing of their president and the First Lady. Rifat Jawaid digs deeper in Venezuelan history to explore why anti-Americanism has been an integral part of the ideology of the current lot governing Venezuela.
The Trump administration’s military aggression against the people of Venezuela proves the dictum: US/Western imperialism is gangsterism on an international level. The World has witnessed an attempted smash and grab/shakedown operation, and extortion racket perpetrated by a gangster state.
Of course, Trump is going to strut and preen and sputter braggadocio about his exercise in plundering Venezuela’s oil assets. Trump’s personality evinces the traits of a gangster given to ostentatious displays of his criminality, not the smart type who schemes from the shadows.
The history of the Mob proves the latter’s reign is …
