by Vijay Prashad and Manolo De Los Santos On August 5, a major oil storage facility in Matanzas, Cuba, 65 miles east of Havana, was hit by lightning. A tank that contained 25,000 cubic meters of crude oil caught fire after being struck. Since then, an enormous fire has been raging in Matanzas. Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Ávalos Jorge, deputy head of Cuba’s[Read More...]
On August 2nd, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi became the highest-level U.S. official to visit Taiwan since 1997, against all warnings from China and from American officials, who said it could lead to more aggressive military posturing. The objective of the visit was not clear, besides making a stand against China with the usual “democracy” rhetoric. What will America gain by[Read More...]
by Natasha Lycia Ora Bannan and Medea Benjamin By now, the images of the oil explosion that erupted in the Cuban province of Matanzas on Friday, August 5 and continues blazing have become international news. When lightning struck an oil tank in Cuba’s largest oil storage facility, it quickly exploded and began to spread to nearby tanks. As of now,[Read More...]
No, this is not about baseball, though this writer as a youth participated in many squeeze plays. Sometimes they were actually ‘ Suicide Squeezes’, so apropos to this current political climate. No, this is about millions of us working stiffs who consider ourselves Socialists or Socialist thinkers. Some in the sadly corrupt Democratic Party call themselves ‘ Progressives’ , but…[Read More...]
Amid the military standoff in the Taiwan Strait triggered by the visit of US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan last week, the US is planning to send warships through the Taiwan Strait “in the coming days,” the publication of the United States Naval Institute reported Tuesday. On Monday, the Pentagon confirmed earlier statements by the White House that the[Read More...]
Xenophobia is a global crisis, but in South Africa, it takes a particularly violent form. The day-to-day accumulation of insult and harassment from within the state and society periodically mutates into open-street violence in which people are beaten, hacked and burned to death. If there is a useful point of global comparison, it may be with the communal riots that[Read More...]
On the 77th anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki during WWII was cause for a small group of anti-war activists to demonstrate at the White House to draw attention to both that disaster and the ongoing legacy of nuclear war that continues to threaten the world. The setting was appropriate as nearby on the sidewalk in a tent at Lafayette[Read More...]
Ukrainian forces have threatened civilians by setting up bases and operating weapons systems in populated areas, including schools and hospitals, as they battled the Russian intervention that began in February, Amnesty International said in a statement. “Such a tactic violates international humanitarian law and endangers civilians, as it turns civilian objects into military targets. The Russian strikes that followed in[Read More...]
The United Nations prides itself on exposing, monitoring and noting the travails and vicissitudes to be found on this troubled planet. It also prides itself on being the premier international institution that protects, or at the very least keeps an eye out for, the principles of the Charter that underpin its existence. But as with all bodies with mighty aspirations[Read More...]
Our journey with food had a tumultuous start with our progenitors being banished from paradise for eating the forbidden fruit. Since then, food has been predominant in our existence, evolving with the evolution of humanity. The biological progression of human bodies and the development of our brains commenced with the discovery of food and progressed with the gradual expansion of[Read More...]
