The Australian High Court has ruled that correspondence between the Queen and the Governor-General of Australia, her viceroy in the former British colony, is no longer “personal” and the property of Buckingham Palace. Why does this matter?
Secret letters written in 1975 by the Queen and her man in Canberra, Sir John Kerr, can now be released by the National Archives. On November 11, 1975, Kerr infamously sacked the reformist government of prime minister Gough Whitlam, and delivered Australia into the hands of the United States.
The mass media, as Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman documented decades ago, are structurally dependent on pre-ordained “experts,” who play a decisive role in filtering the information reaching the public.
When it comes to Venezuela, one DC-based think tank has become the Western media’s go-to source for confirming the US elite’s regime change groupthink (FAIR.org, 4/30/19): the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA).
Thousands of health care workers have joined the protests against police violence that have swept the United States and other countries in recent days.
This weekend, videos showed hundreds of nurses cheering protesters in Manhattan in New York City, and on Tuesday, hundreds again joined a protest in Times Square. Protests have also taken place in Boston, Chicago, and Oakland, California.
It is a miracle—even if not as great as the natural one it describes—that a song so simple, so welcoming, so resolute, so reassuring, so optimistic as Woody Guthrie’s “Roll on, Columbia” is not dragged down by the ironies that eddy around it.
The song springs from a clever musical pun. Guthrie re-used the music of Lead Belly’s “Goodnight, Irene” to deliver the message that the Columbia River’s “power is turning the darkness to dawn.” Human advance could now hold back the night—whether good or bad.
Israel’s balancing act that allowed it to reap America’s unconditional and, often, blind support, while slowly benefiting from China’s growing economic influence and political prestige, is already floundering.
Thanks to the heated cold war between the US and Chinese economic superpowers, the Israeli strategy of playing both sides is unlikely to pay dividends in the long run.
Looking upward, the sky above Palestine has darkened, but whether portending a storm or nightfall is uncertain.
If de jure annexation will go forward, then the sky is likely to emit thunder and lightning. When the storm passes, nothing will seem changed. Annexation is being discussed as if a game changer yet ‘annexation’ has already taken place in the form of settlements, the separation wall, denial of building and residence permits to Palestinians living in Area C, and long-affirmed Israeli sentiments of biblical entitlement solidified by continued tradition of affirming ‘Palestine’ as ‘the promised land’ of the Jewish people.
While police nationwide have been escalating violence against protesters, Denver law enforcement appear to be some of the worst offenders.
Elisabeth Epps, a Colorado-based attorney and bail activist, publicly resigned from the Denver Police Department’s Use of Force Committee last night after being shot and tear gassed by the same force she was trying to regulate. “Plenty of Black folks will shuck & jive for ya, it just can’t be me anymore,” Epps said via Twitter, sharing pictures of the welts across her body and legs from police gunshots.
I have a bedtime story for you.
Once upon a time a brave nation liberated itself from the tyranny of the British empire and birthed freedom and democracy into the world. With the help of heroes like the abolitionists, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X it overcame systemic racial inequality, and now it is a shining exemplar of human rights, the respected friend of free democracies around the world and the hated foe of all tyrannical regimes. It is not without its faults and its past mistakes, but it is the best leader and protector of the liberal world order that we could possibly hope to have.
The Wiltshire county coroner investigating British Government allegations that Russian military agents using a Russian-made poison called Novichok caused the death of a woman, Dawn Sturgess, on July 8, 2018, has lied in his report of the inquest into her death. This has been revealed by evidence gathered by the Wiltshire police two years ago, and recovered this week.
Senior Coroner David Ridley (lead image, right) has also concealed evidence from the coroner’s court inquest file and withheld it from the Russian Government after promising “to assist with the Russian Federation’s investigation of Ms Sturgess’ death…if the Russian Federation were to be supplied with a copy of the coronial investigation file which focuses on Ms Sturgess’ death.”
Microsoft is firing dozens of news contractors after June 30 and replacing them with artificial intelligence (AI). Around 50 journalists and editors in the US contracted though Aquent IFG and MAQ Consulting and 27 in the UK contracted through PA Media (formerly the Press Association) will lose their jobs. These workers operate MSN news pages, curating content and in some cases rewriting headlines and editing content to fit the format.
MSN was launched as Microsoft’s news portal in 1995. At its launch, MSN published original content as well as links to news, weather and sports updates. In 2014, the site was relaunched as a partner with other news sites, paying them to redistribute their content.
[Los Angeles; Minneapolis. Saturday.] The cop raised his weapon shouting, “Forty millimeter up! Curfew! YOU WILL BE FIRED UPON.”
Olympic Street near LA Police headquarters in downtown LA was lit up by a bright blue and purple disco light-show from about 40 police cars, all with sirens braying. It was just past the 8pm curfew meant to stop the riot.
An entire generation of Yemeni children has suffered the traumas of war, many of them orphaned, maimed, malnourished, or displaced. The United Nations reports a death toll of 100,000 people in that nation’s ongoing war, with an additional 131,000 people dying from hunger, disease, and a lack of medical care.
A report from Save the Children, issued in November 2018, estimated at least 85,000 children had died from extreme hunger since the war began in 2015.
These days, teaching graduating college seniors has me, as the Brits would say in the London Underground, “minding the gap.” In my case, however, it’s not the gap between the platform and the train I’m thinking of, but a couple of others: those between U.S. citizens and our government, as well as between different generations of Americans. The Covid-19 crisis has made some of those gaps far more visible than usual, just as my students leave school with many of their personal expectations in tatters.
The chasms illuminated by the coronavirus are many: the gender pay gap; the wealth gap between African Americans and Latinos on one side and white Americans on the other, not to speak of the gap in their healthcare access and health outcomes; the gap in the amount of domestic work and childcare done by women and men; and that’s just to start down a longer list. Covid-19 has exacerbated all of these gaps in very concrete ways. To take just one example, the children of families with the fewest resources will be the ones most affected by missing almost half a school year or more.
Welcome to GR. We are as yet NOT broadcasting live from the basement of the Student Union Building at the University of Victoria, but instead recording live-to-Skype this day, May 13th, 2020.
Listen. Hear.
Chris Cook hosts Gorilla Radio, airing live every Thursday between 11-Noon Pacific Time. In Victoria at 101.9FM, and on the internet at: http://cfuv.ca. He also serves as a contributing editor to the web news site, http://www.pacificfreepress.com. Check out the GR blog at: http://gorillaradioblog.blogspot.ca/
In an act unprecedented in American history, Donald Trump has repudiated the Constitution and is attempting to establish a presidential dictatorship, supported by the military, police and far-right fascistic militia acting under his command. The Socialist Equality Party appeals to the working class and all those committed to the defense of democratic rights to oppose this criminal action.
Speaking on national television, Trump proclaimed: “I am your president of law and order… Our nation has been gripped by professional anarchists, arsonists, looters, criminals, Antifa and others.”
In a letter to Congress, the American Council on Education, a policy group for universities and colleges in the US, pleaded on Thursday for legal liability protections ahead of potential lawsuits brought by students, faculty and staff as campuses plan to reopen in the fall in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. The letter was co-signed by 70 other higher education associations.
The move comes as over a dozen campuses currently face class action lawsuits from students demanding a partial reimbursement in tuition costs as schools moved instruction online due to campus closures in response to the pandemic.
For decades, Cuba has sent tens of thousands of its medical professionals abroad to work in countries where natural disasters or poverty have left people without healthcare.
In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the catastrophic US response to it, the absurdity of a propaganda war against Cuban medical missions has become more obvious than ever. But you can’t rely on corporate media to explain why.
While some in media have condemned the protests as violent “looters” imposing “tyranny” upon the country, much of the violence is being deliberately instigated and propagated by an out of control police force that appears to have gone berserk over the widespread public challenge to their authority and their impunity to act as they wish.
Six days after Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd, asphyxiating him by keeping his knee on his neck for nearly nine minutes, America is still burning with outrage. Violent clashes have broken out across the nation as the killing has proven to be a catalyst for protests against a racist justice system.
Just over a year ago, five New York Times reporters published lies about the dead ducks they were told had been killed by Russian assassins running amok in the English town of Salisbury with a poison they called Novichok.
This was a lie which came from the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Gina Haspel. She told her lie to President Donald Trump, who promoted her to head the CIA a few days later. She then handed the lie to the reporters to print as proof of how much the President trusted her.
To exorcise my worst fears about the coming decade, I chose to write a bleak chronicle of it. If, by December 2030, developments have invalidated it, I hope such dreary prognoses will have played a part by spurring us to appropriate action.
Before our pandemic-induced lockdowns, politics seemed to be a game. Political parties behaved like sports teams having good or bad days, scoring points that propelled them up a league table that, at season’s end, determined who would form a government and then do next to nothing.
