Новости за 12.04.2024

Bob Gibson was one of the three or four greatest pitchers in the history of baseball. He won the Cy Young Award as best pitcher twice. He was twice named MVP of the World Series, once in 1964 and again in 1967.  He was the rare pitcher to win the MVP for the National League. Gibson set the modern record for the lowest earned run average in a year. He was deemed so unhittable in the 1968 season that the league’s owners ordered radical changes to the game, including shrinking the strike zone and lowering the height of the pitcher’s mound. Читать дальше...

Known as treacherous and despite all the efforts of the neoliberal press to pretty him up, Michel Temer was extraordinarily unpopular. Understanding that public security was one of the most worrying issues afflicting the population, he decided to turn it to his advantage and puff up his reputation. He chose Rio de Janeiro, the country’s security flashpoint, suspending state autonomy and putting the army in charge, unfazed by the fact that he was messing with a narco-regime whose territories and... Читать дальше...

Soldiers of the Israeli Defense Forces have marched the length of Gaza carrying with them the spoils of victory: clothes, musical instruments, watches, jewelry, bicycles, mirrors, cosmetics, prayer rugs and even Qur’ans. Looting is widespread and conducted without shame. “There was zero talk about it from the commanders,” one soldier said. “Everyone knows that people are taking things. It’s considered funny — people say: ‘Send me to The Hague.’ It doesn’t happen in secret.” More

Soldiers of the Israeli Defense Forces have marched the length of Gaza carrying with them the spoils of victory: clothes, musical instruments, watches, jewelry, bicycles, mirrors, cosmetics, prayer rugs and even Qur’ans. Looting is widespread and conducted without shame. “There was zero talk about it from the commanders,” one soldier said. “Everyone knows that people are taking things. It’s considered funny — people say: ‘Send me to The Hague.’ It doesn’t happen in secret.” More

Who built the seven gates of Thebes? The books are filled with names of kings. Was it the kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone? –Bertolt Brecht Four weeks ago, Saint Martin’s University sent me and thirteen other faculty notices of “non-renewal of faculty appointment for 2025-2026 Academic Year Termination of Faculty Appointment Without More

When America’s leading authority on the climate system Gavin Schmidt of NASA throws his hands up in the air, exclaiming, we’ve got a knowledge gap for the first time since satellites started tuning into the planet’s climate system, what does this imply about future conditions for the planet? Gavin Schmidt, Director, Goddard Institute for Space More

As the cost of housing has exploded, so has the number of people experiencing homelessness. And unfortunately, instead of trying to house people, more states and cities are criminalizing people simply for lacking a safe place to sleep. According to the National Homelessness Law Center, almost every state restricts the conduct of people experiencing homelessness. More

David Brooks has written a lengthy New York Times article on the war in Gaza that boils down to one proposition: “If this war ends with a large chunk of Hamas in place, it would be a long-term disaster for the region” (“What Would You Have Israel Do to Defend Itself,” 3/25/24). Unless Hamas is More

Long bullied on the Western playground, Serbia finally may acquire a big, strong ally – BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa). On March 29, the economic and political behemoth formally invited Serbia to its next big pow-wow in Kazan, Russia in October, an invite which has obvious appeal for Belgrade, especially since Serbia’s More

In 2007, towards the end of the Bush regime, amendments to legislation were passed that raised the minimum wage from $5.85/hour in the middle of 2007 to $7.25/hour in July 2009 where, as of today, it remains unchanged.  Many states require employers to pay a higher minimum wage. However, as of January 1, 2024, some 13 states, including workers’ More

Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, Did It Happen Here? Perspectives on Fascism and America (New York: WW Norton, “2024”) But something is happening here and you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones? + Bob Dylan, 1965 Now that the Trump era has officially ended…it seems clear that there are still many social and psychological variable More

A new, disturbing milestone has been confirmed in the latest Forbes World Billionaires List. The U.S. billionaire class is now larger and richer than ever, with 813 ten-figure oligarchs together holding $5.7 trillion. This is a $1.2 trillion increase from the year before — and a gargantuan $2.7 trillion increase since March 2020. The staggering upsurge shows More

Coexistence is the right policy for humanity and nature in the western United States. In a civilized society, we do not kill others, vandalize homes, or otherwise infringe unnecessarily upon the liberty of others. The same set of values should apply to our treatment of wolves, a species that does not require human management, harassment, More

Joe Biden and the Democrats are perplexed. They look at the numbers and think the economy is going well and cannot figure out why the President’s approval rating is so low. Yet they are looking at the economy from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, a street far removed from all the other streets in the United States. More

With no public debate and scant publicity, deep-sea mining has gotten quietly underway in recent years. Exploratory mining contracts have been granted for over 1 million square kilometers of seabed in international waters, while the International Seabed Authority—the official UN body regulating ocean “resources”—deliberates how to cloak the enterprise in sustainababble attire. (Apparently, exploratory mining More

When I was in the U.S. military, I learned a saying (often wrongly attributed to the Greek philosopher Plato) that only the dead have seen the end of war. Its persistence through history to this very moment should indeed be sobering. What would it take for us humans to stop killing each other with such vigor and More

To correct this condition (as inferiors, as “niggers”) the black man could either work on the outer manifestations of discrimination – as did Martin Luther King – or change himself from within, through transformation. Malcolm took the latter course. – Tamara Payne, intro to The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X, by Les Payne When More

As soon as I heard the news that Ecuadorian police had stormed the Mexican Embassy in Quito, arresting former vice president Jorge Glas, who had just been given diplomatic asylum, I was transported 50 years back in time. I myself had managed to take refuge in the Argentine Embassy in Santiago, Chile, to escape being More

Recent scientific predictions have Miami Beach, a slender barrier island just off the swampy Florida mainland, more than halfway underwater by mid-century. Chronically underestimating looming realities, climate scientists admit to being continually overtaken by increasingly catastrophic developments. One can assume that the white sands of Miami Beach and the stylish foyers of its famous art More

That should have been the full title of the show currently on at Somerset House, half a mile along the Strand from Trafalgar Square. Unfortunately, only the four-letter word beginning with “c” was used, which dupes families into visiting an innocent, kiddy-friendly entertainment, only to find out that half of it is a show of More

There are two essentially different ways of appreciating a figurative painting. You may see it as a representation of something— a landscape, a person or a mythological scene. Or you may look closely to see how the representation is made. A great deal of traditional aesthetic theory is concerned with analysis of the relationship between More

Patricia Evangelista’s Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country is not an easy read. An account of genocide is never an easy read. Now, some may quibble that former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s taking the lives of only (!) 27,000 people does not qualify as genocide. But Duterte himself knew it More

An enormous flash, a mushroom cloud, multi-thousands of human beings dead. We win! Nuclear weapons won’t go away, the cynics — the souls in despair — tell us. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. You can’t, as Gen. James E. Cartwright, former head of U.S. Strategic Command, once put it, “un-invent nuclear More

Lana Young/AntarcticaNZ/NIWA/K872, CC BY-SA Craig Stevens, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau At the end of the southern summer, Antarctica’s sea ice hit its annual minimum. By at least one measure, which tracks the area of ocean that contains at least 15% of sea ice, it was a little above the record low of 2023. More

As the Israeli onslaught continues in Gaza, so does the ongoing takeover of the West Bank by Israeli settlers and their military muscle. Armed men and women move onto land that was never theirs and take it by force from the people living there. The Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF—whose official moniker IDF pretends they are More