Author: nick
Medea Benjamin warns that a decades-long economic war against Cuba has escalated into what she calls a “medieval siege,” as fuel shortages cripple hospitals, food systems and daily life while U.S. officials openly discuss military options. Joshua Scheer For more than six decades, Washington has tried to force Cuba to its knees. Today, according to peace activist Medea Benjamin, that campaign has reached a new and dangerous stage. Fuel shipments have been blocked, foreign companies threatened, humanitarian aid obstructed and military rhetoric intensified, creating what Benjamin describes as a modern-day siege designed to break the Cuban economy and the…
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair Vijay Prashad was interviewed by K. Swaminathan, Tamil Nadu Untouchability Eradication Front (TNUEF), Tamil Nadu, India, May 2026. K. Swaminathan: What is the fundamental difference between the wars waged by hereditary monarchs in the past to expand their kingdoms and the wars waged today by democratic governments against other countries? Vijay Prashad: Hereditary monarchs reported largely to themselves and not to their own populations, although they could not fight wars that did not have some popular support and benefit. But there was no real need to inculcate support for these wars and there was no…
Photograph by Nathaniel St. ClairPresident Donald Trump campaigned on a promise to strengthen the labor market. His immigration platform – including a pledge to conduct the largest deportation campaign in U.S. history – was central to that promise. “For too long, Washington ignored how mass illegal immigration artificially suppressed wages, hurting working-class Americans – especially young men,” wrote Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on X in July 2025. “But under President Trump, we now have a secure border, a blue-collar wage boom, and major investments from trade deals.” The labor market tells a different story. In the first year of Trump’s…
Officials in Macon–Bibb County, Georgia, have dropped their case against 95-year-old Paula East after realizing they had approved her vinyl windows more than 20 years ago. East lives in a historic row house from 1860, and a neighbor complained that her windows were inauthentic to the style and hurt neighborhood resale value. A design review board had sided with East, saying she didn’t have to replace her windows, but the county zoning commission voted in May to overrule that decision, threatening East with fines or jail time if she didn’t install compliant windows within 60 days. The commission chair claimed…
In the fall of 1957, I began visiting the student bookstore at the University of Missouri where the table with books of the Beat Generation, buoyed by the victory in San Francisco from the Howl trial, changed the course of my life. I purchased Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems, mostly because of me scanning the introduction by William Carlos Williams. That day I also purchased some issues of “Evergreen Review,” (especially the one about the San Francisco Renaissance), and Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot. My experience at the MU bookstore helped make me obsessed with bookstores and I began to spend…
Image by Tim Mossholder. While Washington’s war with Iran drags on, month after month, without any end in sight, the world is witnessing the very real limits of U.S. global power. As President Donald Trump lurches repeatedly from threats of devastation to promises of peace, it’s becoming increasingly clear that U.S. military might is no longer capable of subduing even a mid-sized power like Iran, much less holding the rest of the world in its thrall. Amid all the drama of air raids, drone strikes, and naval blockades, there are deeper geopolitical forces at play that lend a lasting historical import to events…
The United States and Russia have agreed on little in the war in Ukraine. The one thing they have agreed on is the existential necessity of avoiding a direct war between NATO and Russia, which could become a third world war or even a nuclear war. At the beginning of November 2021, three and a half months before the war began, then-CIA Director William Burns spoke to Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, and the two laid out what the boundaries of the proxy war would be. Newsweek reported the “rules of the road” to be these: “The United States would not…
If the Nazi tattoo and Reddit posts weren’t the end of it, why should we think the sexting will be the end of embarrassing revelations about Graham Platner? Source link
In a speech delivered in the autumn of 2002, as the United States moved inexorably toward war with Iraq, the late Joan Didion delivered an offhand remark that effectively summed up the flaw at the heart of the logic behind that coming war, and of the logic of a number of wars before it, and of a number of wars to come. Referring to “the ‘war on terror’ that the President had declared” of which the operation against Iraq was the centerpiece, Didion added a parenthetical critique: “…as if terror were a state and not a technique.” Twenty-three and a…
Grizzly in Yellowstone. Photo: NPS / Jim Peaco. Grizzly bears were put on the Endangered Species List in 1975 — 51 years ago. They will not be recovered until bears from the Northern Continental Divide and the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem can connect to provide crucial genetic exchange to prevent irreversible inbreeding. Yet, despite having a legal mandate to recover the species, the Forest Service continues to log, burn, and build roads in critical connectivity corridors. The Larabee Hat logging and burning project is located in just such a critical wildlife corridor and will destroy the secure habitat grizzlies require for survival. That’s…