Author: nick

Photo by Theo Bickel After having accused five Chinese refineries of buying Iranian oil, the US Treasury on 24 April put them on its ever-growing list of sanctioned companies. On the face of it, routine enough. For decades Washington has asserted the right to decide who can trade with the rest of the world, and everyone else has acquiesced to its diktats for fear of being shut out of an international financial system tethered to the dollar. But this time it didn’t go according to plan. Beijing, which had previously limited itself to verbal protests and discreet workarounds, rejected the…

Legislative efforts to make daylight saving time permanent year round got a boost with support from President Donald Trump, who criticized the twice-yearly clock switching as cost-prohibitive. But there is no strong evidence that Trump’s solution — switching permanently to daylight saving time — would provide the economic boost Trump suggests it would. The Sunshine Protection Act, which would make daylight saving time permanent year round unless states opt out, was folded into a motor vehicle safety bill that passed out of the House Energy and Commerce Committee on May 21 with a 48-1 vote. Shortly after, Trump posted his…

The Trump administration is still fighting to keep billions of dollars in tariff revenue that it unlawfully collected from American businesses. Despite begrudgingly starting to refund some of those tariff payments in April, the Trump administration told a federal court this week that it should not have to refund all those payments. If the administration prevails, it would only have to issue refunds to the businesses that filed lawsuits challenging the legality of those tariffs—which the U.S. Supreme Court struck down in February—while many other businesses would be out of luck. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is also trying to shield a top…

U.S. aid to Israel is one of the most contentious foreign policy issues in America. The last three years of wars in the Middle East—culminating in the latest war with Iran—have soured a majority of Americans on the U.S.-Israeli relationship, polling shows. And the aid is up for debate soon, as President Barack Obama’s “memorandum of understanding” guaranteeing $3.8 billion per year for Israel expires in fiscal year 2028. Earlier this year, Axios reported that Israel was looking for a new memorandum of understanding that would last twice as long as the previous one but shift the money from direct…

Big Media depends on big money from big corporations. No wonder that it promotes the corporate agenda and the agendas of governments that serve corporate interests. Protest at major television news headquarters near the U.S. Capitol building in Washington over the media’s coverage of Gaza, Aug. 11, 2025. (Joe Lauria) Truly independent media depends on money from small donors. No wonder that it reports from the perspective of the average woman and man against corporate-controlled government agendas at home and abroad. With the concentration of Big Media in the hands of a few big corporations, and with Big Media supporting…

Angeles National Forest firefighters during initial attack of the Eaton Fire. Photo by Christian Ruiz, US Forest Service. Hypocritically, MSNOW and CNN express outrage at Donald Trump’s takeover of CBS. But do they serve another segment of the oligarchy? Advertisers, some of whom are cozy with the oligarch’s employee, Donald Trump? Is this why a parade of white men on Morning Joe and CNN programs blamed the Eaton Fires on Karen Bass and not the Southern California Edison Company? Is it because Southern California Edison Company spends millions on advertising in the Los Angeles media market. It’s bad enough that…

Good news is rare when it comes to pancreatic cancer.  Early detection is difficult. Post-diagnosis survival times are relatively short. Existing treatments are mostly available in the disease’s early stages. Even though just 3.2% of newly diagnosed cancers are pancreatic, it is the nation’s third-leading cause of cancer deaths. So when Dr. Rachna Shroff, who has been treating pancreatic cancer patients for 16 years, saw promising findings from a recently published clinical trial, she felt what she described as a monumental shift. “The data brought tears to my eyes,” said Shroff, the University of Arizona Cancer Center’s chief of hematology and…

[This essay is co-authored with Professor Arthur Hellman and Gabe Roth, Executive Director of Fix the Court. Their biographies are below.] The Constitution provides only one method to punish federal judges who misbehave: impeachment, which can lead to removal from office. But there is broad consensus that judicial impeachment should be reserved for only the most egregious cases. Instead, Congress crafted a middle ground. A judicial council within the regional circuit can review allegations of misconduct, impose reprimands, and where appropriate, make an impeachment referral to the House of Representatives. Of course, the House retains the power to impeach a…

A bill’s provision to integrate the U.S. and Israeli militaries will go to a U.S. House vote after an effort to stop it failed Thursday. Passage will make it nearly impossible to end the U.S.-Israel special relationship, Alan MacLeod writes.  U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 5, 2025. (DoD /Madelyn Keech) By Alan MacLeodMintPress News Amid widespread and growing public opposition to the Israeli genocide of Gaza and South Lebanon, a controversial new bill seeks to formally integrate the U.S. and Israeli militaries like never before, making it…

This interview delves into the uncomfortable discussion about what is actually driving successive waves of mass migration into Europe, the UK and North America, and who is capitalizing on this perpetual crisis. Upon closer examination, it’s now clear that NATO interventions are causing the very migrant crisis that its member states claim to be solving—by fueling the Far Right at home, and by prosecuting both military and economic warfare oversees. In terms of western foreign policy, one of the biggest influences is Israel. Likewise, Israel and its wealthy lobby are also funding the Far Right reactionary and Christian nationalist extremist…