Cuba, battling successfully to contain COVID-19 at home, also provides medical internationalism and solidarity abroad. While Cuba dispatches the Henry Reeve Brigade to countries requesting healthcare assistance, Donald Trump’s administration escalates the anti-Cuba economic, financial and commercial blockade while threatening sovereign states who request needed Cuban medical solidarity — in a global pandemic.
The current uprising across the nation is a take-off moment for systemic racism in the United States. A take-off moment occurs when awareness about a crisis reaches a level of public consciousness where an event (in this case, the recent high-profile police murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd) sparks protests across the country.
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It sometimes feels incredible that this time last year, many of us had never even heard of coronavirus. There had been no lockdowns. No lives lost. No economic collapse.
And for many of us, the threat of a pandemic felt like a relic of the last century, something about as menacing as hat pins, phonograph needles, or corsets laced too tightly.
September 24. Central Criminal Court, London.
September 23. Central Criminal Court, London.
Following the script sheet of the previous day, the non sequitur, pop medical view of the prosecution was again in sharp evidence at the Old Bailey. In an effort to make the road for Julian Assange’s extradition to the United States for 17 charges under the US Espionage Act and one under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act smoother, James Lewis QC persisted in attacking suggestions that the WikiLeaks publisher was autistic, or should be treated as such.
At the risk of counting chickens before they hatch, what would the return of Team Blue portend?
Liu Bolin (China), Guernica, 2016
Dedicated to Soni Prashad, 1929-2020, who spent her life looking for a better world.
US President Donald Trump and his ‘war council’ – led by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo – have amplified their aggression against China. What began as a trade dispute in the 1990s has now escalated into the United States making an existential challenge against China.
It’s been a weird time, the last six months, and so it continues; perhaps it always was. It’s certainly been an unjust violent mess in varying degrees of severity, for as long as most can remember. With selfishness, division and pleasure firmly in the driving seat, and the planet beautiful, slowly choking to death under the weight of human greed and stupidity.
The Republican and Democratic Party conventions showed that both major parties are failing to control the pandemic and protect people, address the climate crisis and clean up the environment, support families and businesses during the economic collapse, prevent police violence or deal with any of the other major problems we face.
As a coup de grâce to the Bernie Sanders campaign Joe Biden declared that he would veto Medicare-for-All. This could drive a dedicated health care advocate to relentlessly pursue Med-4-All as a final goal. However, it is not the final goal. It should be the first step in a complete transformation of medicine which includes combining community medicine with natural medicine and health-care-for-the-world.
