Новости за 08.08.2025

China has transitioned from one of the poorest nations in the world to the second-largest economy with nuclear-armed forces growing at a record pace.  Over the past 40 years, China has had the world’s fastest-growing economy with annual growth rates that often exceeded 10% a year.  China’s economy grew over five percent in the first half of this year; the U.S. economy expanded by one percent.  Meanwhile, U.S. tariff policy is losing friends around the world. More

There are times when it is difficult to bring myself to my writer’s desk, when I know there is something that desperately needs to be acknowledged, but I barely have the words for it. And if I could find them, I ask myself what effect could one small voice possibly have. Is this even a meaningful process? Daily seeing pictures of children with bones sticking out of their emaciated flesh, let alone children missing limbs, while most of the western world continues support for Israel, pierces me... Читать дальше...

The following is an excerpt from Nafis Hasan’s new book, Metastasis: The Rise of the Cancer-Industrial Complex and the Horizons of Care, published by Common Notions. Listen to an interview with Hasan on the latest episode of CounterPunch Radio. +++ Every major armed conflict since World War I has created significant cancer clusters among both More

Just days after a federal appeals court upheld a ban on ICE using roving patrols and racial profiling to target immigrants, Trump’s secret police launched Operation Trojan Horse, a shock raid outside of a Home Dept in the Westlake area of Los Angeles. Posing as building contractors, ICE agents drove a yellow Penske van in front of a group of day laborers at 6:44 in the morning, asking in Spanish if any of them were looking for work. Then masked ICE agents, one of them wearing a cowboy hat, jumped out of the van and began grabbing people. Читать дальше...

Eighty years ago this week, Manhattan Project workers at the top-secret bomb development lab at Los Alamos, New Mexico were rushing to get the disassembled sections of the five-ton “Fat Man,” plutonium bomb ready to be flown by several planes to remote Tinian Island, a location that had an airfield and was near enough to More

Counterfactuals – what if so and so had happened? – are always dicey. For example; would there have been a full-scale Vietnam War if President John F. Kennedy had not been assassinated? There is no way to prove that hypothesis right or wrong. In the case of today’s Middle East, one could pose the counterfactual More

The Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem released a comprehensive report on July 27 describing the Israeli war on Gaza as genocide. However, the delay in publishing such an indictment is troubling and adds to an existing problem of politically motivated decision-making processes that have, in their own right, prolonged the ongoing Israeli war crimes. The More

I began publicly invoking the word “genocide” in July 2025 to describe the actions of the Israeli government in Gaza in response to the horrific Hamas terrorist attacks of October 7, 2023, and the incomprehensible ongoing hostage crisis. Since that time, despite increasing agreement among liberal Jewish organizations over the use of this term, I More

There are lost periods in the history of California.  How many people know that well after California banned slavery, entering the Union as a free state in 1850, Chinese girls and women were sold as slaves in California?  Fae Myenne Ng doesn’t want to forget.  Even at sixty-eight years of age, this celebrated author has More

It has become abundantly clear that after 250 years, a second American revolution is necessary.   Thomas Jefferson, principal author of the Declaration of Independence (1776), emphasized the importance of periodic uprisings to preserve liberty and protect against government overreach when he presciently wrote in 1787: “I hold it that a little rebellion now and More

It’s not exactly big news that the Trump administration – famous for slashing Biden era clean energy subsidies and cheering on fossil fuels to the tune of “Drill Baby, Drill” – is not interested in policies to address climate change. And lately they have been busy finding new ways to undermine the science that enhances More

On Tuesday, August 5, Brazil’s Congressional President Hugo Motta (PB) from the conservative Republicanos party left Brasilia on a business trip, turning control of the floor over to his elected Vice President, Altineu Cortes (RJ), a member of Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party (PL). Cortes invited a group of PL lawmakers to the table and they paralyzed More

The Middle East is a tinderbox, and America has struck a match. Last month’s U.S. airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities—Fordo, Natanz, Isfahan—ignited a firestorm. Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, emerged from his bunker to declare, “The Iranian nation isn’t one that surrenders,” vowing “everlasting consequences” for U.S. aggression. Iran’s retaliatory missile strike on the More

Zohran Mamdani’s surprise win in the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City was powered by a focus on affordability. One of his more innovative proposals to help address the city’s growing cost-of-living crisis is to open a city-owned grocery store in each borough that expands access to good-quality food for residents at an More

I don’t know what word in the English language—I can’t find one—that applies to people who are willing to sacrifice the literal existence of organized human life … so they can put a few more dollars into highly overstuffed pockets. The word ‘evil’ doesn’t begin to approach it. —Noam Chomsky Unlike other historical periods of More

“I sit in this office now. Tomorrow it will be someone else… Can you imagine that hundreds of my colleagues could stomach or remain quiet about publishing a… rate very different from what they had established?” You might be forgiven for thinking that this quote came from now former US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) More

De-industrialization in the northeast spawned a service sector that didn’t quite match the employment opportunities of the old, manufacturing-based economy.  The resulting lower wages, limited job benefits, and reduced job security propelled many workers, their families, and communities into a downward spiral. Two great regional story tellers—Russell Banks and Richard Russo—ploughed this field, with great More

Prologue On and off, I have spent decades studying Greek history. I am not so sure, however, that I fully understand what made the ancient Greeks so original and, at times, so self-destructive. Greatness, however, is easier to explain than the temptation to discord and civil wars. As early as in the Bronze Age of More

In an economy as small as Chile’s, and with the degree of concentration that characterizes it, the constant appeal to “what the market thinks” should at least raise doubts. Far from representing a collective consciousness or objective technical rationality, this alleged oracle is nothing more than the amplified voice of a small group of businesspeople, More

The evening light was a sickly sepia. The haze from the wildfires gave the clapboard houses on the steep hillside above one of Ithaca’s many gorges a simultaneously antique and apocalyptic cast.  Down below in the valley extending south from Cayuga Lake, the town seemed two-dimensional—a flat, fugitive memory soon to fade completely away.  The More

The drug wars started more than a century ago when Britain and the USA were smuggling opium into China. The Chinese lost two wars trying the end the opium imports. Several of America’s greatest fortunes were started or supplemented by smuggling opium into China. The Delano, Astor, Russel, Perkins, and Forbes families made fortunes getting More

The Theater of the Absurd is something I participate in everyday: I photograph architecture: It is something real in my career- – life, the life of my career: In this universe “The Theater…”  is and was imagined and executed through minds like Cocteau’s, Genet’s, Pinter’s and possibly one million more: Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming often comes to mind: His More

This rant is devoted in loving memory to Virginia Giuffre, a woman who died speaking the truth about powerful men. I lost my virginity in preschool. I don’t know a worse way to start a post. Unfortunately, I also don’t know a more appropriate way to start this one so, buckle up. I was a More