ZNet

In ancient Greek mythology, Cassandra was a priestess who was able to predict the future but unable to convince others to act upon her prophecies. The fate of Cassandra seems particularly relevant today, for there has been ample warning about three developments that...

On September 10, 2021, during an important diplomatic meeting that occurred by telephone, U.S. President Joseph Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping affirmed the necessity of a better relationship between their two nations.  According to the official Chinese...

Is it possible to build social solidarity beyond the state? It’s easy to conclude that it’s not.  In 1915, as national governments produced the shocking carnage of World War I, Ralph Chaplin, an activist in the Industrial Workers of the World, wrote his stirring song,...

The US government will (perhaps as I write this piece) succeed in extraditing businessman Alex Saab from Cape Verde. His “crime” was being an official envoy for the Venezuelan government as he attempted to negotiate the sale of medicines from Iran to Venezuela. US...

By Lawrence Wittner and Joseph Mangano In 2020, Harvard University’s T. C. Chan School of Public Health began a five-year study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, that will examine the connection between early life exposure to toxic metals and later-life...

I reviewed Josiah Thompson’s new book in a blog post the other day. The book makes a persuasive case that there was a second shooter who killed JFL, but I don’t think it’s a slam dunk. Neither is Gerald Posner’s conclusion that Oswald acted alone. I consider it a...

I just finished Josiah Thompson’s excellent new book on the JFK assassination: Last Second in Dallas (University Press of Kansas, 2021). Near the end of the book he describes how the scene of the crime, Dealey Plaza, looks to him in 2020. He reflects that “the case...

In 1980, Venezuela’s infant mortality rate ranked 58th best in the world, far below Cuba, whose infant mortality rate was 28th that year. Infant mortality is a basic Venezuela’s infant mortality rate in 1980 was more than twice as high as that in Cuba – all according...

Venezuela has been an important oil exporter since the 1920s. See this essay for historical details. As the chart below shows, It was not until the 1970s that big Middle east oil exporters like Saudi Arabia and Iran overtook Venezuela in oil production  

There’s a serious political problem in the Spanish Kingdom that seems difficult to resolve and leads to a vicious circle. Probably because of the influence  of Francoist ideology, having independence as an objective is contrary to the Spanish Constitution, (art.2...

The United States and China, the world’s mightiest military and economic powers, are currently heading toward a Cold War or even a hot one, with disastrous consequences.  But an alternative path is available and could be taken. Beginning in 2018, U.S. government...

Although, beginning in about 2015, nationalist political parties made enormous advances in countries around the world, more recently they have been on the wane. The nationalist surge was led by a new generation of rightwing populist demagogues who, feeding on public...