From Caracas to Minnesota, from Iran and Cuba to the streets of Los Angeles, Chicago and New York City, from the Persian Gulf to the waters of the eastern Pacific and Caribbean, Donald Trump and his henchmen are collapsing US foreign military and domestic policing operations into a single, unified domain of imperial impunity.

A domain where anything goes; where Trump and his minions, Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio, and US ‘Homeland Security’ chiefs, consider themselves free to carry out military/policing operations without restraint, largely immune from Congressional oversight, and beyond the reaches of international and domestic US law.

Their preferred  modus: sudden, highly dramatic acts of violence and murder that can be parlayed into media spectacles, staged for instant transmission to the American public and the world on Donald Trump’s “Truth Social” platform.

“Smash and grab” operations, American historian Nikhil Pal Singh calls these.

In a recent article for the journal Equator, Singh unpacks the Trump regime’s core innovation: the expansion of the borders of US state power, collapsing foreign and domestic violence into a single domain of impunity.

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“Homeland empire,” US academic Nikhil Pal Singh calls this.

Nikhil Pal Singh is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at NYU, focusing on the intersection of contemporary US history and political theory.

Singh’s first book, Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy, was recognized as the best work of US civil rights history by the Organization of American Historians.

Singh’s other works include Climbin’ Jacob’s Ladder: The Black Freedom Movement Writings of Jack O’Dell, Race and America’s Long War, and Reconstructing Democracy: Black Intellectuals in the American Century.

Listen to our complete conversation with Nikhil Pal Singh. Click on the play button above, or go here.

On May 4, Donald Trump swore that Iran would be “blown off the face of the earth” if it didn’t immediately restore maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.

Trump’s genocidal fulminations have become familiar.  Late last month, he predicted that “a whole civilization will die” if Iran doesn’t do what he wants. Weeks earlier, Trump vowed to send Iran “back to the Stone Ages” (plural) if Iran didn’t lower its neck to US-Israeli imperialism.

Well, Iran doesn’t seem to be listening.

Indeed, according to numerous informed observers outside the Trump Administration, the Islamic Republic has actually turned the tables on Israel-USA, scoring what many see as a strategic victory over the conjoined entity.

To catch up on the current situation, the GPM reached out to Arang Keshavarzian, Associate Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. Keshavarzian is the author of Bazaar and State in Iran: Politics of the Tehran Marketplace (2007), Geographies and Histories of the Iranian Revolution (2021), and Making Space for the Gulf: Histories of Regionalism and the Middle East (2024).

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Watch our complete conversation here:

Boys will be boys. Tech Bros certainly will.

While Donald Trump and his crusading Christian warrior chief, Pete Hegseth, vow to rain hellfire on Iran, Silicon Valley ‘titans’ pronounce on how they intend to rule the world, backed by AI-based surveillance and weapon systems.

Over a mid-April weekend, AI wunderkind Alex Karp, founder of the surveillance giant Palantir, posted a 22-point manifesto about all this. Like most pompous pronouncements, Alex Karp’s bursts with Big Narrative.

The “Technological Republic” owes a “moral debt” to America and the world, and “free email” won’t cover the bill. Civilizational decadence must be squashed, says Karp, along with “vacant and hollow pluralism,” and the “dysfunctional and regressive” belief that all cultures are equal. (They’re not, says Karp)

Karp’s fixes? AI-based military deterrence, obligatory “national duty” (as if humans have something to offer in his dystopian future), reinvigorated religious faith at upper state echelons … and the remilitarization of Germany and Japan.

Inevitably, Alex Karp’s manifesto has drawn fire. Among those speaking out, a group of academics at the University of Ottawa. David Murakami Wood is one of them.

David Murakami Wood is Professor of Criminology in U. Ottawa’s Faculty of Social Sciences, and Canada Research Chair in Critical Surveillance and Security Studies. His research focuses on emerging AI-based “smart cities”, private surveillance companies, AI regulation, and the relationship between surveillance and the climate crisis.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Watch our complete conversation here:

This is the situation in Apartheid Israel.

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Since Israel’s conquest of the West Bank, back in 1967, the apartheid regime has spirited over a million Palestinians into prisons, most of them inside Israel ‘proper’, in flagrant breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention; tens of thousands without charge, including children, under  routinely extended rounds of preventive detention

Palestinian political prisoners and hostages are routinely subjected to what experts define as torture.

In a July 2023 report to the UN Human Rights Council, Italian legal scholar Francesca Albanese laid out Israel’s carceral system in graphic detail, a system she says has turned occupied Palestine into a “carceral continuum,” and “constantly surveilled open-air panopticon.”

In her most recent report,  released in February 2026, Albanese says that “torture has become integral” to Israel’s system of domination and oppression.

A “continuous, territorially pervasive regime of psychological terror,” is how Albanese describes Apartheid Israel’s system, “designed to break bodies, deprive a people of their dignity, and force them from their land.”

Francesca Albanese is Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in occupied Palestine. The GPM has spoken with her on a couple of occasions. Here’s a conversation we had back in 2023. Listen to it in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Here’s a more recent conversation with Francesca, following Israel’s assault on Jenin refugee camp, in the northern West Bank, in early 2025, replicating its then-well advanced genocidal assault on Gaza: 

Of the ten-thousand Palestinians currently held in Israeli dungeons, none are more prominent than Marwan Barghouti.

Marwan Barghouti is a veteran member of Palestine’s Fatah movement and political party.

In 2002, the Second Intifada just underway, Barghouti was convicted by a military court for his alleged involvement in attacks in which five Israelis dies. Barghouti denied the charges, and refused to recognize the court. The Inter-Parliamentary Union declared, at the time, that Barghouti was denied a fair trial.

Barghouti, now 66 years-old, is serving a life sentence. He’s widely considered Palestine’s most popular leader – far more so than Israel-USA’s collaborative man in Ramallah, Mahmoud Abbas. Should he ever be liberated, Barghouti is considered the most likely figure to replace Abbas, uniting Palestinians across political factions, and advancing the so-called Two-State Solution.

For this reason, the apartheid regime has no intention of releasing him.

The Palestinian Mandela, Marwan Barghouti is commonly called. The comparison isn’t quite apt. Nelson Mandela was liberated, after 27 years in jail. A similar figure, native American leader Leonard Peltier, spent almost fifty years in jail, before Joe Biden pardoned him.

Will the Israelis ever liberate Marwan Barghouti? Not unless they’re forced to — and no one is going to do that.

Of late, Barghouti has been starved, beaten, denied access to health services, and set upon by dogs. Apartheid Israel’s fascist security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has gone to the bother of visiting Barghouti in jail, just to taunt him!

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For the latest news about Marwan Barghouti, the GPM reached out to his lawyer, Ben Marmorelli.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Watch our conversation here. Ben’s audio isn’t that good. Listen closely.

The Canadian financial sector is deeply engaged in supporting Israel’s unlawful occupation of Palestine, bankrolling Jewish colonization, apartheid and genocide there, along with internationally wrongful Israeli acts in Lebanon and the illegally annexed Syrian Golan Heights.

That’s the finding of a new report released on April 9 by the Canadian human rights group, Just Peace Advocates.

Over a hundred Canadian financial institutions have invested half a trillion US dollars in Israeli activities deemed unlawful by the International Court of Justice and other human rights bodies, the report reveals. Among these: eleven Canadian pension funds, eight banks, seven insurance companies, and 85 fund managers.

Canadian investments are tied to the development and manufacturing of lethal weapons, population surveillance and control systems, construction equipment used to demolish homes and property, and to the systematic plundering of Palestinian natural resources, the Just Peace Advocates report says.

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Among the corporations benefiting from Canadian investment largesse: Israel’s notorious weapons manufacturer Elbit systems, Lockheed-Martin, the manufacturer of the F-35 jet fighter, and the population surveillance and spyware company Palantir, leader in the emerging techno-fascist sector.

Disclosure gaps mean total Canadian investments in Israeli settler-colonialism, apartheid and genocide are likely higher. The Carney government must oblige Canadian corporations to divest, the report says.

The GPM spoke Just Peace Advocates campaigner Becca Steckle. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Watch our complete conversation here:

Over a hundred Canadian financial institutions have invested in Israel’s occupation of Palestine – to the tune of over a half trillion US dollars – and are therefore complicit in Israeli policies and practices judged to be unlawful by the International Court of Justice and other human rights bodies.

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Of course, they’re playing with the dollars of individual Canadians. Do people have the power to control how their dollars are invested? The GPM spoke about this with Peter Larson.

Peter Larson is an independent researcher and blogger based in Ottawa, Canada. He was the founding Chair of the Middle East Study Group of the Canadian International Council (National Capital Region), a board member of the National Council on Canada Arab Relations, and the first chair of its National Education Committee on Israel/Palestine. Peter is the long-time chair of OFIP – the Ottawa Forum on Israel-Palestine.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

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In the purely notional realm of international law, nothing is more fundamentally unlawful than the war Israel-USA launched on Iran on February 28, 2026.

Like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, almost four years earlier, the conjoined entity’s assault on the Islamic Republic was an act of naked aggression, pure and simple.

Article 2(4) of the UN Charter prohibits the “threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state,” for any reason other than self-defense, as provided for under Article 51, which Israel-USA cannot claim.

Well, who cares? The ruination of the UN Charter, the trampling of its most sacred injunctions and canonical legal conventions, is not something most world leaders lose sleep over, certainly not in the morally enlightened West.

For those like Mark Carney, an international banker now serving as Canada’s 24th Prime Minister, it’s the disruption of global supply chains, trade in fossil fuels and other lucrative commodities, and the integrity of the procedural rules governing the smooth functioning of trade and financial systems (“rules-based international order”) that matter the most.

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In search of words to capture how lawless the world Mr. Carney waxed nostalgically for in Davos actually is – a world of colossal inequality, insatiable corporate greed, apartheid, genocide, and other monstrous crimes, live-streamed on ‘social media’; a world where laws count for nothing, and no one comes to their defense; not even their supposed Western guardians – worried observers turn to Antonio Gramsci.

Antonio Gramsci was a fierce critic of Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime. Jailed in 1926, the Italian Marxist died there in 1937. His famous words live on, summing up darker times Gramsci could never have imagined:

“The old world is dying,” Gramsci wrote, “and the new world struggles to be born … Now is the time of monsters.”

The GPM speaks about these dark, monstrous times with Atif Kubursi.

Atif Kubursi is Professor Emeritus of Economics at McMaster University, and the President of Econometric Research Limited. Since joining the United Nations Industrial Organization as a Senior Development Officer in 1982, Kubursi led missions to Indonesia, Thailand, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Sudan, and Egypt. In 2006 he was appointed Executive Secretary of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia.

Professor Kubursi has published extensively on macroeconomics, economic development strategies, international trade, and regional planning centering on the environment. He joined McMaster University as an Assistant Professor of Economics in 1969, and became a full professor in 1981. He is currently a Professor Emeritus.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Alternatively, give this a listen:

Earlier this month, in the Canadian House of Commons, a private member’s bill aimed at halting the flow of lethal weapons, munitions and their hi-tech components to Israel, via the US, was defeated.

Although the ‘No More Loopholes Act’ did not mention Israel, or any other state, Israel-USA’s genocidal assault on Gaza was clearly on the mind of the Parliamentarian who tabled it, last September, New Democratic Party member Jenny Kwan.

Bill 233, An Act to Amend the Export and Import Permits Act, also known as the No More Loopholes Act, failed by a vote of 295 to 22. Fifteen members of Mark Carney’s pro-genocide/apartheid Liberal government voted in favour of closing the loophole. Another fifteen abstained. Canadian anti-war activists see that as a victory.

Back in September 2024, US-Israeli genocide well underway in Gaza, and Justin Trudeau still Prime Minister, Trudeau’s Foreign Minister, Melanie Jolie, announced that new arms shipments to Israel would cease to be permitted, regardless of their route. Old export permits would be honored.

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As it turns out (reported by Canada’s independent journal The Maple), bombs, ammunition, and spare parts for the F-35 fighter bomber and other murderous hi-tech systems continued to flow to Israel via its conjoined twin, the US.

In the lead-up to the March 11 vote on the No More Loopholes Act, a handful of Canadian antiwar and human rights organizations lobbied Parliamentarians to close the Israel loophole. Rachel Small is Canada Organizer for one of those groups, World Beyond War.

Listen to our conversation with Rachel Small. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Watch out complete conversation here:

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Are you worried about the direction the world is heading today?

Does the relentless rise of fascism, anti-immigrant hatred, and authoritarian tyranny scare you?

Perhaps it’s the ceaseless enrichment of a handful of already obscenely rich men, peddling climate-destroying AI technologies, or the perfidious silence of corporate media, or the sterilization of public education systems that bum you out the most.

If so, you may wish to resist. Before you get up/stand up, sit down and give Henry Giroux a read. No one captures the contours of fascist culture and aesthetics, the role of critical education in resisting “fascist plague,” and the imperative to resist more sharply and colourfully than Henry Giroux.

Henry Giroux is Professor for Scholarship in the Public Interest, and Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario. Among his latest books: The Violence of Organized Forgetting, Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of Spectacle, America at War with Itself, and Dangerous Thinking in the Age of the New Authoritarianism (together with Brad Evans).

Listen to our conversation in today’s GPM podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Listen to our complete conversation here:

In response to expanding climate system breakdown, in September 2023, UN Secretary General Antonio Gutteres warned that humanity has “opened the gates of Hell” and is “hurtling towards disaster, eyes wide open.”

Since then, a team of scientists have spelled out humanity’s predicament in drier fashion. Six out of sixteen planetary ‘tipping’ points may have been transgressed, points of no-return beyond which the Earth system could slip into an entirely new state, something it hasn’t experienced in 15 million years, a recent report states.

“The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory” was published last Fall in a journal called One Earth. The GPM spoke with one of its authors.

Katherine Richardson is principal investigator at the Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate and Professor of Biological Oceanography at the University of Copenhagen. She co-authored the groundbreaking 2009 study that introduced the Planetary Boundaries/Safe Operating Space concepts.

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Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Watch our complete conversation here:

Earth’ surface is a little over one degree warmer today, on average, than it was at the start of the industrial revolution 200 years ago.

Doesn’t seem like much.

Under the Paris Agreement, governments agreed to limit temperature rise to 1.5 degrees. That target seems to have been exceeded.

In a series of landmark reports published in 2009, 2015 and 2023, researchers warned that a two degree rise in global surface temperature may actually exceed a critical planetary threshold, pushing Earth down a cascade of tipping points into “hothouse” mode, unlike anything this third rock from the sun has experienced since the mid-Miocene epoch, fifteen million years ago.

Stability landscape for Earth system departing the Holocene (PNAS, used with permission)

The GPM spoke with one of the leading proponents of hothouse Earth science, Will Steffen.

A native of Norfolk, Nebraska, Steffen emigrated to Australia in the 1970s, where he took up a position at the Australian National University in Canberra. Steffen served as the Executive Director of the International Geosphere–Biosphere Programme, a ground-breaking initiative aimed at studying the chemical, physical and biological processes governing Earth as system. His name came to be associated with a host of ideas about our planet, and humanity’s fate, and the associated ideas of Planetary Boundaries and Safe Operating Space.

Will Steffen’s Great Acceleration curves helped corroborate the idea, first proposed by Paul Crützen, that Earth has entered a new Epoch, the Anthropocene.

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Will Steffen passed away in January 2023. The GPM spoke with him in 2018. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Listen to our complete conversation here:

UN Rights Expert Francesca Albanese Under Attack

“Speak out, you got to speak out against the madness. You got to speak your mind, if you dare.”

David Crosby’s rallying cry for peace and justice back in 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War, rings loud and clear today.

If US-backed Israeli genocide, ethnic cleaning and apartheid are what you’re speaking out against, better watch your back. No one knows this better than Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights Situation in Occupied Palestine.

Since assuming the unpaid position in 2022, the Italian legal scholar and human rights advocate has submitted a host of excoriating reports to the UN, detailing Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity.

In response to her filings, in July 2025, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, slapped crushing sanctions on Albanese. Albanese’s reports amount to “lawfare,” Rubio declared, and a “gross infringement” of Israel-USA’s right to commit internationally unlawful acts with impunity.

Albanese family has now launched a lawsuit against the Trump Administration.

“Francesca’s expression of her views about the facts as she has found them in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and about the work of the ICC is core First Amendment activity,” the legal filing says.

Francesca Albanese isn’t the only one in Little Marco’s crosshairs.

Following the issuance of arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then War Minister Yoav Gallant, eleven prosecutors and judges at the International Criminal Court have had their bank accounts frozen, credit cards cut off, and online services terminated. Of course, they’re all banned from entering the US.

Smelling blood, pro-Israeli Apartheid lobby group UN Watch has called on the UN to dismiss Albanese from her post as Special Rapporteur. Based on a doctored video from UN Watch, France, Germany, Italy, Austria and Czechia seconded the group’s call. The Human Rights Council has yet to act on the call. Annual meetings of the Council, in Geneva, Switzerland, have now closed.

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The GPM reached out to Francesca Albanese’s predecessor in the Special Rapporteur position, Canadian legal scholar Michael Lynk. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Listen to our conversation here:

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Speaking of ‘lawfare’ (in the positive sense), a handful of human rights groups have just filed a complaint to the International Criminal Court, calling on it to prosecute top international football chiefs for aiding and abetting Israeli crimes in Palestine.

Gianni Infantino is the President of the International Football Federation, FIFA. Aleksander Ceferin is the President of UEFA, the European Football Federation.

According to the 120-page filing, submitted to the world’s only permanent criminal court on February 16, Infantino and Ceferin have provided extensive organizational and financial aid to Israeli football clubs based in illegal Jewish settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, at the expense of Palestinian teams and players.

FIFA and UEFA have allowed settlement clubs to compete in European and international matches, all the while ignoring Israel’s systematic persecution of Palestinian footballers. Settlements are illegal under international law – a war crime under the court’s founding instrument, the Rome Statute.

By allowing settlement football clubs to compete in league play, Infantino and Ceferin have aided and abetted Israel’s apartheid regime, a crime against humanity under the Rome Statute, for which they bear personal responsibility, the filing states.

To learn more about the ICC filing, the GPM reached out Rebecca O’Keeffe, a spokesperson for one of the filings sponsors, Irish Sport for Palestine.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

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Listen to our complete conversation here:

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Independent Jewish Voices

Are you worried about the direction the world is heading today?

Does the relentless rise of fascism, anti-immigrant hatred, and authoritarian tyranny trouble you?

Perhaps it’s the ceaseless enrichment of a handful of already obscenely rich men peddling climate-destroying AI technologies, or the perfidious silence of corporate media, or the sterilization of public education systems that collaborate with, rather than oppose authoritarianism, that bums you out the most.

If so, you may wish to resist. Before you get up/stand up, sit down and give Henry Giroux a read. No one captures the contours of fascist culture and aesthetics, and the role of critical pedagogy in resisting “fascist plague,” more sharply and colourfully.

Henry Giroux is Professor for Scholarship in the Public Interest, and Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy, at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario. Among Giroux’s latest works: The Violence of Organized Forgetting, Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of Spectacle, America at War with Itself, and Dangerous Thinking in the Age of the New Authoritarianism (together with Brad Evans).

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Listen to our conversation with Henry Giroux in today’s GPM edition. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Listen to our complete conversation here:

US-Israeli genocide continues to be waged in Gaza and the Palestinian West Bank (notwithstanding the October 10 “ceasefire,” reportedly violated by Israel over 1600 times, killing over 600 Palestinians), but Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney won’t talk about, much less condemn US-Israeli perfidy.

British, German and French leaders Keir Starmer, Frederick Merz, and Emanuelle Macron won’t either.

Israel’s largest trading partner, the EU, continues to extend generous aid and assistance to a regime declared unlawful by the international community’s supreme judicial body, the International Court of Justice.

Western leaders want to help Israel out — militarily, economically, diplomatically – not hold it accountable under international law. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and the Munich Security Conference, Carney and other leaders commented dispassionately on the collapse of the euphemistically phrased  “international rules-based order,” all the while ignoring Israel-USA’s relentless assault on the UN Charter.

Rather than standing up for the canonical instruments of 20th century international law — the UN Charter, the four Geneva Conventions, the Genocide and Apartheid Conventions, and the International Covenants on civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights — Carney seems to believe Canada should get smart and adapt to the rules of the jungle.

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In startling contrast, those who do name Israeli crimes, and call for justice – like Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights Situation in Occupied Palestine – get mercilessly condemned. The US government has slapped crushing sanctions on Albanese, and on the prosecutors and judges of the International Criminal Court.

Out on the street, Canadians of conscience do their best to shift the needle, but it ain’t easy. Getting the government to stop funneling weapons and ammunition to Apartheid Israel, via the US, will take lots of organization, and vast amounts of energy.

In contrast, the simplest acts may be the most rewarding.

To learn more about the size and shape of simple acts of justice, the GPM reached out to David Mivasair.

Originally from Baltimore, Rabbi David Mivasair has lived in Canada for years. He’s a member of a group called Independent Jewish Voices Canada, and a tireless Palestine solidarity activist in Hamilton, Ontario.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Listen to our complete conversation here:

Anyone who’s flown across Canada, coast to coast, knows the country is blanketed in lakes and rivers. To a greater or lesser extent, like everywhere else on planet Earth, Canadian surface waters contain chemically pollutants.

Industrial effluents are the major source, right?

Think again. The largest source of surface water pollution in Canada are domestic sinks and toilet bowls, and storm waters draining across urban streets and green spaces, all flushing into municipal wastewater plants.

Those treatment plants do their best to remove organic pollutants, but others remain. Among these, thousands of compounds contained in household detergents, cleansers, and personal care products, partially metabolized pharmaceutical products, and vast quantities of microplastics from washing machines and dryers.

More exotic toxins are there too, including polyfluorinated alkyl substances (PFAS) — those ‘forever chemicals’, virtually impossible to break down, biologically — and mercury, naturally present in soils, and generated through the burning of fossil fuels.

Dr. Karen Kidd has spent her career studying the effects toxic contaminants have on fish and tiny invertebrates living in Canadian lakes and rivers. Kidd is a Professor in the Department of Biology at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario.

Orb-weaving spiders inhabiting the riparian edge of those rivers are a powerful research tool in the Kidd lab.

Riparian arachnids dine on insects emerging from surface waters, and on their larvae. Chemical contaminants inside those aquatic insects appear to alter the composition of microbial communities living inside their terrestrial spider predators — a complex microbial mix that can be monitored.

Like the human microbiome, spider endosymbionts like Wohlbachia know no other home, and help spiders out.

They also help ecotoxicologists monitor the presence and impact of freshwater contaminants.

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The GPM paid a visit to the Kidd lab, to learn more about how the microbiomes of tetragnathid (‘four-jawed’) spiders are being used to monitor river pollution.

Karen Kidd has been Jarislowsky Chair of Environment and Health at McMaster University since 2017. Before that, she was a Canada Research Chair on the Chemical Contamination of Food Webs at the University of New Brunswick, and a Research Scientist with Fisheries and Oceans Canada. Dr. Milena Esser is a postdoctoral fellow in Karen Kidd’s lab, and Colleen Wardlaw is a Ph.D. candidate.

Listen to our conversation in today’s edition of the GPM. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Listen to our complete conversation here:

With all eyes fixed on the genocidal war Israel-USA has been waging in Gaza since October 2023, the self-proclaimed ‘Jewish State’ has also been consolidating its unlawful colonization and de facto annexation of the Palestinian West Bank.

Since the Gaza genocide began, Israeli soldiers and Jewish settlers have been prosecuting a parallel campaign of terrorism and ethnic cleansing up and down the Palestinian West Bank. Ten thousand indigenous Bedouins have been displaced from their communities in the fertile Jordan Valley. Another 30,000 have been forcibly driven from their homes in the so-called ‘refugee camps’ of Jenin, Tulkarem and Nur Shams.

With the full support of Israeli soldiers and police, in and out of uniform, Jewish settlers have forcibly displaced the entire Bedouin population between Ramallah and the Jordan Valley. Over sixty communities have been erased. A clear war crime – arguably a crime against humanity — that the most powerful Western and Gulf/Arab states fully support.

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The GPM spoke about the ethnic cleansing of West Bank Palestinians with Fathi Nimer. Nimer is Palestine Policy Fellow of the Palestinian Policy Network, Al-Shabaka.

Listen to our conversation in today’s GPM edition. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Watch our complete conversation here:

GPM # 110

Donald Trump wants Greenland, he repeatedly declares, and will seize control of the largely frozen island “one way or the other.” 

Military force is a clear option.

“We won’t get anything unless I use excessive strength and force,” Trump told a packed room at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland last week.

Trump’s rationale for such a move, in blatant odds with the UN Charter, not to mention the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty, founding instrument of NATO: protecting the western hemisphere from the rapacious Chinese and Russians.

No one in a position to know such things believes Russia or China actually threaten the self-governing, autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark. Everyone’s military aircraft and ships go wherever they’re able, first and foremost the US’s, with a constellation of 800 military bases encircling the planet.

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The real origin of Donald Trump’s Greenland lust is as clear as his and his War Minister’s willingness to militarily seize it. Borrowing a phrase from Bill Clinton — it’s the precious minerals, stupid.

Trump didn’t abduct Venezuelan president Nicholas Maduro, effectively taking over the South American nation, because Maduro is a drug trafficker. Just a flimsy ruse. Trump wanted Venezuelan oil.

Likewise, it’s the wildly valuable rare-earth metals embedded in Greenland rock that Trump thirsts for.

If the US does invade Greenland, Canada could be next. So says Robert Huish, Associate Professor in International Development Studies at Dalhousie University. He’s not the only one.

“Perhaps not immediately as the 51st state,” Huish writes, in a recent article for The Conversation, “but quite possibly as a U.S. territory that would deny Canadians any voting rights for Congress or the Presidency.”

The GPM reached out to Robert Huish, an Associate Professor in International Development Studies at Dalhousie University, in Halifax. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Watch our complete conversation here:

Wanna get fired from the job you love? Just condemn Israel for the hideous crimes it’s been committing against the Palestinian people, in occupied Gaza and the Palestinian West Bank.

Call Israel a settler-colonial state, or an apartheid regime. Accuse it of committing genocide.

Post your comments on Facebook, X, Instagram or TikTok. Then, wait a bit.

More likely than not, pro-Israeli/Zionist forces will complain to your boss or the school or university where you teach, and you’ll be out the door.

If you’re a person of colour, or a Palestinian, or Muslim, you’ll be out the door real fast.

Dozens of American academics, teachers and civil servants have been investigated, suspended or fired for their peaceful, pro-Palestine discourse or activism. Those who’ve held on to their jobs – those who’ve never said anything at all — feel the chill.

Here in Canada, the situation is less extreme, but worrisome, nonetheless. Especially for those who speak out on social media – in the most measured of ways. Read their stories here and here and here.

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One Canadian academic who’s experienced the chill is Mohammad Zubairi. Zubairi is an Associate Professor in the Department of Pediatrics in the Faculty of Health Sciences at McMaster University. In late 2024, Zubairi was appointed Post-Graduate Medical Education Director for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion — a well-established policy rubric in Canada, unlike Trump’s US, where it’s been all but stamped out. Complaints about Zubairi’s appointment soon rolled in, from Zionist forces in both Ontario and the U.S.

Judging from the way it handled complaints, McMaster University appears to be an enlightened institution. Zubairi has held onto his job – a job he greatly enjoys.

The GPM sat down with Mohammad Zubairi in the studios of 93.3 CFMU-FM, McMaster University Radio. Zubairi is a developmental and behavioural pediatrician. Since late 2024, Zubairi has served as the Post-Graduate Medical Education Director for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Development is a human right.

So are clean air and water, and a stable climate.

No one is more engaged in advancing these ideas than McMaster University professor Bonny Ibhawoh.

For the past year, Ibhawoh and his colleagues have been formulating a policy document exploring the connections between sustainable development as a human right, and climate justice – bringing a justice dimension to discussions about how to mitigate and adapt to climate breakdown.

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Last November, Ibhawoh presented the document at the 30th Conference of the Parties to the UN Climate Change Convention, in Belem, Brazil, COP-30. Ibhawoh teaches Global Human Rights in the Department of History, and the Centre for Global Peace, Justice and Health at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario. He is the founding Director of the McMaster Centre for Human Rights and Restorative Justice, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and current Chair of the United Nations’ Expert Mechanism on the Right to Development.

The GPM sat down with Bonny Ibhawoh in his McMaster University office. Listen to our conversation. Click on the play button above, or go here.

The Chagos Islands — not a place many people have heard of, much less visited. You can barely find them on a map, in the middle of the Indian Ocean.

Long before Europeans arrived, the Chagos Islands were culturally tied to the island of Mauritius, as it’s known today, 900 km east of Madagascar.

The Dutch occupied the island between 1638 and 1710. The French seized it in 1715, naming it Île de France. In 1810, the British seized it from the French, consolidating their colonial possession in the 1814 Treaty of Paris.

Mauritius, they called it — declaring it part of Britain’s far-flung “Indian Ocean Territory.”

At the height of the decolonization movement, in March 1968, Mauritius gained its independence – with one small cut-out: the Chagos islands, 2200 km northwest of Mauritius.

The Chagos Archipelago consists of a number of islands and atolls, the largest of which is Diego Garcia. Due south of the oil-rich Persian Gulf, about 27 square kilometers in size, Diego Garcia would be the perfect place to set up a military base, the British thought. In cahoots with their fast friends in Washington, that’s exactly what they did.

In late 1966, Diego Garcia became a shining star in the expanding constellation of US military bases all around the planet (now 800 in total). Also, a great ‘Black Site’ where official enemies could be detained and tortured in secret, without due process.

The Chagossians were forcibly displaced, in the cruelest of ways.

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Between 1967 and 1973, the Chagos Archipelago’s entire population was either blocked from returning or forcibly removed by the UK. The forcible expulsion of Diego Garcia’s population took place between July and September 1971. Britain declared the entire archipelago a “Marine Protected Area.”

In 2010, Mauritius undertook proceedings against the UK. They dragged on for years.

In 2017, the UN General Assembly asked the International Court of Justice, the international community’s supreme judicial body, to render an Advisory Opinion on the matter. The ICJ issued its Advisory Opinion in February 2019:

The decolonization of Mauritius was not lawfully completed when that country acceded to independence, the Chagossian people’s inalienable right to self-determination has been violated, the UK’s administration of their island home is an internationally wrongful act, and the UK must end its administration of the archipelago “as rapidly as possible,” the ICJ declared.

The UN General Assembly endorsed the ICJ ruling shortly thereafter, calling on all UN member states to secure Chagossian independence by November 2025.

Colonialists to the core (and the tightest of US allies), Britain said sure, then hedged its bets.

In May 2025, the UK struck a deal with Mauritius. Under that deal — ostensibly aimed at implementing the ICJ ruling — Mauritius would lease Diego Garcia to the UK for 99 years, with a 40-year extension option.

This past December, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) called on the UK to suspend that deal. In addition to denying the Chagossian people’s right to return to Diego Garcia Island, CERD said, the UK-Mauritius deals prevents Chagossians “from exercising their cultural rights and preserving their cultural heritage,” and perpetuates longstanding violations of the Chagossian people’s right to self-determination.

Under international law, the right to self-determination is jus cogens (obligatory;  no questions, no exceptions) and erga omnes (owed to all; all states are obliged to enforce it). 

A very long story that David Vine has been following for years.

David Vine is a Professor of Anthropology at American University, in Washington D.C. He’s the author of a trilogy of books about the US penchant for permanent war, and about America’s network of 800 military bases around the world. Island of Shame, the Secret History of the US Military Base on Diego Garcia, was published in 2011. All royalties go to the Chagossian people.

The latest of David Vine’s books, published in 2020 by University of California Press, is entitled The United States of War – a Global History of America’s endless conflicts, from Columbus to the Islamic State.

Listen to our conversation with David Vine. Click on the play button above, or go here.

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Watch our complete conversation with David Vine here:

One in four Canadians live in households experiencing food insecurity.

That’s the finding of a report from Statistics Canada, released in December 2025.

Over the last five years, the rate of “severe food insecurity,” situations in which Canadians skip meals, has doubled. Food insecurity is highest in Nunavut – 60-70% of households experience it there — and the lowest in Quebec.

For insight into the nature and drivers of food insecurity in Canada, the GPM reached out to Valerie Tarasuk, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Nutritional Sciences at the University of Toronto. Tarasuk is the lead investigator for PROOF, a research program that explores policy interventions to reduce food insecurity in Canada.

Listen to our conversation in today’s GPM. Click on the play button above, or go here.

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Watch our complete conversation here:

Zohran Mamdani … Prior to his historic victory in the New York City mayoralty election, last November, his name was barely known.

Zohran Mamdani is the first South Asian, and first Muslim to be elected mayor of the U.S.’s most populous city.

He’s also the first Democratic Socialist mayor of a major American city. 

In the very first line of his acceptance speech, Mamdani tipped his hat to America’s most illustrious, trailblazing democratic socialist – Eugene Debs.

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“The sun may have set over our city this evening,” Mamdani declared last November 4, to huge applause, “but as Eugene Debs once said: “I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity.””

How many of Zohran Mamdani’s supporters actually knew who Eugene Debs was? Few, for sure.

Eugene Debs was one of America’s great trade union leaders and political radicals. In contrast to late 19th/early 20th century labour leaders like Samuel Gompers, the founder of the American Federation of Labour, Debs was a man of the left, with a distinctive class-based analysis.

Debs was an anti-capitalist, a socialist, and a fierce political radical. He marched with Susan B. Anthony, America’s trailblazing women’s rights activist. Emma Goldman was his friend.

Perennial socialist candidate, Eugene Debs ran for president three times in the early 20th century, under the banner of the Democratic Socialist Party.

The most radical, personally hazardous of Debs’ positions — his opposition to and active promotion of resistance against American involvement in the First World War. 

On September 14, 1918, U.S. District Judge David C. Westenhaver sentenced Eugene Debs to ten years imprisonment for an anti-war speech he’d delivered to a Socialist Party gathering in Canton, Ohio, three months earlier, in alleged violation of the Espionage Act of 1917. 

In response to the jail sentence, Debs famously declared:

“Let the people take heart and hope everywhere, for the cross is bending, the midnight is passing, and joy cometh with the morning.”

To learn more about Eugene Debs, the GPM reached out to Shawn Gude.

Gude is the author of a new biography of Eugene Debs, due to be published on the 100th anniversary of Debs’ death, this coming October. Gude is a senior editor for Jacobin Magazine. His book — American Socialist: The Life & Times of Eugene Debs – will be released by Simon & Schuster in October 2026.

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Listen to our conversation with Shawn Gude. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Watch our complete conversation here:

Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza drags on, with no end in sight.

Over 63,000 Palestinians have been killed by US bombs and missiles, almost twenty thousand of them children. Tens of thousands more lie dead and rotting beneath the rubble.

Over 80% of the Gazans Israel has killed were civilians, its own data reveals. Indirect deaths — from infectious disease, chronic ailments that can no longer be treated, and forced starvation — may bring that number to 200,000.

Last week, Israel launched a full-scale assault on northern Gaza, home to an estimated million Palestinians. Benjamin Netanyahu’s aim — to drive them and the remainder of the estimated 2.1 million Gazans who’ve managed to survive Israel’s biblical onslaught into a vast concentration camp on the southern end of the enclave, there to be bombed, to perish from starvation and disease, or to pack up and get out.

Israel is reportedly in negotiations with South Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, Libya, and Indonesia to accept Palestinian deportees.

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Meanwhile, a slew of Western leaders have vowed to recognize Palestinian statehood at the 80th session of the UN General Assembly, scheduled to convene on September 8, in NYC (or Geneva, if that’s where the UNGA moves its proceedings, following US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s refusal to grant visas to Palestinian delegates).

Recognizing Palestinian statehood is their best way to secure what they call ‘peace’.

Palestinian statehood — with conditions.

Only Western-approved Palestinian parties and candidates will be allowed to run (Hamas excluded, of course), and Palestine will need to be demilitarized, therefore defenseless in the face of certain Israeli assault. Hardly a day goes by when Israel doesn’t violate the territorial integrity of Lebanon and Syria, both of them UN member states.

Of course, Palestinians will be obliged to guarantee Israeli security.

The GPM spoke about Israel-USA’s war on Gaza, and the future of the Palestinian people, with American-Palestinian journalist and author, Ramzy Baroud. Baroud is the editor of the Palestine Chronicle, former Managing Editor of London-based Middle East Eye, and former Deputy Managing Editor of Al Jazeera Online.

Baroud is also the author of six books, and a contributor to many others. His latest volume, co-edited with British-Israeli author Ilan Pappé — Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak Out — has just been published by Clarity Press.

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Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Watch our complete conversation here:

Israel-USA’s genocidal war on Gaza drags on.

Sixty-one thousand have been killed by US bombs and missiles. Some German and British ordnance in there.

Indirect deaths — from infectious disease, chronic disorders that can no longer be treated (due to Israel-USA’s blockade), and malnutrition — may bring that number to 200,000. Over 150,000 have been injured.

Israel-USA’s wanton destruction of Gaza’s health care system — infrastructure and personnel — has given rise to a new term: ‘medicide’.

The most recent figures from the World Health Organization tell the story:

Half of the 36 hospitals operating in Gaza before October 7, 2023 have been destroyed. The other half are partially functional, overwhelmed with the injured and refugees.

Two-thirds of little Gaza’s primary health care facilities have been demolished. In North Gaza, home to an estimated million souls at this moment (people Israel-USA wants to forcible expel), one partially functional hospital remains.

As if the situation in Gaza weren’t sufficiently appalling – two years into a war widely described as genocidal, by people who know what genocide is and have the honesty to use the word (too many to cite here) — Gaza is now swept by infectious pathogens few if any drugs can treat.

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In a recent report in the British medical journal The Lancet Infectious Diseases, a half-dozen strains of multidrug-resistant bacteria have been described, isolated from 1300 tissue specimens gathered at one of Gaza’s sole surviving microbiology units, at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, in Gaza City, between November 2023 and the end of August, 2024.

Among the strains of drug-resistant bacteria the researchers identified, notorious wound pathogens Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Staphylococcus aureus, Klebsiella, and E. coli.

Two-thirds of all isolates were resistant to multiple antibiotics, from different drug classes (a benchmark for establishing ‘multidrug resistance’), indicating “sustained selection pressure.”

In other words, prevailing conditions in Gaza are ‘selecting for’, and therefore driving the emergence of resistant strains of virulent bacteria few if any drugs will treat.

Conditions are also ripe for the spread of these diseases.

Crowded field hospital wards, squalid tent encampments, and the almost complete destruction of Gaza’s sewage and freshwater systems are a perfect storm for the spread of diseases no drug will treat.

To make the situation even more acute, antibiotics are in short supply in Gaza. So are wound irrigation fluids and sterile dressings, and the materials needed to culture bacteria, in order to establish the best antibiotics to treat them.

Sixteen percent of Pseudomonas samples examined by the Lancet study’s authors were resistant to the drug colistin, the drug of last resort when all others fail. The last remaining bullet.

“The international medical community has a duty to act and respond to this crisis,” the authors of the Lancet piece write.

“First and foremost, healthcare workers and governments worldwide must advocate for the cessation of the Israeli military invasion that has resulted in a surge of trauma injuries and the widespread deliberate targeting of hospitals, laboratories, and water desalination plants; without this ceasefire, the infection burden will escalate further.”

The GPM spoke with one of the authors of the Lancet report.

Bilal Irfan is a bioethicist at Harvard Medical School, and a researcher at the medical school’s Brigham & Women’s Hospital, specializing in conflict health. Irfan has been collaborating with Palestinian medical students and physicians in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza in the documentation of Israeli medicide.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

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And here’s another Lancet piece, released on August 18, 2025, lead author Bilal Irfan, entitled “Is Gaza still a place for newborn life?”

Twenty-two months into Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, the official death toll now topping 60,000 (possibly approaching 200,000), famine has now been formally declared by the UN agency that declares such things – the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or IPC.

It’s a “worst case scenario,” the IPC declared at the end of July.

No news for those who follow the media.

Skeletal toddlers and non-lactating Gazan mothers crowd TV screens and online news platforms day after day.

All “blood lies,” says criminal fugitive Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, under arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court.

Still, Israel’s fast friends seem moved, and are now declaring the horror show has to stop.

“Dangerous,” a couple of dozen Western officials recently declared. “Inhumane,” “unacceptable,” “egregious.”

Outrageously unlawful? No. No Western state has gone that far. No mention of the G-word, nor the A-word.

But a sea change seems to be underway, in places you’d least expect – the UK, the Netherlands … Germany.

And Canada — rock-solid Israeli Bro when Stephen Harper was Prime Minister.

Justin Trudeau vowed a more nuanced, Palestine-friendly policy. Displaying true Liberal colours, however, Trudeau’s Foreign Minister, Chrystia Freeland, vowed Canada would be Israel’s “asset” at the UN Security Council — should it win a seat.

It didn’t.

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Now, in the Red Chamber of the Canadian Parliament, the Senate, sturdier voices are calling for justice and action.

In late June, then again in late July, Canadian Senators called on Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to uphold international law, urging the Canadian government to implement a half dozen punitive measures against Israel. The GPM spoke with one of them, Canadian Senator from the Province of Manitoba, the Honorable Marilou McPhedran.

Marilou McPhedran is a Canadian lawyer and human rights advocate. She was the Dean of the University of Winnipeg’s Global College, in Manitoba, between 2008 and 2012, and has been a member of the Senate of Canada since October 2016.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Watch our complete conversation here:

War and police repression — land and climate destruction: flip sides of the same coin.

Twenty-two months into Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, US bombs and missiles have reportedly generated about 40 million tonnes of concrete rubble, liberally seasoned with the toxic residues of US, British and German munitions.

Cleaning up Israel-USA’s mountain of poisonous detritus, reducing it to a finer grade of carcinogenic rubble, trucking it all off (underlying terrain to be replaced by Trump/Witkoff real estate?), will generate an estimated 90,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases.

By some estimates, rebuilding Gaza (if this can be imagined) will generate thirty million tonnes of Earth-warming gases — and a shit-load of cash.

Meanwhile, in Israel-USA — intellectual co-author/perpetrator of Israeli mass murder and destruction — Donald Trump’s “Big Ugly Billionaire Bailout Bill” pulverizes America’s fledgling renewable energy industry. Wind turbines and solar panel farms have been slashed. They kill birds and mar the landscape, the NYC/Florida-based sociopath says.

Buried in his ten-thousand-word pile of vicious legislative rubble, a $150 billion allocation to ICE – US Immigration Control & Enforcement. Trump’s Brown Shirts are now terrorizing black, brown and Latino communities coast to coast.

The GPM talked about all this with Aaron Kirshenbaum, War is Not Green organizer for the US antiwar and justice organization CODEPINK.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Watch our complete conversation here:

You have to laugh to keep from crying sometimes. Two years into Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza — bloody slaughter and mass starvation live streamed on TV screens — the old blues lyric rings true.

For tears of joy, not rage, friends of Palestine should consider visiting Bethlehem.

Clinging to the walls of a fertile valley beneath the loveliest of holy towns, hemmed in by concrete walls, watchtowers, checkpoints, and a string of mega-Jewish settler-colonies, a biologist named Mazin Qumsiyeh, his partner Jessie and friends are planting native Palestinian seeds, raising chickens, rabbits and fish, and offering up habitat for insects, birds, bats, and other small mammals.

Rescuing their beloved landscape from Euro-North American land thieves and eco-vandals.

The Palestine Institute for Biodiversity & Sustainability, their oasis is called. Perched above the Palestine Institute’s splendid gardens, a 1200-square meter museum is now nearing completion.

For an update on the Palestine Institute’s new museum, and gardens beneath, we reached out to Mazin Qumsiyeh.

Mazin Qumsiyeh is a Palestinian scientist, scholar, author, and environmental justice advocate. Together with his partner Jessie Chang, Mazin founded the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability, and the Palestine Museum of Natural History. Mazin has published over 150 scientific papers and books on topics ranging from cultural heritage to biodiversity.

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Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Learn how to volunteer here.

Watch a complete conversation of ours here, recorded in the Palestine Institute garden back in April 2024. Thanks to Paul Tekenbroek for video production. 

Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza drags on, with no end in sight.

Mainstream commentators with some degree of sympathy for the Palestinian people argue that Israel needs to be ‘pressured’ to end the war.

Others say Israel will have to be forced to withdraw from Gaza. Indeed, to terminate its unlawful occupation of all Palestinian territories.

Unlawful is how the International Court of Justice described Israel’s 58-year-old occupation, in a UN-solicited Advisory Opinion issued over a year ago. In the wake of the ICJ’s ruling, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution calling on Israel to end its occupation within a year. That would be this coming September.

Israel will certainly not do so. The US won’t pressure it, let alone force it. The US and Israel are blood-brothers; conjoined twins.

So, hope turns to European capitals. Last week, French Prime Minister Emmanuel Macron announced that France would formally recognize the State of Palestine.

The UK may follow, but British Prime Minister Keir Starmer is much more weak-kneed that Macron, and anxious to please Donald Trump, who thinks Gaza should be completely bulldozed, then turned into a real estate paradise for people like himself and his wealthy friends.

Last May, speaking to a People’s Tribunal on the Gaza genocide in Sarajevo, Israeli historian Ilan Pappé offered his own thoughts on the troubling situation.

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Pappé is a professor at the University of Exeter’s College of Social Sciences and International Studies, where he directs the European Centre for Palestine Studies.

He’s also the author of various foundational works on Palestine. Among these, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, and Ten Myths About Israel. His most recent work — Lobbying For Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic — was released last year.

Listen to Ilan Pappé in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

GPM # 103

It’s been seven months since the start of Donald Trump’s second administration. A hundred and eighty days. Feels like years.

With lightning speed, razor-sharp precision, and the ferocity of junkyard dogs, Trump and his minions have slashed thousands of federal jobs, gutted departments responsible for health, education, environmental protection; for international development assistance; for the funding of medical and climate research.

War has been declared on free speech, transgender people, and the media — corporate and public.

“Fake News,” Trump calls them. “Enemies of the People.”

Central mission of Trump’s second regime: driving millions of undocumented migrants out of the country; pursuing them with militarized savagery; spiriting them off to gulag jails stretching from Florida, Louisiana and Texas down to El Salvador; shipping them off to remote African locations; people who’ve lived and worked in America for years; who’ve never committed a crime; who’ve paid taxes; raised kids – kids born in America.

Strip them of their citizenship,  Trump and his ‘Homeland Security’ capos cry.

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Aside from migrant black, brown and Hispanic folks who just want to earn a living in a country they believe is great, nothing fills Donald Trump’s craw with more bile than those three normative nouns – diversity, equity and inclusiveness.

Trump and his White-America-First czars are now rooting out DEI programs with the zealousness of medieval crusaders.

Dorothy Roberts

American scholar and writer Dorothy Roberts spoke with the GPM about Trump’s first 180 days, examining Trump’s policies through the lens of race, class and gender.

Dorothy Roberts is the 14th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor, the George A. Weiss University Professor of Law & Sociology, and the Raymond Pace & Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights at the University of Pennsylvania. She’s also the founding director of the Penn Program on Race, Science, and Society – and a prolific writer.

Among Dorothy Roberts’ works: Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century; Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty; and Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare.

Roberts’ latest book — The Mixed Marriage Project: A Memoir of Love, Race, and Family — will be available in February 2026.

Listen to our conversation with Dorothy Roberts in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Watch our complete conversation here:

Criminal kingpins defend themselves. Cross them at your own risk.

White Rose activists resisting the Nazis; Italian journalists and prosecutors pursuing the mafia; dissident Russian politicians challenging Vladimir Putin – and getting too popular … they all paid the price: guillotined, gunned down, poisoned, or starved to death in gulag dungeons.

White Rose activist Sophie Scholl

Now, condemning the US government and its foreign policies, or pursuing its beloved partner in crime in court, probably won’t get you killed. Donald Trump and his Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, will just ruin your life.

Ask Andrew Cayley. Together with American lawyer Brenda Hollis, Cayley, a British barrister, steered the International Criminal Court investigation leading to arrest warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu and his war minister, Yoav Gallant, back in November 2024.

“It was the worst few months of my life,” Cayley told the Observer.

US Senator Lindsey Graham screamed and yelled at Cayley and his colleagues, vowing sanctions against them and the court, in his cranky redneck drawl.

Scary phone threats followed. Then, the kicker: Watch your back, Dutch police warned Cayley.

“They said we need to look at your flat and we need to put alarms on all the French windows, bars across the skylights and you need a reinforced bulletproof door,” Cayley recounted to the Observer.

Terrorized, Cayley quit last fall. Others have too.

ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan, flanked by prosecutors Brenda Hollis and Andrew Cayley

Meanwhile, ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan and four judges now face crushing US sanctions; bank accounts have been frozen; email accounts blocked. The entire court’s IT system – its very existence – is under threat. (in flagrant breach of Article 70 of the ICC’s Rome Statute.)

In the midst of it all, Benjamin Netanyahu travels back and forth between Tel Aviv and Washington, through European airspace, fearing nothing from Greek, Italian, French, or British authorities.

The GPM spoke with British barrister Toby Cadman about ICC arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant, where they stand, anticipated warrants against other Israeli leaders, and crippling US sanctions against the ICC.

Toby Cadman is an international human rights lawyer, and the co-founder and joint head of Guernica 37 Chambers, a London-based law firm specializing in international criminal and humanitarian law.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Watch our complete conversation here:

Then, there’s Italian human rights lawyer Francesca Albanese.

In her role as Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in Occupied Palestine, Albanese has submitted a host of damning reports to the UN General Assembly and Human Rights Council.

Israel and its conjoined twin have not been amused.

Albanese’s latest report has really pissed off the Americans.

 “From economy of occupation to economy of genocide,” it’s called.

Albanese’s report lists dozens of mega-corporations that have been aiding, abetting, and profiting from Israeli settler-colonialism, apartheid and genocide. Among these, US-based Lockheed-Martin, Hewlett-Packard, Amazon, Palantir, Microsoft, Google, Caterpillar … the list goes on and on.

Infuriated, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has struck back.

“Albanese has spewed unabashed antisemitism, expressed support for terrorism, and open contempt for the United States, Israel, and the West,” Rubio wrote in a statement released on July 9, slapping sanctions on Albanese.

Little Marco was just warming up.

Albanese, Donald Trump’s poker-faced Secretary of State declared, has written “threatening letters to dozens of entities worldwide, including major American companies across finance, technology, defense, energy, and hospitality, making extreme and unfounded accusations and recommending the ICC pursue investigations and prosecutions of these companies and their executives. We will not tolerate these campaigns of political and economic warfare, which threaten our national interests and sovereignty.”

The GPM spoke to Albanese last January.

At the time, Israeli Occupation Forces were in the midst of demolishing Jenin refugee camp, in the northern West Bank. Since then, some 70,000 Palestinians have been forcibly displaced from Jenin, Tulkarem and Nur Shams camps.

Since October 7, 2023, about a thousand Palestinians have been killed up and down the West Bank by Jewish settler-terrorists and their soldier friends.

Since May, almost 800 starving Gazans have been gunned down by Israeli military snipers and US mercenaries, while seeking out food at US/Israeli “humanitarian aid” centers.

Most recently, Israeli war minister Israel Katz has floated the idea of building a concentration camp on the ruins of southern Rafah, into which Gaza’s surviving two million woe begotten residents would be forced — presumably by a fleet of weaponized, heavily armoured Caterpillar D9 bulldozers, provided by Israel-USA.

Listen to our conversation with Francesca Albanese. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Watch our complete conversation here:

We’ve been sharing extracts from a People’s Tribunal on the Gaza Genocide, that took place in Sarajevo at the end of May. Inspired by the 1966 Russell Tribunal on the US war on Vietnam, and the 2003-2005 World Tribunal on the US war on Iraq, the Gaza Tribunal was launched in London in November 2024.

Faced with a “total failure of the organised international community to implement international law in the most severe, visible case of genocide in real time,” the Gaza Tribunal “aims to legitimize an alternative paradigm of international law, one that derives its authority from people and their sense of justice rather than relying solely on governments and their institutions.”

The Gaza Tribunal is governed by an eight-member Steering Committee headed by Richard Falk, Emeritus Professor of International Law and former UN Special Rapporteur on Occupied Palestine, assisted by a 29-member Advisory Policy Council of civil society leaders and public intellectuals from Palestine, Europe and North America.

The Tribunal’s final judgement will be rendered by a ‘Jury of Conscience’, following closing hearings in Istanbul in late October. That judgement, together with personal testimony, civil society submissions, and closing reports from each of the Tribunal’s three Chambers, will be incorporated into a set of public archives that will remain open for continuing submissions.

In today’s GPM podcast — voices from a tribunal session about corporate media reporting on the Gaza genocide, chaired by Turkish attorney Mehmet Karli.

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Participants include: Lubna Masarwa, Palestine/Israel bureau chief for the Middle East Eye; British journalist Victoria Brittain; Ezgi Basaran, Oxford University scholar on Turkish and Middle East politics; Assal Rad, Middle East history scholar and non-resident Fellow at DAWN, a group founded by murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and British broadcaster and journalist, Lauren Booth.

Listen to the panel in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

“Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, which includes mass killing, arbitrary detention, torture, and the imposition of a legal regime that provides far less due process than that provided to Israelis living in the same territory, meets the legal definition of apartheid.”

So say four American human rights lawyers and scholars in a report released on May 15, entitled “An Analysis of Israel’s Laws and Policies and the Responsibilities of US Academic and Other Institutions.”

Sandra Babcock is director of the International Human Rights Clinic at Cornell Law School. Thomas Becker is the legal and policy director at the University Network for Human Rights, and teaches human rights at Columbia Law School. James Cavallaro is the executive director of the University Network for Human Rights, and a visiting professor at the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs. Susan M Akram is director of the International Human Rights Clinic at Boston University School of Law.

The GPM spoke about the report with Susan Akram.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Flag Woman in Rotterdam, October 2023 (David Kattenburg)

We’ve been playing extracts from a People’s Tribunal on the Gaza Genocide, that took place in Sarajevo at the end of May. Inspired by the 1966 Russell Tribunal on the US war on Vietnam, and the 2003-2005 World Tribunal on the US war on Iraq, the Gaza Tribunal was launched in London in November 2024.

Faced with a “total failure of the organized international community to implement international law in the most severe, visible case of genocide in real time,” the Gaza Tribunal’s website states, it “aims to legitimize “an alternative paradigm of international law, one that derives its authority from people and their sense of justice rather than relying solely on governments and their institutions.”

The Gaza Tribunal is governed by an eight-member Steering Committee headed by Richard Falk, Emeritus Professor of International Law, and former UN Special Rapporteur on Occupied Palestine, assisted by a 29-member Advisory Policy Council of civil society leaders and public intellectuals from Palestine, Europe, and North America.

Among these: Diana Buttu, Susan Abulhawa, Mouin Rabbani, Raja Shehadeh, Ghassan Abu Sittah, Mazin Qumsiyeh, Cornel West, Judith Butler, Yanis Varoufakis, Tariq Ali, Mary Kaldor, Naomi Klein, and Jeremy Corbyn.

The Tribunal’s final judgement will be rendered by a ‘Jury of Conscience’ composed of a half dozen judges, following closing hearings in Istanbul in late October.

That judgement, together with personal testimony, civil society submissions, and closing reports from each of the Tribunal’s three Chambers, will be incorporated into a set of public archives that will remain open for continuing submissions.

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Here’s a presentation from the third day of the Gaza Tribunal, in Sarajevo.

Saree Makdisi is an American literary critic and professor, of Palestinian and Lebanese descent. He also writes on contemporary Arab politics and culture. Makdisi is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Listen to Saree Makdisi in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

The official death toll in Gaza now stands at 55,000.

According to a pair of reports in the British medical journal The Lancet, the number may be much higher.

Before the war, Gaza’s population was pegged at 2.3 million. These days, mainstream media talk about 2.1 million Gazans. What happened to the remaining 200,000? Fifty to seventy-five thousand have likely been blown to bits by US bombs and missiles, many of them now buried under vast piles of rubble.

Another 150,000 would have died from profound injuries that couldn’t be treated, or from wound infection, infectious disease, chronic diseases that can no longer be treated — because Israel has blocked entry of medicines and vital equipment — and from starvation.

As awful as these figures are, worse is surely in store for little Gaza.

Nearly half of its population are children. Those who physically survive, deeply traumatized, will carry scars for the rest of their lives, both physical and psychological. Many now face a life of disability, under permanent military occupation and siege the international community has shown no interest in ending.

If they bear children, their children will too. A “pandemic of disabilities,” the Commissioner General of UNRWA, the UN Relief & Works Agency, called this.

In late May, a People’s Tribunal on the Gaza genocide, featuring scores of witness accounts and testimony, was held in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Tribunal’s final judgement will be rendered by a ‘Jury of Conscience’ composed of a half dozen judges, following closing hearings in Istanbul in late October.

That judgement, together with personal testimony, civil society submissions, and closing reports from each of the Tribunal’s three Chambers, will be incorporated into a set of public archives that will remain open for continuing submissions.

Last week, the GPM featured a presentation to the Gaza Tribunal by British scholar Penny Green, speaking about the “disabling” tactics Israeli Occupation Forces have deployed over the course of the last 21 months in Gaza. We reached out to Penny Green, for a more in-depth conversation.

Penny Green is Professor of Law and Globalisation at Queen Mary University of London, and the acting chair of the Gaza Tribunal.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click play above, or go here.

Watch our complete conversation here:

Israel-USA’s genocidal war on Gaza has just entered its 21st month.

According to Gaza health officials, almost 55,000 have been killed since the war began (the actual number may be two or three times higher), and 125,000 have been injured, with fewer and fewer places to seek care.

Gaza’s health system — among the region’s most functional, before the war — has been laid to waste. Hospitals, clinics, emergency rescue vehicles and health care personnel are perfectly legitimate targets, Israel says, insisting that it’s operating squarely within the bounds of international law.

Of the 36 hospitals operating in Gaza before October 2023, seventeen are now in partial operation. Seven out of fifteen field hospitals, 61 out of 160 primary health centres, and 127 out of 353 mobile clinics are partially functional.

Gaza’s kids are suffering the most. The tiny enclave, under comprehensive Israeli siege since 2007, is now reportedly home to the largest cohort of child amputees in the world.

“Gaza has become a graveyard for thousands of children,” UNICEF spokesperson James Elder said, at the end of October 2023. In late May, UNICEF reported that fifteen thousand Gazan kids have been killed, over 34,000 injured, and nearly a million deprived of their right to basic services.

Last week, the GPM reported on a People’s Tribunal on the Gaza genocide, held in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The three-day hearing featured scores of witness accounts and testimony. Among the most gripping, accounts from two physicians who’ve worked in Gaza hospitals.

Dr. Mimi Syed is an American board-certified emergency medicine physician. She served in Gaza from August to September 2024, and in December 2024, at both Al-Aqsa and Nasser Hospitals.

Dr. Thaer Ahmad is an emergency medicine physician at Advocate Christ Medical Center in Chicago, and an Assistant Clinical Professor at the University of Illinois.  He spent time at Nasser Hospital, in Khan Younis, just north of Rafah, the last remaining referral hospital in south Gaza.

Listen to Mimi Syed and Thaer Ahmad in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

The official death toll in Gaza now stands at 55,000.

According to a pair of reports last year in the British medical journal The Lancet, the number may be much higher.

Before the war, Gaza’s population was pegged at 2.3 million. These days, mainstream media talk about 2.1 million Gazans. What happened to the remaining 200,000?

Fifty to seventy-five thousand have likely been blown to bits by US bombs and missiles, many of them now buried under vast piles of rubble.

Another 150,000 have presumably died from grave injuries, or from wound infection, infectious disease in fetid refugee encampments (that Israel incessantly bombs), chronic ailments that can no longer be treated, due to Israel’s blockade on drugs and vital equipment, and from starvation.

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As awful as these figures are, worse is surely in store for little Gaza.

Nearly half of Gaza’s population are children. Those who survive, deeply traumatized, will carry both physical and psychological scars for the rest of their lives. Many now face a life of disability, without social or economic supports, under permanent military occupation and siege the international community has shown no interest in ending.

If they bear children, their children will too, and their children’s children. 

A “pandemic of disabilities,” the Commissioner General of UNRWA, the UN Relief & Works Agency, called this.

Late last month, at the Gaza Tribunal, in Sarajevo, British scholar Penny Green spoke about the “disabling” tactics Israeli Occupation Forces have deployed over the course of the last 21 months in Gaza. Green is Professor of Law and Globalisation at Queen Mary University of London, and the acting chair of the Gaza Tribunal.

Listen to Penny Green in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Israel’s war on Gaza is about to enter its twentieth month.

Widely described as genocidal by legal scholars and human rights experts, Israel and its conjoined twin (‘Israel-USA’) say it’s nothing of the sort.

One would hardly expect genocide perpetrators to acknowledge committing the crime of crimes. 

Israel’s ability to commit the highest of crimes with impunity — aided, assisted, and shielded by Israel-USA — makes the world a more dangerous place, Norway’s international development minister said the other day.

“Genocide is the worst crime a country can do and the worst crime that politicians can do and this should not be polarised,” Åsmund Aukrust said, according to The Guardian, without indicating when or where.

Western politicians shouldn’t be aiding and abetting Israeli genocide, Aukrust might have said. 

Alongside Israel-USA, the UK and Germany are Israel’s most generous arms suppliers.

The Netherlands sends Israel spare parts for the F-35 bombers it’s been using to lay Gaza to waste.

Turkey – not really a Western power, but a member of NATO – happily funnels jet fuel to Israel, all the while condemning Israel for its crimes.

Back on May 19, the UK, France and Canada suggested they may hold Israel to account — at some point. No sign of that yet.

“The Israeli government’s denial of essential humanitarian assistance to the civilian population [of Gaza] is unacceptable, and risks breaching International Humanitarian Law,” the British, French and Canadians said in their joint press release [emphasis added].

The Brits, French and Canadians are hedging their bets. So are the most powerful Arab states, who’ve yet to lift a finger to halt the mass murder of their Palestinian confreres.

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For his views on this sorry international affair, the GPM reached out to Christopher Gunness, former UN director for Strategic Communications & Advocacy in the Middle East, and chief spokesperson for UNRWA. These days, Gunness is the executive director of the Myanmar Accountability Project.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Watch our complete conversation here:

“The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born,” Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci famously wrote, from a fascist prison, back in the 1930s.

“Now is the time of monsters, Gramsci said.

Almost a century later, the monsters are back again, committing unspeakable crimes with absolute impunity; laying waste to the 20th century’s most fundamental international laws, set forth in the wake of European fascist horror; turning the 21st century into a lawless, dangerous place.

“The world is approaching a dangerous precipice, the front edge of which is in Palestine,” a People’s Tribunal on the Gaza genocide declared last week in Sarajevo, and “dangerous forces” are “pushing us toward the abyss.”

The Sarajevo Declaration of the Gaza Tribunal culminated three days of public hearings at the International University of Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Inspired by past People’s Tribunals — most notably the 1966 Russell Tribunal on the US war on Vietnam, and the 2003-2005 World Tribunal on the US’s war on Iraq – the Gaza Tribunal was launched in London in November 2024.

Listen to an abbreviated version of the Sarajevo Declaration in today’s podcast, read by Penny Green, Professor of Law and Globalisation at Queen Mary University of London, and the Gaza Tribunal’s acting chair, at the close of last week’s hearings.

Here’s the complete Gaza Declaration.

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A Conversation With Michael Lynk

Nineteen months into Israel-USA’s genocidal war on the people of Gaza, the official death toll now over 53,000, likely much higher and climbing fast (approaching 200,000, some say), two questions beg to be asked – how and why did it start, and why has it been so hard to stop?

According to The Guardian, the Gaza war was “triggered by Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack on Israel, in which militants killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted another 250.”

As for why the war drags on, with no end in sight, informed observers say the two ‘sides’ in the ‘conflict’ can’t agree to a ceasefire.

A circular argument, if ever there was one.

Hamas’ audacious assault on southern Israeli communities, back in October 2023, was certainly the most proximal cause of Israel’s war — waged in partnership with the US (Israel-USA) – and the supposedly tireless efforts of staunch US allies Egypt and Qatar to broker a ceasefire have definitely been vexed.

But, in search of deeper reasons for the apocalypse Gazans now face, alongside their brethren across the Israeli-occupied West Bank, and the apparent incapacity of the world’s most powerful players to bring it to an end, entrenched political philosophy and doctrine may be more instructive than recent incidents and scenarios.

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Key among these: the categorical imperative among the Western world’s most powerful states that, at the end of the day, international law must be sidelined; slipped into the lowest of bottom drawers.

That efforts to end Israel’s savage assault on Gaza, and parallel soldier-settler-terrorist attacks on Palestinians up and down the effectively annexed West Bank, must not be informed — much less constrained — by international legal considerations.

That international law must not be the basis upon which ‘peace’ and ‘security’ are achieved — the North Star for Great Powers anxious to resolve the ‘conflict’.

That scrupulous enforcement of the 20th century’s most canonical legal instruments (promulgated in the wake of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, and Sobibor) doesn’t suit their interests, and might even undermine them.

David Lloyd George

Such was the view of James Balfour, Lloyd George, Winston Churchill and other British leaders, back in the 1920s, when they decided to hand over historic Palestine to European Zionists, in clear breach of their obligation under Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, instructing them to advance “the well-being and development” of Palestine’s “peoples,” as “a sacred trust of civilization.”

At the start of Britain’s Palestine Mandate, in 1922, the British carried out a census.

Seventy-nine percent of Palestine’s people were Arab Muslims, ten percent were Christian, and eleven percent were Jewish, half of the latter of indigenous Arab origin, the remainder recent immigrants from Europe, the census determined.

Out the window these figures were flung, along with Britain’s solemn duty to uphold the freshly minted legal norms of the post-WWI international community.

The rest is history – the history of canonical laws and treaties discarded, on behalf of this ‘Jewish State’ Britain had resolved to create, in partnership with European Zionists, thereby enabling Eastern European Jews to go anywhere, except to Britain.

The UN plan to partition Palestine, following the collapse of Britain’s duplicitous Mandate — set forth in General Assembly Resolution 181 (II), promulgated in November 1947 — assigned 55 percent of historic Palestine to its Jewish people (a third of the population), and the remainder of the tiny slice of territory to Arab Palestinians. Jerusalem would be held as an internationalized corpus separatum.

Israel supported the resolution, then, upon its passage, proceeded to violate it.

Scene from 1947-49 Nakba

Between December 1947 and early 1949, Israel forcibly expelled almost a million Palestinians from their lands, or terrorized them into fleeing, including from territories slated for the future Arab state.

They also seized western Jerusalem.

Western leaders wrung their hands, but did nothing.

UN General Assembly Resolution 194, promulgated on December 11, 1948, stated that “[Palestinian] refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date.”

On 17 December 1948, Israel’s second application for UN membership was rejected by the Security Council (the first had been ignored). Three months later, in Resolution 69, Israel’s third application was approved by a vote of 9 to 1 (Egypt voting against), conditioned on the new ‘Jewish’ state’s implementation of the Partition Plan, and the Palestinian Right of Return, set forth in Resolution 194.

On this basis, on 11 May 1949, the UNGA approved Israeli membership by two-thirds majority.

Israel proceeded to renege on its legally binding commitment to the UN, and the Western powers did nothing.  

In October 1956, in connivance with Britain and France, and in flagrant breach of Article 2(4) of the UN Charter, obliging member states to “refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state,” Israel set out to overthrow Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, and seize the Suez Canal.

Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser

US President Dwight Eisenhower put his foot down, and the unlawful, tripartite assault was thwarted.

Eleven years later, claiming self-defense, Israel launched another war, this time against Egypt, Jordan and Syria. Modern legal scholarship argues Israel’s June 1967 war had no basis under Article 51 of the UN Charter, the right to self-defense.

In any case, under the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, Israel was now an occupying power, legally bound to preserve the well-being of people living under its occupation — referred to under Geneva IV as “protected people.”

Overruling one of its most senior legal advisors (Theodor Meron, now an advisor to the ICC), the Israeli government publicly declared that the Palestinian territories were actually “disputed,” not occupied, that it would uphold Geneva IV as it pleased, although it wasn’t obliged to do so.

The UN Security Council disagreed.

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UNSC resolution 242, passed on November 22, 1967, affirmed the “inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war” (among the most canonical statements of modern international law), and the “commitment [of UN member states] to act in accordance with Article 2 of the Charter.”  

UNSC 242 also called on Israel to withdraw its armed forces from “territories occupied in the recent conflict.”

It didn’t. Fifty-eight years later, Israel continues to occupy the West Bank, including East Jerusalem (which it annexed in 1980, along with the Syrian Golan Heights, in flagrant violation of the UN Charter), and Gaza.

As for its obligations under Geneva IV — obligations it continues to deny — Israel has violated virtually all of them.

Instructions to Bethlehem Palestinians (David Kattenburg)

And, notwithstanding common Article 1 of all four Geneva Conventions, obligating their “High Contracting Parties” to “respect and to ensure respect” for them “in all circumstances,” Israel has violated its Geneva IV obligations with absolute impunity, a situation Israel-USA, Canada, and Europe’s most powerful states accept, defend and actively support, diplomatically and economically.

At no point have any of Geneva IV’s most powerful and influential High Contracting Parties undertaken to “ensure” Israeli “respect” for the convention.

To the contrary, they have aided and abetted Israeli violations as an occupying power, helping Israel to profit from its occupation (declared unlawful last July, by the International Court of Justice).

They themselves have profited from the technologies Israel has developed, in the course of its century-long dispossession, subjugation and oppression of the Palestinian people, all the while ignoring UN Security Council resolutions calling on Israel to abide by its legal obligations.

Article 25 of the UN Charter obliges member states “to accept and carry out the decisions of the Security Council.”

They do not.

Back in December 2016, for the umpteenth time, the UNSC declared that Israel’s West Bank settlements have “no legal validity,” and constitute “a flagrant violation under international law.” UNSC 2334 called on UN member states “to distinguish, in their relevant dealings, between the territory of the State of Israel and the territories occupied since 1967.” 

In other words, to refrain from treating Israel’s occupation as if it were legal, which, according to the July 19 Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice, it is not.

Protesting in the Netherlands (David Kattenburg)

By refusing to order Israel out of Gaza — fully occupied territory since June 1967 and under genocidal assault for the past nineteen months — this is precisely what the most powerful UN members states are doing.

They are treating Israel as if it were Gaza and the Palestinian West Bank’s lawful sovereign, free to do as it pleases, regardless of what the UN Charter, Geneva IV, the 1948 Genocide Convention, and 1973 Apartheid Convention say.

This is why Israel’s war on Gaza began, and why it will not end, any time in the foreseeable future.

In search of the how’s and why’s of Israel-USA’s savage assault on Gaza, dispatching the tiny concentration camp/ghetto to a hell lower than anything Dante could have imagined, and why the war seems impossible to stop, no clearer bottom line than the debasement of international law in Western halls of power.

For his own thoughts on the non-role of international law in halting the gathering genocide in Gaza, the GPM spoke with Michael Lynk.

Michael Lynk is Emeritus Professor of law at Western University, in London, Ontario, Canada. Between 2016 and 2022, Lynk served as the seventh UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in the territories occupied by Israel since 1967.

Listen to our complete conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

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Watch our complete conversation with Michael Lynk here:

Earth is in trouble.

Alongside the collapse of its climate system, the unraveling of the planet’s living fabric poses a threat the human species may not survive — certainly not human ‘civilization’, such as it is.

Earth’s biosphere is now in the throes of a mass extinction event rivaling anything the planet has experienced since life emerged, 3.8 billion years ago. An estimated million species are believed to be on the brink of extinction.

Most will vanish into oblivion before they’ve even been identified.

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In the Netherlands, a groundbreaking project aims to reverse this trend.

ARISE-Biodiversity is a joint project of the University of Amsterdam, the Westerdijk Fungal Biodiversity Institute, the University of Twente, and the Naturalis Biodiversity Center, in the Dutch city of Leiden. Its aim: to identify all species of multicellular life in the Netherlands, as a basis for protecting them, and as a model for conservationists around the world.

Among ARISE’s techniques and tools: DNA barcoding of air, water, and other environmental samples gathered by researchers and citizen scientists, advanced audio, video, photographic, and radar monitoring, and AI-driven meta analysis of resulting data sets, incomprehensibly huge in size.

This past March hundreds gathered in Leiden for the fourth in a series of ARISE days.

Elaine van Ommen Kloeke is ARISE’s program manager. Listen to her in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Cootes Paradise (David Kattenburg)

Since the dawn of civilization, nothing has fascinated humans more than the dizzying variety of life around them.

Aristotle was among the first natural historians. Pliny’s Naturalis Historia is the Roman Empire’s largest surviving work.

The collection, description and preservation of living things has come a long way since then. Today, biologists use hi-tech tools to collect creatures, and DNA barcoding technology to identify them.

Listen to a story about this in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Kevin Beentjes and his barcode reader at Naturalis Biodiversity Center, Leiden (David Kattenburg)

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It’s a living web beneath our feet – a tangled network of microscopic tubes weaving through the soil, pulsating with nutrients, tying the roots of trees and other plants into vast networks.

Mycorrhizal fungi they’re called. Most plants rely on them entirely.

But, mycorrhizal fungi do more than just feed plants. They cycle carbon from atmosphere to soil, regulating Earth’s climate – and they face a host of threats.

Soil scientists and mycologists have come together to protect fungal networks, and are calling on citizens to help out. Researchers Toby Kiers and Vincent Merckx have devoted their careers to studying these astonishing underground networks. Listen to them in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Special thanks to Bart Braun and the Naturalis Biodiversity Center, in Leiden, the Netherlands, for the audio track of Toby Kiers’ presentation.

Toby Kiers (Credit: David Meulenbeld)

Sex is complex (whether you’re XY or XX). So sang a Manitoba trio called the Welfare Starlets.

This past week, the UK Supreme Court ruled that the distinction between XY and XX isn’t that complex at all.

Under Britain’s 2010 Equality Act, the court declared, in a unanimous, landmark decision, the terms “woman” and “sex” refer exclusively to a biological woman and to biological sex – not to transgender women, even those with so-called Gender Recognition Certificates.

The April 16 ruling delivers “clarity and confidence” to those who run hospitals, sports clubs, women’s refuges, and other spaces reserved exclusively to people with two X chromosomes, the UK government responded (without referring directly to the 23rd pair of chromosomes in the human genome).

Others slammed it as a setback for transgender people.

Alongside gays, lesbians, bisexuals and other non-binary folks, trans women and men are among the most marginalized and threatened members of society today. Nowhere more so than in places like Uganda, Iran, and the United States, where being trans can get you killed.

For thoughts on the UK Supreme Court’s ruling, and the complex, politically fraught connection between women’s rights and transgender rights, the GPM reached out to Robert Wintemute, Canadian Professor of Human Rights Law at King’s College London, specializing in discrimination and sexual orientation law, and human rights conflicts.

Wintemute’s new book, “Transgender Rights vs. Women’s Rights: From Conflicts to Coexistence,” will be published by Polity at the end of May.

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Listen to our conversation with Robert Wintemute in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Watch our complete conversation here:

“The world as we know it is gone.”

So wrote British Prime Minister Keir Starmer a few days ago, in a Sunday Telegraph opinion piece.

Sound frightful? Take a close look.

Sir Keir was contemplating the consequences of Donald Trump’s global on-again, off-again, on-again tariff war, now savaging financial markets from Wall Street to Taipei.

The financial world, in Keir Starmer’s mind. The world of Big Business, powerful corporations, and several thousand fabulously rich men, some of them British; the world of trade balances, exchange rates, and ceaseless, unrelenting economic growth — a fraudulent fiction in our closed planetary system.

Starmer, a lawyer, was not thinking about the unspeakable crimes Israel and the US, his dearest friends, have been allowed, indeed enabled and encouraged to commit in Gaza for the last eighteen months, laying waste to the global community’s most cherished legal canon — the UN Charter, the 1948 Genocide Convention, the four Geneva Conventions of 1949.

Shells cracked open, emptied of all meaning.

Starmer was not bemoaning the UN Security Council’s inability or refusal to take action in the face of the most egregious human rights crimes since the outrages of World War Two — in occupied Palestine, Ukraine, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo — aided, abetted or simply ignored by the world’s most powerful states and state institutions, including his own.

Rotterdam protest (David Kattenburg)

The end of law in today’s permanent global war — war on humanity; war on the planet — is not something Keir Starmer is likely to grieve over in the editorial section of the Sunday Telegraph.

Global commerce, yes. A healthy trade balance for Britain and its wealthiest entrepreneurs, for sure. A bit of trickle-down for ordinary British women and men, you bet.

The fate of the planet and its human inhabitants — not yet.

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For thoughts about Sir Keir, his public hand wringing about the global economy, and related legal matters, the GPM reached out to an old friend, Dimitri Lascaris. 

Dimitri Lascaris is an activist, journalist, polemicist, and a lawyer – now fully independent, after quitting his law firm. We reached Dimitri, in Kalamata, Greece.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Or watch here:

Among the many theories about how planet Earth works, none are more fascinating than the role of complexity – the idea that, as human societies develop, they get increasingly complicated; tied together and dependent on connections and systems that defy comprehension, that endlessly proliferate and are liable to come undone, in self-amplifying cascades.

Thomas Homer-Dixon has devoted his academic career to studying complex systems, and how they break bad. Pernicious and virtuous cascades interest him greatly.

Homer-Dixon is the founder and Executive Director of the Cascade Institute at Royal Roads University in Victoria, British Columbia. Through the complexity lens, Homer-Dixon studies social, economic and ecological instability, and how people and societies can thwart threats and promote virtuous cascades.

He’s written various books: The Upside of Down, Environment, Scarcity and Violence and The Ingenuity Gap, and, his most recent — Commanding Hope; The Power We Have to Renew a World in Peril.

Listen to our conversation in today’ podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Human emission of CO2 and other greenhouse gases has warmed Earth’s surface temperature by about 1.1 degrees, relative to the late 19th century, at a rate of about three tenths of a degree per decade since 1980.

That rate is steadily rising.

As Earth’s surface warms, thermal expansion and melting ice sheets have raised sea levels by two tenths of a meter.

That rate is rising too.

Slow and steady for years to come? Think again.

In a 2023 report, a team of scientists warned about tipping points — inflection points where Earth warming and the destruction of Earth’s living fabric become non-linear and unstoppable, and where Earth systems start shifting to new, potentially dangerous states.

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Twenty-five tipping points were identified. Five major ones may already have been transgressed. More could soon be tripped, the report’s authors warned, triggering a cascade of amplifying feedbacks across Earth’s interlocked climate system and biosphere.

Globalized human economies and societies will inevitably suffer.

As if all this weren’t scary enough, “there is no adequate global governance at the scale of the threats posed by negative tipping points,” the report’s authors warned. Manjana Milkoreit was one of them. Milkoreit is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oslo, and lead author of a chapter of the report about tipping point governance.

Listen to our conversation in today’ podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

The Israeli military has directly targeted the women and girls of Gaza, committing acts that constitute the crime against humanity of murder, and the war crime of wilful killing, a UN human rights report says.

“More than a human can bear: Israel’s systematic use of sexual, reproductive and other forms of gender-based violence since 7 October 2023,” the report is entitled.

Released on March 13 by the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory — chaired by South African jurist Navi Pillay — the report also concludes that sexual and reproductive health care facilities in Gaza, including maternity hospitals and wards, have been systematically targeted.

The Pillay Commission’s most graphic conclusion arises from the December 2023 shelling of Gaza’s largest fertility clinic, reportedly destroying around 4,000 embryos, as well as 1,000 sperm samples and unfertilized eggs.

Prior to Israel’s assault — plausibly genocidal, the International Court of Justice ruled, in January 2024 — the al-Basma in vitro fertilization clinic had been serving thousands of patients, carrying out approximately 70 to 100 in vitro fertilization procedures a month. Its destruction was intended to prevent births among Palestinians in Gaza, a genocidal act under the 1948 Genocide Convention, the Pillay Commission report concludes.

Fifteen months after the clinic’s destruction, Gaza almost entirely in ruins, the death toll considerably higher than the official 50,000 (perhaps three or four times higher), Israel’s war of annihilation may soon resume in full force, with the blessing of the Trump Administration.

Talks aimed at advancing the current ceasefire, that Israel has violated on multiple occasions, drag on. 

The first phase of the ceasefire ended on March 2. Attempts to move to phase 2 — in which all Israeli hostages and hundreds of Palestinian political prisoners would be released, followed by full withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza — have so far failed.

In early March, countering Donald Trump’s plan to empty the besieged ghetto entirely, then turn it into the Riviera of the Middle East, the Arab League put forward a proposal to reconstruct Gaza, with Gazans in place.

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For thoughts on all this, the GPM reached out to Mouin Rabbani.

Rabbani is a researcher, analyst, and commentator specializing in Palestinian affairs, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and contemporary Middle East issues, a non-resident fellow at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs, and co-editor of the journal Jadaliyya.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Watch our complete conversation here:

As Israel shreds the laws of war and fundamental human rights standards in Gaza, on the other side of the planet, its conjoined twin (Israel-USA) is waging war on both domestic human rights and the UN-based international legal order.

“The new US administration must recommit to human rights at home and abroad,” a large group of human rights experts declared in a report issued on February 27.

Among the Trump Administration acts red-flagged by the experts: its threats to reclaim the Panama Canal, annex Greenland, and “own” Gaza (no mention of its insistence on turning Canada into the 51st state); its “extortionate demands on Ukraine for its critical minerals”; its withdrawal from the Paris climate accords, the UN Human Rights Council and World Health Organization, and its sanctions against the International Criminal Court.

The report also expresses concern about the Trump Administration’s firing of US justice officials; its failure to comply with federal court orders; its elimination of diversity, equity and inclusiveness (DEI) programs; its “demonisation of transgender people,” “persecution and forced deportation of migrants,” “threats to journalists, students and freedom of expression,” and “censoring and removal of public information.”

And (as if this hasn’t been going on forever), the “corporate capture of the US government.”

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The GPM reached out to one of the report’s authors, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to development, Surya Deva, Director of the Centre for Environmental Law at Macquarie University, Australia.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Watch our complete conversation here:

It’s every stuffy conservative Canadian politician or Zionist cheerleader’s most disagreeable moment – getting accosted by Yves Engler.

Yves Engler is a prolific political commentator and writer, the author of thirteen books and countless articles about Canadian foreign policy and international affairs, through an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist lens.

He’s also a master of guerilla-style political disruption, with an uncanny ability to find out which Canadian political figures are speaking where, penetrating that crowded room, camera rolling, then berating the politician – politely, in English or French, as the case may be; addressing them as ‘Sir’ or ‘Madam’ — or pursuing his unfortunate target down a hallway or a crowded street, peppering them with questions they rarely answer.

Late last month, Engler spent five days and four nights in Montreal’s notorious Bordeaux prison, charged with “harassing” a pro-Israel ‘influencer’ by the name of Dahlia Kurtz on chainsaw-wielding political arsonist Elon Musk’s X platform (calling Kurtz a “fascist” and “genocide” supporter), and with refusing the police demand that he not talk about the incident.

Engler’s refusal to shut up is what landed him in the hoosegow.

Now released, Yves is talking about the incident, to everyone who will listen, including the GPM.

Yves Engler is a Montreal-based writer and human rights activist.

Among his thirteen published works: Canada’s Long Fight Against Democracy (together with Owen Schalk); Stand on Guard for Whom?: A People’s History of the Canadian Military; House of Mirrors — Justin Trudeau’s Foreign Policy; Left, Right — Marching to the Beat of Imperial Canada, and, A Propaganda System — How Government, Corporations, Media and Academia Sell War and Exploitation.

Listen to our conversation with Yves Engler in today’s podcast, click on the play button above, or go here.

Watch our conversation too.

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Imagine a squadron of US F-35 jets roaring over a football stadium in Calgary or Winnipeg or Toronto, packed with maple leaf-waving fans at Canada’s fall classic, the annual championship game of the Canadian Football League, the Grey Cup.

Or over the funeral of a venerated Canadian politician, who had had the temerity to champion Canadian cultural and economic sovereignty in the face of US imperialism.

In both, not so fanciful instances, Donald Trump’s message would be clear: Don’t boo our national anthem. Give us your oil, gas, and minerals; become our 51st state — or else.

A couple of weekends ago, a handful of Israeli F-35 fighter bombers delivered a message of just this sort, flying low over a stadium in Beirut, Lebanon, packed with mourners at the funeral of Hassan Nasrallah, charismatic Shia leader and Secretary General of the Party of God, Hezbollah, brutally murdered five months earlier in a rain of US bunker buster bombs.

For an eyewitness account of the February 23 funeral of Hassan Nasrallah and Israel’s low-altitude flyovers (more than one), the GPM turned to Dimitri Lascaris. Lascaris is a Canadian lawyer, human rights advocate, and journalist.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Watch our complete conversation here:

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Disciplinary Purgatory

By David Kattenburg

“A university is definitely not a democratic institution.”

So said Columbia University’s Vice Dean of Graduate Faculties, Herbert Deane, back in April 1967, at the height of campus protests against America’s war on Vietnam.

“Student or faculty opinion should not in itself have any influence on the formation of administrative policy,” Deane declared, in an interview with the university’s student newspaper, the Daily Spectator.

“When decisions begin to be made democratically around here,” Deane warned, darkly, “I will not be here any longer.”

Then, Dean Deane’s famous throwaway line:

“Whether students vote ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on a given issue means as much to me as if they were to tell me they like strawberries.”

Sixty years later, Herbert Deane’s infamous ‘Strawberry Statement’ continues to sum up Columbia University’s indifference to and contempt for free speech.

Last spring – amid rising campus protests against Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, university investment in the Zionist war machine, and sweetheart study deals for Israeli soldiers with blood on their hands — the Columbia University administration suspended four protest leaders, banned them from campus, forcibly evicted them from precious, off-campus housing, and cancelled their scholarships.

Now, three of those students have struck back.

In a February 3 filing to the Supreme Court of the State of New York [hereafter referred to as ‘The Complaint’], counsel for Catherine Curran-Groome, Brandon Murphy and Aidan Parisi charged Columbia University with breach of NY State landlord-tenant and human rights statutes, breach of contract, negligence, intentional infliction of emotional distress, negligent infliction of emotional distress, and willful misuse of its student conduct system to discriminate against, harass, endanger, and deny their “Tedeschi Rights.”

“Tedeschi Rights,” set forth in the 1980 NY State Appeals Court ruling Tedeschi v. Wagner College, 1980), stated:

“[A] private university must strictly observe and grant the procedural and substantive rights it promises its students in its manuals and codes; implied obligation of good faith and fair dealing; due process, equal protection, and academic freedom set forth in its Student Manual and Charters and Statutes, as well as the confidentiality of their records, including disciplinary files.”

Columbia University has until February 24 to reply to The Complaint.

At the time of her two-year suspension, in early May 2024, Catherine Curran-Groome was pursuing a Master’s degree in International Affairs at Columbia’s Morningside campus, in Harlem, Manhattan. Her full-scholarship was revoked, and she was evicted from her university-leased off-campus flat.

Suspended for a year, Brandon Murphy and Aidan Parisi were both first-year Master’s of Social Work students.

Due to graduate in May 2025, the academic and personal lives of Curran-Groome, Murphy and Parisi have now been upended.

So has their health.

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Three months prior to their university suspension, in the course of a peaceful, January 2024 demonstration, Curran-Groome and Parisi were allegedly sprayed with a noxious chemical substance by a pair of former Israeli soldiers enrolled in Columbia’s School of General Studies.

The Complaint identifies the two former soldiers as Menachem Mendel Perez and Yuval Hadari.

Mendel Perez and Hadari had reportedly been the subject of prior complaints, for spitting on, physically threatening, and doxxing Arab, Muslim, and pro-Palestinian students.

Following the alleged ‘skunk spray’ assault (which campus security personnel had reportedly witnessed, but done nothing), Curran-Groome came down with a host of symptoms Columbia University’s health clinic associated with “toxic chemical inhalation.” According to The Complaint, the clinic declared itself “shocked that a chemical weapon had been used on students on campus and that they had not been notified in order to prepare the necessary services.”

Unable to get her breathing problems addressed at the campus clinic, Curran-Groome transferred herself to Mt. Sinai Hospital, for nebulizer treatment, returning days later after almost eight hours of “unrelenting vomiting.” In the course of these hospital visits, health workers spotted a heart murmur – something Curran-Groome never knew she had. Most distressingly, persistent bleeding forced her to seek treatment at an off-campus gynecology – bleeding that continued for five months following the skunk spray attack.

For their part, soldiers Mendel Perez and Hadari were suspended, then, following a lawsuit against Columbia brought by Mendel Perez, reinstated in good standing.

Israeli soldier

At the heart of Catherine Curran-Groome, Brandon Murphy and Aidan Parisi’s February 3 complaint against Columbia University at the NY State Supreme Court – the 2021 supplanting of Columbia’s University Judicial Board (UJB) by the Orwellianly-named Center for Student Success and Intervention (“CSSI”).

Empowered to pursue disciplinary action in response to numerous acts of “behavioral” and “academic” misconduct, CSSI procedures eliminated protections offered by the UJB – the right to an attorney, time to prepare a defense, to call witnesses, to a prompt hearing, adequate notice, and to make opening and closing statements.

And, in contrast to the UJB — constituted by and accountable to the Columbia University Senate — CSSI proceedings would be overseen by the office of the President, and by extension, the Board of Trustees, populated by corporate figures beholden to powerful interests, including the pro-Israel lobby.

Subjected to chemical attack in January 2024, Curran-Groome and her comrades’ woes would grow.

On March 24, they held an off-campus “Resistance 101” event, featuring Palestinian activist Khaled Barakat.

Their choice of Barakat as a speaker couldn’t have been more daring.

Outspoken proponent of Palestinian resistance, in all forms, with ‘alleged’ ties to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) — a designated “terrorist” organization in the US, Canada and EU (a connection he wisely denies) — Khaled Barakat is a popular bête-noir among pro-Israeli lobbyists.

The session was publicly advertised, and proceeded without immediate incident.

Nine days later, on April 3, 2024, CSSI slapped Curran-Groome and Parisi with “interim suspensions” for organizing an event “at which non-affiliates were granted access to a campus residence, and which enabled members of the University community to directly communicate with individuals and/or organizations known to advocate for violence,” thereby compromising the “well-being and safety of the University community.”

Curran-Groome and Parisi were also banned from campus, and denied access to campus health clinic and psychological services. Desperate for health care, Curran-Groome’s only source of income, a campus research assistant post, was also cancelled.

But Curran-Groome and her comrades remained obdurate.

Catherine Curran-Groome rallies crowd on Columbia campus

On April 17, 2024, they and other pro-Palestine students set up a Gaza Solidarity tent encampment on Columbia University’s East Lawn, one of two spaces formerly designated “Free Speech Zones.”

That same day, campus protests heating up across the US, Columbia University President Minouche Shafik was hauled before the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce.

For the seemingly hapless Shafik, it was a harrowing encounter.

Committee Chair Virginia Foxx (R-NC) had “watched in horror” as Columbia and other elite campuses “erupted into hotbeds of antisemitism and hate,” Foxx snapped at Shafik.

“Columbia stands guilty of gross negligence at best, and at worst has become a platform for those supporting terrorism and violence against the Jewish people,” Foxx sniffed.

Citing ‘From the River to the Sea,” “Viva, Viva Intifada!” and other outrageous chants, Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.) wanted to know if calls “for the genocide of Jews” violated Columbia University’s code of conduct.

Yes, they do, Shafik and two other Columbia administration staff replied.

What did “by any means necessary,” or “intifada” mean to Shafik, Bonamici asked, smelling blood?

“Incredibly distressing,” Shafik replied – both to her and Columbia’s Jewish students.

Jews Against Genocide (David Kattenburg)

Thoroughly chastened, Minouche Shafik hastened to set things right. The day after her House grilling, overriding a decision by the Columbia Senate, Shafik called in the cops. Curran-Groome and over 100 other protestors were arrested, and their tent encampment torn down. Fifteen students were suspended, and another six placed on disciplinary probation.

“They are getting the message,” Shafik said.

Shafik’s move was swiftly condemned by the Columbia and Barnard chapters of the American Association of University Professors, and by the Columbia Senate.

In an April 26 resolution, the Senate “unreservedly” condemned “external interference in the internal affairs of Columbia University that undermines the traditions of academic freedom and shared governance.”

But Columbia students remained undeterred.

On April 21, they formed a “human chain” (to “forcibly exclude others from the South lawn of Columbia University’s Morningside campus,” pro-Israel forces alleged). Curran-Groome watched from the sidelines, engaging in “textbook de-escalation,” The Complaint states.

Then, outraged by seventh months of genocide in Gaza and feeling their oats, in an action harkening back to 1967 anti-Vietnam protests, on April 29, fifty students stormed Hamilton Hall. “Hind’s Hall,” they renamed it, after 6-year-old Hind Rajab, brutally murdered by Israeli soldiers in January 2024. Hundreds of other students rallied outside.

The following day, Shafik declared Columbia’s Morningside campus a restricted zone, accessible to students and essential employees, and no one else.

The NYPD on quick dial, Shafik also called the cops — again.

On the evening of April 30, armed with batons and flash grenades, drones and a helicopter hovering overhead, police stormed Hind’s Hall.

Read a detailed description of the raid here.

Catherine Curran-Groome

Catherine Curran-Groome was “severely injured” (according to The Complaint). Police escorted her, handcuffed, to the Harlem Hospital for Children and Families, where she was X-rayed, treated for a leg wound and other injuries, issued pain medication, and released, then taken to the local precinct for booking, along with fifty other protesters.

Curran-Groome would be the only student protester not to have her charges immediately dismissed. According to The Complaint, she was “singled out by the DA at the request of [Columbia] University.”

Minouche Shafik thanked the NYPD police for their “incredible professionalism.”

The following day, May 1, 2024, Catherine Curran-Groome, Aidan Parisi, and Brendon Murphy received the word: They were now under investigation for committing “egregious violations” of the “Standards & Discipline guidelines,” and “immediately suspended and banned from Columbia University with the expectation of [permanent expulsion] after an expedited hearing.”

Due process, CSSI-style.

Reaffirming the highest academic principles, that same day, Minouche Shafik issued a public statement:

“This drastic escalation of many months of protest activity pushed the University to the brink, creating a disruptive environment for everyone and raising safety risks to an intolerable level,” Shafik wrote. Continuing:

“Columbia has a long and proud tradition of protest and activism on many important issues such as the Vietnam War, civil rights, and the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. Today’s protesters are also fighting for an important cause, for the rights of Palestinians and against the humanitarian tragedy in Gaza. They have many supporters in our community and have a right to express their views and engage in peaceful protest. But students and outside activists breaking Hamilton Hall doors, mistreating our Public Safety officers and maintenance staff, and damaging property are acts of destruction, not political speech. Many students have also felt uncomfortable and unwelcome because of the disruption and antisemitic comments made by some individuals, especially in the protests that have persistently mobilized outside our gates.”

Once again, President Shafik was roundly condemned by her peers.

“There has been a disregard for the students the University exists to educate, a disregard for the University’s Rules and Statutes, and a continued flaunting of the practices of shared governance, to say the least,” Rules Committee member Candice Kail stated at a May 8, 2024 meeting of the University Senate.

“The administration has not only not course corrected but has doubled down in their bulldozing over any possibility of due process and in their refusal to acknowledge the harm they are doing and have done to this institution and this campus,” Kail said in her statement. “We need the CSSI to be disbanded. And we must remove the NYPD and private security from campus and return our campus to students, faculty, staff, and researchers,”.

On May 8, 2024, by unanimous vote, the Columbia Senate called for a halt to CSSI disciplinary proceedings.

“President Shafik’s violation of the fundamental requirements of academic freedom and shared governance, and her unprecedented assault on students’ rights, warrants unequivocal and emphatic condemnation,” the Columbia chapter of the American Association of University Professors declared.

“President Shafik,” the declaration continued, “violated the fundamental obligations of shared governance when she ignored the opinions of the faculty and students on the Senate Executive Committee who unanimously rejected her request to summon armed New York City police onto our campus.”

Minouche Shafik also missed an opportunity to connect with three highly principled Columbia University students; to speak with them, personally – something she may not have imagined doing.

Instead, on September 10, 2024, Columbia University’s “Rules Administrator” sent notices to Catherine Curran-Groome and Brandon Murphy, informing them that four charges continued to be laid against them from their involvement in the April 17 encampment: “unauthorized access” to the lawn, “refusal to self-identify,” and “failure to disperse.”

“Not responsible,” Curran-Groome and Murphy responded.

Since December 20th, 2024, Curran-Groome, Murphy and Aidan Parisi sit in “disciplinary purgatory,” The Complaint states.

Notwithstanding the case’s transfer to the University Judicial Board (something that happened late last year), CSSI interim suspensions against the three students remain active.

On that day, the UJB informed Curran-Groome and Murphy that disciplinary hearings would be held the following week (right after Christmas). Murphy requested a delay, to consult with counsel in the new year.

The “Rules Clerk” rejected his request.

Curran-Groome told the UJB that she’d already been effectively expelled by the CSSI, and asked the UJB if its involvement in her case meant that the expulsion was now rescinded.

The Rules Clerk did not answer her question.

Curran-Groome’s effective expulsion has not been rescinded. Rescinding it, on protest, would have suggested that Columbia University is a democratic institution – something it wasn’t back in 1967, and certainly isn’t today.

Listen to our conversation with Catherine Curran-Groome in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

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Watch our conversation here:

Dylan’s cryptic, seemingly paradoxical line couldn’t have been clearer, or more straightforward. Criticized for abandoning protest songs and going electric, he would remain true to himself and his art.

In the same way (though in a far more consequential sphere), Israel and the US are now shedding all pretenses about abiding by the law — true to themselves as self-declared ‘exceptional’ states, fully and completely above the law.

Indeed, they flaunt their lawlessness. They’re proud of it.

Israel has been living outside international law for years, certainly since the start of its belligerent occupation of the Palestinian West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza, almost sixty years ago – an occupation now declared unlawful by the world’s supreme judicial tribunal, the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

The scope of Israeli lawlessness is breathtaking.

“Israel has openly defied international law time and again, inflicting maximum suffering on civilians in the occupied Palestinian territory and beyond,” a group of eleven human rights experts declared in a December 30 statement.

To whit:

“[C]rimes against humanity including murder, torture, sexual violence, and repeated forced displacement amounting to forcible transfer, war crimes encompassing indiscriminate attacks on civilians and civilian objects, including objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population and educational institutions and cultural heritage, the use of starvation as a weapon of war, the targeting of healthcare workers and health facilities, attacks on humanitarian workers, arbitrary restrictions on access to humanitarian aid, and  attacks on journalists, collective punishment and perfidy.”

“Israel continues to face no real consequences,” the eleven experts wrote, “largely due to protection offered by its allies, who have gone so far as to join Israel in delegitimising international institutions and besmirching Special Procedures mandate-holders.”

The UN rights experts were being diplomatic in their use of the plural. The “allies” they were talking about is the US.

In truth, Israel and its ally are really a single entity — conjoined twins of sorts. Israel-USA.

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Slavishly loyal to the self-proclaimed ‘Jewish State’, Joe Biden and his Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, were both prepared to countenance what senior US diplomats and State Department experts advised them was unlawful.

Equally ignored by Biden and Blinken — indeed, denied: the ICJ’s January 2024 ruling that Israel’s assault on Gaza was plausibly genocidal.

Less than honest about its contempt for international law, the Biden Administration insisted that Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza really was entirely lawful, as preposterous as that assertion was.

Donald Trump, a convicted felon, an enemy of the American justice system, holds the law in complete contempt, and has no problem acknowledging it.

Most recently — clearly embracing the crimes of ethnic cleansing and genocide — Trump declared that Gaza was a “demolition site” that needs to be “leveled out” and emptied of its inhabitants; that the tiny enclave, already pulverized, should be bulldozed from top to bottom, then opened up for real estate development – no doubt by himself and his friends.

One of those friends, Trump’s Special Middle East Envoy, Stephen Witkoff, also a real estate developer, agrees.

There is “almost nothing left” of Gaza, Witkoff told Axios.

“People are moving north to get back to their homes and see what happened and turn around and leave,” Witkoff said. “There is no water and no electricity. It is stunning just how much damage occurred there.” [sic]

Responding to Trump’s and Witkoff’s proposal, on February 11, another group of UN rights experts (three dozen this time) declared:

“Implementing the US proposal would shatter the most fundamental rules of the international order and the United Nations Charter since 1945, that the US was instrumental in creating to restore peace after the catastrophic Second World War and Holocaust. It would return the world to the dark days of colonial conquest.”

On the heels of Trump’s forthright proposal that Gaza be cleansed of Palestinians, the 78-year-old real estate mogul and reality TV huckster issued an even clearer declaration of his contempt for the rule of law — his February 6 Executive Order sanctioning the International Criminal Court.

“The order is an attack on global rule of law and strikes at the very heart of the international criminal justice system,” yet another group of UN experts declared.

“With this order, the US has empowered war criminals by seeking to punish the ICC, denying justice and reparation to thousands of victims around the world, including women and children”, they said. “This law makes a mockery of the decades-long quest to place law above force and atrocity.”

Gazing on Donald Trump’s words and deeds (and the Israeli policies and practices Trump, Biden and all past US Administrations have supported, to a greater or lesser extent, going back to 1967), some human rights experts think legal ignorance is at play.

“Trump is woefully ignorant of international law and the law of occupation,” Navi Pillay, chair of the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, told POLITICO.

“Forcible displacement of an occupied group is an international crime, and amounts to ethnic cleansing,” Pillay said.

Alternatively, Donald Trump, his uber-rich Bros, and Israeli allies know precisely what they’re doing – governing outside the law, and completely honest about it.

The GPM spoke with one of the authors of the aforementioned UN rights statements, Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967.

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Clinging to the walls of a fertile valley beneath the city of Bethlehem, a half dozen kilometers south of Jerusalem, hemmed in by concrete walls, watchtowers, checkpoints, and a string of mega-colonial settlements, a biologist named Mazin Qumsiyeh, his partner Jessie and their friends are planting native Palestinian seeds, raising chickens, rabbits, fish, and hyenas, and offering up habitat for birds, insects and other wildlife.

Rescuing their beloved landscape from the depredation of Euro-North American settler-colonial land thieves and eco-vandals.

The Palestine Institute for Biodiversity & Sustainability, their oasis is called.

Occasionally, Mazin, Jessie and their friends venture out, traveling up, down and across occupied Palestine, studying its flora and fauna. No ecosystem richer than the Jordan Valley, rich in wetlands where wildlife and unusual plants flourish.

But, those wetlands are under increasing threat from relentless Israeli water exploitation, and apartheid water theft.

And, since October 7, 2023, these travels have become increasingly difficult, if not impossible. More and more Israeli checkpoints block their way, and settler-colonial violence makes the Institute’s natural history work hazardous.

The GPM spoke about native Palestinian biodiversity, and the work of the Palestine Institute, with the Palestine Institute’s co-founder and director, Mazin Qumsiyeh.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Watch our complete conversation here:

It was a dreadful way for a little girl to die – huddled in the back seat of a crushed, bullet-ridden car, stranded at a Gaza City intersection, an Israeli Merkava tank looming meters away; her aunt and uncle dead in the front seat; four cousins dead beside her, seeping blood onto her skirt; sobbing to a Palestinian emergency dispatcher on the other end of a cell phone line, pleading to be rescued, crying that she was scared.

Then, in a torrent of machine gun fire, ripped to bits.

Hind Rajab was brutally murdered by an Israeli tank crew a year and a few days ago today. So were a pair of medics from the Palestinian Red Crescent, who’d come to her rescue – with Israeli military permission.

Little Hind was six years-old.

The murder of Hind Rajab, and the Palestinian emergency workers who came to her rescue, is documented here.

Now, a foundation established in Hind Rajab’s name is seeking justice.

In an October 8 submission to the International Criminal Court, in The Hague, the Brussels-based Hind Rajab Foundation has provided the names of a thousand Israeli soldiers it thinks the world’s top criminal court should prosecute. Among 8000 pieces of accompanying evidence, the soldiers’ own social media posts, boasting about blowing up buildings, destroying neighborhoods, looting wrecked Palestinian homes, and gunning down unarmed civilians.

The Foundation is also seeking the arrest of Israeli soldiers and officers in the countries they routinely travel to. Many of them are US, Canadian, UK, and EU citizens, subject to arrest in countries that exercise universal criminal jurisdiction.

Listen to a conversation with the Foundation’s lead counsel, Haroon Raza. Click on the play button above, or go here.

And listen to this. Under immense pressure from slavishly loyal Israel supporters in the US Congress (future US Ambassador to the UN, Elise Stefanik, in the lead), Columbia University crushed student protesters who had the temerity to name a campus building after the little girl an Israeli tank gunner ripped to bits — with US-supplied tank rounds.

This interview and story were originally published in Mondoweiss.

Watch our complete conversation here:

Each year, fossil fuel burning sends 37 billion metric tons of CO2 into Earth’s atmosphere. A little over a tenth of those emissions – 4 billion tons – are associated with heating air and water in homes and buildings. So, clean ways to generate heat are in … hot demand.

Low power pumps transfer heat from air to water, and air to air.

Then there’s geothermal energy – piping hot water from beneath Earth’s surface, using it to heat buildings.

At the Technical University of Delft, in the Netherlands, two pipes are now being bored two and a half kilometers down. A ‘doublet’, this is called. Seventy-five-degree water filled with natural gas will be pumped up, the gas tapped, and the hot water used to heat campus buildings.

Slightly cooler now — 50 degrees – that water will be sent through a grid to surrounding homes, then pumped back down again.

Total output, once the system is up and running: eight megawatts of thermal energy.

There are about twenty geothermal doublets around the Netherlands today. That could expand to seventy-five by the end of this year, and up to 700 by 2050, at which point the Netherlands aims to be CO2 emissions-free.

The GPM spoke about the Delft Geothermal Project with Hemmo Abels. Abels is a geologist at the Technical University of Delft, in the Netherlands.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Hemmo Abels at TU Delft geothermal site (David Kattenburg)

On the other side of the ocean, in Canada’s largest city, Canada’s largest university is exploring another way to harvest the heat beneath our feet. Geoexchange, it’s called.

From a cavernous room beneath historic King’s College Circle, at the St. George campus of the University of Toronto, surface water is piped through a network of 370 boreholes, 250 meters down into warm limestone rock, then back up again.

In the winter, that subsurface water is used to heat campus buildings. In the summer, heat exchangers send surface heat back into the pipes, dispatching warmed water back down again, turning subsurface rock into a thermal battery, while cooling campus buildings.

But Canada’s largest urban geoexchange facility is more than just a low-emission heating and cooling system. It’s an educational display, and a bit of an art installation – an astounding maze of multi-coloured pipes for students, faculty and campus visitors to marvel at through glass windows, on their way to the campus’ underground parking garage (equipped with electric car chargers).

University of Toronto’s geoexchange facility (David Kattenburg)

It’s also a subterranean classroom — a “mechanical engineering dream” students can study and be inspired by.

The GPM visited the U. of T.’s geoexchange facility, last November, buried beneath King’s College Circle, accompanied by Scott Hendershot, Senior Manager of the Sustainability Office at the University of Toronto, and Catherine Thorn, the U. of T.’s Director of Sustainability and Energy Management.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

REDstack electrodialysis membrane stack (David Kattenburg)

Now, a totally different way to cut greenhouse gas emissions using water – fresh and salty water, to be specific.

Salinity gradient power, it’s called. Wherever fresh river water flows into salty seas, control that flow.

Force fresh and salty water across ion selective membranes, cations one way, anions another. Set up electrodes on either end, you generate electricity.

That’s precisely what’s happening in the Netherlands.

In the middle of the long dike separating North Holland from Friesland – the Afsluitdijk, it’s called — fresh water from the inland Ijselmeer is combined with salt water from the North Sea.

Afsluitdijk

REDstack is the first operating facility of this sort in the world. RED stands for ‘reverse electrodialysis’. Now paused, REDstack’s pilot plant has the capacity to produce one kilowatt of electricity.

Not much. But, scaling up will be easy. Having proved it works, under all conditions, the next step will be to build larger membrane stacks. A two megawatt demonstration facility could be up and running in a couple of years. The GPM spoke about salinity gradient power with REDStack co-founder and co-chair Pieter Hack.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

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The first phase of a ceasefire is now underway in war-ravaged Gaza.

The tiny enclave’s woe begotten people, now free to return home under the terms of the US/Qatari/Egyptian-brokered deal, are overjoyed.

That joy is tempered by the enormous death toll they’ve suffered, and the horrific devastation before their eyes.

Numbers speak volumes.

When Israel’s assault began, following Hamas’s October 7, 2023 breakout from what informed commentators refer to as a ghetto, an open-air prison, and a concentration camp — under comprehensive Israeli siege for seventeen years — Gaza’s population stood at 2.3 million.

That number is now smaller. The official death toll stands at 47,000, including 13,000 children, but an estimated 12,000 lie, unidentified and rotting, beneath the rubble left behind by US (and German) bombs and missiles.

Over a thousand were health care workers.

An estimated 1400 Gazan extended families have been wiped out entirely, some numbering in the hundreds.

Horrific as they are, these numbers low-ball the casualties in a war the world’s top court ruled plausibly genocidal.

A recent study published in the medical journal The Lancet estimates that, between October 7, 2023 and June 30, 2024, over 64,000 died from traumatic injuries inflicted by US bombs and missiles.

Another Lancet study, published last summer, pegged deaths from both direct and indirect causes (war-related hunger and illness), at 186,000.

Meanwhile, an estimated 110,000 Gazans have been injured, and 1.9 million displaced — 90% of Gaza’s population.

Where Gaza’s internally displaced people will go, with the first phase of a ceasefire now apparently underway, is anyone’s guess.

Over 400,000 homes have been damaged or destroyed in Israel’s US-armed war of annihilation — 92% of Gaza’s pre-war housing stock.

‘Domicide’, experts call it.

The GPM spoke about all this with Paula Gaviria Betancur, Special UN Rapporteur on the human rights of internally displaced persons. Late last year, Betancur and ten other independent human rights experts published a statement entitled “Israel’s assault on the foundations of international law must have consequences.”

Listen to our conversation with UN Special Rapporteur Paula Gaviria Betancur in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Watch our complete conversation here:

With a ceasefire now underway in Gaza, after 15 months of unimaginable bloodshed and destruction, here are a few more figures in the Gaza numbers game:

Since the start of the war, last October, thirteen resolutions aimed at ending or pausing the bloodshed have come before the UN body responsible for ensuring international peace and security – the Security Council. Of these, four passed, three of them because the US abstained.

US Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield and her deputies — self-professed devotees of peace, human rights, and the rule of law — voted in favour of three watered-down resolutions (one of which ended up passing), and either voted against or vetoed seven.

They did so, having listened closely to testimony of the most gut-wrenching sort.

In this genre, on the eve of the Gaza ceasefire, a January 3 presentation to the UN Security Council by a pediatric intensive care physician named Tanya Haj-Hassan, with extensive experience tending to Gaza’s injured.

Last July, Haj-Hassan and several dozen other physicians wrote to Joe Biden, sharing their experiences tending to Gaza’s wounded and maimed, and calling for an end to the genocide. The Biden Administration ignored their pleas.

A month later, having been denied a speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention, in Chicago, a group of physicians and human rights experts held their own panel on the margins of the Convention. Tanya Haj-Hassan was among them.

Listen to Tanya Haj-Hassan’s January 3 presentation to the UN Security Council. Click on the play button above, or go here.

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The issuance of arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former War Minister, Yoav Gallant, last November 21, descended like a lightning bolt on the two men, neither of whom figured they’d ever face justice for crimes they vehemently deny.

Equally shaken up – some ready and willing to fulfill their duty to the world’s top criminal court; others reportedly hedging their bets – were the 125 State Parties to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), now tasked with executing arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant, should either of them land in their territories.

Among the crimes Netanyahu and Gallant have been charged with, in warrants classified as secret: “the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare, and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts,” all “part of a widespread and systematic attack against the civilian population of Gaza.”

Early last December, at the World Forum Convention Center, in The Hague, states parties gathered for the 23rd Session of the ICC’s Assembly of State Parties (ASP), the representative body that governs the implementation of the ICC’s founding treaty, the 2002 Rome Statute.

The GPM sat down with Vusi Madonsela, South Africa’s Ambassador to the Netherlands, and delegate to the ICC’s Assembly of State Parties.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan addresses 23rd session of Rome Statute’s Assembly of State Parties (David Kattenburg)

Israel’s assault on Gaza, now into its 15th month, shows no sign of ending. Widely described as genocidal, Israel’s campaign has been condemned as such by numerous human rights and international legal authorities — none more authoritative than the International Court of Justice.

Last month, yet another UN body weighed in — the UN Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. CERD was formed under the aegis of the 1966 International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), one of nine human rights treaties under the UN system.

Among the crimes prohibited under ICERD — apartheid, seven years prior to the 1976 Apartheid Convention.

To date, 182 UN member states have ratified ICERD.

The CERD Committee is made up of 18 members, independent human rights experts drawn from around the world.

ICERD is unique among UN rights treaties. It’s the only one that allows one state to lodge complaints against another — “Inter-State Communications,” is the anodyne term for these — and for these complaints to be ‘conciliated’ by an ad hoc, arms-length conciliation committee. Back in 2019, Palestine lodged one of these against Israel, accusing it of apartheid.

It took years for the CERD committee to deal with Palestine’s Inter-State Communication. Having challenged CERD’s jurisdiction over Palestine’s complaint, and its admissibility (challenges Israel lost), Israel refused to participate in the conciliation process.

Earlier this year, CERD’s conciliation committee released its conclusions. Notwithstanding the mountain of evidence presented to it by Palestine, the conciliation committee did not arrive at an explicit finding of apartheid.

Another unusual mechanisms at CERD’s disposal: “Early Warning and Urgent Action” statements.

This past December 13, CERD issued one of these, in response to the ongoing situation in Gaza, the occupied West Bank and Lebanon.

The Committee declared itself “appalled” by the brutal indiscriminate attacks on innocent women, children, and men, mainly in Gaza, the killing of more than 44,500 Palestinians, the injuries of more than 105,000; the near total and deliberate destruction of the homes, hospitals and schools; the displacement of about 1.9 million Gazans; the unprecedented levels of starvation in Gaza; the killing of at least 343 aid workers, including 253 UN staff, 1,047 health workers, and 183 journalists, raising “serious concerns regarding the obligations of Israel and other State parties to prevent war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.”

For thoughts on CERD’s conciliation of Palestine’s complaint, and its Early Warning and Urgent Action statement, the GPM reached out to Irish legal scholar and ICERD expert David Keane . Keane is an Assistant Professor in Law at Dublin City University, Ireland. He has published a number of works on the International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), the CERD Committee and its various unusual mechanisms.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast, or go here … Or watch the accompanying video.

And link to David’s writings here.

The GPM reached out to CERD for its comments on all of the above. An interview request was declined.

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Some are cheering. It may be premature.

On December 8, after almost 25 years of rule, and against all odds, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad was deposed by a small army of Islamist rebels. Assad, a reportedly soft-spoken ophthalmologist, has taken refuge in Moscow.

Assad’s ouster brings to an end 54 years of dynastic, authoritarian, and exceptionally brutal rule. Bashar’s father, Hafez al-Assad, seized power in 1971. Memories of his crackdown on grassroots opponents affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood movement, back in February 1982, still linger on. As many as forty thousand people were massacred by Assad’s military in the central Syrian town of Hama.

Bashar-the-son may have been more easy-going than dad, but Syrians are reportedly very happy to see him go.

As Assad’s tyranny fades (and the bodies of his opponents start to be dug up, reportedly in large numbers), far more powerful, arguably more brutal actors move in like wolves. The Turks, Russians, Saudis, French, British and, of course, the US and its conjoined twin, Israel, are now turning Assad’s downfall to maximum advantage.

Israel-USA and the Turks have been violating Syrian territory and airspace for years. In the wake of Assad’s ouster, Israel has launched airstrikes up and down Syria, all the while expanding its unlawful seizure of Syrian Golan Heights land and announcing an expansion of Jewish-only colonies, in flagrant breach of international law.

The nation with the most at stake as Syria’s ‘liberation’ is undermined — Israeli-colonized Palestine — has no leaders to stand up for its interests. All but annihilated in Gaza, and wherever else its leaders now shelter themselves, the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas — no friend of Bashir al-Assad — has applauded the dictator’s downfall.

The ultimate outcome of Bashar al-Assad’s downfall is anyone’s guess. Everyone’s got an informed hunch. One of them is Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs.

Sachs is an economist and public policy analyst, and the Director of Columbia’s Center for Sustainable Development. He’s the author of numerous books and articles about COVID, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Israel’s war on the Palestinian people, and the unconscionable and incompetent state of US public policy.

Read here and here and here.

Jeffrey Sachs’ most recent writing focuses on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s grand strategy to depose regimes across the Middle East, North Africa and wider Southwest Asia — a strategy well received in the halls of neoliberal, permanently war-fighting power, over in Washington.

The GPM reached Jeffrey Sachs in NYC. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Watch or complete conversation here:

In the wake of Bashar al-Assad’s ouster, and the decimation of Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, Benjamin Netanyahu sets his sights on the last and biggest enemy state on this hit-list Jeffrey Sachs and others speak about – Iran.

Pressured by Netanyahu and deep-pocketed Zionists in Washington, the incoming Trump administration may well green-light a full scale assault on the Islamic Republic, perhaps even with nuclear weapons.

Israel, of course, is the only nuclear-armed state in the region.

A small player, by global standards. There are over 12,000 nuclear warheads on the planet, poised to be fired off at a moment’s notice, most of them in the possession of the Americans and the Russians. Once upon a time, back in the eighties, this was a subject of intense public and media debate. It isn’t anymore.

The global nuclear arsenal is a matter of huge concern for Ivana Nikolic Hughes.

Hughes is the Director of Frontiers of Science and Senior Lecturer in Discipline in the Department of Chemistry at Columbia University, in NYC. She’s also the President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, and has carried out research on the long-term radiological contamination of the Marshall Islands, in the central Pacific, where the US carried out 67 atomic and H-bomb tests between 1946 and 1958.

The GPM sat down with Ivana Nikolic Hughes in her office at Columbia University – a challenging campus to get into if you’re not a student or faculty member, in the wake of protests against Israeli genocide in Gaza. Our conversation went on for about an hour and a half. The first part will be posted in an upcoming GPM podcast.

Here’s the last half hour of our conversation with Ivana Nikolic Hughes, focusing on the long proposed but likely never-to-be-achieved Middle East Nuclear Free Zone, the Frontiers in Science program that Dr. Hughes teaches, the state of science awareness among her students, and the future of science-based policy under a Trump administration.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

The issuance of arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former War Minister, Yoav Gallant, on November 21, descended like a lightning bolt on the two men, neither of whom figured they’d ever face justice for crimes they vehemently deny.

Equally shaken up – some ready and willing to fulfill their duty to the world’s top criminal court; others hedging their bets – were the 125 State Parties to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), soon to be tasked with executing warrants against the two Israeli leaders, and other criminal targets surely in ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan’s sights, once warrants have been certified and communicated to ICC member states by the Court Registry.

This past week, at the sprawling World Forum Convention Center, in The Hague, delegates of those countries gathered for the 23rd Session of the ICC’s Assembly of State Parties (ASP), the representative body that governs and supervises the implementation of the ICC’s founding treaty, the 2002 Rome Statute, ultimately ensuring that the perpetrators of the most serious international crimes are arrested, tried and jailed.

Among the crimes Netanyahu and Gallant have been charged with, in warrants classified ‘secret’: “the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare, and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts,” all “part of a widespread and systematic attack against the civilian population of Gaza.”

Suggesting the crime of genocide – without specifying this crime of international crimes — ICC Pre-Trial Chamber judges cited “reasonable grounds to believe [Netanyahu and Gallant] intentionally and knowingly deprived the civilian population in Gaza of objects indispensable to their survival.”

On the sidelines of last week’s ASP, dozens of side panels featured presentations by international legal scholars, human rights advocates and citizen observers with stories to tell. One of those sessions focused on the destruction of Gaza’s health care system, relentlessly pounded into finer and finer grades of rubble by US bombs and missiles dropped by Israeli jet fighters.

One of the panelists in that session was a physician named Junaid Sultan, a Hull, UK-based cardiovascular surgeon.

Listen to Junaid Sultan’s presentation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Dr. Junaid Sultan

The core of last week’s 23rd session of the Assembly of State Parties to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, in the Dutch administrative capital, The Hague, consisted of brief presentations by State Party delegates. The only one to speak about Israel’s war on Gaza was the Minister of Justice for the southwest African nation of Namibia — Yvonne Dausab.

Listen to Yvonne Dausab’s presentation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Raji Sourani

At another, standing room-only panel session, Palestinian human rights activist Raji Sourani pounded his fist on the table, calling on the international community to hold Israel accountable for its brutal crimes against the Palestinian people. Sourani is the Director of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights.

Listen to Raji Sourani’s presentation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Eighty years after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the real reasons for America’s hideous assault have been unearthed by a small army of scholars. Among these – a guy named Glenn Alcalay, Associate Professor of Anthropology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, at City University of New York.

Back in the mid-1970s, Glenn Alcalay spent two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Marshall Islands, just north of the equator, in the Central Pacific, site of 67 nuclear tests between 1946 and 1958.

The biggest of those nuke tests was Bravo, the Pentagon’s first deliverable hydrogen bomb, detonated at Bikini Atoll, in the central Marshalls, on March 1, 1954.

Glenn Alcalay’s Marshall Islands sojourn was spent on Utirik, a small atoll downwind from Bikini. Inspired by that experience, Alcalay began researching the impacts of US weapons testing on the Marshallese people — and the true history of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The stuff you won’t learn about from the blockbuster film, Oppenheimer.

Fifty years after his Peace Corps stint in Utirik, Glenn Alcalay is in the midst of writing a book about the Marshallese people. The GPM sat down with Glenn in his home office, in uptown Manhattan, to talk about all this — and Donald Trump’s arguably unsurprising election back in early November.

Listen to our conversation in today’s GPM podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Bikini Island, on Bikini Atoll (David Kattenburg)

Of all the staunchly pro-Israel Western powers who mouth support for a ‘two-state’ solution to Israel’s ‘conflict’ with the Palestinian people, no one puts its money where its mouth isn’t more than Canada.

Ottawa’s formal position appears straightforward, even just-minded.

Canada “recognizes the Palestinian right to self-determination,” Foreign Affairs Canada declares at its website, and is “committed to the goal of a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East, including the creation of a Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security with Israel.”

Canada doesn’t recognize “permanent Israeli control” over the Palestinian territories, territories Israel has occupied for the past 57 years, colonizing them with its own citizens, and effectively annexing them.

Israel is indeed an occupying power, Canada has consistently maintained since 1967, therefore subject to the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Israel insists the Palestinian territories are “disputed,” not occupied, and that Geneva IV doesn’t apply to its presence there, but its steadfast ally, Canada, begs to differ.

Geneva IV has been embedded in Canadian domestic legislation, as the Geneva Conventions Act, so Canada is strictly bound to abide by it, beginning with common Article 1 of all four of the 1949 Geneva Conventions.

“The High Contracting Parties [e.g. Canada] undertake to respect and to ensure respect for the present Convention in all circumstances.”

As for those 300-plus Jewish-only settlements and outposts up and down the West Bank and encircling Jerusalem, now home to 750,000 Israeli Jews (“Les colonies,” Canada calls them at its French-language website), these are illegal under Geneva IV, Canada maintains, and “constitute a serious obstacle to achieving a comprehensive, just and lasting peace.”

To be precise, Israel’s colonies breach Article 49(6) of Geneva IV — a “grave breach” under Geneva’s 1977 Protocol Additional, and a war crime under Article 8(2)(b)(viii) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

Palestinian youth detained at a Hebron checkpoint.

Lest there be any doubt about its commitment to the rules-based international order, Canada’s official position is that Israel “must fully respect international human rights and humanitarian law” — the sina qua non for creating a “climate conducive to achieving a just, lasting and comprehensive peace settlement.”

Thus goes Trudeau government lip service to a just, durable peace in occupied Palestine/Israel.

In the first two months of Israel’s plausibly genocidal war on Gaza, however, Ottawa green-lit $28.5 million worth of military exports to Israel. Among these, bombs, torpedoes, rockets, missiles, other explosive devices, and a variety of unmanned aerial vehicles and aviation hardware.

With the death toll rising, in mid-September, Canada suspended 30 active permits for weapon transfers to Israel, and declared its opposition to the transfer of 50,000 “highly explosive” mortars from Quebec to Israel, via the US.

Still, notwithstanding the July 19 Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice that Israel’s occupation and associated settlement enterprise are unlawful, and that UN member states must refrain from extending aid and assistance, the Canadian government continues to allow settlement products to be sold in Canada, tariff-free under the Canada-Israel Free Trade Agreement — labeled ‘Product of Israel,’ no less.

And, the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) grants charitable status to a host of Canadian organizations that funnel funds to Israeli settlement groups and ‘lone soldiers’ of the Israeli Occupation Forces, some of them Canadian.

Palestine advocates Ahed Tamimi & Miko Peled confront Israeli cop in Nabi Saleh (David Kattenburg)

In 2022, over 200 registered Canadian charities funneled $362 million to Israeli organizations linked to the Israeli army and air force, Israeli government agencies, Jewish supremacist groups, and West Bank colonies, in breach of CRA statutes.

Now, a group of Canadian organizations are calling on the CRA to cut these groups off.

They have reason to be optimistic about their prospects. On August 8, Canada’s most venerable Zionist charity and benefactor of the Jewish colonization project, the Jewish National Fund of Canada, had its status revoked.

JNF appealed the decision, seeking judicial review at the Federal Court of Canada, and requesting the court to expunge the publication of the revocation in the Canada Gazette.

The court hasn’t the jurisdiction to do so, Federal Court of Canada Justice Whyte Nowak ruled on November 8, dismissing the request. The Court will now proceed to consider the remainder of JNF’s judicial review application.

Meanwhile, in a report released this past Friday, Just Peace Advocates and Independent Jewish Voices Canada document millions of dollars in charitable donations funneled by ostensibly charitable Canadian groups to a handful of other Israeli organizations engaged in colonizing the West Bank, and soldier-settler violence against Palestinians. Just Peace Advocates and IJV are calling on the Canadian government to suspend the charitable status of these organizations, and to carry out audits and criminal investigations of their activities.

Among these groups — Mizrachi Organization of Canada, Jewish Heritage Foundation of Canada, and the Heseg Foundation.

“Under the Guise of Charity: Canadian Funding for War Crimes in Occupied Palestine” was publicly released at a press conference in Toronto on November 8. Listen to the proceedings in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

In order of appearance: Alice Klein, member of Independent Jewish Voices Canada; Anver Emon, Professor of Law and History at University of Toronto; Khaled Mouammar, founder of the Canadian Arab Federation, and, the report’s co-author, Miles Howe, Assistant Professor of Critical Criminology at Brock University.

The press conference also featured a presentation by Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Since the release of her most recent report to the UN Human Rights Council, “Genocide as Colonial Erasure,” Albanese has been the target of attacks by Israel and its surrogates across Europe and North America.

Listen to Friday’s press conference in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Wanna destroy a people in whole or in part? In other words, commit genocide – as genocide is defined under international law?

You don’t need gas chambers, firing squads, and deep ditches.

Just destroy their schools and universities. Bomb their libraries, archives and cultural institutions; seize their historical records. Make it as hard as possible to go to their kids to go to school.

According to a late August report by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, more than 10,600 children and 400 teachers had been killed in Israeli military operations by August 2024, and more than 15,300 students and 2,400 teachers injured.

“With more than 80% of schools in Gaza damaged or destroyed,” a group of UN experts declared in April, “it may be reasonable to ask if there is an intentional effort to comprehensively destroy the Palestinian education system, an action known as ‘scholasticide’,” the experts wrote.

The GPM spoke with the statement’s lead author.

First, listen to this: two attorneys for the government of South Africa, in January, arguing South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, in The Hague. Tembeka Ngcukaitobi is a South African lawyer and legal scholar, and a member of South Africa’s Judicial Services Commission. Blinne Ni Grahleigh is an Irish human rights and international law expert at Matrix Chambers, in London.

Listen to Ngcukaitobi and Ni Grahleigh in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Little kids go to school in Hebron, occupied Palestine (David Kattenburg)

Numbers speak louder than words.

Since Israel’s assault on Gaza began, back on October 7, at least two thirds of the besieged enclave’s educational facilities have been damaged or destroyed. Israa University, the last remaining higher educational institution in Gaza, was demolished on January 17.

Today, over 600 thousand Gazan students have no access to education.

Or books. Thirteen Gaza public libraries are now in ruins. Some 200 heritage sites, 227 mosques and three churches have also been damaged or destroyed. Among these, Gaza 7th century Omari Mosque, a center of Islamic faith and learning, demolished in an Israeli airstrike back in December. A Hamas stronghold, the Israeli military said.

Gaza’s Central Archives, repository of 150 years of Palestinian history, is reportedly in ruins.

Over the past year, Israeli military forces have killed at least 5500 students, 260 teachers and 95 university professors. The GPM reached out to Farida Shaheed, UN Special Rapporteur on the right to education.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Palestinian astrophysicist Imad Barghouthi – jailed by Israel on multiple occasions

Getting an elementary, secondary or university education in Palestine these days is one thing. Doing top-drawer scientific research is another. That’s what Yousef Najajreh has been doing for quite a number of years, under Israel military occupation and apartheid. Najajreh is a molecular pharmacologist in the faculties of Bethlehem and Al-Quds Universities, in occupied Palestine.

I’ve spoken and hung out with Yousef on a host of occasions, most recently this past May. Here’s a conversation of ours from back in 2022 – in the midst of Covid – in the wake of Israeli government legislation clamping down on visits by foreign academics to Palestinian campuses.

From Yousef, we’ll segue to Palestine’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Riyad Mansour, speaking to the International Court of Justice back in February, on the opening day of hearings on the legal consequences of Israel’s ‘prolonged’ occupation of Palestine.

Listen to all this in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Yousef Najajreh in his lab, Al-Quds University (David Kattenburg)

Over a year has passed since October 7, 2023 — the Palestinian/Israeli equivalent of 9-11.

In the course of its vengeful response to the invasion of southern Israel by Gaza-based Palestinian resistance fighters, itself precipitated by 17 years of brutal Israeli siege, Israel occupation forces have killed at least 42,000 Gazans, 16,000 of them children.

Palestinian casualties, direct and indirect, are surely higher. Some conflict epidemiologists peg the number at 180,000 — ripped to bits by US bombs, missiles, tank rounds and sniper bullets dropped and fired by Israel occupation forces, or snuffed out by forced starvation and thirst.

Meanwhile, in Lebanon, since October 8, Israeli-delivered American bombs and missiles have killed 2300 Lebanese, three quarters of those in the last month alone. Over a million Lebanese people are now internal refugees (two million in Gaza).

Recently returned from his latest trip to Lebanon, Canadian lawyer, activist and journalist Dimitri Lascaris speaks with the GPM about all this. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Watch our conversation here:

Bacteria are Earth’s most ancient creatures.

And there are lots of them, with a total mass a thousand times more than all humans.

Microbes — both prokaryotic and eukaryotic — make planet Earth go round. Some of them are dangerous pathogens. Most of them aren’t. Indeed, some bacteria are great kitchen companions.

Anna Sigrithur has been harnessing microbial magic, fermenting food and drinks for years. She’s also a writer and artist, focusing on food cultures, food preservation, fermentation, microbiology, sensory perception and human/non-human relationships.

Listen to our conversation in today’s GPM podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Ferments in process

Since the dawn of civilization, nothing has fascinated humans more than the diversity of life around them. Aristotle was among the first natural historians. Naturalis Historia, by Pliny, is the Roman Empire’s largest surviving work. The collection, description and preservation of living things has come a long way since then. Today, biologists use fancy tools to collect creatures, and DNA barcoding technology to identify them.

Here’s a story about DNA barcoding. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Dutch barcoder Kevin Beentjes and his barcode reader (David Kattenburg)

Earth’ surface is a little over one degree warmer today, on average, than it was at the start of the industrial revolution 200 years ago.

That doesn’t seem like much. Under the Paris Agreement, governments agreed to limit temperature rise to two degrees. At present emission rates, that target will likely be exceeded.

In a landmark report published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Scientists, back in 2018, researchers warned that a two degree rise in global surface temperature may actually exceed a critical planetary threshold, pushing Earth down a cascade of tipping points into “hothouse” mode, unlike anything this third rock from the sun has experienced since the mid-Miocene epoch, fifteen million years ago.

The GPM spoke about the report with its lead author, Will Steffen. A native of Norfolk, Nebraska, Steffen emigrated to Australia in the 1970s, where he took up a position at the Australian National University in Canberra. He served as the Executive Director of the International Geosphere–Biosphere Programme, a ground-breaking initiative aimed at studying the chemical, physical and biological processes governing Earth as system. His name came to be associated with a host of ideas about our planet, and humanity’s fate. Steffen’s Great Acceleration curves helped corroborate the idea, first proposed by Dutch chemist Paul Crützen, that Earth has entered a new Epoch, the Anthropocene.

Will Steffen passed away in January 2023.

Listen to our conversation in today’s GPM podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

This past September 11 – an indelibly dreadful date — thirty-four Palestinians were killed in a pair of Israeli airstrikes on a school in the Nuseirat refugee camp, in central Gaza.

Twelve-thousand were sheltering there at the time, most of them women and children. Among the casualties, six aid workers with the UN Relief & Works Agency, UNRWA.

Founded in 1949, UNRWA provides humanitarian aid, protection and social services to millions of Palestinian refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, and is mandated to do so until a “just and durable solution” to the plight of the Palestinian people is found.

In theory, that solution would involve fulfillment of the UN-mandated right of the Palestinian people to return to their homes inside present-day Israel, or be compensated for their losses.

Not surprisingly, Israel has had a hate-on for UNRWA since its inception.

Indeed, the Swedish diplomat responsible for the agency’s formation, Count Folke Bernadotte, was gunned down by Zionist militants shortly after his plan for Palestinian refugees driven from their homes in the course of Israel’s founding was tabled at the United Nations.

Bernadotte’s vision and plan lived on. So has Israel’s hatred for the agency he helped create.

Seventy-five years after Bernadotte’s brutal assassination, in the course of its seemingly genocidal war on Gaza, Israel has killed at least 220 UNRWA staff with US bombs and missiles.

For thoughts on Israel’s September 11 attack on the Nuseirat school, the GPM reached out to former UNRWA spokesperson Chris Gunness, now the Executive Director of the Myanmar Accountability Project.

Listen to our conversation in today’s GPM podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Count Folke Bernadotte

According to Wikipedia, Zionism is “an ethno-cultural nationalist movement that emerged in Europe in the late 19th century and aimed for the establishment of a Jewish state through the colonization of a land outside Europe … a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible. Following the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Zionism became Israel’s national or state ideology.”

In 1975, the UN General Assembly declared Zionism to be “a form of racism and racial discrimination.” In 1991, that resolution was revoked.

Anti-Zionism is a form of antisemitism, Israel’s allies and advocates insist.

Tell that to US-based Jewish Voice for Peace, “the largest progressive Jewish anti-Zionist organization in the world.”

North of the border, Independent Jewish Voices Canada has just declared itself to be anti-Zionist. For thoughts on that stance, the GPM reached out to IJV founding member Sid Shniad.

Listen to our conversation in today’s GPM podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

It’s a staggering statistic. Covid killed almost seven million worldwide. The number is likely higher.

Meanwhile, a potentially deadlier pandemic sweeps the planet — Bacterial infections antibiotics can’t cure.

According to one UK government study, by 2050, ten million may die annually, infected by multi or pan-resistant microbes no drug will kill.

Drug resistance is the ineluctable result of antibiotic overuse or misuse – to treat viral infections, for example. What doesn’t kill infectious bacteria makes them stronger. So, science searches for new ones.

The trouble is, Big Pharma isn’t interested. There’s no profit to be made developing drugs that will end up on the top shelf, reserved for emergencies, when no other drug will work. Big Pharma wants to produce drugs that billions will use, all the time – precisely how antibiotics can’t be used, or else they’d become useless!

So, academic researchers are picking up the slack.

At McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario a team of scientists are screening thousands of hopeful candidates, totally new kinds of antibiotics, that bugs have never seen, and are unlikely to become resistant to.

And, for hot tips on what will work and what won’t, they’re turning to artificial intelligence, neural networks and machine learning.

Jon Stokes is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Biomedical Sciences at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus

Since ancient times, nothing has fascinated human beings more than the diversity of life around them. Aristotle was among the first natural historians. Naturalis historia, by Pliny, is the Roman Empire’s largest surviving work.

The identification and description of living things has come a long way since ancient Greece and Rome. Today, biologists use DNA barcodes to identify living creatures.

a DNA barcode is a small fragment of DNA that’s characteristic for a species. A half-dozen standardized barcodes exist for different groups of organisms. COX1 is used to identify animals. Botanists use a chloroplast gene. The ‘Internal Transcribed Spacer’, or ITS barcode, is used to identify fungi. Bacteria have their own barcodes too.

Within any broad group, that standard barcode varies from species to species. A digital device reads it, just like a supermarket scanner reads the barcode on a can of soup or a roll of toilet paper. Predictably, DNA barcode readers are getting small.

Here’s a story about that. Listen to it in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Dutch biologist Kevin Beentjes and his barcode reader (David Kattenburg)

Men are from Mars, women from Venus, John Gray famously wrote, back in the nineties.

Science says it’s true – sort of: male and female brains are wired differently.

Sandra Witelson is a veteran brain researcher, with a collection of over a hundred brains she’s been gathering for years. Albert Einstein’s was the first. The differences between male and female grey matter – especially in the language and speech regions – interest Witelson greatly.

Witelson’s studies revolve around brain lateralization – anatomical and functional differences between people’s right and left cerebral hemispheres just above the ears. And, how male brains get sexualized. At the tender age of five weeks, male embryos get doused in testosterone, changing them and their brains forever.

Sandra Witelson is Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry & Behavioural Neurosciences at McMaster University. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Sandra Witelson (David Kattenburg)

Humanity has never faced a more monumental challenge. After two centuries of burning fossil carbon, trashing the atmosphere, pushing Earth systems to the edge of collapse, industrial societies need to develop other sources of energy that are renewable and clean.

The prospects are frightening, but climate angst has an antidote.

Wind and solar, for sure.

There’s another vast storehouse of energy on half the world’s doorstep — Earth’s oceans.

Covering three quarters of the planet’s surface, they store colossal volumes of heat, that can be tapped.

So can the kinetic energy from ocean waves and tides.

This past spring, in the Dutch capital of Den Haag, several hundred entrepreneurs and engineers came together to showcase innovative devices for doing just that, at the annual gathering of Ocean Energy Europe.

Listen to some voices the GPM gathered. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Alejandro Marques de Magallanes Crespo, founder of Magallanes Renovables

Talking about the energy of ocean tides — rising and falling like clockwork, under the influence of the moon — no better place to tap this colossal energy resource than the Shetland Islands, on the northern tip of Scotland, and in the Bay of Fundy, between Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, in eastern Canada, home to the highest tides in the world.

That’s what a company called Nova Innovation is doing. Simon Forrest is founder and CEO. In a quiet spot on the margins of last spring’s Ocean Energy Europe conference, in The Hague, the GPM sat down for a chat with Simon.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Petit Passage, on the Bay of Fundy, where a Nova turbine will soon generate tidal energy

Conferences are fun. Lots of interesting people to meet and sessions to attend.

Better still, heading out into the field. Especially if it’s North Holland. That’s where the GPM went, last spring, on a bus trip organized by the Dutch Energy From Water Association, together with forty ocean energy innovators from around the world.

Our first stop: Den Helder, at the manufacturing facility of Symphony Wave Power, to see their wave energy demonstrator. Fred Gardner is Symphony’s founder.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Rik Siebers, Director of REDstack, showing small-scale model of reverse electrodialysis

Of all the forms of energy readily available to coastal communities around the world, none is more intriguing than salt.

To be more precise, salt gradients. Wherever fresh river water flows into salty ocean, that freshwater gets infused with sodium, calcium, chloride and sulfate ions, and salt gradients form. Make this happen across a plastic membrane, under controlled conditions, you generate electricity.

Reverse electrodialysis, it’s called. No better place to see this in action – indeed, the only place – than the Afsluitdijk. Check it out on a map. It’s that long highway, built on a dike between the Dutch provinces of North Holland and Friesland, separating the freshwater Ijsselmeer from the salty Waddenzee.

Afsluitdijk

Right in the middle of the Afsluitdijk, a company called REDstack is bringing fresh and saltwater together, and putting electricity into the Dutch grid. RED stands for Reverse Electrodialysis.

The first voice you’ll hear is Peter Scheijgrond, Chairman of the Dutch Energy From Water Association, our tour leader last spring. Then Rik Siebers, REDstack’s Managing Director and Michael van Oostrom, Head of Market Development.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Five weeks shy of the first anniversary of October 7, 2023 and the launch of Israel’s retaliatory assault on Gaza, the GPM sat down with one of the conflict’s most astute observers, Mouin Rabbani.

Rabbani shared his thoughts about Israel’s genocidal war, the Palestinian people’s depleted, divided and leaderless ‘national liberation movement’ (a state of affairs much to Israel-USA’s liking), and about the much touted ‘Axis of Resistance’ — a coalition of independent parties that know how far to push Israel, ostensibly on behalf of the Palestinian people, without damaging their own interests.

Shifting perceptions of the self-declared ‘Jewish State’ in Europe, the US, and within Israel itself, and recent groundbreaking developments at the International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court, all point towards an uncertain future for Palestinians and Israelis alike, Rabbani tells the GPM in this interview.

Mouin Rabbani is a Dutch-Palestinian researcher, analyst, and commentator specializing in Palestinian affairs, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and contemporary Middle East issues. He’s served as the head of political affairs with the Office of the United Nations Special Envoy for Syria, and as Senior Middle East Analyst and Special Advisor on Israel-Palestine with the International Crisis Group.

These days, Rabbani is a non-resident fellow at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs, and co-Editor of Jadaliyya.com.

The GPM spoke with Mouin Rabbani in The Hague. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Mouin Rabbani (David Kattenburg)

“It’s the economy, stupid.”

In search of US presidential campaign slogans summing up what concerned voters, this was the catchiest Bill Clinton strategist Jim Carville came up with, back in 1992.

“Change vs. more of the same” and “Don’t forget health care” were much less memorable.

Thirty-two years and eight presidential campaigns later, another pressing issue is on the minds of those who’d likely vote for Kamala Harris, if she gets on the right page — an arms embargo on Israel, and a US-enforced halt to the Gaza genocide.

The GPM spoke about the Harris campaign and Israel-USA’s ongoing Gaza genocide with Medea Benjamin, co-founder and tireless guerilla activist with the American feminist antiwar group, CODEPINK.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above or go here.

Gaza (Tasnim News Agency)

Here’s another slogan – ‘From the River to the Sea, Palestine Shall be Free’.

Sounds righteous, no? Calling for freedom … or an end to non-freedom?

According to allies and advocates of the ‘Jewish State’ of Israel, this popular slogan is horridly antisemitic – a vulgar rallying cry for racial hatred and genocide.

In the Federal Republic of Germany, shouting out this phrase can land you a stiff fine, or get your fired.

Earlier this month, a Berlin court slapped a 600 Euro fine (about 600 US dollars) on a young German-Iranian woman for shouting out this two-phrase declaration at a Berlin rally, four days after Hamas’ assault on southern Israel.

Bad timing. According to a court spokesperson, the slogan “could only be understood as a denial of Israel’s right to exist.” All the more reprehensible, Judge Birgit Balzer sniffed, given Germany’s responsibility for the horrors of the Holocaust, and its sacred obligation to be perpetually penitent.

Staatsräson, it’s called. Reason of state. To learn more about Staatsräson — and the hazards of calling for Palestinian liberation in Germany, especially if you’re a person of colour — the GPM reached out to Wieland Hoban, Chairman of Germany’s Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East — Jüdische Stimme.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above or go here.

Listen to our complete conversation here:

Konrad Adenauer, architect of Staatsräson

And … Shout out about to another Harbinger Media Network podcast you might be interested in — Cyborg Goddess: a Feminist Tech Podcast. Host Jennifer Jill Fellows interviews researchers about the effects of technology. From bicycles to vibrators, birth control to fitbits, social media to chatGPT, Cyborg Goddess unpacks it all from a feminist intersectional lens. Check them out here.

Seventy-nine years ago, on August 6, 1945, the US dropped a uranium-enriched fission bomb, code named ‘Little Boy’, on the Japanese port city, Hiroshima.

Three days later, they dropped a second bomb, a plutonium-implosion device — Fat Man — on Nagasaki.

When the dust settled, between 130 and 225,000 people were dead or dying. To this day, casualty numbers vary widely. One thing is clear: they were almost all civilians.

Thousands more would sicken and die in the years to come.

America’s public rationale for its nuclear bombing of Japan: avoiding the huge casualties that supposedly would have resulted from putting boots on Japanese ground.

Other, more cynical reasons would emerge in time.

Here’s a story about America’s development of the bomb, adapted from a documentary produced by Clive Baugh, Ed Reece and David Kattenburg back in 1986. It takes its name from a prose-poem by the American Trappist monk, theologian, mystic and writer Thomas Merton.

The story features interviews with German-American nuclear physicist Hans Bethe, the head of the theoretical physics division of the Los Alamos Laboratory, where America’s first nuclear ‘device’, Trinity, was developed, and the winner of the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physics. We interviewed Bethe in his office at Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York. A memorable conversation.

You’ll also hear Martin Johns, late Professor Emeritus of physics at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario, and researcher at Canada’s Chalk River nuclear facility. Johns joined the McMaster faculty in 1947, and helped manage its small experimental particle accelerator. He shares the history of Canada’s involvement in the development of America’s nuclear bombs (The Canadians were indeed involved. Listen to Hans Bethe).

And Rosalie Bertell, late anti-nuclear campaigner and authority on the effects of ionizing radiation. Bertell was a sister of the Grey Nuns of the Sacred Heart, and author of the 1985 work No Immediate Danger – Prognosis for a Radioactive Earth. She won the 1986 Right Livelihood Award — the ‘Alternative Nobel Prize’ — for “raising public awareness about the destruction of the biosphere and human gene pool, especially by low-level radiation.”

Thanks to Brenda Muller for her cello and Michael J. Birthelmer for his guitar. And to the Firesign Theatre, America’s counterculture comics.

Listen to all these voices in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Almost eighty years after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the real reasons for America’s hideous assault have been unearthed by a small army of scholars. Among these – a guy named Glenn Alcalay. Alcalay is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, at City University of New York.

Back in the mid-1970s, Alcalay spent two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Marshall Islands, just north of the equator, in the Central Pacific. The US carried out 67 nuclear tests there, between 1946 and 1958.

The biggest was Bravo, its first deliverable hydrogen bomb, detonated at Bikini Atoll, in the central Marshalls, on March 1, 1954. Alcalay spent those two years on a small atoll downwind from Bikini. Inspired by that experience, he began researching the impacts of US weapons testing on the Marshallese people — and the true history of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The stuff you won’t learn about from the blockbuster film, Oppenheimer.

Listen to our conversation with Glenn Alcalay. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Old observation tower pad on Bikini Island (David Kattenburg)

It’s a sobering truth – that few know. Having dropped those two bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, eighty years ago, America would probably not have become the most powerful nation in the world had it not been for a string of atolls in the central Pacific, and the hospitable islanders who let it test its arsenal there.

They didn’t have much choice. America tested its first bomb, Trinity, in Alamogordo, New Mexico. It dropped its second and third bombs on Japan. A year later — having been handed the Marshall Islands as a Strategic Trust by the UN — the US set out to use it as the testing ground for its now burgeoning nuclear arsenal. In July 1946, the US set off Able and Baker at Bikini Atoll, in the central Marshalls.

Twenty-one more would follow, including the leviathan, 15-megatonne Bravo blast, on March 1, 1954. Forty-four bombs were tested at Eniwetok atoll, in the northern Marshalls. Read a detailed account of the history of the Marshall Islands here, written back in 2007.

Nothing much has changed since then. Bikini is still contaminated, and has not been resettled. Radiation monitoring continues. Health impact claims adjudicated and awarded by the new defunct Nuclear Claims Tribunal have yet to be paid. Trust funds administered since 2016 by Bikini leaders have reportedly been squandered.

A third Compact of Free Association between the US and the Republic of the Marshall Islands is on track to be approved this Fall.

The Marshalls faithfully vote the way Washington tells them to at the UN — most famously, alongside neighboring Pacific island states, in opposition to UN resolutions condemning Israel or calling for the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination.

The US continues to fire missiles at Kwajalein Atoll from California and Alaska, and nearby Ebeye is still packed like a sardine can.

Not surprisingly, the Marshallese people are as friendly as ever. Diabetes and heart disease kill more of them than nuclear-related cancers.

Listen to this story about the Marshall Islands in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

On July 19, the International Court of Justice, in The Hague, issued a historic ruling.

In an 83-page Advisory Opinion, addressed to the UN General Assembly, the UN’s top court declared that Israel’s 56-year belligerent occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem and Gaza is unlawful, and that Israel must terminate it in short order.

The self-declared ‘Jewish State’ must also stop building settlements, the ICJ advised the UN, evacuate all its settlers, allow Palestinians to return to their lands, and compensate them for the losses and damages they’ve suffered.

The last time the ICJ issued an Advisory Opinion on the so-called Israel-Palestine ‘conflict’, back in 2004, it focused on the Separation Wall Israel was building, largely on Palestinian land. The Wall was illegal, the court declared, an infringement of the inalienable right of the Palestinian people to self-determination in their historic homeland, and had to come down.

Israel ignored the order, and the international community hasn’t enforced it. ICJ Advisory Opinions are non-binding. They do carry enormous judicial authority, however.

Item 7 of the court’s July 19 Advisory Opinion, passed by a vote of 12-3, declared that “all States are under an obligation not to recognize as legal the situation arising from the unlawful presence of the State of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and not to render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by the continued presence of the State of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.”

Will the UN’s most powerful member states honor that obligation, and cut Israel off? The US certainly won’t. How about steadfast US and Israeli ally Canada?

In search of wisdom on this thorny question, the GPM reached out to Peter Larson. Larson is an Ottawa-based researcher and blogger, Chair of the Ottawa Forum on Israel/Palestine, and author of a weekly newsletter called CanadaTalksIsraelPalestine. He’s also taught a course about the Middle East at Carleton University, and has taken groups of Canadians on tours up and down occupied Palestine, guiding them through the ‘complexities’ of Israel-Palestine’s so-called ‘conflict’.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

U.S. and allied aircraft at Andersen Air Force Base, Guam, July 19, 2023

An astonishing fact: In the 248 years since the United States of America became an independent republic, the US has only been at peace for about eleven.

The United States of War, you could call it. David Vine does. Vine is a Professor of Anthropology at American University, in Washington D.C., and the author of a trilogy of books about permanent war as an American way of life, and about the role military bases play in its warfighting pursuits – across North America, at first; then around the world. The latest, published in 2020 by University of California Press, is entitled The United States of War – a Global History of America’s endless conflicts, from Columbus to the Islamic State.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Guess what? Mobile phones are covered in germs.

Duhh … You talk into them. You spit on them. You touch them with hands you just sneezed or coughed into! You take them into the toilet!

The GPM spoke about the dark, dirty side of smart phones with Lotti Tajouri, Associate Professor of Molecular Genetics at Bond University, in Robina, Australia.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast, or go here.

The US anti-abortion movement portrays itself as ‘pro-life’, ‘pro-family’, and conventionally conservative – whatever that may mean.

Close to the surface, something darker bubbles: a wellspring of misogyny, racism, hatred toward immigrants and antipathy for personal freedom of all sorts. Among these, the freedom of a woman to control her own body.

The GPM spoke about the history of women’s reproductive rights with Lauren MacIvor Thompson, Assistant Professor of History at Kennesaw State University, in Kennesaw, Georgia, and a historian of early-twentieth-century women’s rights and public health at Georgia State University College of Law’s Center for Law, Health & Society.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast, or go here.

Wheat: genus Triticum. It’s a grass, a cereal, cultivated around the world for its grain, across vast swaths of land.

Alongside maize and rice, wheat is the food staple for human beings here on Planet Earth.

Wheat has come a long way since humans began cultivating it, 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent. Of the dozens of species, Triticum aestivum is the most commonly grown these days.

Since the launch of the Green Revolution, sixty years ago, Triticum has come to be bred for a half dozen traits best suited for mass production — yield being the most crucial. The payoff has been huge. Wheat accounts for an estimated fifth of the calories Earth’s eight billion, 123 million people consume.

Wheat field in Ukraine

But success also breeds frailty. In a warming world, inbred wheat is poorly adapted to heat stress, and stressed wheat is more vulnerable to pathogens and pests.

Now, plant geneticists are combing through wheat’s huge genetic source code — its genome — in search of useful traits lost by the wayside over the past hundred years of hybridization and inbreeding, and the genes that code for them.

At the John Innes Centre, in the UK, researchers are drilling down into the DNA of wheat varieties gathered from fields around the world, by a very inquisitive man named Arthur Watkins. It’s a genetic gold mine, now fully sequenced by scientists in China, led by Professor Shifeng Cheng at the Agricultural Genomics Institute in Shenzhen.

Read their research study here.

The GPM spoke with Simon Griffiths about the Watkins Collection and its DNA sequencing. Griffiths is Group Leader at the Delivering Sustainable Wheat Programme of the John Innes Centre, in Norwich, England.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Ethiopian farmer Birtukan Kebede shows off some prize grains of heritage wheat (David Kattenburg)

This past Friday, the International Court of Justice, in The Hague, issued a landmark ruling.

In an 83-page Advisory Opinion, addressed to the UN General Assembly, that solicited it, the UN’s top court declared that Israel’s 56-year belligerent occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem and Gaza is unlawful, and that Israel must terminate it in short order.

The self-declared ‘Jewish State’ must also stop building settlements, the ICJ advised the UN, evacuate all its settlers, allow Palestinians to return to their lands, and compensate them for the losses and damages they’ve suffered.

The last time the ICJ issued an Advisory Opinion on the so-called Israel-Palestine ‘conflict’, it focused on the Separation Wall Israel was building, largely on Palestinian land. The Wall was illegal, the court declared — an infringement of the inalienable right of the Palestinian people to self-determination in their historic homeland — and had to come down.

Israel ignored the order, and the international community hasn’t enforced it. ICJ Advisory Opinions are non-binding.

They do carry enormous judicial authority, however. Days before the release of the ICJ’s Advisory Opinion on the ‘Legal Consequences’ of Israel’s prolonged occupation, the GPM discussed its significance with Michael Lynk, a Canadian legal scholar, retired faculty member at Western University, in Ontario, and former UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in occupied Palestine.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Bethlehem protest against Israeli occupation (David Kattenburg)

The pollution of Earth’s atmosphere by fossil fuel burning is just one of the insults the planet faces in this human-engineered age of ours – the Anthropocene.

In their relentless hunger for food, fiber and fuel, humans have transformed an estimated three quarters of Earth’s vegetated land surface, and appropriated a quarter of its natural productivity.

Human Appropriation of Net Primary Production, or HANPP, it’s called. Fridolin Krausmann is an authority on the phenomenon and metric. Krausmann is professor of sustainable resource use at the Institute of Social Ecology, at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, in Vienna.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Credit: Andrew S. Wright

It’s something human beings take for granted. The World is a very human place.

Covered by concrete and tall buildings; cars racing this way and that; food from all corners of the planet.

Some green space — for us humans.

Earth’s human age has a name: the Anthropocene. Dutch chemist Paul Crützen coined the term, twenty years ago. The Anthropocene, Crützen said, should be declared a new ‘epoch’ in Earth history, terminating the one we’ve been in for the past 12,000 years, the Holocene.

Last year, a panel of scientists recommended that Crützen’s idea be moved up a notch, formally designating the Anthropocene as the latest epoch in the geochronological time scale.

That idea got deep-sixed earlier this year by the geological powers that be.

The Anthropocene idea is too political, they argue.

John McNeill was an advisory member of the Anthropocene Working Group, a colleague of Paul Crützen’s, and one of the early proponents of the idea that the Anthropocene began in the mid-20th century, at the start of something called the Great Acceleration, when the scale, scope and pace of humanity’s impact on Planet Earth started to skyrocket.

John McNeill is a professor of environmental history at Georgetown University, in the US. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Israel’s assault on Gaza – plausibly genocidal, according to the International Court of Justice – is now into its tenth month. Almost 40,000 Palestinians have been killed by American bombs and missiles, half of them women and children. Unknown numbers lie dead and rotting beneath the rubble.

Ninety thousand have been injured.

Apartment blocks, schools, universities, hospitals, places of worship, cultural institutions and most of Gaza’s sewage treatment infrastructure are now in ruins.

The ultimate death toll in Israel’s war of vengeance following the events of October 7 will likely be much higher.

According to a report in the British medical journal The Lancet, in recent conflicts around the world, communicable and non-communicable disease, reproductive dysfunction, drinking water scarcity, hunger and disruption of health-care infrastructure killed between three and fifteen times more people than bombs or missiles.

“Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death to the 37,396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza,” the authors wrote.

The physical health and psychosocial impacts of hunger, extreme trauma and ceaseless insecurity on pregnant women and young children (some of them epigenetic), promise to linger for generations.

Late last month, the UN-affiliated Famine Review Committee announced its latest appalling figures on the impacts of Israel’s forced starvation policy in Gaza.

In north Gaza, 45% of households are in an ‘emergency’ food security situation, a number projected to rise to 50% by the end of the summer. Twenty percent face catastrophe.

Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis, in central Gaza, and southern Rafah, fare slightly better.

Backing off projections issued in late March, the Review Committee said that famine, as formally defined, has yet to emerge – but it may well in the months to come.

The Israeli government and its lobbyists quickly jumped on this, arguing that the situation in Gaza is better than everyone says.

Tell that to the International Criminal Court.

In late May, Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan announced he’ll be seeking arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and three Hamas leaders.

Topping the crimes the British barrister says Netanyahu and Gallant bear criminal responsibility for: starvation as a method of warfare.

A panel of ICC judges are expected to rule on Khan’s application later this summer.

Three weeks from today (July 26), British lawyers are scheduled to submit a brief to the ICC’s Pre-Trial Chamber, urging it to reject Khan’s application. The tightest of Israel’s tight friends (indeed, the intellectual authors of the Zionist state’s creation, and parallel dispossession of Palestine’s indigenous people), the UK will argue that Netanyahu, Gallant and other Israeli leaders are immune from prosecution under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

In search of wisdom about hunger and starvation as weapons of war, the GPM reached out to Alex de Waal.

De Waal is the Executive Director of the World Peace Foundation, and an authority on human rights, governance, peace-building and global response to food crises. His books include The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa, and Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine, both published by Polity Press. Alex de Waal teaches a course on Conflict in Africa at the Fletcher School, Tufts University, in Boston.

Listen to our conversation with Alex de Waal in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Listen to our complete conversation here:

Forcible starvation and infectious disease are famous dance partners. From colonial America’s genocidal western expansion to Darfur to Democratic Kampuchea, engineered starvation and infection have gone hand in hand.

Now Gaza: reduced to rubble; a million and a half of its people displaced, half of them children; no safe place to rest their heads and eat a healthy meal; packed into crowded tent camps, on the floors of UN refugee centers (a favourite target for Israeli airstrikes), or on the street.

No better conditions for respiratory infection, diarrhea and hepatitis to spread, communicated by rats and mosquitoes, now breeding in open pools of sewage water.

To learn more about the gathering infectious disease crisis in little Gaza – nine months into Israel’s genocidal war – the GPM spoke with the global spokesperson for the World Health Organization. Margaret Harris is a physician, an epidemiologist and a former journalist.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Listen to our complete conversation here:

Back in late May, Spain, Ireland and Norway declared their formal recognition of Palestinian statehood. One hundred-forty five out 193 UN member states now do so.

In situations like this, Israel doesn’t just fulminate. It doubles down on its illegal activities — activities it knows it can carry out with impunity — all the while turning the screws on Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank.

One day after Spain, Ireland and Norway’s statehood recognition came into effect, the Israeli military announced that dozens of bylaws governing its administration of the occupied West Bank would be transferred to pro-settlement civil servants under the supervision of far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.

The move consolidates Israel’s effective annexation of the West Bank, flagrantly illegal under international law.

In a subsequent move, Smotrich announced that five so-called ‘illegal outposts’ would be formally legalized.

Halamish settlement, in the northern West Bank (David Kattenburg)

An estimated 750,000 Jewish settler-colonists now live in hundreds of fully developed colonies up and down the West Bank. Among the most violent, those living in the southern West Bank city of Hebron.

No one knows more about Israeli settler violence and land theft — aided and abetted by the Israeli military — than Atta Jaber. Jaber lives on a plot of land across Highway 60 from Kiryat Arba, a large settlement on the edge of Hebron.

Jaber’s family has owned the land for generations. Since the 1980s, his land and property have been steadily seized and destroyed. The GPM visited Atta Jaber back in 2022, in the company of Israeli activist Jeff Halper, founder of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD).

Listen to Jeff and Atta in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Jeff Halper & Atta Jaber (David Kattenburg)

Nine months into Israel’s assault on Gaza – widely described as genocidal by legal scholars; a position deemed “plausible” by the International Court of Justice – a top UN committee has just weighed in on the whole sorry affair.

The Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel,” it’s called. More simply, the Pillay Commission, after its chair, South African jurist Navi Pillay.

Pillay, a South African jurist of Indian Tamil origin, has a lengthy resume: first non-white woman judge of the High Court of South Africa; UN High Commissioner for Human Rights from 2008 to 2014; former judge of the International Criminal Court, President of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and Commissioner of the International Commission Against the Death Penalty.

Established in May 2021, the Pillay Commission has issued a handful of reports and a host of press releases. This past June 12, it delivered its most recent report to the Human Rights Council in Geneva.

Words were not minced. Israeli authorities, Pillay told the Council, are responsible for the war crimes of starvation as a method of warfare, murder, intentionally directing attacks against civilians and civilian objects, forcible transfer, sexual violence and torture, and the crimes against humanity of extermination, gender persecution, murder, forcible transfer, and torture.

Hamas and six other Palestinian armed groups have committed plenty of war crimes themselves, Pillay went on.

Having been denied entry to either Gaza or Israel ‘proper’ (standard Israeli procedure for all UN agencies independent experts), the Commission based its findings on interviews carried out in Turkey and Egypt, and other documentary evidence.

The Commission’s assessment of Hamas’ October 7 attack, and Israel’s response, are contained in a 21-page report to the Council, and a pair of detailed companion reports about Hamas’ October 7 attack, and Israel’s response.

Listen to Navi Pillay in today’s podcast, speaking to the Human Rights Council in Geneva on June 12. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Mark Deretz, University of Leuven archivist & library historian, in front of charred book remains (David Kattenburg)

As Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza unfolds — drawing attention away from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Europe’s bloodiest conflict since World War Two — thoughts turn to the First World War, the one that was supposed to end all wars.

On August 4, 1914 – almost 110 years ago — Germany invaded little Belgium. Three weeks later, in an orgy of destruction, German troops laid seven Belgian towns to waste.

The “Martyr Cities,” they came to be called. Leuven – Louvain, in French — was one of them.

Of all the acts committed by German troops in Leuven in August 1914, none sparked more international outrage than the destruction of Leuven University library, a treasure trove of European literature and art, torched by the Germans on the night of August 25, 1914.

Here’s a story I produced on the hundredth anniversary of that dreadful event – an event elderly residents of Leuven remember. Click on the play button above, or go here.

It’s a living web beneath our feet – a tangled network of microscopic tubes weaving through the soil, pulsating with nutrients, tying the roots of trees and other plants into vast networks.

Mycorrhizal fungi they’re called. Most plants rely on them entirely.

But, mycorrhizal fungi do more than just feed plants. They cycle carbon from atmosphere to soil and back again, regulating Earth’s climate – and they face a host of threats. Soil scientists have come together to protect fungal networks, and are calling on citizens to help out.

Listen to this story in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Complex flows inside the hyphae of an arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (Credit: Loreto Oyarte Galvez, AMOLF + VU, Amsterdam)

Human emission of CO2 and other greenhouse gases has warmed Earth’s surface temperature by about 1.1 degrees Celsius, relative to the late 19th century, at a rate of about three tenths of a degree per decade since 1980.

That rate is steadily rising.

As Earth’s surface warms, thermal expansion and melting ice sheets have raised sea levels by two tenths of a meter.

That rate is rising too.

Slow and steady for years to come? Think again.

In a recent report, a team of scientists warn about tipping points — points of inflection where Earth warming and the destruction of Earth’s living fabric become non-linear and unstoppable, and where Earth systems start shifting to new, potentially dangerous states.

Twenty-five tipping points have been identified. Five major ones may already have been transgressed. More could soon be tripped, potentially triggering a cascade of amplifying feedbacks across Earth’s interlocked climate system and biosphere.

Globalized human economies and societies will inevitably suffer.

As if all this weren’t scary enough, “there is no adequate global governance at the scale of the threats posed by negative tipping points,” the report’s authors warn. Manjana Milkoreit is one of them. Milkoreit is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oslo, and lead author of a chapter of the report about tipping point governance.

The GPM reached Manjana Milkoreit in Oslo. Listen our conversation. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Cootes Paradise (David Kattenburg)

Intact, natural ecosystems are home to a wide range of plants and animals. Cities are ecosystems too. The healthiest ones coexist with nature.

On the edge of one of Canada’s largest cities, the benefits provided by natural ecosystems, and the importance of protecting them, are on display. Here’s a story from Hamilton, Ontario – a place called Cootes Paradise. Click on the play button above, or go here.

What makes music sound funky? What makes it sound thrilling, sad, offbeat or downright strange? What makes you hum along, before you even know what notes come next?

The ability to ‘understand’ and interpret music is hardwired in your brain. I spoke about this with Roger Dumas. Dumas is a neuromusicologist and brain-audio innovator, with a long, storied career. Having introduced Janet Jackson, Prince and other artists to the Moog synthesizer, Dumas took up research study at the University of Minnesota’s Brain Sciences Center.

These days, Dumas is working on behavioral and neuroimaging, and the validation of a musical chill-identifying algorithm.

Listen to our conversation with Roger Dumas. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Roger Dumas and his Moog synthesizers (David Kattenburg)

Then, there are the sounds of silence: formerly sound-rich ecosystems, bursting with bird songs, insect buzz and the reverberations of less noticeable creatures, that don’t resonate like they used to.

Earth’s oceans, packed with sound wave artists of all sizes, have reportedly fallen silent too.

Or, maybe it’s human machine noise — along with all the chatter in our head — that’s drowning out their voices.

People need to quiet down, focus and listen harder. They need to come to their auditory senses.

Bernie Krause and Hildegard Westerkamp think so.

Bernie Krause is a soundscape ecologist based in northern California. Armed with various recording devices, Krause — the originator of the acoustic niche and biophony concepts — has captured the sounds and songs of creatures large and small, above and below ground, and inside trees.

Hildegard Westerkamp is a Vancouver-based composer, radio artist and sound ecologist, and an alumnus of the World Soundscape Project. Westerkamp’s soundscape installations and small group soundwalks, down Vancouver streets, are renowned.

Listen to our conversation with Hildegard Westerkamp and Bernie Krause in today’s  podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Wanna destroy a people in whole or in part? In other words, commit genocide – as genocide is defined under international law?

You don’t need gas chambers or firing squads and deep ditches. Just destroy their schools and universities.

Bomb their libraries, archives and cultural institutions; seize their historical records. Make it as hard as possible for their kids to go to school.

“With more than 80% of schools in Gaza damaged or destroyed,” a group of UN experts declared in an April 18 statement, “it may be reasonable to ask if there is an intentional effort to comprehensively destroy the Palestinian education system, an action known as ‘scholasticide’.” 

The GPM spoke with the statement’s lead author.

First, listen to this: two attorneys for the government of South Africa, this past January, arguing South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, in The Hague.

Tembeka Ngcukaitobi is a South African lawyer and legal scholar, and a member of South Africa’s Judicial Services Commission. Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh is an Irish human rights and international law expert at Matrix Chambers, in London.

Listen to Ngcukaitobi and Ní Ghrálaigh in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Little kids go to school in Hebron, occupied Palestine (David Kattenburg)

Numbers speak louder than words.

Since Israel’s assault on Gaza began, back on October 7, at least 60 percent of the besieged enclave’s educational facilities have been damaged or destroyed.

Israa University, the last remaining higher educational institution in Gaza, was demolished on January 17.

Today, over 600 thousand Gazan students have no access to education.

Or books. Thirteen Gaza public libraries are now in ruins.

Some 200 heritage sites, 227 mosques and three churches have also been damaged or destroyed. Among these, Gaza 7th century Omari Mosque, a center of Islamic faith and learning, demolished in an Israeli airstrike back in December.

A Hamas stronghold, the Israeli military said.

Gaza’s Central Archives, repository of 150 years of Palestinian history, is reportedly in ruins.

In the course of all this physical annihilation, Israeli military forces have killed at least 5500 students, 260 teachers and 95 university professors.

These figures were contained in an April 18 statement by two dozen UN Special Rapporteurs and subject experts. The GPM reached out to the statement’s lead author, Farida Shaheed. Shaheed is the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to education.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Yousef Najajreh in his lab, Al-Quds University (David Kattenburg)

Getting an elementary, secondary or university education in Palestine these days is one thing. Doing top-drawer scientific research is another.

That’s what Yousef Najajreh has been doing for quite a number of years, under Israel military occupation and apartheid. Najajreh is a medicinal chemist in the Faculty of Pharmacy at Al-Quds University, in occupied Palestine.

The GPM has spoken and hung out with Yousef on a host of occasions, most recently this past May. Here’s a conversation of ours from back in 2022 – in the midst of Covid – and in the wake of Israeli government legislation clamping down on visits by foreign academics to Palestinian campuses.

From Yousef, we’ll segue to Palestine’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Riyad Mansour, speaking to the International Court of Justice back in February, on the opening day of hearings on the legal consequences of Israel’s ‘prolonged’ occupation of Palestine.

Listen to these voices in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Al-Quds University Students (David Kattenburg)

The wheels of justice turn slowly, nowhere more slowly than at the world’s top international courts, where lawless powerful states and their allies enjoy impunity — perhaps.

No state commits crimes with more assured impunity than the State of Israel. Its unique dispensation may be crumbling.

Last week in The Hague, the chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, British barrister Karim Khan, announced that he’ll be seeking arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, for a host of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza – among these, starvation as a weapon of war, willful killing and murder, extermination and persecution.

“Reasonable grounds” also exist for charging Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’ leader inside Gaza, the Commander-in-Chief of Hamas’ military wing, and Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas’ political bureau, for a host of crimes committed since “at least” October 7, Khan also announced.

Four days later, across town from the ICC, the international community’s top judicial body, the International Court of Justice, ordered Israel to suspend its military operations in the southern Gazan city, Rafah, to open the Rafah crossing to humanitarian aid, and to let international observers in to ensure that evidence of genocide is not destroyed.

The ICJ ruling was issued in response to an ongoing case initiated by South Africa against Israel, in January, under the 1994 Genocide Convention. This was the fourth time South Africa asked the Court to order Israel to halt its assault on Gaza.

For Israel, last week’s ICJ ruling was the latest twist in a slow-motion legal train wreck. Long accustomed to doing what it wants – with impunity — Israeli leaders are now doubling down on their lawless acts, both in Gaza and the West Bank.

To learn more about last week’s landmark rulings at the ICC and ICJ, the GPM reached out to three legal and human rights scholars. In today’s podcast, you’ll hear Toby Cadman first. Cadman is a British barrister specializing in international criminal, human rights and humanitarian law. He’s the co-founder of The Guernica Group and Joint Head of Chambers at Guernica 37 International Justice Chambers in London.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Watch our conversation here:

To learn more about Karim Khan’s applications for arrest warrants against Israeli and Hamas leaders at the ICC – what they say and what they don’t – the GPM reached out to Canadian legal scholar William Schabas. Schabas is Professor Emeritus of International Criminal Law and Human Rights at Leiden University, and professor of international law at Middlesex University in the UK. Among the twenty books he’s authored — The International Criminal Court: A Commentary on the Rome Statute, and Genocide in International Law. Schabas was named an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2006.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Watch our conversation here:

No one has followed the international legal dimensions of Israel’s prolonged, effectively permanent occupation of Palestine more than Michael Lynk. Lynk is a retired professor of law at Western University, in Ontario. Between 2016 and 2022, Lynk served as the seventh UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in the occupied Palestinian Territories.

The GPM reached out to Michael Lynk for his thoughts on arrest warrants soon to be issued against top Israeli and Hamas leaders at the International Criminal Court, and about this past Friday’s ruling by the International Court of Justice, ordering Israel to halt its military assault on the southern Gaza city, Rafah.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Watch our conversation here:

Israel’s assault on Gaza is now into its eighth month. As Israel wages war on Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied, effectively annexed West Bank, Western governments wage war on their own citizens who condemn Israeli crimes – on students, faculty and off-campus antiwar protestors, many of them Jewish.

McCarthyism is abroad, once more — communications surveilled; gatherings banned; reputations smeared; careers ruined; artists blackballed; academics dragged before angry legislatures.

Scoundrel time revisited. Back then it was communism. Today’s it’s Palestine.

Social media bursts with images of pro-Gaza, anti-genocide protestors young and old, on the ground, beaten, tasered, handcuffed and dragged away.

Much more tranquilly, on May 13, prominent Jewish-Israeli historian Ilan Pappé was interrogated for over two hours by FBI agents at Detroit Metro Airport. Pappé is a history professor at the University of Exeter, in the UK, and the author of the groundbreaking 2006 work, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.

Did he support Hamas, FBI agents asked Pappé in that little room on the edge of Motown? Was Israel’s war on Gaza genocidal? Did Pappé have Arab and Muslim friends in the Detroit area? What is the solution to the ‘conflict’?

After a lengthy exchange with someone on the phone (Pappé thinks they were Israeli), airport coppers returned his phone and waived him on.

British-Palestinian surgeon Ghassan Abu-Sittah didn’t fare so well.

Last April 12, at Berlin airport, heading to a big Palestine conference, Abu-Sittah was detained, questioned for hours, then put back on a plane to London.

Abu-Sittah is the Rector of the University of Glasgow, and an expert in plastic and reconstructive surgery. Know one knows more about the bloody carnage Israel’s war has inflicted, especially on little kids, than Ghassan Abu-Sittah.

Not something German authorities wanted him to talk about. Hours later, dozens of German police broke up the conference he was going to attend. The Palestine Congress had barely convened. Heavily armed German cops cut off power and a live feed, and emptied out the crowded hall. One of the organizers, a Jewish activist, was reportedly arrested.

This story grows. Three weeks later, on May 4, Abu-Sittah was halted in his tracks at a Paris airport. Scheduled to address a symposium at the French Senate, French authorities told him to go away. Why? A Schengen ban had been placed on him.

Originally designed to stop football hooligans from traveling match to match within Europe’s border-free Schengen zone, a Schengen fatwa had just been slapped on the Israel critic — by Germany!

Schengen bans being what they are, the Dutch followed suit, blocking Abu-Sittah from attending a May 17 session of the Netherlands’ Rights Forum, in Amsterdam. Abu-Sittah had also planned to meet two Dutch MPs, and present details about Israel’s use of white phosphorus to a chemical weapons monitoring organization.

Thanks to the efforts of the European Legal Support Center, Germany’s fatwa against the eminent surgeon has just been lifted, though not in time to attend the Rights Forum gathering. Instead, Abu-Sittah beamed in, on Zoom.

Listen to Ghassan Abu-Sittah in this edition of the GPM. Click on the play button above or go here. You’ll also hear Dutch anesthesiologist Sara Galli, with Artsen Voor Gaza (Doctors For Gaza). Berber van der Woude, a political scientist, moderates the session.

Flag Woman in Rotterdam, October 2023 (David Kattenburg)

Germany’s Schengen fatwa on Ghassan Abu-Sittah has recently been lifted, thanks to the efforts of the European Legal Support Centre. The ELSC supports and defends advocates for Palestinian rights across mainland Europe and the UK. Tobias den Haan is a legal researcher with the center. Listen to den Haan in this edition of the GPM, speaking at last Friday’s Rights Forum gathering, in Amsterdam, in conversation with moderator Berber van der Woude. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Anti-war protesters in Amsterdam, May 2024 (David Kattenburg)

Palestine solidarity activists have been doxxed, smeared, fired and arrested for years, increasingly so with the widespread adoption of the pro-Israel IHRA — the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s Working Definition of Antisemitism.

October 7 moved the repression up a notch. Over the past month, almost 3000 students have been arrested on US campuses, in the course of peaceful protests against what the International Court of Justice considers plausible Israeli genocide in Gaza.

Here in Europe, no country is more hostile to free speech about the nature of the Israeli state and its core ideology, Zionism, and about the fate of the perpetually subjugated Palestinian people, than Germany.

Listen to British-German activist Wieland Hoban speak about this at that Rights Forum gathering this past Friday, in the wake of the busting up of that Palestine Congress in Berlin, and about the deep roots of Germany’s undying commitment to the ‘Jewish State’ (you may be surprised).

Hoban is a British-German composer and translator, and chair of the German group Jüdische Stimme – Jewish Voice for Just Peace in the Middle East.

Click on the play button above, or go here.

Palestine solidarity protests have been taking place around the world, no more dramatically – and in the face of brutal police violence – than on university campuses.

In the Netherlands, students and faculty can expect to be dealt with in two very different ways.

At the end of March, at the most august proceedings of the University of Utrecht’s 388th birthday gathering, in a magnificent old church — Dies Natalis — a handful of students and faculty stood up and spoke out against genocide in Gaza.

True to the event’s theme — democracy and free speech – they got three and a half minutes to state their case during the opening comments of the university’s Rector Magnificus, and another ninety seconds in the middle of the keynote address by a professor of public management to hold up an anti-genocide banner in front of the podium.

Oppose unfolding Israeli genocide in Gaza, student and faculty protesters insisted. Disclose ties with Israeli universities and companies, and commit to an academic boycott.

The gowned rectors listened – with deaf ears, protesters told the GPM.

Standing close by with a microphone, Utrecht U. president Anton Pijpers did his best to hasten the termination of their interventions.

Watch this video of Utrecht U.’s Dies Natalis proceedings. Student and staff interventions at 8:29 and 24:24. Also check out the featured video interview with a pro-Palestine faculty member, draped in a keffiyeh. (pretty sporting of Utrecht U. to make all this available!)

Feeling ignored following months of letter-writing and their Die Natalis disruption, on May 7, students and faculty set up a protest encampment in a university courtyard. Riot police evicted them, violently, reportedly on the request of president Pijpers. Protesters were driven by bus to a remote location and dumped – a process reportedly referred to as “administrative displacement.”

The next day, students and faculty struck again, occupying a campus building. Once again, violence was meted out, this time involving the ‘Romeos’ – a notorious Dutch police unit consisting of masked cops disguised as protesters.

Infuriated, this past Monday, May 13, Dutch university faculty and students staged walkouts – in Amsterdam and Utrecht. The GPM attended the Utrecht protests. Listen to to today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

The GPM also rendezvoused with two of the students who participated in the March 27 Dies Natalis disruption, at a large pro-Gaza march in Amsterdam. Raha and Jeran are Masters students at Utrecht U. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

‘Palestine shall be free’ in Arabic (David Kattenburg)

In response to the violent police assault on Utrecht University staff and students on May 7 and 8, called in by university and city officials, on May 13, Utrecht students and staff staged a walkout.

A loud gathering and die-in unfolded in front of the university’s administration building. Come on out and speak to us, instructors asked university officials. They wanted to speak with Anton Pijpers. Pijpers declined.  Vice Rector of Administration, Margot van der Starre, came out instead — acquitting herself with considerable grace.

A very well trained crowd of students repeated van der Starre’s words in smartly phrased chorus. Listen to all this in this GPM podcast edition. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Utrecht U. vice-rector Margot van der Starre speaks to student and faculty protesters (David Kattenburg)

After their noisy encounter with vice rector van der Starre, a handful of protesting instructors stepped into Utrecht U.’s administration building for quieter consultation. Forty-five minutes later, they stepped out and debriefed protesters.

The university had agreed to take a closer look at ties with Israeli universities, the instructors told cheering students, and will disclose its findings later this week.

Student protesters at Utrecht U. (David Kattenburg)

University officials will also consider attending a talk by Canadian academic Maya Wind, author of a new book entitled Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom. That talk takes place this afternoon, May 14, in Utrecht. Stay tuned for an update on all this.

Utrecht U. faculty member Katherine van den Boger hands vice rector van der Starre a copy of Maya Wind’s book (David Kattenburg)

It’s a vast, living web beneath our feet – a tangled underground network of microscopic tubes weaving through the soil, pulsating with nutrients, tying the roots of trees and other plants into networks that extend over square kilometers.

Mycorrhizal fungi they’re called. Most plants rely on them entirely. In exchange for plant sugars, mycorrhizal fungi provide phosphorus and nitrogen.

But, mycorrhizal networks do more than just feed plants. They cycle carbon from atmosphere to soil, regulating Earth’s climate.

Underground fungi face a host of threats from above. Soil scientists have come together to protect fungal networks, and are calling on citizens to do the same. Toby Kiers is a professor in the Faculty of Science, Ecology & Evolution at the Free University of Amsterdam. She’s also the founder of a group called SPUN – the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks.

Toby Kiers (Credit: David Meulenbeld)

The cedar is Lebanon’s national symbol. It’s on its flag, its banknotes, a source of identity and pride.

But Lebanon’s renowned cedar forests are not what they used to be. Once a continuous carpet running up and down Lebanon’s mountainous spine, these splendid forests of cedar, pine and spruce have been exploited since the days of the ancient Phoenicians, who built ships out of them. The Egyptians used cedar in their mummies. The Ottomans, British and French took their turn, exploiting Lebanon’s forest wealth.

Today, all that remains of Lebanon’s cedar forests are a dozen fragmented islands, threatened by livestock grazing and climate change. The key to restoring them is their genetic diversity.

That’s precisely what a Lebanese NGO called Jouzour Loubnan – ‘Lebanon Roots’ — has in mind. Here’s a story about that.

Jouzour Loubnan’s seed bank (David Kattenburg)

Back in 2017, astronomers feasted their eyes and focused their instruments on something Albert Einstein predicted, but no one had every actually observed. A hundred and thirty million light years away, a pair of super dense neutron stars had collided with each other (when dinosaurs roamed the Earth), sending out pulses of electromagnetic signals and gravitational waves, rippling the fabric of space-time.

The GPM spoke with Samar Safi-Harb about the event, named after the date it was observed — GW170817. Safi-Harb is a Professor of Physics and Astronomy, and a Canada Research Chair on Extreme Astrophysics at the University of Manitoba.

Lots of reports in the news these days about Israeli military assaults on Palestinian refugee camps.

In little Gaza – Israel reduces refugee camps to rubble with 2000-lb American bombs, or plows them into the mud with armoured Caterpillar D9 bulldozers.

In the Israeli-occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, Palestinian refugee camps are routinely assaulted by heavily armed soldiers or police in search of “terrorists” to arrest or — more likely — gun down, no questions asked.

Teargas and sound bombs fill the air, fired by roof-mounted guns, drones or remotely operated sentry sites.

Apartheid wall and watchtower watch over Bethlehem and Aida (David Kattenburg)

For those who’ve never visited a Palestinian refugee camp, these are not dense tent or tin shacks encampments. They’re more like barrios; densely packed, tightly knit, fully functioning communities. On a very recent trip, I visited one of Palestine’s largest refugee camps – Aida – in the southern West Bank town of Bethlehem.

Founded in 1950 to house 1200 victims of Israeli ethnic cleansing, Aida is now home to about 6000. It’s a safe, welcoming place to walk, talk and film, a vibrant community packed with art and political graffiti.

But violent assault is always imminent, especially at night.

Heavily armed Israeli Border Police enter in armoured vehicles, through sliding steel doors along Israel’s apartheid wall, snaking along Aida’s northern edge.

The GPM spoke about all this with Rohini Haar, one of the authors of a report entitled No Safe Space: Health Consequences of Tear Gas Exposure Among Palestine Refugees, published in January 2018 by the Human Rights Center of the School of Law at the University of California at Berkeley.

Wall art, Aida, Bethlehem (David Kattenburg)

Aida Refugee Camp is a bustling and vibrant community. It’s also something of an outdoor art gallery. Resistance artwork, portraits of iconic poets and fighters, and political graffiti adorn its walls and facades.

Leila Khaled on Aida wall (David Kattenburg)

One of Aida’s best known hubs for resistance art and culture — the Alrowwad Culture & Arts Society and Vocational Training Center. Abdelfattah Abusrour is the Center’s founder and director.

Abdelfattah Abusrour (David Kattenburg)

Jeff Halper was a Child of the Sixties.

The 78-year old American-Israeli activist ticks off all the boxes. Born in Hibbing, Minnesota in 1946, his older brother was a classmate of Robert Zimmerman, soon to be known as Bob Dylan. Bob and younger Jeff hung out in the basement of Bob’s home. Bob attended Jeff’s Bar Mitzvah.

In the early Sixties, Halper traveled to Mississippi in support of the civil rights movement. He resisted the draft. Following high school graduation in the summer of ’68 (Dylan attended his grad party), he loitered on the streets of Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, doing his best to avoid the clubs of Mayor Daley’s thugs.

In the summer of’69, 23-year-old Jeff tromped through mud at Max Yasgur’s farm, in Woodstock, along with a half million other young music lovers.

But America bored him. In 1973, armed with an anthropology degree and disillusioned with American politics — with ‘The Movement’, widely seen as motionless and likely dead under Richard Nixon’s regime — Jeff Halper packed his bags and moved to Israel.

Six years into its belligerent occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza, the self-declared ‘Jewish State’ struck the young Minnesota activist as “another front in the revolution.”

Halper was aware of the plight Palestinians faced, but Jewish ‘nationalism’ also piqued his interest. The occupation wouldn’t last long, he and other young Jewish activists figured. Israel’s settlement enterprise was still a blip. The oppression of Palestinians could be reined in through conscientious struggle.

“My idea was to, on the one hand, reconnect with a place that’s meaningful for Jews, with a Jewish population, but on the other hand work very much for an end to … I mean, we didn’t use those terms in those days; the ‘colonial thing’ … but an end to the occupation; to a just peace with the Palestinians; living together,” Halper told the GPM in a wide-ranging conversation at his West Jerusalem dining room table.

Before too long, Halper and others clued in to Israel’s modus operandis — the ruthless, systematic demolition of Palestinian homes.

In 1997, Halper and other peace activists formed ICAHD — The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions. With financial support from the EU, UN and various church groups, staff were hired and an office rented. They began meeting Palestinians, something the Israeli peace movement wasn’t accustomed to doing, but clearly had to happen.

The learning curve was steep. Halper and his comrades knew nothing about the situation Palestinians faced at the hands of the administrative entity charged with their deepening subjugation and oppression — the Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) — and trust needed to be built.

Palestinian home demolition had been the driving wheel of Israel’s settler-colonial project from the get-go.

Between the UN resolution partitioning Palestine in November 1947 and Israel’s May 1948 declaration of statehood, 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly driven from their homes. The destruction of over 500 Palestinian villages and urban areas, and the demolition  of over 50,000 homes, would follow.

Israel’s aim was clear: preventing Palestinians from returning.

Between Israel’s 1967 conquest of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza and today, another 60,000 Palestinian homes and building structures would be demolished. The homes of Palestinian-Israelis — Israeli citizens — weren’t spared. Now and then, demolition of their homes exceeded that of Palestinians in the occupied territories.

Demolished Palestinian home in Al-Walaja, south of Jerusalem (David Kattenburg)

And Israeli  domesticide doesn’t cease. Indeed, it accelerates.

In the seven months since Hamas’ daring incursion into southern Israel, the Israeli military has demolished over 300,000 Gazan homes — almost three-quarters of Gaza’s housing stock — killing an estimated 35,000, most of them women and children. Countless thousands of Gazans remain buried under the rubble of their humble homes.

Armed with US bombs and missiles, Israel demolishes Palestinian homes in an instant. Palestinian suffering and trauma will endure for generations. What’s its aim? Ethnic cleansing, genocide, and the consolidation of the settler-colonial regime it established in 1948, says Jeff Halper.

“You can’t do that without house demolitions,” Halper told the GPM in a wide-ranging conversation at his West Jerusalem kitchen table.

Jeff Halper is a founding member of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, and of the more recent One Democratic State Campaign. He’s also the author of a host of books, including An Israeli in Palestine (2010), War Against the People (2015), and Decolonizing Israel, Liberating Palestine: Zionism, Settler Colonialism and the Case for One Democratic State (2021).

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Jeff Halper (David Kattenburg)

Earth would do perfectly fine without people. Human beings are much less indifferent. Denied earth’s bounty, they’d be be nowhere. Nothing.

The bonding relationship begins with soil. From this most precious of substrates, food grows. And water springs, the sina qua non of life.

Equally precious are gifts that can’t be counted, measured or monetized: rootedness, memory, narrative, identity, belonging, heritage, tradition, continuity.

In the hands of those who covet land, Earth’s resources become weapons — vital resources to be denied, their indigenous stewards dispossessed, forcibly transferred, cleansed.

And replaced. Colonizers re-brand themselves as the land’s true, authentic and promised people.

This is the story of Palestine, its native inhabitants, and the colonizers who came from far away, claiming these lands as their own, a mere hundred years.

But, like Palestine’s gnarled olive trees — burned, chopped down and poisoned by the colonists and their military in the hundreds of thousands — Palestine’s native people are steadfast, and the final chapters of their struggle have yet to be written.

On a tiny patch of earth just south of Jerusalem, a pile of pages are being laid down and seeds sown by a Palestinian-American scholar/gardener/activist named Mazin Qumsiyeh and his green-thumbed, organizationally talented partner Jessie.

The Palestine Institute for Biodiversity & Sustainability, and Palestine Museum of Natural History, Mazin and Jessie call their enterprise.

Mazin and Jessie Qumsiyeh (David Kattenburg)

Clinging to the walls of a fertile valley beneath the city of Bethlehem, a half dozen kilometers south of Jerusalem, alienated from the holiest of Palestinian towns by walls, barbed wire and a string of mega-colonial settlements, boxed in by settler-only roads and militarized checkpoints, Jessie, Mazin and their friends are planting their native seeds, growing fruits and vegetables, raising chickens and rabbits and fish, offering up habitat for birds, insects and other wildlife. Rescuing their beloved landscape cruelly scarred by land thieves without true roots.

School kids and grown ups from up and down Palestine come to visit. So do international visitors and volunteers from far-off places. GPM correspondent David Kattenburg is one of them.

Listen to this report. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Thanks to Paul Tekenbroek for video production.

Seven months into Israel’s assault on Gaza, starvation in the besieged enclave is widespread. In north Gaza, famine is “projected and imminent.”

These are the latest findings of a UN-affiliated group of food security experts, released on March 18.

The Famine Review Committee based itself on something called the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or IPC system. According to IPC metrics, famine has begun when at least 20% of households face an extreme lack of food, at least 30% of children suffer from acute malnutrition, and two out of 10,000 are dying each day from starvation, or the interaction of malnutrition and disease.

The “famine threshold for acute food insecurity has already been far exceeded” in Gaza, accompanied by a “major acceleration of death and malnutrition,” the Committee declared.

Fifty-five percent of North Gaza households are currently experiencing catastrophic food insecurity, it said, a figure projected to rise to 70% by mid-July.

According to Al-Jazeera, 27 Gazans have died of hunger since Israel’s assault began, 23 of them children.

On a related matter, this past week, the Irish government announced that it will be intervening in South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, and that it will be calling on the UN’s top court to include forced starvation in its definition of genocide.

The GPM spoke about all this with Michael Fakhri, Special UN Rapporteur on the right to food. In a March 5 statement, Fakhri and five other UN experts declared that Israel has been “intentionally starving” Gaza.”

Michael Fakhri is a professor at the University of Oregon School of Law. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Unknown photographer. Please reveal yourself.

Speaking of genocide – the so-called crime of crimes; a crime against humanity under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court – a group of Canadian lawyers and legal scholars have submitted a letter to the Canadian government, demanding that it “take all actions within its power to prevent the commission of genocide in Gaza” – something they say the Trudeau government is not doing.

Specifically, the group is calling on Ottawa to halt arms sales to Israel, and Canada’s importation of Israeli arms and weapon systems.

It also wants Ottawa to suspend military cooperation with Israel, to ban the importation of products produced in Jewish settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, to impose sanctions on Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, his cabinet ministers and top military chiefs, to withdraw their ambassador, to prosecute individuals and groups recruiting Canadians to serve in the Israeli military, and to prohibit Canadian enlistment.

That’s just part of their list of demands, on behalf of three Palestinian-Canadians who’ve lost family members in Gaza. One of them has lost 74 members of his extended family in the course of Israel’s bombing campaign, soon to enter its seventh month.

The GPM spoke about the Demand for Action letter with two of its authors. Dimitri Lascaris is a private attorney, journalist and activist. Faisal Bhabha is an attorney with the Legal Centre for Palestine. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Thanks to Dan Weisenberger for his outstanding guitar instrumentals.

An astonishing fact:

In the 248 years since the United States of America became an independent republic, the US has only been at peace for about eleven.

The United States of War, you could call it. David Vine does. Vine, a Professor of Anthropology at American University, in Washington D.C. has recently completed the third in a trilogy of books about Washington’s fondness for permanent war – and about the role military bases play in its warfighting pursuits – across North America, at first; then around the world.

The United States of War – a Global History of America’s endless conflicts, from Columbus to the Islamic State, was published in 2020 by University of California Press.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

And listen to the GPM‘s complete conversation with David Vine here:

Speaking about tiny islands coveted, invaded by and oppressed by Washington and its Western allies, consider little Haiti.

Columbus landed in Haiti (then Hispaniola) on his first voyage in 1492. Haiti became a Spanish colony.

In 1697, Spain ceded Haiti to the French, who turned it into a slave colony, reaping tons of sugarcane and massive wealth for the freedom-loving French. In 1791, former slave Toussaint Louverture launched a revolt. His successor, Jean-Jacques Dessalines defeated Napoleon, declaring Haitian independence in 1804 – the second free republic in the Americas.

Clearly a threat to Haiti’s far larger and more powerful slave-based republic to the north. Throughout the 19th century, US gunboats invaded Haitian waters on numerous occasions, seeking access to Môle Saint-Nicholas, a protected harbor on Haiti’s northwest tip – the perfect place to establish a naval base and coaling station.

US troops occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934, protecting US corporate interests. Powerful US, French and Canadian corporations would take their place, reaping profits from Haitian natural resources and cheap labour, in alliance with local ‘white’ elites, and the dictatorial dynasty of Francois Duvalier and his son.

Baby Doc was deposed in 1986. Elected but compliant regimes followed, punctuated by popular governments that inevitably displeased France, the US – of course – and Canada.

Haiti’s current turmoil began in July 2021, following the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse. Moise’s successor, Ariel Henri, has now been booted out, in violent street campaigns led by heavily armed street gangs. Anti-imperialist, the most powerful Haitian gangster calls himself.

To learn more about all this, the GPM spoke with Yves Engler. Engler is a Montreal-based writer and political commentator, and the author of thirteen books. His latest, Canada’s Long Fight Against Democracy — co-written with Owen Schalk — documents Canada’s contribution to the ouster of over twenty elected governments around the world, including the popular Haitian government of Jean Bertrand Aristide.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Thanks to Dan Weisenberger for his fabulous guitar instrumentals.

Nothing like a huge bazaar. Who doesn’t love wandering through a crowded food market, or scouting out old vinyl or antiques in a packed convention hall, bursting with merchants and awesome deals.

How about an arms convention, merchants of death at every turn, hawking surface-to-air missiles, armored personnel carriers, speed boats bristling with guns, and killer drones of all sizes — for deadly prices?

That’s what the Doha International Maritime Defence Exhibition & Conference, or DIMDEX, offered up, earlier this month in the Qatari capital. DIMDEX describes itself as “a dynamic platform attended by key decision makers and industry leaders,” showcasing “state-of-the-art technologies and products,” “significant deals and partnerships.”

Merchants of death is what Dimitri Lascaris calls them. Lascaris – a Canadian lawyer, activist and journalist – is an intrepid follower of the arms industry. He attended DIMDEX, smart phone on a selfie-stick, videoing the scene, with colour commentary.

The GPM reached Dimitri somewhere in the Middle East. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

And go on Dimitri’s tour of the DIMDEX 24 here:

Imagine this scenario: A G20 summit is taking place near Quebec City. Protesters will be there. Among these, anti-capitalists vowing to disrupt the summit, exploiting the presence of international media to further their radical cause.

Wise to their aims, the Canadian Air Force launches an unmanned surveillance drone. Severe storms are on the horizon. The drone flies to the summit, through restricted airspace, under military and Air Traffic Control.

Loitering over the noisy protesters, the drone confirms there are no threats, but beams back lots of photos to National Defense controllers.

Here’s another scenario: The same drone takes off from a runway west of Kandahar, in Afghanistan. A High-Payoff Target has been spotted beside a road where an alliance convoy will soon be traveling, so the drone is armed with an AGM114 Hellfire Missile and a pair of 250-lb. GBU 48 laser-guided bombs.

Arriving at the scene, the drone spots three “fighting-aged males.” Zooming in, operators back in Canada spot disturbed earth nearby. Circling for a closer look, they spy a wire coming from a patch of disturbed earth, near the three, clearly suspicious suspects. One of them appears to be holding a radio or cell phone. Now it’s clear. He and is friends are clearly combatants, legal agencies and controllers conclude, authorizing the use of force and the immediate liquidation of the three men.

These two imaginary scenarios were contained in a Request for Proposals issued by the Canadian Department of National Defense back in 2016. Canada is in the market for a fleet of drones that can perform these tasks for real. Two weapons firms put in offers. Quebec-based L3-Harris produces Israeli-style Heron drones. The American one markets Predator 2.0. Since then, L3-Harris has reportedly pulled out of the competition.

The GPM spoke about Canada’s future drone fleet with Matt Korda. Korda is a Canadian researcher at the Federation of American Scientists, in Washington D.C. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Thanks to Dan Weisenberger for his fabulous guitar instrumentals.

Some time in the next six months, the International Court of Justice, in The Hague, will issue an advisory opinion on the legal consequences of Israel’s 57-year occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza.

The UN top court will be responding to a request from the UN General Assembly, asking it to determine whether Israel’s occupation is legal, and if not, what Israel’s obligations are under international law, and what the obligations of third states are to set things right.

If the top UN court does deem Israel’s occupation – its settlement enterprise certainly is – all UN member states would be obliged not to acknowledge the legal validity of Israel’s prolonged occupation, nor render it aid and assistance.

Peace Palace, seat of the International Court of Justice, The Hague

Arguably, no country bears greater historical responsibility for all this mess then Britain.

Still, with supreme richness, in late February, British lawyers (in lockstep with their American colleagues) urged the ICJ not to render an Advisory Opinion on Israel’s ceaseless occupation of Palestine, or if it did, not to go into all the history.

The UK has reason to make such a request.

As Mandatory Power in former Ottoman Palestine, under the League of Nations Covenant and Mandate system, following World War I, Britain was obliged to prepare Palestine’s people for independence. In a census carried out at the start of its Mandate, it determined that seventy-eight percent of Palestine’s people were Muslims, ten percent were Christian, and eleven percent were Jewish.

Rather than building independence for Palestine’s people, Britain proceeded to hand it over to European Jewish colonists. The rest is history.

The GPM spoke about all this, and the ICJ Advisory Opinion hearings, with Victor Kattan, Professor in Public International Law at the University of Nottingham School of Law, and author of the 2009 work From Coexistence to Conquest – International Law and the Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1891-1949.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Israel’s assault on Gaza is now into Day 156.

Ostensibly aimed at wiping out Hamas, Israeli leaders openly admitted from the start that they’re aim was to wipe out Gaza; slim its population down by 90 percent or so; driving Gazans into Egypt, or wherever. The sea, if need be.

Five and a half months in, Gazans are starving and sick.

All according to plan. Israeli war minister Yoav Gallant announced, at the get-go, that all food, water, electricity and medicine would be cut off from the ‘Jewish’ state’s sliver of a ghetto, already under comprehensive siege since 2007.

As Israel turns the screws on Gaza, it takes aim at an even older enemy – the single most important organization, on the ground in Gaza, providing Gazans what Israel doesn’t want them to have: food, schooling, and other social supports: the UN Relief and Works Agency, UNRWA.

At the end of January, Israel alleged, with a big splash, that twelve out UNRWA’s 13,000-strong staff in Gaza had joined Hamas in its October 7 assault. A hoary Israeli tactic that invariably works, for a while. Predictably, Western powers quickly suspended aid to the Gazan people’s only secure lifeline.

Since then, various media outlets and governments have concluded that Israel’s accusations are thin gruel. Essentially, baseless. Sweden and Canada have renewed funding to UNRWA — a decision Canadian ‘human rights’ organization and “staunch” Apartheid Israel “defender” B’Nai Brith Canada is now howling about..

Truth be told, Israel’s hate-on for UNRWA predates the emergence of Hamas by decades — back to UNRWA’s founding, in 1949, brainchild of Swedish diplomat Count Folke Bernadotte.

Count Folke Bernadotte

Bernadotte was the UN’s first mediator in Palestine, appointed days after Israel’s founding, on May 20, 1948.

On September 16, 1948, Bernadotte submitted his first plan.

Central to the Swedish diplomat’s vision – the Palestinian people’s inalienable right of return to lands they’d been brutally expelled from by Zionist militias, inside Israel.

And, in the interim, creating an agency to help Palestinian refugees out.

That organization would emerge as UNRWA.

Bernadotte didn’t live to see UNRWA’s foundation, in December 1949. One day after submitting his peace plan, on September 17, 1948, Count Folke Bernadotte was brutally assassinated by Zionist militias, led by future Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir.

The GPM spoke about Count Folke Bernadotte, and UNRWA, with former UNRWA spokesperson Chris Gunness, who has written about Bernadotte.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Thanks to Dan Weisenberger for his fabulous guitar instrumentals.

This past Friday, March 1, marked the 70th anniversary of the Bravo Shot, the first in a series of high-yield US thermonuclear tests in the Marshall Islands, just north of the equator, in the central Pacific.

The Pentagon carried out 67 nuclear tests in the Marshalls between 1946 and 1958 — 44 at Eniwetok Atoll, in the northern end of the chain, and 23 at Bikini Atoll.

Castle Bravo was the biggest, and a big experiment: a fission-fusion device fueled by lithium-deuteride, designed by the Hungarian and Polish nuclear physicists Edward Teller and Stanisław Ulam.

Bravo exceeded expectations. Rated at 6 megatons, it yielded fifteen. Thrilling news for nuclear scientists and the American military.

Bad news for the Marshallese people. Just north of Bikini, fallout rained down on the people of Rongelap and Utirik Atolls. Finer particulate fallout drifted up and down the Marshalls, and, through Earth’s stratosphere, all around the planet.

I visited the Marshalls on the fiftieth anniversary of Bravo, back in 2004; then again in 2007. Here are some voices from those trips. In order of appearance: American anthropologist and nuclear researcher Holly Barker (reached in the US); Rongelap residents (on the Day of Two Suns) Elio Boaz (living in Salt Lake City at the time of this conversation), and Lamayo Abon; Canadian nuclear health activist Rosalie Bertell (now passed away); the former chair of the Nuclear Claims Tribunal (set up to adjudicate nuclear claims), Jim Plasman; the Tribunal’s Public Defender Bill Graham (now passed away), and Rongelap Senator Abacca Anjain-Maddison.

Listen to these folks in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Old observation tower pad on Bikini Island (David Kattenburg)

The history of US nuclear weapons testing in the Marshalls Islands, its health, social and cultural impacts, and the drawn-out effort to get the US to pay full compensation to the Marshallese are complicated.

Having secured the Marshalls as a UN ‘Trust Territory’, between 1946 and 1958, the US achieved nuclear superpower status for itself by testing 67 fission and fusion devices there — above, at the surface and within the waters of Bikini and Eniwetok Atolls (talk about trust and good faith).

Although US government and other independent studies had/have shown that all of the Marshalls were exposed to radioactive fallout in the course of its testing program, US government compensation has always been limited to the residents of just four atolls, Rongelap and Utirik among them.

Under the terms of the first ‘Compact of Free Association’ agreement between the US and the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI), in 1983, the US provided $150 million to the RMI, in “full and final” compensation for damages done.

The RMI is one of three Pacific island states that have signed Compacts of Free Association with the US (the Federated States of Micronesia and Palau are the other two).

In return for exclusive access to its territorial waters, and the right to use Kwajalein Atoll as a bullseye for ICBMs fired from California and Alaska, Washington provides the RMI with defense and economic assistance — and ample supplies of canned, boxed and other ultra-processed foods.

Diabetes and heart disease kill far more Marshallese than lingering radioisotopes.

Under Section 177 of the US-RMI Compact, in 1988, a Nuclear Claims Tribunal (NCT) was established. Its mission: to render “final determination [of] all claims past, present and future, of the Government, citizens and nationals of the Marshall Islands which are based on, arise out of, or are in any way related to the [American] Nuclear Testing Program.”

Invested in secure instruments, the NCT’s 150 million allocation was supposed to generate interest. Instead, it suffered a crushing loss in the 1987-88 Black Monday stock market crash. By the time it ceased functioning in 2011, the NCT had adjudicated over $2 billion in personal injury, property loss, and class-action claims.

Shortly prior to the NCT’s folding, the RMI submitted a “Changed Circumstances” petition to the US Congress, asking for additional funding to pay out adjudicated claims. The petition was rejected.

Under the 1990 Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (amended in 2023), US government funding is provided to ‘Downwinders’ — Americans who lived downwind from the Nevada Test Site (where numerous nuclear weapons were also tested in the atmosphere) — as well as to American uranium miners and nuclear installation employees, and to US service personnel recruited to observe atomic blasts (those still alive).

Not to the Marshalls.

In January 2023, a new US-RMI Compact of Free Association was signed, allocating $2.3 billion to the Marshalls over 20 years (Israel receives about $4 billion every year), and $700 million for an RMI trust fund, associated with the RMI’s ‘Four-Atoll Program’.

On the 70th anniversary of the March 1, 1954 Bravo Shot, the GPM spoke with Giff Johnson, long-time resident of the Marshalls, and the editor of the Marshall Islands Journal.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Sunset over Bikini Island (David Kattenburg)

I visited Bikini Island back in 2007, in the course of a round-the-world trip. A very isolated spot.

Bikini Island lies across Bikini Atoll from the spot where Bravo lit up the morning sky, seventy years ago, on that infamous Day of Two Suns, excavating a huge hole in the atoll’s coral.

Bikini’s leaders ran a dive operation at the time. For a certain sum of money, tech-divers from around the world got to explore various mangled destroyers and aircraft carriers. Among these, the USS Arkansas, the Saratoga (affectionately referred to as ‘Sara’), and the flagship of the Japanese navy, all sent to the bottom of the atoll — along with lots of other small vessels — by US nuclear bombs of all sorts

We ended up stranded on Bikini for a week. Bikini Atoll Divers has since shut down.

Here’s a story from back then. Listen to it in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Thanks to Dan Weisenberger for his wonderful guitar instrumentals.

Israel and its allies moved heaven and Earth to prevent it from happening. This past week in The Hague, it did.

On Monday, February 19, in response to a late December request from the UN General Assembly for its authoritative legal opinion — a request Israel, the US and fifteen other states voted against — the UN’s supreme judicial body, the International Court of Justice, convened oral hearings on the status of Israel’s 57-year belligerent occupation of the Palestinian territories, under international law, and on the legal ‘consequences’ arising from Israel’s extraordinarily well documented, though unadjudicated crimes.

In other words, what Israel must do to set things right, and what the international community must do to ensure it does. ICJ hearings wrap up on the afternoon of Monday, February 26.

Here are a few voices from the proceedings:

Riyad Mansour is Palestine’s Ambassador to the United Nations. An emotional pleading to the court.

Some of the tiniest state delivered the most powerful presentations at the ICJ this past week. Little Belize topped the list. Assad Shoman, is special envoy of the Belizean Prime Minister, on sovereignty issues.

Philippa Webb is another member of Belize’s delegation. She’s a professor of international public law at King’s College London, and member of the bars of Belize, New York State, England and Wales.

And, one of the session’s most cogent presentations, from Ireland. Rossa Fanning is Ireland’s Attorney General.

Listen to these voices in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Qalandia checkpoint between Ramallah and Jerusalem.

Some like it hot – or get used to it. In Iceland, where volcanoes belch hot gases and volcanic cracks burst open, spewing thousand-degree magma across the landscape, volcanism is a way of life.

This past November, the town of Grindavík, population 3400, on Iceland’s Reykjanes peninsula, was evacuated as red hot magma — 1200-degree hot; that’s 2200 Fahrenheit — started pouring out of a nearby crack.

Iceland owes its very existence to this thick, super-heated fluid. The world’s 18th largest island is formed from magma, oozing out of a huge fissure on the bottom of the north Atlantic, where two of Earth’s largest tectonic plates originate, spreading apart from each other.

As they spread, magma rises, solidifying into basaltic rock and forming a ridge. Iceland, about the size of southern Britain, is perched on top that mid-Atlantic ridge. Sometimes it’s quiet – relatively speaking. Every few thousand years, things heat up. That’s what’s happening now.

To learn more about Iceland and its geology, I reached out to Freysteinn Sigmundsson, a geophysicist at the Nordic Volcanological Center, at the University of Iceland’s Institute of Earth Sciences, in Reykjavik.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Shawn O’Halloran at 2015 CD release party (Clive Baugh)

Shawn O’Halloran was a Canadian musician based in Hamilton, Ontario. Shawn passed away, in most untimely fashion, back in 2019. Among the dozen songs he wrote and performed for Earth Chronicle Productions, back in 1993, accompanied by percussionist Paul Panchezak — Tectonics. Thankfully, Paul Panchezak is still drumming away with Hamilton-based group Trickbag.

Listen to Shawn’s song about Earth tectonics in today’s podcast.  Click on the play button above, or go here.

Volcanic eruptions, ground fissuring and red hot magma creeping towards town can be a big nuisance, not to mention a deadly hazard. On the other hand, volcanism provides heat and electricity to Iceland’s 373,000 people, and also a Blue Lagoon to bathe in.

Near surface geology also provides an opportunity to store atmospheric carbon – permanently. There’s been lots of talk over the years about carbon storage and capture as a way to fight Earth warming: pumping CO2 into the ground; into porous rock or gas deposits. Climate activists see it as a scam. How long will that CO2 stay in subsurface deposits, before it seeps right back into the atmosphere again?

In Iceland, and other places where granitic rocks forms from magma, not far beneath Earth’s surface, scientists have been combining CO2 with water – carbonating it – then pumping that water deep down. Slowly, that CO2 becomes incorporated into carbonate rock.

I spoke about this, a few years ago, with Peter Kelemen, Arthur D. Storke Memorial Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University, in NYC, and a member of Columbia Climate School’s Lamont-Doherty Earth University.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Thanks to Dan Weisenberger for his fabulous guitar instrumentals.

We have heard it before – to avoid impending Earth crisis (if it isn’t too late), people need to change their eating habits. Those who have the choice, should opt to eat food grown or raised close to home. Unpackaged, unprocessed foods contain less embodied carbon.

Grilled Meat (David Kattenburg)

And, experts says, eat less meat. Takes lots of energy to grow meat. Livestock production generates lots of CO2 and methane, and “leaks” nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus into the environment.

Aside from all this, people who get to eat probably eat too much. So says Allan Buckwell, a British agricultural economist. Turning to a concept associated with Swedish Earth scientist Stefan Rockström, Buckwell co-authored a paper entitled What is the Safe Operating Space for EU livestock. Buckwell taught agricultural economics at Newcastle University and Wye College, in the UK. He was Policy Director of the Country Land and Business Association, and is currently Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for European Environmental Policy.

Listen to my conversation with Allan Buckwell. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Growing bacteria in a Winogradsky column (David Kattenburg)

Mention the word bacteria, some people recoil in horror. Truth be told, most prokaryotes are perfectly harmless, and even helpful. Better yet, bugs are fun to grow, observe, play with and harness for useful purposes – outside and inside your body. Listen to this story in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Silwan, East Jerusalem (David Kattenburg)

Jerusalem: the ‘eternal, undivided capital’ of what a growing number of credible observers call an apartheid state

Under the 2002 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, Apartheid is defined as “an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.”

In search of Israeli Apartheid, go no further than East Jerusalem. Home to 362,000 indigenous Palestinians and 234,000 Jewish settlers, transferred into East Jerusalem, across the Green Line, beyond Israel’s legal borders, in flagrant breach of international law. East Jerusalem’s Jewish settlers get all the breaks. The Palestinians get surveilled, humiliated, harassed, attacked, arrested and shot, no questions asked. Their homes get confiscated, or bulldozed. Israel’s aim – to get rid of them, boosting Jewish demographics.

I toured East Jerusalem with a chap named Shai Goren. Goren is a teacher and tour guide with the progressive Israeli group Ir Amin. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Thanks to Dan Weisenberger for his fabulous guitar instrumentals.

Remember the closing scene from Planet of the Apes? The first in the franchise? American astronaut George Taylor, played by Charleton Heston, trots on horseback down a lonely beach, accompanied by a female human buddy.

Suddenly, astronaut George spies an awful sight, something terribly familiar, poking out of the sand. This isn’t a far-off planet, it’s Planet Earth, Taylor’s home, long since destroyed by nuclear war, its proud structures now fossilized.

Without a doubt, that’s how all of Earth’s great cities will end up, millions of years from now, nuclear war or not. Mark Williams studies the future geology of Earth’s surface, when humanity in its present incarnation is long gone. Williams is a professor at the School of Geography, Geology and the Environment, at the University of Leicester, in the UK.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Mark Williams (David Kattenburg)

Their precise scientific name is a mouthful: per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. But you don’t want them in your mouth.

Hard to avoid. Forever chemicals are in adhesive tape; non-stick cookware; greasy food wrap; microwave popcorn bags. Lipstick! They don’t break down, they build up in your body, and they’re very bad for your health.

And, most people have them in their blood!

Here’s a bad news story about this. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Chemicals structures of PFOA, PFOS, HFPO-DA, and PFBS.

Of all the things that take place inside a healthy human body, none are more astonishing than pregnancy. Women’s bodies undergo enormous change in the course of nine months of pregnancy, all aimed at promoting fetal growth and development.

Even more astonishing, bacteria in a pregnant woman’s gut help steer the process. Deb Sloboda studies the role a woman’s gut microbiome plays in healthy pregnancy. Sloboda is a professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Biomedical Sciences, and an associate member of the Departments of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Pediatrics at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Marla Gross, Manitoba midwife

Thanks to Dan Weisenberger for his fabulous guitar instrumentals.

Israel’s high-flight lawyers may have thought they dodged a bullet at the International Court of Justice last Friday, in The Hague, when it ruled on South Africa’s application against Israel under the 1948 Genocide Convention.

Days after that ruling, the Israelis are not uncorking champagne.

In a virtually unanimous decision, on January 26, the UN’s supreme judicial body delivered the lion’s share of what South Africa had requested in its December 29 application to the court, accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza and asking the ICJ to take urgent action.

The core of South Africa’s request — that the ICJ issue a ‘provisional measures’ order, or injunction, instructing Israel to cease acts defined as genocidal under Article II of the Convention.

That’s precisely what the ICJ did. In so doing, an overwhelming majority of the court’s fifteen regular and two ad hoc judges acknowledged the plausibility of South Africa’s genocide charges.

Court President Joan Donoghue – a former U.S. State Department official — delivered a withering summary of the situation Gaza’s 2.3 million people face after sixteen weeks of unrelenting Israeli ultra-violence. In her 45-minute presentation to a packed chamber of attorneys and diplomats, Donoghue quoted a host of senior UN officials, human rights experts and the UN Secretary General himself, describing a situation in Gaza that looks, sounds and smells like genocide.

Listen to a portion of Judge Joan Donoghue’s presentation, reading out the court’s reasoning and its provisional measures order last Friday. Click on the podcast play button above, or go here.

Unknown photographer. Please reveal yourself.

Minutes after the International Court of Justice rendered its preliminary measures order in The Hague, this past Friday, we reached out to Canadian international law professor and genocide scholar William Schabas for his thoughts on the decision. Schabas is a professor of international law at Middlesex University and professor of international humanitarian law and human rights at Leiden University.

Listen to Schabas’ comments in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Peace Palace, seat of ICJ in The Hague

In search of further wisdom about last Friday’s ICJ ruling in South Africa v. Israel, the GPM reached out to Dimitri Lascaris, a lawyer, human rights activist and journalist based in Montreal and southern Greece. Listen to Lascaris’ comments in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Thanks to Dan Weisenberger for his fabulous guitar instrumentals.

It’s an astonishing fact:

In the 248 years since the United State of America became an independent state, the American republic has only been at peace for about eleven.

The United States of War, you could call it. David Vine does. Vine, a Professor of Anthropology at American University, in Washington D.C., has recently completed the third in a trilogy of books about permanent war as a US way of life, and about the role military bases play in Washington’s warfighting pursuits – across North America, at first, then around the world.

The United States of War – a Global History of America’s endless conflicts, from Columbus to the Islamic State, was published in 2020 by University of California Press.

The GPM spoke with David Vine. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Listen to our complete conversation here:

It’s a sobering, largely unappreciated truth:

Having dropped two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, eighty years ago, America would probably not have become the most powerful nation in the world had it not been for a string of atolls in the central Pacific, and the hospitable islanders who let it test its arsenal there.

The people of the Marshall Islands didn’t have much choice.

America tested its first bomb in July 1945, code named Trinity, in Alamogordo, New Mexico.

Two months later, it dropped its second and third bombs — Little Boy and Fat Man — on Japan.

A year after that, having secured the newly liberated Marshall Islands as a UN Trust Territory, with the fiduciary duty of helping the Marshallese people fulfill their inalienable right to self-determination, the US turned two of the Marshalls’ populated atolls into nuclear weapons testing sites.

The US set off ‘Able’ and ‘Baker’ at Bikini Atoll in July 1946. Twenty-one more tests followed, including the leviathan Bravo blast, on March 1, 1954. Forty-four nuclear weapons were tested at Eniwetok atoll, in the northern Marshalls.

Old observation tower pad on Bikini Island (David Kattenburg)

The Pentagon’s nuclear weapons testing program changed the Marshall Islands, and the lives of their people, forever.

Sixty-six years after the end of US nuclear weapons testing, Bikini is still contaminated, and has not been resettled.

Cancer rates in the Marshallese population are high. Unable to grow their own traditional subsistence foods, Marshallese residents eat packaged and canned foods shipped from the US. Diabetes and heart disease kill more of them than nuclear-related cancers. 

Still, the Marshallese people and their leaders are friendly to a fault — even warmhearted toward the Americans. Since 1986, the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) has maintained a ‘Compact of Free Association’ with the US. In exchange for favours of questionable value (chief among these, the right to reside in the US), the RMI faithfully votes the way Washington tells it to at the UN.

Kwajalein Atoll, in the central Marshalls, has been a US ballistic missile and missile defense site for years. Since the early 1960s, the US has been firing nuclear-capable missiles at it from California and Alaska.

Last October, the US-RMI Compact of Free Association was renewed for another twenty years.

In the words of a US State Department media note, the Compact confirms a “special relationship that is deep and enduring, and that furthers the U.S. commitment to a Pacific that is secure, free and open, and more prosperous.”

Since the end of US nuclear weapons testing in 1958, the U.S. has provided the Marshalls about $600 million in cleanup, resettlement and health payments. The Marshalls claims about $3 billion.

Listen to a story about all this in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Bikini Island at sunset (David Kattenburg)

Thanks to Dan Weisenberger for his superb guitar instrumentals.

On January 11 and 12 in The Hague, the international community’s highest judicial body, the International Court of Justice, heard arguments for and against the proposition that Israel is committing genocide in its war on Gaza.

South Africa is asking the court to issue an injunction bringing Israel’s genocidal war to a halt. A provisional measures order, this would be called.

In an 84-page submission to the ICJ, lawyers for South Africa argue that Israel’s assault on Gaza matches the definition of genocide set forth in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The ICJ will take years to adjudicate the merits of South Africa’s claims. That provisional measures order will be issued in the next few weeks.

The court’s response to South Africa’s application turns largely on one question: Are Israeli political and military leaders “deliberately inflicting … conditions of life calculated to bring about [the] physical destruction [of the Gazan people], in whole or in part,” as genocide is defined under the Convention?

It’s a tough question. Nothing harder than proving genocidal intent among those in charge of the killing.

One thing is clear: genocidal rhetoric permeates the Israeli government, military and society, from the top down.

Listen to South African attorneys Adila Hassim and Tembeka Ngcukaitobi, then Irish attorney Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh, arguing South Africa’s case before the 15 regular and two ad hoc judges of the International Court of Justice on the first day of court hearings, January 11, 2024.

Click on the play button above, or go here.

Listen to Adila Hassim, Tembeka Ngcukaitobi and Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh’s complete presentations to the ICJ here:

Genocide – the “crime of crimes,” but a tough one to prove. Genocide verdicts have been issued by special criminal tribunals and the ICJ, in cases involving the 1994 Rwandan genocide, the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, committed by Serbian militias against 8000 Bosnian men and boys, and Myanmar.

Israel will be much harder to nail. Unlike Rwandan Hutu, Serbian and Myanmar military chiefs, Israel has fast friends in Washington, Ottawa, London, Brussels and Berlin.

I spoke about South Africa’s genocide case against Israel with a leading genocide scholar. William Schabas is a professor of international law at Middlesex University in the UK, and professor of international humanitarian law and human rights at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the  play button above, or go here.

William Schabas

Thanks to Dan Weisenberger for his wonderful guitar instrumentals.

This coming Thursday and Friday, the international community’s highest judicial body, the International Court of Justice, will be hearing arguments for and against the proposition that Israel is committing genocide in its war on Gaza.

That proposition has been put forward by the Republic of South Africa. In an 84-page submission to the ICJ, lawyers for South Africa argue that Israel’s assault on Gaza matches the definition of genocide set forth in the 1949 Genocide Convention.

International Court of Justice, Den Haag

The ICJ could take years to adjudicate South Africa’s claim. In the meantime, South Africa has asked the court to issue an injunction, calling on Israel to halt its assault on Gaza.

The court’s decision turns largely on one question: Are Israeli political and military leaders “deliberately inflicting … conditions of life calculated to bring about [the] physical destruction [of the Gazan people], in whole or in part,” as genocide is defined?

It’s a tough question. Nothing harder than proving genocidal intent, among those directly involved in killing.

One thing is clear. Genocidal rhetoric permeates Israeli society. In a December 28 letter to Israel’s Attorney General and state prosecutors, fifteen prominent Israeli figures document “extensive and blatant incitement to genocide, expulsion, and ethnic cleansing by Israeli politicians, media commentators, activists and social influencers, and the absolute silence of the judicial system.

Israeli human rights attorney Michael Sfard represented the authors of the letter. Listen to our conversation in today’s GPM podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

UNOCHA/Samar Elouf

Wars are easy to start, and supposedly hard to stop.

In truth, halting bloody conflicts is easy, if the world’s most powerful nations resolve to do it.

Take Israel’s war on Gaza, now into its fourth month. If the US demanded that the violence stop, immediately, it would.

Israel has now killed over 22,000 Gazans, including almost 8000 children. Another 8000 are missing and presumed dead under the rubble. Fifty-five thousand have been injured. Over 355,000 homes have been destroyed — two-thirds of Gaza’s housing stock.

So have bakeries, schools, universities, businesses, mosques, churches, cemeteries, cultural sites, municipal buildings, critical infrastructure and most of Gaza’s hospitals.

How to halt Israeli bloodshed? A sharply worded order by the world’s highest court will not do it. An international enforcement operation under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, issued by the UN Security Council, almost certainly would.

Pure fantasy. The Council can’t even call for a ceasefire. The US won’t allow it.

There is an alternative: the Uniting for Peace Resolution, codified by the UN General Assembly in 1951. By a two-thirds vote of the General Assembly, the Resolution could be re-invoked in response to Israel’s war on Gaza.

To learn more about Chapter VII and the Uniting for Peace Resolution, the GPM spoke with Ardi Imseis. Imseis is Assistant Professor of Law at Queen’s University, in Ontario. Between 2002 and 2014, Imseis served in senior legal and policy capacities with UNRWA in the occupied Palestinian territory. His scholarship has appeared in the American Journal of International Law, the Harvard International Law Journal, and the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies.

Imseis’s latest book — The United Nations and the Question of Palestine — has just been published by Cambridge University Press.

Listen to our conversation in today’s GPM podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Back in the early 2000s, Dutch chemist Paul Crützen suggested that humans have pushed Planet Earth into a brand new age, terminating the one geologists say we’ve been in for the past 12,000 years, the Holocene. The Anthropocene, Crützen called his proposed, human-engineered Epoch.

This past spring, a scientific panel presented its own proposal for how the Anthropocene should be defined. That proposal is now being considered by its parent body, a subcommission of the International Commission on Stratigraphy. If it approves, the proposal will move up the geo-bureaucratic hierarchy, ultimately to the arbiter of all matters geological, the International Union of Geological Sciences.

Martin Head is a geologist at Canada’s Brock University. He’s been involved in all this from the start. Last Spring, Martin Head spoke about the Anthropocene to an audience at Leiden University, in the Netherlands. If the Anthropocene is accepted as a new geological Epoch, Head said, it’ll only be 72 years-old. Head invited his listeners to gaze into the future.

Listen to excerpts from Martin Head’s talk in today’s GPM podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Thanks to Dan Weisenberger for his fabulous guitar instrumentals.

Eighty days have passed since the deadly events of October 7. Israel’s retaliatory assault – Operation Iron Swords – has been way deadlier.

Eighty days into its bombing campaign – likened to the savage bombardment of Dresden, Cologne and Hamburg – Israel has dropped an estimated 25,000 tonnes of ordnance on the tiny enclave, among the most densely populated in the world, already crippled by eighteen years of Israeli siege.

Among Israel’s 22,000 targets, hundreds of residential buildings. “Power targets,” the Israelis call these.

Huge casualty numbers. Over 20,000 dead, half of them children and infants. Countless more are buried under the rubble. Fifty-three thousand Gazans have been injured, and 1.9 million displaced, cold, starving and ill.

Sound brutal? You bet. Also very intelligent.

Israel has an artificially intelligent targeting system. The Gospel, it’s called. Pioneers in mass surveillance, Israeli intelligence units have oceans of terabytes to feed it: countless hours of drone and satellite footage; intercepted communications; cell phone metadata; personal details up the yin-yang. Gospel spits out targets like there’s no tomorrow, from fifty a year to 100 a day.

It even calculates collateral damage! ““Nothing happens by accident,” an IDF source told Israeli journalists. When a 3-year-old girl is killed … it’s because someone decided it wasn’t a big deal; a price worth paying in order to hit someone else.

To learn more about AI-based warfighting systems like Israel’s Orwellianly-named Gospel, and their sinister connection to social media and domestic policing, the GPM traveled to Utrecht, the Netherlands, home base for the Realities of Algorithmic Warfare project.

The GPM spoke with three of the project’s staff: Lauren Gould is Assistant Professor of conflict studies at Utrecht University. Jessica Dorsey is Assistant Professor of International and European Law and a member of the Open-Source Global Justice Investigations Lab. She’s also the chair of the Dutch Airwars Foundation. Dennis Jansen is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Media and Culture Studies, with an interest ‘ludification’ – playfulness – among Dutch military innovators.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Destruction in Gaza

Israel’s AI-based targeting system spares nothing and no one. Missile strikes and two-thousand-pound bombs reduce mosques and churches to rubble, along with fishing boats, journalists’ headquarters and cultural centers.

All perfectly legitimate targets, the Israeli military says. Their AI systems told them so.

Over in the West Bank, five minutes from Gaza, on the wings of an F-35, boots on the ground do the door-smashing.

On the night of December 12, in the besieged city of Jenin, IDF troops broke into the renowned Freedom Theater, ransacking and vandalizing its rooms and stage (as Israeli soldiers are wont to do), before moving on to the homes of the theater/cultural center’s extensively surveilled directors.

Ahmed Tobasi was released the next day. General Manager Mustafa Sheta remains in detention, reportedly in Megiddo, in northern Israel, where most of Israel’s 8000 political prisoners are held.

Under Article 76 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, occupying powers like Israel are required to detain prisoners inside occupied territory. Israel routinely flouts the Convention, with complete impunity.

I spoke with Mustafa Sheta last July. He will reportedly face a military court in the coming days. His chances of acquittal are virtually nil. The charges he faces are unknown. Such is the nature of Israeli military justice in occupied Palestine.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Mustafa Sheta (courtesy Jaashar Ashtiyeh/AFP)

Thanks to Dan Weisenberger for his great instrumentals.

The world’s largest source of untapped energy … What comes to mind? Remaining oil/gas reserves? How about clean wind and solar?

In fact, it’s the world’s oceans. Huge volumes of energy are stored in ocean waves, tides and surface heat.

Then there’s salt gradient energy. Wherever fresh river water flows into salty seas, salt ions can be directed across a stack of plastic membranes, generating electricity. Salinity gradient or ‘Blue’ energy, it’s called.

Here’s a story about that. Listen to today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

In order of appearance, you’ll hear ocean energy innovators and promoters from REDstack, Magallanes Renovables, CorPower Ocean, Eco Wave Dynamis, Ocean Energy Europe and Symphony Wave Power.

REDstack’s Rik Siebers shows how salinity gradient energy works (David Kattenburg)

Human emission of CO2 and other long-lived greenhouse gases has warmed Earth’s surface temperature by about 1.1 degrees, relative to the 1850-1900 time frame, at a rate of about three tenths of a degree per decade since 1980. That rate is steadily rising.

As Earth’s surface warms, thermal expansion of oceans and melting ice sheets have raised sea levels by two tenths of a meter. That rate is rising too. Slow and steady?

Think again. In a recent report, a team of scientists warn about tipping points — points of inflection where the pace of Earth warming and destruction of Earth’s living fabric become non-linear and irreversible, and where Earth systems start shifting to new, potentially dangerous states.

The report identifies twenty-five tipping points. Five major ones may already have been transgressed. More may soon be tripped. If they are, a cascade of responses would likely reverberate across Earth’s tightly coupled climate system and biosphere. Countless others would race through globalized human economies and societies.

As if all this weren’t scary enough, “there is no adequate global governance at the scale of the threats posed by negative tipping points,” the report’s authors warn. Manjana Milkoreit is one of them. Milkoreit is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oslo, and lead author of Chapter Three of the first Global Tipping Points Report.

Listen to our conversation with Manjana Milkoreit in today’s edition of the GPM podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Listen to our complete conversation about the Global Tipping Points report here:

Courtesy McKay et. al., Science Magazine.

Everyone loves a good joke. Here’s one for you:

What’s the difference between the State of Nebraska and the State of Israel? See if you can guess, after listening to the collage of voices in today’s podcast, captured from the proceedings of the Armed Services Committee of the US Senate, back in February 2013.

Barack Obama had tapped Chuck Hagel for the post of Secretary of Defense, a nomination the Committee needed to confirm. Hagel, formerly a Senator for the state of Nebraska, was not popular among Republicans, and they’d come with a shopping list of angry complaints.

Hagel had compared the Iraq war to Vietnam. Israel’s 2006 war on Lebanon, he’d said, was a “sickening slaughter.” In a Senate resolution sanctioning Iran, Hagel had voted no. And, Hagel had refused to sign a letter to the European Union calling on the EU to declare Hezbollah a “terrorist organization.”

Most egregiously, Hagel once told an interviewer “I’m not an Israeli senator. I’m a United States senator.”

Chuck Hagel

The Armed Services Committee ended up approving Hagel’s nomination by a vote of 14–11, short of the two-thirds vote needed to end debate. So, on February 26, 2013, in full session, the US Senate ordered cloture, and then confirmed Hagel’s nomination to America’s top war-fighting post, along partisan lines. Hagel took office on February 27, 2013, and would serve until 2015.

Listen to the audio collage in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

The answer to our joke is at the end.

Thanks to Dan Weisenberger for his brilliant guitar instrumentals.

Today, Sunday, December 10, is the 75th anniversary of the international community’s most canonical human rights statement – the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Promulgated by the UN General Assembly on December 10, 1948 – in the wake of the horrors of World War II – the Declaration sets forth what its drafters considered the most basic rights all people should enjoy, regardless of race, religious creed or nationality. The Magna Carta of Human Rights, Eleanor Roosevelt called it.

Canadian John Peter Humphrey, author of Declaration’s first draft, and Eleanor Roosevelt, chair of the Declaration’s drafting committee.

The GPM spoke about the Universal Declaration with Rhoda Howard-Hassmann. Hassmann is a Canadian social scientist specializing in international human rights. From 2003 to 2016, she held the Canada Research Chair in International Human Rights at Wilfrid Laurier University, in Waterloo, Ontario. In June 2023, Hassmann was appointed to the Order of Canada. In November 2023, she was appointed a Member of the Order of Ontario, and has been a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada since 1993.

Hassmann has written and co-edited various books. Among these: State Food Crimes, The Human Right to Citizenship, Can Globalization Promote Human Rights, Reparations to Africa, The Age of Apology and In Defense of Universal Human Rights.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Listen to our complete conversation here:

According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, everyone has the right to life, liberty and personal security. No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest or detention, it says, or to degrading treatment, punishment or torture. All people are equal before the law, presumed innocent until proven guilty, with the right to be well defended in a public trial.

In the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories, these rights are routinely and systematically denied.

Since the start of Israel’s belligerent occupation, 55 years ago, the Israeli military has jailed an estimated million Palestinians – typically inside 1948 Israel, in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention (Article 76) — often without charge or trial.

Israel’s Palestinian prisoners are routinely abused, denied food and medical treatment, and tortured.

Hundreds of youths and children are detained and jailed each year.

Palestinian youth detained at a Hebron checkpoint.

The GPM spoke about Israel’s carceral system with Milena Ansari, back in the summer of 2022. Ansari is international advocacy officer with the Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, a Palestinian NGO based in Ramallah, occupied Palestine.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Thanks to Dan Weisenberger for his wonderful guitar instrumentals.

Few things in life are more precious than a good night’s sleep. Six or seven hours of shuteye, punctuated by brief visits to the loo.

Better yet, sleep bursting with pleasant dreams.

Microsleeping in the middle of an important meeting, or behind the wheel of your car, is an entirely different story. This past week, scientists reported that nesting chinstrap penguins do just that, nodding off for a few seconds, ten thousand times every day, while keeping a wakeful eye on their nestlings.

The GPM spoke about the human form of this most cherished and mysterious activities with Brian Murray. Murray is a sleep neurologist at Sunnybrook Hospital and Research Institute, in Toronto.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Dar es Salaam (David Kattenburg)

Dar es Salaam — Tanzania’s largest city and Africa’s fourth largest port, on the edge of the Indian Ocean — is a funky town.

It also gets rainy. For the past few months, under the dual influence of El Niño, originating in the Pacific, and the Indian Ocean Dipole, Dar has been experiencing heavy rains and flooding.

Stuck in your own car, or packed into a daladala minibus on a muddy road, creeping from one side of Dar to another, can be a tiring challenge.

No one knows better than one of the GPM’s oldest friends, Josephat Mwanzi. Mwanzi is a journalist and radio trainer based in Dar es Salaam. I reached Josephat at home, on the edge of Tanzania’s City of Peace.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Each year, fossil fuel burning sends 37 billion metric tons of CO2 into Earth’s atmosphere.

A little over a tenth of those emissions – 4.1 billion tons – are associated with heating air and water in houses and buildings. So, clean ways to generate heat are in … hot demand.

Low energy pumps transfer heat from air to water and air to air. Then there’s geothermal – piping water from beneath Earth’s surface, where water approaches boiling temperature.

At the Technical University of Delft, in the Netherlands, two pipes are now being bored two and a half kilometers down. A ‘doublet’, these are called. Seventy-five degree C. water filled with natural gas will be pumped up, the gas will be tapped, and the hot water will be used to heat campus buildings.

Slightly cooler now — 50 degrees C. – that water will be sent through a grid to about 10,000 surrounding Delft homes, then pumped back down into the Earth again. Total output: 8 megawatts of thermal energy.

There are about twenty geothermal doublets around the Netherlands today. That could expand to seventy-five by 2025, and up to 700 by 2050, at which point the Netherlands aims to be CO2 emissions-free.

I spoke about the Delft Geothermal Heat Project with Hemmo Abels, a geologist at the Technical University of Delft.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Hemmo Abels (David Kattenburg)

Thanks to Dan Weisenberger for  his fabulous guitar instrumentals.

It was a convoluted but portentous American declaration:

“The occasion has been judged proper for asserting, as a principle in which the rights and interests of the United States are involved, that the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers … we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety.”

And, to be clear:

“… with the Governments who have declared their independence and maintained it, and whose independence we have, on great consideration and on just principles, acknowledged, we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling in any other manner their destiny — by any European power — in any other light than as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States.”

You guessed it. The Monroe Doctrine. Drafted by US Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, enunciated by President James Monroe in his 7th State of the Union Address to the US Congress, in 1823, its original inspiration was anti-imperial — French meddling in the Americas in mind. Too weak to enforce it, young America turned to the British.

As US power grew, Monroe’s doctrine came into its own, constantly reinventing itself, or getting reinvented by shrewd American statesmen. From the 1840s till the Cold War, it would be the source code for a host of foreign policies aimed at projecting American power and influence up and down the Americas and across the Pacific.

And inspiration for a host of catchy rallying cries: Manifest Destiny; “Speak softly and carry a big stick“; The Big Brother Policy; America’s Backyard.

What was the Monroe Doctrine all about? The GPM reached out to Jay Sexton. Sexton is Kinder Institute Chair in Constitutional Democracy and Professor of History at the University of Missouri, and author of the 2011 book The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-Century America.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Or listen here:

It’s one of the greatest festivals in the world, centering around one of the world’s greatest natural wonders.

This past weekend, Cambodians celebrated Bon Om Touk – the Water Festival. Lots and lots of colourful boats, racing up and down the Mekong and Tonle Sap rivers, putting on a show. Monsoon rains are over, and it’s time to catch lots of fish.

Cambodia’s Water Festival has been six months in the making. Flash back to May, when those monsoon rains began falling across the lower Mekong basin. The lower Mekong normally flows south, into the South China Sea. As rains reach their peak, The Mekong swells, slows down and begins flowing north.

Cambodian village in the middle of the mangroves (David Kattenburg)

In the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh, the Lower Mekong joins the Bassac river, and their engorged waters split. To the northeast, the Upper Mekong continues up to Laos. To the northwest, the Tonle Sap river flows up to the Tonle Sap, southeast Asia’s largest inland lake.

In the dry season, the Tonle Sap is shallow. Adjoining wetlands are prime fish spawning grounds. At the end of the rainy season, in November, those waters are ten times deeper, and the lake begins flushing out. Down in Phnom Penh, it’s time to catch and eat fish.

Listen to this story in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Thanks to Dan Weisenberger for his wonderful guitar instrumentals.

Hamas, its leaders and armed militants are alien to Gaza and its people. They’ve parachuted in from some other place and are hiding out in the civilian population — criminally and cynically — using ordinary, innocent Gazans as human shields.

Such is the wisdom of the highest authorities. People like Joe Biden and top European diplomats.

Ilan Pappe sees things differently. In his groundbreaking 2006 work, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, the Israeli-British historian described how Gaza’s people ended up in the tiny enclave — driven from their ancestral lands by Zionist militias in the course of Israel’s founding.

Ilan Pappe is an Israeli-British historian and political scientist, and professor with the College of Social Sciences and International Studies at the University of Exeter in the UK. He’s also the director of Exeter’s European Centre for Palestine Studies, and co-director of the Exeter Centre for Ethno-Political Studies.

The GPM reached Ilan Pappe in Exeter, England, shortly after last week’s huge demonstrations in London.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Listen to our complete conversation here:

Collective punishment; denying food, water, electricity, fuel and medicine to a civilian population while waging war on them; targeting hospitals, ambulances, medical workers, schools and residential buildings; forcible transfer; telling civilians to flee, then bombing them (perfidy).

These are unlawful acts under international humanitarian law, and the customary laws of war. In other words, war crimes.

Under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, apartheid and genocide are crimes against humanity.

Is Israel guilty of these crimes? If so, will the political and military leaders who directed them be held to account?

Time will tell.

The GPM spoke about all this with Toby Cadman. Cadman is a barrister with Guernica 37 International Justice Chambers, and Associate Counsel to the Guernica for International Justice group, in London.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Listen to our complete conversation here:

Thanks to Dan Weisenberger for his inspired guitar instrumentals.

Imagine this scenario:

A G20 summit is taking place near Quebec City. Protesters will be there. Among these, “anti-capitalists” vowing to disrupt the gathering, exploiting the presence of international media to further their radical cause.

Wise to their aims, the Canadian Air Force launches an unmanned surveillance drone that can carry weapons, but in this instance does not.

Severe storms looming on the horizon, the drone flies to the summit, through restricted airspace, under military and civilian air traffic control. It arrives on site, loiters over the noisy protesters for a while, confirming that there are no threats, but beaming back lots of photos to National Defense controllers, who place these images on file.

Here’s another scenario:

The same drone takes off from a runway west of Kandahar, in Afghanistan. A “High-Payoff Target” has been spotted beside a road where an alliance convoy will soon be traveling, so, this time, the drone has been armed with an AGM114 Hellfire Missile and a pair of 250-lb. GBU 48 laser-guided bombs.

Arriving at the scene of the potential threat, the drone spots three “Fighting Aged Males.” Zooming in with joy sticks, operators back in Canada spot a patch of disturbed earth near the three males. Circling for a closer look, they notice a wire emerging from the soil. One of the males appears to be holding a radio or cell phone.

He and is friends are clearly combatants, legal agencies and controllers conclude. They authorize the use of force and the three men are blown to bits. Mission accomplished. Safety has been restored.

These two imaginary scenarios were contained in annexes to a Request for Proposals issued by the Canadian Department of National Defense back in 2016. Canada, as it happens, is in the market for a fleet of drones that can perform these tasks for real.

Two weapons firms responded to the Canadian government request. Quebec-based L3Harris produces Israeli-style Heron drones. The American one, General Atomics, markets the MQ-9B SkyGuardian, a follow-up to the MQ-9A Reaper drone.

The GPM spoke about Canada’s putative future drone fleet with Matt Korda. Korda is a Canadian researcher at the Federation of American Scientists, in Washington D.C.

Listen to our discussion in today’s podcast. Click the play button on top, or go here.

Vladimir Putin at Valdai Discussion Club

In times of war, truth is the first casualty. So said the ancient Greek tragedian, Aeschylus.

In Western democracies, “it is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies.” Noam Chomsky said that.

The GPM sat down for a lengthy discussion about truth and lies in times of war with two of its favourite guests. Radhika Desai is Professor in the Department of Political Studies and Director of the Geopolitical Economy Research Group at the University of Manitoba. Dimitri Lascaris is a lawyer, journalist and activist based in Montreal – and Greece.

Listen to our discussion in today’s podcast. Click the play button on top, or go here.

Listen to the GPM‘s complete conversation with Radhika Desai and Dimitri Lascaris here:

Thanks to Dan Weisenberger for his fabulous guitar instrumentals.

The cruel events of October 7 are almost a month gone now.

Over 1400 Israelis were brutally killed by armed militants dashing through or paragliding over the fortified, seemingly unbreachable perimeter of their open-air prison.

Thirty days later, retaliatory Israeli bombardment has reduced Gaza to rubble, and killed many. According to Gaza Health Authorities, Israeli bombs and missiles have killed almost ten thousand Gazans, including 4000 children.

Twenty-five thousand have been injured, some critically.

With half of Gaza’s housing stock severely damaged or destroyed, a million and a half are now refugees. No place is safe. Civilians fleeing south, as Israel told them to, are getting bombed. This past week, an airstrike left Gaza’s central road littered with bloodied bodies, many of them children.

UN schools, mosques and churches have been targeted too. So have ambulances and about a dozen hospitals, including a pair of pediatric clinics in Jabaliya refugee camp. Fifteen were killed in a strike on Al-Fakhoura school.

Here’s the most recent World Health Organization report on health care attacks in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

These were all legitimate targets, Israel says. Hamas tunnels are underneath.

Meanwhile, in Ramallah, seat of the US/Israeli-backed Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, now in the eighteenth year of his four-year presidential term, has had little to say to his own people. He’d rather sit down with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who opposes a halt in violence and defends Israel entirely.

I spoke about October 7, Israel’s subsequent war on Gaza and status of Palestinian leadership with Fathi Nimer. Nimer is a Palestine policy fellow at the Al-Shabaka Palestinian Policy Network.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Listen to our complete conversation here:

As Israel’s Gaza assault reaches genocidal proportions, over in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, a dozen Palestinians have been killed by armed Jewish settlers, some of them off-duty soldiers.

Among these, an olive farmer named Bilal Saleh, from the village of Al-Sawiya, near Nablus, reportedly shot in the chest last week while picking olives.

Jewish settlers attack and kill Palestinians with impunity. Israeli human rights organization Yesh Din reports 1600 acts of settler violence against Palestinians and destruction of their property between 2005 and 2022. Three percent of these alleged crimes lead to convictions.

Many of them took place in the presence of Israeli soldiers, or with their assistance. Many Israeli soldiers are settlers, and vice versa. In and out of uniform, soldiers and settlers work hand in hand.

To learn more about settler-soldier collusion and the ethnic cleansing of Bedouin communities, the GPM spoke with Dror Sadot, spokesperson for the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Listen to our complete conversation here:

Thirty days into Israel’s war on Gaza, the long-besieged enclave in rubble, nearly half of its people homeless, almost ten thousand dead and no end in sight, observers cry genocide.

So do Israeli leaders. Gaza should be nuked, at least one has suggested.

Genocide is an ancient Jewish tradition, Benjamin Netanyahu told IDF troops, in an open letter last week. “This is a war between the children of light and the children of darkness,” the Prime Minister wrote. “Remember what Amalek did to you.”

For those not up on their Bible, the Amalekites come up in 1 Samuel 15:

“This is what the Lord Almighty says: ‘I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel … Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.’”

Israeli Air force and ground troops seem to be heeding the Biblical injunction. In a recent editorial in the British Medical Journal, a half dozen physicians and public health experts deplore the “litany of atrocious” Israeli attacks, including the use of white phosphorus.

“Violence in Palestine demands immediate resolution of its settler colonial root causes,” their piece is called. The GPM spoke with its lead author. James Smith is a physician and public health scholar in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at University College London.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Thanks to Dan Weisenberger for his beautiful guitar instrumentals.

Humanity has never faced a more monumental challenge.

After two centuries of burning fossil carbon, trashing the atmosphere, pushing Earth systems to the brink of collapse, industrial societies desperately need to develop other sources of energy that are renewable and clean — and quickly. The prospects are frightening.

But climate angst has an antidote: tested, renewable technologies of all sorts. Wind and solar come immediately to mind.

There’s another vast energy storehouse on half the world’s doorstep — Earth’s oceans. Covering three quarters of the planet’s surface, they store colossal volumes of heat, that can be tapped.

So can the energy from ocean waves and tides. This past week, in the Dutch capital of Den Haag, several hundred entrepreneurs and engineers came together to showcase innovative devices for doing just that, at the annual gathering of Ocean Energy Europe.

Listen to some voices I gathered in today’s podcast. In order of appearance: Alejandro Marques de Magallanes Crespo (Magallanes Renovables), Eunice Silva (CorPower Ocean) and Mike Robinson (PPI Engineering).

Click on the play button above, or go here.

Alejandro Marques de Magallanes Crespo, CEO of Magallanes Renovables (David Kattenburg)

Talking about the energy of ocean tides — rising and falling like clockwork under the influence of the moon — no better place to tap this huge resource than the Shetland Islands, on the northern tip of Scotland, and in the Bay of Fundy, between Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, in eastern Canada, with the highest tides in the world.

That’s what a company called Nova Innovation is doing. Simon Forrest is founder and CEO. In a quiet spot on the margins of last week’s Ocean Energy Europe conference, in The Hague, Simon and I sat down for a chat.

Listen to our conversation. Click on the podcast play button above, or go here.

Petit Passage, on the Bay of Fundy, where a Nova turbine will soon generate tidal energy

Conferences are fun. Lots of interesting people to meet and sessions to attend.

Better still, heading out into the field. Especially if it’s North Holland. That’s where I went, this past Friday, on a bus trip organized by the Dutch Energy From Water Association, together with forty ocean energy innovators from around the world.

Our first stop: Den Helder, at the manufacturing facility of Symphony Wave Power, to see their wave energy demonstrator. Fred Gardner is Symphony’s founder.

Listen to Fred Gardner. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Fred Gardner, CEO of Symphony Wave Power, shows his wave energy converter (David Kattenburg)

Of all the forms of energy readily available to coastal communities around the world, none is more intriguing than salt.

To be more precise, salt gradients. Wherever fresh river water flows into salty ocean, that freshwater gets infused with sodium, calcium, chloride and sulfate ions, and salt gradients form.

Make this happen across a plastic membrane, under controlled conditions, and a voltage is generated. That voltage can be used to generate electricity. Reverse electrodialysis, it’s called.

No better place to see this in action – indeed, the only place in the world – than the Afsluitdijk.

Afsluitdijk

Check it out on a map. It’s that long highway, built on a dike between the Dutch provinces of North Holland and Friesland, separating the freshwater Ijsselmeer from the salty Waddenzee.

Right in the middle of the Afsluitdijk, a company called REDstack is bringing fresh and saltwater together, and putting electricity into the Dutch grid. RED stands for Reverse Electrodialysis.

REDstack electrodialysis membrane stack (David Kattenburg)

Listen to audio from our trip to the REDstack facility. The first voice you’ll hear is Peter Scheijgrond, Chairman of the Dutch Energy From Water Association, our tour leader this past Friday. Then Rik Siebers, REDstack’s Managing Director, and Michael van Oostrom, Head of Market Development.

Click on the play button above, or go here.

REDstack Managing Director Rik Siebers makes ions flow and a little propeller spin (David Kattenburg)

Thanks to Dan Weisenberger for his salty guitar instrumentals.

Nothing more powerful than a risky personal act. Consider Greta Thunberg.

Or Gianluca Grimalda.

When Grimalda’s German bosses told the Italian climate researcher to return to work fast, from the other side of the planet, Grimalda declined. A 32-hour airplane journey from Papua New Guinea to Germany would generate 5.3 tonnes of Earth-warming CO2, Grimalda insisted. Slow travel – by ocean freighter and train — would generate 420 kilos. Twelve times less. He’d come back slow.

Gianluca Grimalda

Grimalda got the boot. A hard hit, but Grimalda is philosophical. He’d told the 1800 participants in his climate research project, in Bougainville, that he’d travel back to Europe low-carbon, and he didn’t want to be seen as a giaman – a liar or fraudster in the Solomon Islands language.

Moreover, honest researchers are the foundation of credible climate science, Grimalda reasoned.

The GPM reached Gianluca Grimalda on a freighter docked in Rabaul, East New Britain, on the Bismarck archipelago of Papua New Guinea, at the start of his slow journey back to Germany.

Listen to our conversation. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Listen to our complete conversation here:

Gianluca Grimalda’s slow travel trajectory

One of the best parts of academic research is going to conferences, in far off places. Earlier this month, Canadian political scientist Radikha Desai travelled to Russia (by plane, not boat) to attend a forum organized by the Valdai Discussion Club, an annual talk-fest for Russian academics, diplomats and politicians. Vladimir Putin typically attends.

Radhika Desai

Desai is interested in this kind of stuff. The University of Manitoba political scientist has written extensively on US hegemony, globalization and contemporary imperialism, from a critical Marxist perspective. Among her positions – that the US and NATO provoked Russia into invading Ukraine, and that the war, now into its eighteenth bloody month, is actually an American proxy war on Russia. So, definitely beyond mainstream.

As it happens, here in Canada, the Valdai Discussion Club is beyond the pale. Last September, Ottawa slapped sanctions on it for “generating and disseminating disinformation and propaganda.”

As if this didn’t put Desai in a delicate spot, Vladimir Putin answered her submitted question. What did Russia’s president think about that standing ovation 98-year-old Ukrainian veteran Yaroslav Hunka got in the Canadian Parliament for fighting the Russians in World War II, on the side of the Nazis?

Putin’s answer, nuanced and diplomatic, sent ripples across global media and a flood of hate mail into her inbox.

Desai’s question – her mere presence at the forum – was “morally reprehensible” and “pretty horrendous,” one Canadian right-winger declared.

Her students support her.

Radikha Desai is Professor in the Department of Political Studies and Director of the Geopolitical Economy Research Group at the University of Manitoba, and Convenor of the International Manifesto Group. The GPM spoke with her about her risky move, and her thoughts on the Russia-Ukraine war.

Listen to our conversation. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Thanks to Dan Weisenberger for his wonderful guitar instrumentals.

In anticipation of an Israeli ground invasion, thousands of Gazans are now fleeing the northern half of the tiny enclave, already devastated by sixteen years of brutal siege.

Destruction in Gaza

Israel’s imminent invasion comes in response to last weekend’s horrific assault on Israeli communities east of its Gaza ghetto. In the wake of that attack, the Israeli military ordered Gaza’s 1.1 million northern residents to get out. Tens of thousands are now trying to do so.

Thirteen hundred Israelis perished in last weekend’s terrorist attack by Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants. Most were civilians. A hundred and fifty were taken hostage. Three hundred soldiers were killed, including high-ranking officers.

According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, over 2300 Gazans have been killed by retaliatory Israeli strikes, including 700 children. Seventy died in an airstrike on Friday, including children, in the course of heeding Israeli evacuation demands. Ten thousand have been wounded.

In a news release this past Friday, the UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights of internally displaced persons declared that Israel’s evacuation order — after cutting off food, water, electricity and fuel to Gaza, then dropping 6000 bombs, some of them reportedly white phosphorus munitions – constitutes ‘forcible transfer’ and ‘collective punishment,’ crimes against humanity under international law.

Nothing new for the people of Gaza. Three-quarters of the enclave’s 2.3 million residents are already refugees, or the descendants of refugees driven from their villages by Zionist militias between late 1947 and 1949. The lovely Israeli communities brutally invaded by Palestinian militants last weekend lie on or near the ruins of those villages — an irony mainstream media has ignored.

The GPM spoke about the unfolding situation in Gaza and Israel with Michael Lynk. Lynk is Associate Professor of law at Western University, in London, Ontario, specializing in labour, human rights, disability, constitutional and administrative law. Between 2016 and 2022, Lynk served as ‘UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967’.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button on top, or go here.

Listen to our complete conversation here:

In search of ways to describe the world today, songwriters and poets are never at a loss for words. It’s a crazy mixed up world … Well fed masters reap the harvests of the polluted seeds they’ve sown … The gambling man is rich and the working man is poor … Everybody’s crying ‘peace on Earth’ — just as soon as we win this war.

In search of a scholarly explanation for the world’s woes, I spoke with Radhika Desai. Desai is Professor in the Department of Political Studies and Director of the Geopolitical Economy Research Group at the University of Manitoba, Canada, and Convenor of the International Manifesto Group.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button on top, or go here.

Listen to our complete conversation with Radhika Desai here:

Thanks to Dan Weisenberger for his wonderful guitar instrumentals.

Back in the early 2000s, Dutch chemist Paul Crützen suggested that humans have pushed Planet Earth into a brand new age, terminating the one geologists say we’ve been in for the past 12,000 years, the Holocene.

The Anthropocene, Crützen called his proposed, human-engineered Epoch.

This past spring, a scientific panel presented its own geological definition of the Anthropocene.  The core of that definition — the Anthropocene’s ‘Golden Spike’, the one spot on Earth where the start of Earth’s proposed new Epoch is best observed in surface sediments.

The panel’s choice — Crawford Lake, in southern Ontario.

Crawford Lake is meromictic, so its waters don’t turn over and its bottom sediments remain perfectly preserved.

Those sediments have been recording human activities for 12,000 years, beginning with First Nations activities dating back to the late 13th century. Sedimentary layers laid down in the mid-19th century record the logging activities of European settlers along the lake’s shores. Layers dating to the mid-20th century — the proposed time base of the Anthropocene — contain the chemical signatures of fossil fuel burning and atmospheric nuclear weapons testing. 

The Anthropocene Working Group’s proposed geological definition of the Anthropocene – with Crawford Lake as the new Epoch’s Golden Spike – will be submitted to its parent body, a subcommission of the International Commission on Stratigraphy, later this Fall. A final decision, rejecting or adopting the Anthropocene as a new Epoch in Earth’s history, could be announced in August 2024, at the 37th congress of the International Union of Geological Sciences, in South Korea.

I visited Crawford Lake in the company of some of its greatest fans. The first one you’ll hear is Brenna Bartley, Manager of Education & Outreach with Halton Region Conservation Authority.

Listen to our conversation. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Coring Crawford Lake sediments. Mike Pisaric (standing), Tim Patterson (kneeling) and Chelsi McNeill-Jewer (laying down). (Courtesy Patterson Lab)

Videoed sessions of the Canadian House of Commons don’t usually go viral. Late last month, a seemingly innocent act of courtesy by the Commons Speaker sparked national furor and global media coverage.

Moments after a speech by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, House Speaker Anthony Rota called on MPs to stand up and applaud an elderly man sitting in the visitors’ balcony. Yaroslav Hunka, a 98-year-old Ukrainian veteran, had valiantly fought the Russians in World War Two, Rota declared.

Everyone rose and clapped, with great emotion, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Deputy PM Chrystia Freeland among them.

As it turns out, Yaroslav Hunka was a veteran of one of Nazi Germany’s most notorious divisions, the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician). Under the command of Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler, one of Nazi Germany’s most powerful leaders and Holocaust architects, the Galician Division committed atrocious crimes across western Ukraine and Poland.

Hunka was eighteen years-old when he volunteered. His political beliefs at that time are unknown, and there’s no evidence he participated in atrocities. Some time in the mid-1950s, Hunka emigrated to Canada. So did hundreds of other veterans of Nazi units, as documented by the 1985-86 Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals in Canada (Deschênes Commission).

Monuments would be erected across Canada, commemorating their ‘courageous’ struggles.

In more recent years, that sentiment has been shared by Chrystia Freeland. Freeland’s own grandfather was the senior editor of a Nazi newspaper in occupied Poland, something she has been circumspect about in public.

The GPM spoke with Dimitri Lascaris about Yaroslav Hunka, and Canada’s reputation as a place where old Nazis went to pasture. Lascaris is a lawyer, human rights activist and journalist.

Listen to our conversation. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Dimitri Lascaris

Back in 2019, in the midst of another Canadian scandal, Chrystia Freeland, Foreign Minister at the time, declared that international law wasn’t a “smorgasbord to pick and choose from.”

Freeland was being coy. When it comes to China or Russia or Iran or Syria or Venezuela or other countries of that sort, Canada calls for international law to be strictly enforced, and even gets involved.

On the other hand, when it comes to Israel, Canada calls for international law to be waived. Late last December, along with two dozen other Israeli allies, Canada voted against a UN resolution requesting the International Court of Justice to render an Advisory Opinion on the legal consequences of Israel’s half-century-long occupation of Palestine.

The resolution passed by a wide margin, and the ICJ is now preparing to render that opinion.

International Court of Justice, Den Haag

This past July, in a letter to the Court, Canada urged it to step back. Rendering a legal opinion would only harden positions, a senior government lawyer argued. The Israel-Palestine ‘conflict’ must be resolved through negotiation, untethered from international law.

I spoke about Canada’s equivocal positions on the enforcement of international law with Canadian scholar William Schabas. Schabas is a professor of international law at Middlesex University in the UK, and professor of human rights law and international criminal law at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

Listen to our conversation. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Thanks to Dan Weisenberger for his wonderful guitar instrumentals.

Henrietta Lacks — not a household name.

Lacks was a black woman. The daughter of Virginia sharecroppers, she ended up in Baltimore. There, around the age of thirty, she came down with cervical cancer. In the course of surgery, in the ‘coloured ward’ at Johns Hopkins hospital, unbeknownst to her, a piece of her cervix was removed, then passed along to a medical researcher.

Henrietta Lacks (Courtesy Lacks family)

Henrietta Lacks died of her cancer. Her cells turned out to be immortal, doing what no line of cultured human cells had ever done: reproduce indefinitely in lab dishes.

HeLa cells, as they came to be known, revolutionized biomedical research. Among the advances they leveraged — the polio vaccine, treatment for sickle cell anemia and in vitro fertilization.

HeLa cells also generated huge profit for a company called Thermo Fisher Scientific. The Lacks family never saw a penny. Indeed, advanced medical treatments made possible by HeLa cells were beyond their means. In 2021, the Lacks family launched a lawsuit against Thermo Fisher. In early August, the case was settled for an undisclosed sum.

I spoke about Henrietta Lacks and medical racism in America with Dorothy Roberts. Roberts is Professor of Law and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, and the director of the Penn Program on Race, Science & Society at U. Penn’s Center for Africana Studies.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Listen my complete conversation with Dorothy Roberts here:

Courtesy: Aghirin’man

Uranium mining is not the business it used to be. What with Fukushima and the shift to clean wind and solar, fewer reactors are being built and more are being decommissioned.

What’s a profit-hungry uranium mining company to do? Head to Niger, in north-central Africa. It’s the world’s seventh largest producer of the radioactive element.

Icing on the cake – Nigerien environmental regulations are lax and weakly applied. Massive volumes of Nigerien uranium have been dug by French state-owned Orano, outside the northern town of Arlit.

Now, a pair of Canadian companies have arrived. At another spot near Arlit, Toronto-based Global Atomic is digging a shaft, aiming to market uranium — including to one of North America’s largest utilities — by 2025.

BC-based GoviEx has yet to begin exploiting one of the world’s largest uranium deposits, at Madaouela, also near Arlit. Niger is “mining-friendly,” GoviEx says.

I spoke about the uranium mining industry, uranium mining in Niger and these two Canadian companies with Gunter Wippel. Wippel is a veteran anti-nuclear campaigner in Germany and helps run a group called the Uranium Network.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Thanks to Dan Weisenberger for his fabulous guitar instrumentals.

In response to the heightening climate crisis, UN Secretary General Antonio Gutteres warned last week that humanity has “opened the gates of Hell” and is “hurtling towards disaster, eyes wide open.”

Days before, a team of scientists spelled out humanity’s predicament in drier fashion. Six out of nine planetary systems key to the survival of the human species are under threat, they report, breaching the estimated boundaries of Earth system stability and resilience and pushing our planet “well outside of the safe operating space for humanity.”

The GPM spoke with the lead author of the report, Katherine Richardson. Richardson is principal investigator at the Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate and Professor of Biological Oceanography at the University of Copenhagen. She co-authored the groundbreaking 2009 study that introduced the Planetary Boundaries/Safe Operating Space concepts.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Listen to our complete conversation here:

Lake Chad is drying up.

Poised at the spot where Niger, Chad, Cameroon and Nigeria meet, the freshwater body has lost an estimated seventy percent of its volume due to water extraction — from the lake itself and its upstream sources — and as the result of climate change.

Courtesy: Nidhi Nagabhatla

Several inter-basin water transfer projects have been put forward to restore the lake, involving Italian and Chinese investors, the African Union and a host of international development institutions.

The biggest project, on the drawing board since the 1970s, would involve the creation of a 2400-kilometer-long canal between Lake Chad and the Congo River, with power generation stations along the way.

Another proposal envisions a shorter canal between the lake and a pair of reservoirs to be built on a tributary of the Congo River, the Ubangi. Opposed by the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and European scientists, both projects remain on the drawing board.

Their potential impact on one of Africa’s most endangered wetland ecosystems, and on the livelihoods of fishers and pastoralists along Lake Chad’s shores, continues to be the subject of study and debate.

Nidhi Nagabhatla has been studying the various ‘discourse coalitions’ on one side and other. Nagabhatla is a Senior Research Fellow in the Climate Change and Natural Resources program at United Nations University and an Adjunct Professor at the School of Earth, Environment & Society at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Listen to our complete conversation here:

You are what you eat, so they say.

As it happens, the trillions of bacteria living in your gut eat what you eat, and turn meals into molecules that boost your health and spirit – if you feed them well. I spoke about the gut microbiome with Genelle Lunken-Healey. Healey specializes in the influence of dietary fibre on gut bacteria. She’s a registered dietitian and Assistant Professor in the Division of Gastroenterology and Nutrition at the University of British Columbia.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast edition. Click on the play button on top, or go here.

Trillions of bacteria live in your gut. What you eat, they eat. Gut microbes enjoy a balanced diet, with lots of fiber, fresh fruit, vegetables and nuts.

They also enjoy good drink. How about alcohol? It’s a question science has been debating for years. Of course, moderation is always advised. Is a glass or two of red wine actually good for your health? Or will it send you on a trip to the hospital?

If you live in Strasbourg, France, it may well.

Strasbourg Civic Hospital is one of France’s oldest medical institutions – as large as a small town, with a staff of over ten thousand. In the basement of the hospital’s administration building, there’s a wine cellar. Here, the finest wines from France’s Alsace region are available at a reasonable cost.

Wine casks cleaning (David Kattenburg)

Strasbourg’s Cave Historique des Hospices is a tourist destination – and you don’t have to buy wine. You can just wander through the cool, dimly-lit cellar, gawking at giant oak casks and reading about how the hospital got into the wine business six hundred years ago.

Paying for health care was what it was all about. The hospital’s wealthiest patients forked out gold. Others handed paid with livestock, houses … or vineyards. Over time, the hospital became one of Alsace’s biggest vineyard owner.

Groundwater levels are high in Strasbourg. So, like the city’s famous cathedral, the Civil Hospital’s wine cellar is supported by pillars built atop tree trunks up to five meters tall. “Fondacion sur pilotis,” the system is called.

Along the walls of the cellar, huge oak casks filled with wines produced by twenty-seven vintners from across Alsace. All of the region’s illustrious vintages are here: Riesling, Pinot Gris, Gewurztraminer, Sylvaner, Pinot Blanc, Pinot Noir and Pinot Auxerrois.

Also a pair of unusual cépages: Klevinger de Heiligenstein, from the village of Heiligenstein, thirty kilometers southwest of Strasbourg, and from the village of Ammerschwihr, a short drive west of Colmar, Alsace’s only blended grand cru, Grand Cru Kaefferkopf: sixty percent gewurtztraminer and forty percent of other grape types.

Sticking out of each cask – a shiny spigot that opens with a “paradise key.”

Alsatian vintners have paid for these casks to be refurbished. Still, storage costs must be covered. This is where the cellar’s wine shop comes in. Upon maturation, a small percentage of the wines in the Civic Hospital’s cellar will be bottled for sale.

Some physicians are uncomfortable with the arrangement. But fine wines are prestigious in France – none more so than the 540 year-old wine stored at the very end of the Civic Hospital’s cellar — an Alsatian white wine from 1472. Behind a heavily locked steel gate, five hundred liters of the precious fluid sit tranquilly in a specially-built oak cask.

Thibaut Baldinger and cask of very old wine

Nearby, an enormous oak cask lies on its side. It’s empty now, but once contained twenty-six thousand liters of Pommard — enough to fill 34,000 bottles.

Through a hallway and into another room, something most tourists don’t visit. Here, hundreds of years ago, corpses were dissected by doctors and students — many of them who’d just been executed by drowning at Strasbourg’s nearby Pont Corbeau.

Strasbourg Civic Hospital’s historic wine cellar is open to visitors from 8:30 till 5:30, Mondays to Fridays; Saturdays till noon.

Listen to this story in today’s podcast edition. Click on the play button on top, or go here.

Thibaut Baldinger serves up a glass of chilled Alsatian cremant (David Kattenburg)

A much darker story:

In the annals of racist terrorism, few acts were more hideous or cowardly than the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.

Sixty years ago — shortly before 10:30 a.m. on Sunday, September 15, 1963 — nineteen sticks of dynamite attached to a timing device blew out a hole two-meters wide in the eighty year-old church’s back wall, and a half meter-deep hole in its basement. The blast knocked a passing motorist from his car, blew out windows blocks away and could be heard and felt across town.

Five girls were in the church’s basement at the time, preparing for a sermon entitled “A Rock That Will Not Roll.” Four were killed:

Carol Denise McNair was eleven. Addie May Collins, Carole Rosamond Robertson and Cynthia Dionne Wesley were fourteen. One of the four was decapitated. Twenty-two others were injured, some of them grievously.

In the minds of the four Klansmen who committed the crime, the 16th Street Baptist Church was a logical target. Since that Spring, it had been the epicenter of civil rights organizing aimed at registering black voters, desegregating downtown businesses and schools and confronting violence meted out by local Klansmen — violence committed with the support of Birmingham police.

Indeed, in the years leading up to the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, almost two dozen Black-owned businesses and homes had been torched or bombed, earning the northern Alabama city its nickname — “Bombingham.”

With the encouragement and guidance of activists from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Congress on Racial Equality, Birmingham residents kicked off the Birmingham Campaign, centering around non-violent direct action and civil disobedience.

School kids were at the vanguard. Over the course of two days in early May 1963, three thousand participated in the Childrens’ Crusade. On the first day, scores were arrested. On the second day, under the command of Birmingham’s notorious Commissioner for Public Safety, Theophilus Eugene (“Bull”) Connor, Birmingham police sicced attack dogs on the kids, and pounded them with fire hoses powerful enough to remove mortar from brick walls and bark from trees.

This was the sort of response Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders had anticipated. Police brutality against ordinary school children, some as young as four, became instant national TV news.

In response to the devastating media coverage (these were the early days of prime time evening news, when families gathered around black and white TV sets), President John Kennedy and his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, began crafting civil rights legislation that would culminate in the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

On August 28, 1963, millions marched on Washington, listening, spellbound, to Martin Luther King and his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. The following week, desegregated classrooms opened up in Birmingham public schools.

For Denise McNair, Addie May Collins, Carole Rosamond Robertson and Cynthia Dionne Wesley, there would be little time to celebrate. Although the FBI would establish the identity of their murderers in 1965, the four Klansmen would run free for years.

In 1977, Robert Chambliss was handed a life sentence for the murder of Carol McNair. Thomas Blanton and Bobby Frank Cherry received life sentences in 2001 and 2002 respectively. Herman Frank Cash died in 1994.

I spoke about Birmingham Sunday, and the civil rights activism that led up to it, with Paul Kix. Kix is an American journalist and author. His new book — You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live – Ten Weeks in Birmingham That Changed America – has just been published.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast edition. Click on the play button on top, or go here.

Thanks to Dan Weisenberger for his fabulous guitar instrumentals.

Fifteen months after the US Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson, overturning fifty years of abortion rights, millions of American women and girls face deteriorating access to reproductive health care.

This is the finding of a group of human rights experts, communicated in a recent letter to the US government.

Abortion services are now banned in fifteen US states, and sharply restricted in seven. So are a host of other fundamental rights, the experts say: to privacy, bodily integrity, autonomy, freedom of thought and conscience.

Disadvantaged women and girls have been especially hard hit. Health care providers have been chilled, even in States where abortion is still legal. Threats of violence are common.

And, law enforcement officials are using electronic data to track and pursue women.

Reem Alsalem was the lead author of the letter. Alsalem is Special UN Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, its causes and consequences. I reached Reem Alsalem in Amman, Jordan. Listen to our conversation. Tap the podcast play button on top, or go here.

Listen to our complete conversation here:

It’s that time of year again – time to commemorate the 22nd anniversary of 9-11.

Also time to commemorate the first 9-11, fifty years ago.

On September 11, 1973, in a brutal coup backed by the CIA, Chile’s democratically elected socialist leader, Salvador Allende, was ousted, then killed. Over the following weeks, a hundred thousand Chileans would be detained in Santiago’s national stadium. Thousands were tortured, killed outright or disappeared.

All under the beneficent gaze of the Nixon Administration and its foreign policy chief, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

North of the US border, Canadian officials were also pleased. Indeed, in cooperation with Washington, Pierre Trudeau’s government helped destabilize Chile’s economy. Yves Engler has written extensively about Canadian involvement in the Chilean coup. Here and here and here.

Engler is a Montreal-based writer and political commentator.

Listen to our conversation. Tap the podcast play button on top, or go here.

Listen to our complete conversation here:

Imagine an entire nation of imprisoned people. Thousands behind bars. Millions more within their own communities, hemmed in by walls, checkpoints and armed colonists, and a panoply of regulations restricting their movement; constantly surveilled; their most intimate details and relationships digitized; blackmailed into informing on each other.

Instructions to Bethlehem Palestinians (David Kattenburg)

This is the situation in Israeli-occupied Palestine.

The numbers are startling. Since Israel’s conquest of the West Bank, in 1967, almost a million Palestinians have been jailed – most of them inside Israel, in flagrant breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Tens of thousands without charge; and children, routinely subjected to what experts call torture.

In a recent report to the UN Human Rights Council, Francesca Albanese, Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in occupied Palestine, laid out Israel’s carceral system in graphic detail – a system she says has turned occupied Palestine into a “constantly surveilled open-air panopticon.”

Listen to our conversation. Tap the podcast play button on top, or go here.

Listen to our complete conversation here:

Thanks to Dan Weisenberger for his fabulous guitar instrumentals.

Youth and protest. These are words that go together well.

Older folks protest too. Many have been doing it for years. Michael Polanyi was in his twenties when he committed his first act of public disobedience. I recall walking into a room back then, seeing Michael getting his blood drawn. It would end up getting tossed on an outer wall of the Canadian Department of War, in protest against low-level jet fighter training in Labrador, over indigenous Innu land.

Fast forward. Michael is now sixty, and still protesting. Just the other day, worried about wildfires sweeping across Canada – thousands of them, devastating splendid forests; sending colossal volumes of CO2 into Earth’s atmosphere – Michael hopped into a car, drove over to a big highway outside Ottawa, and …

Well, listen to Michael tell the story in today’s podcast. Click ‘play’ above, or go here.

Michael Polanyi studied engineering, physics, political science and ecology at various Canadian universities. He was an assistant professor of health studies at the University of Regina. He’s particularly interested in participatory action research, where people design and implement research on matters that affect them.

Climate protest in Ottawa

Canadian musicians hungry for air play (fame and fortune, if they’re lucky) head down to the USA.

Marcel Soulodre did. A native of St. Boniface, Manitoba, Winnipeg’s Francophone sister city, Marcel spent a few years in Louisiana and toured the States extensively. Then, in search of deeper roots, he moved to lovely Strasbourg, France, on the German border. Johnny Cash is huge in this part of the world, and Marcel Soulodre channels Johnny Cash very well.

Here’s a story about Marcel – aka M. Soul. Click on the ‘play’ button on top, or go here.

And check out Marcel’s tour dates here.

M. Soul wows Epfig crowd (David Kattenburg)

Are you disenchanted with politics? Do politicians turn you off?

You’re not the only one. Vote for me, they shout, promising the moon and stars. They slag other politicians, yelling at each other in their chambers. Some of them take money from powerful corporations. When they’re through with politics, into some corporate law firm or directors board they go.

Sure, most politicians are honest and conscientious, but their congresses and parliaments are poorly equipped to solve huge, complex challenges like climate change, that require unity, consensus, imagination and courage.

Courtesy Citizens’ Assembly, Dublin

On the other hand, citizens’ assemblies, made up of ordinary people from all walks of life, are much better suited to problem-solving in dark times.

I spoke about citizens’ assemblies with Ansel Herz, Communications Director for an organization that promotes them — DemocracyNext. Listen to our conversation. Click on the play button on top, or go here.

Thanks to Dan Weisenberger for his wonderful guitar instrumentals.

Senegal, on the western edge of Africa, has long been considered an anchor of stability. Today, tension fills the air.

Senegalese opposition leader Ousmane Sonko, a would-be presidential candidate, is on life support following a three-week hunger strike, protesting his house arrest. Sonko supporters say he’s been targeted because he wants to change Senegal’s relationship with France, which many see as neocolonial.

It’s a common theme across West Africa today, where the economic legacy of colonialism is a daily reality. Over a century ago, France banned the use of the cowrie shell as an exchange currency, imposing its own – the CFA . The meaning of the term has changed over the years. Between 1945 and 1958, CFA stood for Colonies Françaises d’Afrique — French colonies of Africa. Then French Community of Africa.

Since the early 1960s, when Senegal and France’s other North African colonies became independent, the CFA has been taken to mean African Financial Community. Backed by the French treasury, the CFA is pegged to the Euro, and France enjoys a huge trade advantage. Inflation – and the dependency of France’s former colonies on imported commodities – fuel staggering poverty.

Also violent extremism. Most of the coups in the Sahel over the past decade have been in former French colonies.

Berlin-based journalist and correspondent Alexa Dvorson has lived and worked in Senegal. During her most recent trip, in 2022, Senegal won the Africa Cup of Nations football tournament for the first time, defeating Egypt on penalties. Euphoria – and hope for the future – filled the air. It didn’t last long.

Here is her report from that trip to the Senegalese capital Dakar, on the Atlantic Ocean, Africa’s western tip.

Listen to Alexa’s story. Click on the podcast button above, or go here.

Dakar market (Alexa Dvorson)

For those who don’t know a whole lot about global politics and international affairs, Canada is seen as a kinder, gentler, more enlightened country than its neighbor to the south – with a young, photogenic leader always talking about human rights, justice and international law.

Yves Engler sees things very differently. Engler is a Montreal-based writer and political activist. His 2009 book, The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy, was short-listed for the Quebec Writers Federation’s Mavis Gallant Prize for Nonfiction. His most recent work, Stand on Guard For Whom? A People’s History of the Canadian Military, was co-published last year by Black Rose Books and Red Publishing.

Listen to our conversation with Yves Engler. Click on the podcast button above, or go here.

Yves Engler

Last week, one of the world’s longest ruling strongmen finally stepped aside — handing power to his son.

Hun Sen has had a long and colourful career. During the Cambodian civil war, between 1975 and 1979, he served as a commander for the Khmer Rouge. Following his defection to Vietnam in 1977, and the downfall of the Khmer Rouge, he became Cambodia’s Foreign Minister in the Vietnamese occupation government, then Prime Minister in 1983.

On August 22, Hun Sen finally stepped aside, handing the Prime Minister post to his 45 year-old son, Hun Manet. The move was rubber-stamped by the Cambodian Parliament, controlled by the Cambodian People’s Party, that Hun Sen continues to lead.

Not much is known about Hun Manet, other than his military pedigree. Since graduating from West Point, he’s been Cambodia’s counter-terrorism chief and a deputy military commander. Western observers wonder if he’ll govern with a more liberal touch than his father, and whether Cambodian relations with China will continue to prosper. Washington is reportedly upset by Chinese plans to help develop Cambodia’s naval base in Ream, on the Gulf of Thailand.

Cambodia mangrove forest (David Kattenburg)

The fate of mangrove forests up the coast from Ream is likely not on the Biden Administration’s radar.

Coastal mangroves are threatened all around the world. In Cambodia, they’ve been cut down for charcoal and replaced by shrimp farms. Government figures, military chiefs and their rich clients have had a hand in this for years. Their involvement in mangrove destruction, coastal sand dredging and the harvesting of upland timber species, for sale in Thailand, Vietnam and China, is well documented. Read this and this.

Here’s a story I produced about this, back in 2008. Click on the podcast button on top, or go here.

Cambodian village in the middle of the mangroves (David Kattenburg)

Thanks to Dan Weisenberger for his guitar instrumentals.

The mining, milling, processing and enrichment of uranium for use in nuclear bombs, the testing of those bombs, their actual or threatened use against people, the use of uranium in power reactors and the extraction of weapons-grade plutonium from those reactors has poisoned relations between states, polluted environments, stunted First Nations societies, sickened and killed countless millions and alienated humans from the rest of the living world.

Consider little Niger. The north African nation is the world’s seventh largest uranium producer. Massive volumes of uranium ore have been extracted over decades from an open pit mine operated by the state-owned French company, Orano, in the northern Nigerien town of Arlit, and from an underground mine nearby.

Niger’s minority stake in Orano’s operations likely provides its military with a healthy income – certainly with a quantum of power when dealing with the French, who they claim to hate, and whose military they’ve reportedly expelled.

Ordinary Nigeriens get poisonous mine tailings, polluted air and water and radioactive buildings.

I speak about uranium mining in Niger with Bruno Chareyron, a researcher with the French NGO CRIIRAD (Commission de Recherche et d’Information Indépendentes Sur la Radioactivité).

Listen to our conversation. Click on the link above or go here.

Courtesy: Aghirin’man

While Nigeriens cope with the radioactive legacy of uranium mining, eleven thousand kilometers to the east, Vietnam continues to confront the toxic legacy of what they call the American War.

Between 1961 and 1971, in an attempt to eliminate forest cover and food supplies for North Vietnamese forces, the US Air Force dropped an estimated seventy-five million liters of the defoliant Agent Orange across the southern end of what was then South Vietnam.

Almost 30,000 square kilometers of forest and some 5 million acres of farmland got drenched. So did lots of Vietnamese soldiers and peasant farmers.

Agent Orange is a mixture of the herbicides 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D. Within that ugly brew, traces of dioxin – a toxic chlorinated organic compound that persists in soils and sediments, and accumulates in fish that people eat.

Up to four million Vietnamese were exposed to America’s toxic defoliant.

To this day, dioxin ‘hot spots’continue to be cleaned up. There were initially four of these across southern Vietnam: former US airbases at Danang, Bien Hoa and Phu Cat, where Agent Orange was stored in drums and loaded onto planes, and sections of the A Luoi Valley, near the border with Laos.

Cleanup at Danang was completed in 2018. In late 2022, the US government allocated $29 million to remediate a mess four times that size, at Bien Hoa. The whole job is expected to cost a half-billion and take a decade to complete.

Meanwhile, in the minds of many Vietnamese (and American experts), the health effects of the American War have transcended generations. These include a host of cancers, Vietnamese health authorities insist, and the most shocking birth defects.

Of course, American servicemen and women were exposed too. Read about that here.

Listen to this story about the legacy of Agent Orange in Vietnam. Click on the link above or go here.

A Luoi valley, near Vietnam’s border with Laos (David Kattenburg)

Human beings have transformed Planet Earth’s surface — geologically. Dutch Chemist Paul Crützen captured this idea in a single word: the Anthropocene.

This past July, in Lille, France, a scientific panel announced its own definition of the Anthropocene: when it began; how Earth’s new time unit should be ranked in the geological time scale, and where humanity’s overwhelming impact is best observed in Earth’s sediments, as a reference standard for other spots of the same age around the world.

The panel’s choice for that one spot: Crawford Lake, in southern Ontario.

It’s key human ‘signature’ of humanity’s presence: radioactive plutonium from atmospheric thermonuclear tests that peaked in the mid-1950s. The panel will present a detailed proposal to the body that commissioned it, this coming Fall.

Crawford Lake core (courtesy: Patterson lab)

Jan Zalasiewicz was the first chair of the Anthropocene Working Group. Zalasiewicz is an Emeritus Professor of Palaeobiology at the University of Leicester and a member of the Anthropocene Working Group.

Listen to our conversation. Click on the link above or go here.

Thanks to Dan Weisenberger for his wonderful guitar instrumentals.

Uranium is a subversive element.

The mining, milling, processing and enrichment of uranium-235 for use in nuclear bombs, the experimental testing of those bombs, their actual or threatened use against people, the use of uranium in power reactors and the extraction of weapons-grade plutonium from those reactors, have undermined relations between states, poisoned environments, stunted indigenous societies, sickened and killed countless millions, and alienated humans from the rest of the living world.

Since life on Earth began, 3.8 billion years ago, living things have obtained energy or heat in one way, and one way only: by stripping electrons off reduced (electron-rich) inorganic molecules (oxidizing them), or by burning (oxidizing) carbon-based food, firewood, coal, oil or gas.

Gazing past those electrons, in December 1938, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann stumbled on an immensely greater energy source. Uranium nuclei, they and their colleagues discovered, could be split by bombarding them with neutrons, triggering a self-amplifying, energy-yielding chain reaction.

Talk about light bulbs turning on. Awesome amounts of energy could be tapped through nuclear fission, other physicists immediately realized, and unbelievably powerful bombs could be built.

Julius Robert Oppenheimer located the blinding brilliance of the moment in Hindu scripture:

“If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one … Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” the Bhagavad Gita says.

Others turned to ancient Greece.

“Modern Prometheans have raided Mount Olympus again and have brought back for man the very thunderbolts of Zeus,” the Scientific Monthly opined in September 1945, in the blinding wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In the eighty years since then, far below Olympian heights where flesh-and-blood Prometheans destroy worlds, impoverished women and men have laboured in the fields of the bomb and its allied power industry, keeping fissile fuel flowing.

Little Niger comes to mind.

Now in the throes of political turmoil, the Sahelian nation is an important source of uranium for the world’s five franchised nuclear weapons powers (the US, Russia, China, France and UK) and four others outside the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel), and for 32 countries with operating nuclear power plants.

Massive volumes of uranium ore have been extracted over the past decades from an open pit mine operated by the state-owned French company, Orano, in the northern Nigerien town of Arlit, and from a conventional underground mine in nearby Agadez, now closed.

Niger is the seventh largest producer of uranium in the world (after Kazakhstan, Namibia, Canada, Australia, Uzbekistan and Russia). France – with 300 nuclear warheads and 56 operable power reactors, generating 70% of its electricity – sources about ten percent of its uranium supply from Niger.

Niger’s minority stake in Orano’s operations likely provides the country’s military and business elite with a healthy income – certainly with a quantum of power when dealing with the French, who they claim to hate, and have reportedly expelled.

Ordinary Nigeriens get contaminated mine tailings, polluted air and water, radioactive building materials, and a government and military subverted by nuclearism.

Niger ranks 189 on the Human Development Index, third from the bottom, above Chad and South Sudan.

I spoke about uranium mining in Niger with Bruno Chareyron, a researcher with the French NGO CRIIRAD (Commission de Recherche et d’Information Indépendentes Sur la Radioactivité).

CRIIRAD partners with a Nigerien NGO called Aghirin’man (Organization for the Protection of Environment and Well-Being).

Listen to my conversation with Bruno Chareyron here:

Bruno Chareyron inspects radioactive materials in Niger (courtesy CRIIAD)

Seventy-eight years ago, on August 6, 1945, the US dropped a uranium-enriched fission bomb – ‘Little Boy’ – on the Japanese port city, Hiroshima.

Three days later, anxious to test their second innovative device before the war ended, they detonated a second bomb — a plutonium-triggered implosion device called Fat Man — over Nagasaki.

Why Nagasaki? Because Nagasaki lay in a bowl, surrounded by hills nuclear scientists figured would reflect neutrons. They wanted to check that out (listen to Glenn Alcalay here).

When the dust settled, a couple hundred thousand lay dead or dying. Most were civilians. Thousands more would sicken and die in the years to come.

America’s official rationale for dropping bombs on Japan: avoiding huge casualties a ground invasion of Japan would supposedly have incurred. Harry Truman’s non-mea culpa was immediately accepted by the American media and public.

The real reason would emerge in time: one-upping the Soviets, setting the stage for global supremacy, with the bomb as gold standard.

Gar Alperovitz has written a pair of books about the nuclear bombing of Japan. Alperovitz is a historian, political economist, activist and writer, and the author of two books about the nuclear bombing of Japan. Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam was published in 1965.

His 1995 work, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth, updated the story.

Alperovitz is also the co-founder of something called the Democracy Collaborative, a research centre on ecologically sustainable, community-based economics, and the Next System Project.

Listen to my conversation with Gar Alperovitz. Click on the play button on top, or go here.

‘Bravo Shot’ over Bikini atoll, the Marshall Islands, March 1, 1954

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were just the start.

Building bombs would become a booming business for America and the other four ‘Permanent Members’ of the United Nations (the ones franchised to possess nuclear weapons and to threaten their use), Russia, China, the UK and France.

Nuclearism was a bonanza for the ‘Military-Industrial Complex’ of course, and for the Pentagon too. Each military service hustled for its own nukes. The Air Force had dropped their first two on Japan. Soon, the army had a growing arsenal of its own, mounted on missiles. So did the navy, to detonate at or below the surface of bodies of water.

Hungry for their slices of protection, prestige and power, a half dozen other countries developed smaller but equally deadly arsenals. Here’s a great song about that.

In the fields of the bomb, there was no shortage of profits to go around — digging up uranium in desolate, underdeveloped areas of the world inhabited by disenfranchised indigenous people; enriching it; selling it; designing warheads of the latest sort; testing nukes in the atmosphere or just below ground, spreading radionuclides all around the planet.

Power plants put the peaceful atom to work. Their radioactive wastes got dumped in the seas, buried or processed into fertilizer to be spread on farm fields.

Plutonium from spent fuel rods would be enriched and packed into warheads.

Untold numbers of nuclear workers and innocent bystanders would die in the course of all this atomic industriousness, especially islanders and other First Nations people.

Tens of millions more would perish (and continue to do so) in wars fought or engineered by the possessors of the ultimate weapon — the weapon that determines who wields bona fide power and who doesn’t.

This is something I produced back in 1986. In order of appearance: Rosalie Bertell was a Canadian-American anti-nuclear activist and authority on the health effects of ionizing radiation. Bertell, a sister of the Grey Nuns of the Sacred Heart, founded the International Institute of Concern for Public Health, in Toronto. Her book — No Immediate Danger – Prognosis for a Radioactive Earth — was published in 1985. In 1986, Bertell received the Right Livelihood Award, known as the alternative Nobel Prize. Rosalie Bertell passed away in 2012.

You’ll also hear two voices recorded at the ‘Crimes of the Official Terror Network Tribunal’, a four-day popular summit organized by the Alliance for Non-Violent Action, in Toronto, in June 1988: Al Draper, a Royal Canadian Air Force serviceman, was one of many US and Canadian servicemen recruited to observe US nuclear bomb tests in the Nevada desert, to see how it affected them.

Ward Churchill was a professor at the University of Colorado at the time of this recording, and an activist with the American Indian Movement (AIM).

Donna Smyth was an English professor at Acadia University, in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, and an anti-uranium mining activist. Smyth’s 1986 work, Subversive Elements — drawing on her experience opposing uranium mining in Nova Scotia in the early 1980s — was described at the time as “a multi-generic, postmodern, ecofeminist, Maritime novel.”

Thanks to Terre Roche, Robert Fripp and Peter Gabriel for their song Exposure (written by Gabriel). According to Ira Kantor at Vintagerock.com: “Roche makes it clear the vocal you hear is not hers entirely as Fripp’s production expertise would elongate her voice to make it sound as if sustaining for several seconds. The album’s liner notes indicate her voice had been “fritched.””

Listen to No Immediate Danger. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Uranium mine tailings near Moab, Utah

Out of the ashes of World War Two, in response to Nazi and Imperial Japanese crimes (not American ones), four treaties were drafted, updating the laws of war. The four Geneva Conventions came into force in 1949, and would be ratified by 196 nations.

Thirty years later, in response to evolving war-fighting trends, two Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions were drafted. Article 36 of the first Additional Protocol dealt with new weapons and methods of warfare.

“In the study, development, acquisition or adoption of a new weapon, means or method of warfare,” Article 36 reads, “a High Contracting Party is under an obligation to determine whether its employment would, in some or all circumstances, be prohibited by this Protocol or by any other rule of international law.”

Today, Article 36 is cited as the basis for banning weapons that kill autonomously. Killer robots, in popular lingo.

It’s no joke. Robotic dogs (‘quadrupeds’) are now on the market. The New York Police Department uses them (two acquired for US $750,000), and Los Angeles City Council has reportedly ordered one of its own, for $278,000.

Robotic dogs have not been weaponized — yet.

Then there are drones that swarm, drop tear gas and shoot, and automated gun sentries that read faces.

Now, a UK-based NGO is calling for legal standards and bans. Article 36, they call themselves. Elizabeth Minor is an advisor for Article 36.

Listen to our conversation. Click on the play button on top, or go here.

Thanks to Dan Weisenberger for his virtuoso guitar instrumentals.

Seventy-eight years ago, on August 6, 1945, the US dropped a uranium-enriched fission bomb, code named ‘Little Boy’, on the Japanese port city, Hiroshima. Three days later, they dropped a second bomb, a plutonium-implosion device — Fat Man — on Nagasaki.

When the dust settled, between 130 and 225,000 people were dead or dying. To this day, casualty numbers vary widely. One thing is clear: almost all were civilians. Thousands more would sicken and die in the years to come.

America’s public rationale for its nuclear bombing of Japan: avoiding the huge casualties that would supposedly have resulted from putting boots on Japanese soil.

Other, more cynical reasons would emerge in time.

Here’s a story about America’s development of Little Boy and Fat Man, adapted from a documentary produced by Clive Baugh, Ed Reece and David Kattenburg back in 1986. It takes its name from a prose-poem by the American Trappist monk, theologian, mystic and writer Thomas Merton.

The story features interviews with German-American nuclear physicist Hans Bethe, head of the theoretical physics division of the Los Alamos Laboratory, where America’s first nuclear ‘device’, Trinity, was developed, and the winner of the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physics. We interviewed Bethe in his office at Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York. A memorable conversation.

You’ll also hear Martin Johns, late Professor Emeritus of physics at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario, and researcher at Canada’s Chalk River nuclear facility. Johns joined the McMaster faculty in 1947, and helped manage its small experimental particle accelerator. He shares the history of Canada’s involvement in the development of America’s nuclear bombs (Canada was indeed involved. Listen to Hans Bethe).

And Rosalie Bertell, late anti-nuclear campaigner and authority on the health effects of ionizing radiation. Bertell was a sister of the Grey Nuns of the Sacred Heart, and author of the 1985 work No Immediate Danger – Prognosis for a Radioactive Earth. She won the 1986 Right Livelihood Award — the ‘Alternative Nobel Prize’ — for “raising public awareness about the destruction of the biosphere and human gene pool, especially by low-level radiation.”

Thanks to Brenda Muller for her cello and Michael J. Birthelmer for his guitar. And to the Firesign Theatre, America’s counterculture comics.

Listen to this story in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Bikini Island, the atoll’s largest island, at sunset (David Kattenburg)

Almost eighty years after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the real reasons for America’s hideous assault have been unearthed by a small army of scholars. Among these – Glenn Alcalay. Alcalay is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, at City University of New York.

Back in the mid-1970s, Alcalay spent two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Marshall Islands, just north of the equator, in the Central Pacific. The US carried out 67 nuclear tests there, between 1946 and 1958. The biggest was Bravo, its first deliverable hydrogen bomb, detonated at Bikini Atoll, in the central Marshalls, on March 1, 1954.

Alcalay spent those two years on a small atoll downwind from Bikini. Inspired by that experience, he began researching the impacts of US weapons testing on the Marshallese people — and the true history of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The stuff you won’t learn about from the blockbuster film, Oppenheimer.

Read this recent piece by Glenn Alcalay.

And listen to our complete conversation here:

Old observation tower pad on Bikini Island (David Kattenburg)

It’s a sobering truth that few know. Having dropped those two bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, eighty years ago, America would probably not have consolidated its status as the most powerful nation in the world had it not been for a string of atolls in the central Pacific, and the hospitable islanders who let it test its arsenal there.

They didn’t have much choice. America tested its first bomb, Trinity, in Alamogordo, New Mexico. It dropped its second and third bombs on Japan. A year later — having been handed the Marshall Islands as a Strategic Trust by the UN — the US set out to use it as the testing ground for its now burgeoning nuclear arsenal. In July 1946, the US set off Able and Baker at Bikini Atoll, in the central Marshalls.

Twenty-one more atomic and thermonuclear tests would follow, including the leviathan, 15-megatonne Bravo blast, on March 1, 1954.

Forty-four bombs were tested at Eniwetok atoll, in the northern Marshalls.

Read a detailed account of the history of the Marshall Islands here, written back in 2007.

Nothing much has changed since then. Bikini is still contaminated, and has not been resettled. Radiation monitoring continues, under the aegis of the US Department of Energy.

Health impact claims adjudicated and awarded by the now defunct Nuclear Claims Tribunal have yet to be paid. Trust funds administered since 2016 by Bikini leaders have reportedly been squandered.

A third Compact of Free Association between the US and the Republic of the Marshall Islands is on track to be approved this Fall.

The RMI continues to faithfully vote the way Washington tells it to at the UN — most famously, alongside neighboring Pacific island states, in opposition to UN resolutions condemning Israel or calling for the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination.

The US continues to fire missiles at Kwajalein Atoll from California and Alaska, and nearby Ebeye is still packed like a sardine can.

Not surprisingly, the Marshallese people are as friendly as ever. Diabetes and heart disease kill more of them than nuclear-related cancers.

Listen to this story in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Thanks to Dan Weisenberger for his wonderful guitar instrumentals.

You are what you eat, so they say.

As it happens, the trillions of bacteria inhabiting your intestinal tract eat what you eat, turning meals into molecules that affect your gut, immune system and mind. The brain and nervous system, in turn, seem to be able to scan and modulate your gut microbiome.

Premek Bercik and his colleagues untangle the mysteries of this bi-directional relationship.

Bercik — a Professor in the Division of Gastroenterology and member of the Farncombe Family Digestive Health Research Institute at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario — studies gut disorders such as Celiac disease and Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), and the links between gut bacteria, bowel inflammation and affective disorders such as depression and anxiety.

Listen to the GPM‘s conversation with Premek in today’s podcast. Click on the button above or go here.

Gut bacteria have numerous tricks up their sleeves. Virtuosic metabolisers of the meat, carbs, fiber and fats we feed them, those bacteria generate molecules that modulate our immune system, stimulate neurons in the walls of our intestinal tract or travel straight to mood centres in our brain. Among these, neurotransmitters such as serotonin and histamine.

Bacteria also stimulate the vagus nerve, the longest nerve in the body, connecting the brain stem and the walls of the gut. The beneficial effects of bacterial supplements (probiotics) may be mediated by the vagus.

In return, the vagus seems to affect gut microbes, scanning those bugs and modifying the composition of bacterial populations. Not surprisingly, the gut microbiome is affected by emotional stress.

Much of what we know about the gut-brain axis has been established in experiments on germ-free mice. Inoculated with stool samples from people with Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), germ-free mice exhibit negative shifts in their own bowel behaviour.

Inoculated with gut samples from people with mood disorders, germ-free mice exhibit their own behavioural shifts.

Drilling down into the mysteries of human gut physiology, Premek Bercik and his team have studied specific strains of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ bacteria. In the former category, Bifidobacterium longum is a well known probiotic.

B. longum NCC3001 reduces patient depression scores and improves gut symptoms, Bercik and his colleagues have found. It also shifts neural activity in brain regions known to be targeted by antidepressants, such as the hippocampus and amygdala.

And, B. longum raises levels of a molecule called brain-derived neurotrophic factor in the hippocampus of mice.

Then there’s a known intestinal ‘bad guy’, Klebsiella aerogenes. Certain strains possess an enzyme that converts the amino acid histidine — found in dietary protein — into the inflammatory and pain mediator, histamine. That histamine crosses the intestinal barrier, where it stimulates mast cells, a type of white blood cell. They, in turn, secrete even more histamine.

Consistent with this scenario, people with IBS tend to secrete elevated levels of histamine in their urine.

And, decreased consumption of certain types of fermentable fiber (which, when digested by bacteria, create optimal metabolic conditions for bacterial histamine production) leads to lower urinary histamine and pain relief.

Listen to our conversation with Premek in today’s podcast. Click on the button above or go here.

Land of a Thousand Hills (David Kattenburg)

The 29th anniversary of Rwanda’s 1994 genocide has just come to a close. Over the course of those awful hundred days, between April 7 and July 15, 1994, an estimated eight hundred thousand ethnic Tutsis and a lesser number of their Hutu neighbors were brutally killed by Hutu extremists armed with knives, hoes and machetes.

Over the airwaves, venom flowed. Announcers at Radio-Télévision Mille Collines (from Rwanda’s popular nickname, the ‘Land of a Thousand Hills’), urged listeners to “kill the cockroaches.”

RTLM chiefs distributed cheap pocket radios to stoke the furnace of ethnic hatred. Established in July 1993 by Hutu extremists “to create harmonious development in Rwandan society,” it became the genocide’s key driving force, mobilizing grassroots members of the notorious Interahamwe militia.

This documentary was produced in 2009. All the people you hear have moved on. ‘Gacaca’ courts ended in 2012. Radio Izuba continues to broadcast in Kibungo, eastern Rwanda.

Listen to the story in today’s podcast. Click on the button above or go here.

They’re all the rage. Drones. Every country wants them, packed with sensors, cameras and missiles. Small ones that loiter, drop tear gas or bombs, or crash with a big bang, in kamikaze fashion; big ones that fire missiles, blowing up cars, buildings and people to bits.

All on command from control rooms hundreds, if not thousands of kilometers away.

Now, Canada is in the market for a fleet of its own. Hellfire missiles and laser guided bombs may be on its shopping list, although details are hard to come by. The acquisition process has been opaque from the start.

In 2019, the Canadian Department of National Defense sent an Invitation to Qualify to two drone manufacturers – US weapons firm General Atomics, with its MQ-9B SkyGuardian, a variant of the notorious Reaper, and Quebec-based L3 Technologies, manufacturer of Heron drones, on license to Israeli Aircraft Industries. A formal request for proposals was issued to the two in February 2022.

Lots of countries produce drones. None have more experience field testing them on defenseless, subjugated populations of people than the Israelis.

L3 Technologies and its Heron drones may now be out of the running.

The GPM spoke about Canada’s planned acquisition of a fleet of potentially armed drones with Branka Marijan, a senior researcher at Project Ploughshares, one of Canada’s oldest arms control and disarmament NGOs.

Listen to our conversation with Branka in today’s podcast. Click on the button above or go here.

Thanks to Dan Weisenberger for his fabulous guitar instrumental themes.

In a recent appeal to the world, Canadian AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton and 180 other leading scientists and luminaries issued a warning about the existential threats to humanity posed by … not climate change, not the demise of Earth’s biosphere … but artificial intelligence.

“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI,” their statement reads, “should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

According to other AI practitioners and observers, the prospects of human extinction at the hands of self-reproducing, self-defending generative AI systems and autonomous killer robots are overblown. The scariest things about AI – they warn — are much more mundane.

“Big data increases inequality and threatens democracy,” Cathy O’Neil wrote in her 2016 work, Weapons of Math Destruction.

Then there’s AI’s carbon footprint.

According to a 2019 report in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Technology Review magazine, cloud computing is responsible for two percent of global greenhouse gas emissions — a larger carbon footprint than the global airline industry. According to a more recent report, ‘training’ a single AI model consumes more energy than a hundred American households.

The GPM spoke with Dylan Baker, a research engineer at the Distributed AI Research Institute.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the audio box on top, or go here.

Ever wonder what secrets lurk within your personal genetic source code? How much DNA did you inherit from Neanderthals? Perhaps you’re the proud owner of a sports gene!

Hopefully no skeletons in the closet – like the Alzheimer’s allele. Would you want to know? If so, consumer genome kits can oblige, in exchange for a bit of spit.

Listen to this story in today’s podcast, produced in 2013. Click on the audio box on top, or go here.

Update: The US FDA warned 23andMe about marketing health predictive genome testing in 2013. In 2017, the FDA authorized it to market Late-Onset Alzheimer’s Disease, Parkinson’s and Hereditary Thrombophilia risk reports. As for National Geographic’s Geno Kits, the Society stopped marketing these in 2019.

National Geographic says, at its website, that it deleted or destroyed DNA data in June 2020, with the exception of info from users who consented to their use for population-related research.

UBC Professor Rosie Redfield checks her genome test results (David Kattenburg)

Their precise scientific name is a mouthful. Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. But you don’t want to get them in your mouth.

Hard to avoid. Forever chemicals are in non-stick cookware; greasy food wrap; microwave popcorn bags … even lipstick. They don’t break down, they build up in your body, and they’re very bad for your health.

And, most people have them in their blood! A recent mapping study reports that PFASs are present at high concentrations in thousands of spots across the UK and Europe. A similar exercise was carried out in the US.

Now, a scientific study from California reports nine compounds in the blood of pregnant women and umbilical cords. Jessica Trowbridge is the study’s lead author. Trowbridge is a research scientist in the Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment at the University of California, San Francisco. Here’s more about the program’s research.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the audio box on top, or go here.

Thanks to Dan Weisenberger for his wonderful guitar instrumentals.

Planet Earth. We humans tend to think of it as ours, to do with as we please.

Over the past two centuries, that’s exactly what humans have done. Humanity’s transformation of Earth’s atmosphere, land surface and oceans has a name – the Anthropocene. Dutch chemist Paul Crützen and American biologist Eugene Stoermer coined the term a quarter century ago.

Last week, at a geology conference in Lille, France, a scientific panel presented their formal definition of the Anthropocene — when it began, how it should be ranked in the official geological time scale and where human impacts are best observed in the rock record.

The panel’s proposed location — a little lake in southern Ontario.

To be more precise, the Anthropocene Working Group’s proposed ‘reference standard’ or prototype for the base of a new Earth stage/age and epoch/series is a 2-centimeter segment of a sedimentary core pulled from the bottom of Crawford Lake, in Milton, Ontario, an hour’s drive west of Toronto.

Crawford Lake sediments, as it happens, have been studied for years. Back in the 1970’s, palynologists pinpointed corn pollen there, dating to the 14th and 15th centuries, the legacy of indigenous people who lived along the lake’s shores, cultivating their Three Sisters — corn, beans and squash.

Above those corn pollen grains, in layers (varves) laid down in the mid-20th century, Anthropocene researchers have pinpointed the fingerprints of less benign human activity — spheroidal carbonaceous particles from high-temperature coal burning and radioactive plutonium from thermonuclear weapons tests that peaked in the mid-1950s.

That distinct layer is now being put forward as the Global Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP), marking the base of the Crawfordian stage/age, and a brand new Epoch/series – the Anthropocene — thereby terminating the one we’ve been in for the past 12,000 years, the Holocene.

The more popular name for a GSSP – a ‘Golden Spike’.

This past Tuesday, at the 4th International Congress of the International Commission on Stratigraphy, in the northern French city of Lille, two members of the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) presented their results.

The geological definition the AWG is now proposing – centering on the Crawford Lake GSSP — will need to be ratified by the body that commissioned it, the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy. If that happens, the proposal will move up to the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), then to the supreme arbiter of all matters geological, the International Union of Geological Sciences.

At each stage, supermajority approval will be required. The proposal’s future is anything but certain.

If it manages to climb to the pinnacle of the geo-bureaucratic hierarchy, ratification or rejection could be announced in August 2024, at the 37th congress of the International Union of Geological Sciences, in Busan, South Korea.

If the IUGS ratifies the Anthropocene as a new Epoch, terminating the Holocene, it will be a momentous event. Never before have geologists announced the start of a new Epoch in their own life times – one caused by humans themselves.

Crawford Lake’s selection as the proposed Anthropocene’s ‘Golden Spike’ culminates years of analysis. Twelve candidate GSSPs were originally put forward, from locations around the planet. This was narrowed down to nine, of which four received votes in various voting rounds.

Full details on the nine sites can be found here. A great read.  

Listen to the AWG’s Anthropocene announcement in this podcast edition. Click on the button on top, or go here.

Colin Waters, chair of the AWG, is the first you’ll hear. Francine McCarthy follows. McCarthy is a geologist at Brock University, and the scientific director of Team Crawford.

This is technical stuff. Listen closely.

Colin Waters, Francine McCarthy and Martin Head outside the STRATI 2023 conference in Lille (David Kattenburg)

Last week’s announcement of a proposed definition of the Anthropocene may come as a surprise to some.

Aren’t we already in the Anthropocene, ordinary people ask?

Not according to those who govern Earth’s official time scale — the International Chronostratigraphic Time Chart.

Judging from the public comments of ranking geologists, the AWG’s proposed formal definition, announced last week in the French city of Lille, may well wither on the geo-bureaucratic vine.

Further indication of which way the wind blows was on display at the International Commission of Stratigraphy’s conference in Lille, last week. After having suggested that the AWG’s proposed definition of the Anthropocene and its candidate Golden Spike could be publicly announced at the conference, organizers did a volte-face.

Crawford Lake findings could be presented to stratigraphers by AWG chair Colin Waters and Crawford Lake researcher Francine McCarthy, they said — as planned — but media would not be welcome. Certainly not film crews.

So, a French camera crew spoke with Waters, McCarthy and Brock University geologist Martin Head outside the conference hall (see photo above).

That evening, their public announcement took place at a Lille hotel, in partnership with the Berlin-based Haus der Kulturen der Welt and Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, who helped fund the AWG’s work.

If the AWG’s Anthropocene proposal does end up getting deep-sixed by higher geological authorities, a large pack of hardworking geologists will be crestfallen.

The AWG’s 38 members (23 voting; 15 advisory) have been labouring on their proposal since 2009 — increasingly so over the past four years.

Then there are the geologists, geochemists, palynologists and other specialists associated with the dozen candidate sites originally in the running for the Anthropocene’s Golden Spike. Hundreds of them.

Among these, no one has worked harder than the scientific director of the winning candidate, Crawford Lake — Francine McCarthy.

I spoke with McCarthy the morning after the July 11 Big Announcement in Lille.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the button on top, or go here.

Francine McCarthy (second from left), Carleton University colleague Tim Patterson, to her left, other members of Team Crawford, Halton Conservation Authority staff and a friend, on the lake’s boardwalk. (David Kattenburg)

Francine McCarthy pays homage to the First Nations people who lived and walked lightly on Crawford Lake shores, leaving the most benign of signature in the lake’s sediments – corn pollen.

Today, the lake and its immediate surroundings are owned and operated by Halton Region Conservation Authority, established under the Conservation Authorities Act of the Province of Ontario. The Niagara Escarpment area it lies in is a UN Biosphere Reserve and wonder-of-the-world.

Crawford Lake also sits on unceded lands of the Wyandot, Wendat, Attawandaron, Tianantate and Wenro peoples. First Nations leaders granted permission for the lake’s bottom sediments to be cored, on various occasions, for Anthropocene research.

Now they want her to remain in peace, and recover.

Catherine Tammaro is a seated Spotted Turtle Clan Faith Keeper, and an artist living in Toronto. Catherine’s ancestral roots at Crawford Lake run deep. Her installations have appeared at exhibitions around the world. Among these, at the House of World Culture, in Berlin, that helped fund the activities of the Anthropocene Working Group, and at Crawford Lake itself.

Catherine Tammaro’s beadSpitter installation

I spoke with Catherine Tammaro at her art studio in Cabbagetown, Toronto.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast, or go here.

Instrumental guitar in GPM podcasts are performed by Dan Weisenberger.

It’s neither a drunkard’s dream nor a woolly Socialist notion: a universal basic income, guaranteed for a nation’s citizens – perhaps residents too – in return for … nothing. Just to get by.

No far-fetched idea, the Universal Basic Income (UBI) concept is endorsed by the World Bank.

The universal basic income concept “holds an attractive promise of change across many lines,” the World Bank stated in a 2020 report. “These include coverage potential, fairness in social contracts, power relations in labor markets, and gender equity.”

Just two countries have implemented UBI systems, for limited periods – the Islamic Republic of Iran and Mongolia.

Among the longest standing and most successful guaranteed income systems — the Alaska Permanent Fund.

In the UK, a group of social entrepreneurs are preparing to launch their own locally-led pilot study to see how UBI systems play out on the ground, in people’s lives. It will be a community-driven project. Two communities have been selected to participate: the Grange area of East Finchley, in north London, and the South Tyneside town of Jarrow.

Jarrow residents have good reason to be interested in the Universal Basic Income pilot project. In October 1936, two hundred men marched from Jarrow to London to protest unemployment.

Cleo Goodman leads the UBI pilot project, currently in the scoping, community-consultation and fundraising stage. Goodman co-founded the Basic Income Conversation project in 2019, based at a think tank called Autonomy, that specializes in the future of work.

I reached Cleo Goodman in Edinburgh. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the podcast link above, or go here.

Jarrow “Crusaders” set off for London in October 1936 to protest unemployment.

The Biden Administration has just announced it plans to provide cluster munitions to Ukraine.

Ukrainian forces seem to be bogged down in their struggle against the Russians. As both sides slaughter each other, Washington reckons cluster bombs have something positive to contribute in its proxy war with Russia.

Russia has also reportedly used cluster munitions in its invasion of Ukraine.

Human rights groups have condemned the idea of sending cluster munitions to Ukraine. Several EU/NATO member states have voiced concern.

Cluster munitions release scores of little bomblets that fly through the air and bounce around, slicing and dicing human flesh. Many of them don’t explode, littering the landscape with munitions that continue to kill for years, especially kids.

As Europe’s bloodiest conflict since World War Two drags on, thoughts turn to the First World War – the one that was supposed to end all wars.

On August 4, 1914 – 109 years ago — Germany invaded little Belgium. Three weeks later, in an orgy of destruction, German troops laid seven Belgian towns to waste. The “Martyr Cities,” they came to be called. Leuven (Louvain, in French) was one of them.

Of all the acts committed by German troops in Leuven in August 1914, none sparked more international outrage than the destruction of Leuven university library, a treasure trove of European literature and art, torched by the Germans on the night of August 25, 1914.

Here’s a story I produced on the hundredth anniversary of that dreadful event – an event elderly residents of Leuven remember. Click on the podcast link above, or go here.

Mark Deretz, Leuven University archivist, beside carbonized remains of old library. (David Kattenburg)

It’s something human beings take for granted: the World is a very human place — covered by concrete and tall buildings; cars racing this way and that; food from all corners of the planet.

Some green space — for us humans.

Earth’s human age has a name – the Anthropocene. Dutch chemist Paul Crützen coined it, twenty years ago. The Anthropocene, Crützen said, should be declared a new ‘Epoch’ in Earth history, terminating the one we’ve been in for the past 12,000 years, the Holocene.

Some time this summer, a panel of scientists — the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) — will move Crützen’s idea up a notch, with a proposal of their own on how Earth’s human age should be defined – geologically.

Paul Crützen’s original idea was that the Anthropocene began with the 18th century Industrial Revolution. In 2019 — a decade of research under its belt — the AWG decided it actually began around 1950, at the start of the “Great Acceleration’, when the scale, scope and pace of humanity’s impact on Planet Earth started to skyrocket.

American environmental historian John McNeill, a colleague of Crutzen’s, had come up with the term in 2005, inspired by a 1944 work by Hungarian economist Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time.

McNeill’s idea would be corroborated by a set of ‘Great Acceleration curves’, or graphs, published in 2007 by Crützen, McNeill and Australian Earth system scientist Will Steffen.

There are two sets of Great Acceleration curves– one for human drivers of planetary change: population, GDP, energy use and so on. The second set charts Earth system responses to these drivers, such as rising CO2 concentrations, mean global temperature; ocean acidification and tropical forest loss. Each graph showed sudden, steep increases in the mid-20th century.

John McNeill is a professor of environmental history at Georgetown University. Among his writings, a book called Something Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World.

The GPM reached John McNeill at Georgetown University. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the podcast link above, or go here.

Music themes in this podcast by Dan Weisenberger.

It’s something human beings take for granted. The World is a very human place; covered by concrete and tall buildings; cars racing this way and that; food from all corners of the planet.

Some green space — for us humans.

Earth’s human age has a name – the Anthropocene. Dutch chemist Paul Crützen coined it, twenty years ago. The Anthropocene, Crützen said, should be declared a new ‘Epoch’ in Earth history, terminating the one we’ve been in for the past 12,000 years, the Holocene. Now, a panel of scientists is poised to ratify Crützen’s idea.

Listen to this story in today’s podcast. Click on the button on top, or go here.

The Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) was set up in 2009 by a subcommission of the International Commission on Stratigraphy, the largest component body of the International Union of Geological Sciences.

The AWG’s assigned task: defining the Anthropocene, geologically – the precise year it began, where the new time period is best exemplified in the rock record (a ‘Golden Spike’) and how it should be ranked in the official geochronological time scale.

Paul Crützen’s original idea was that the Anthropocene began with the 18^th century Industrial Revolution. In 2019 — a decade of research under its belt — the AWG decided it actually began around 1950, at the start of the “Great Acceleration.’ American environmental historian John McNeill coined the term in 2004, inspired by a 1944 work by Austrian economist Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time.

McNeill’s idea was corroborated by a set of ‘Great Acceleration curves’, or graphs, published in 2007 by Crützen, McNeill and Australian Earth system scientist Will Steffen.

There are two sets of Great Acceleration curves– one for human drivers of planetary change: population, GDP, energy use and so on.  The second set charts Earth system responses to these drivers, such as rising CO2 concentrations, mean global temperature; ocean acidification and tropical forest loss. Each graph showed sudden, steep increases in the mid-20th century.

Reflecting on the Great Acceleration idea, Canadian social scientist and author Thomas Homer-Dixon identifies another key human accelerating force, fueled by massive fossil energy inputs – complexity.

“One of the things, as a complexity theorist, that I note, is that that kind of energy input into a system will increase and sustain complexity,” says Homer-Dixon in today’s podcast.

Among the many analyses of the Anthropocene today, none are more fascinating than the role of complexity in human society – the idea that, as human societies develop, they get increasingly complicated; tied together and dependent on connections and systems that defy comprehension, that endlessly proliferate and are liable to come undone, in self-amplifying cascades. Pernicious and virtuous cascades interest Homer-Dixon greatly.

Having decided that the Anthropocene began with the mid-20^th century’s Great Acceleration, the AWG’s second task was to identify one spot on Earth where that human-engineered acceleration is best observed in mid-20^th century sediments.

The technical term for this is a mouthful – a “Global Stratotype Section & Point” (GSSP). The more popular one – ‘Golden Spike’.

To be precise, that Golden Spike would be the thin sequence of layers in a core pulled from the bottom sediments of a lake, bay or estuary, or from a peat bog, ice sheet, coral reef or stalagmite, somewhere on Earth, containing the chemical and material “signatures” of human activity dating to the mid-20^th century.

After years of investigation, the AWG came up with a list of twelve candidate Golden Spikes (later narrowed down to nine): the Baltic Sea; Japan’s Beppu Bay; Sihailongwan crater lake, in China; Śnieżka peat bog, at the heart of Poland’s “Black Triangle”; San Francisco Bay estuary; urban soils from Vienna; a stalagmite from a cave in Italy; coral samples from the Gulf of Mexico and Cairns, Australia; a couple of ice cores from Greenland and the Antarctic, and a small lake in southern Ontario.

Each candidate site assembled a scientific team to study their cores in the minutest detail.

Over the course of their scientific research, a host of chemical, material and biological ‘signatures’ of human activity were identified. Key among these — ‘spheroidal carbonaceous particles’ (fly ash) from coal burning, microplastics, heavy metals, isotopes of carbon and nitrogen associated with fossil fuel burning, and radioactive Plutonium-239 from atmospheric nuclear weapons testing that peaked in the 1950s.

Carleton University Earth Sciences professor Tim Patterson (kneeling), while Brock University’s Mike Pisaric pulls core from bottom of Crawford Lake, assisted by Ph.D. student Chelsi McNeill-Jewer (credit: Gavin Woodburn)

“We do have the best site!” says Brock University geologist Francine McCarthy. “I have to accept some kind of maternal pride!” 

McCarthy, a lead scientist for ‘Team Crawford’, has reason to be proud. Crawford Lake is a meromictic lake on the edge of the Niagara Escarpment, an hour’s drive west of Toronto: conical, small –  but very deep. So its waters don’t mix, and its bottom sediments are perfectly preserved. Those sediments consist of many layers, laid down seasonally, year after year, in paired couplets called ‘varves’, all precisely dated.

Among the world’s meromictic lakes, Crawford Lake sediments are highly unusual. Contrary to what one might expect (and key to their ability to hang on to Plutonium-239), those bottom sediments contain oxygen.

Those sediments have been building up since the start of the Holocene, 12,000 years ago, and have recorded three phases of human activity.

For about five hundred years, starting in the late 13^th century, Crawford Lake sediments recorded the activities of First Nations people living along the lake’s shores: grain and pollen from corn, beans and squash – the ‘Three Sisters’.

In the mid-19^th century, the logging and farming activities of European colonists were deposited in Crawford Lake’s sediments.

Then, beginning in the mid-20^th century, industrial activity of a more globally pervasive nature appeared: spheroidal carbonaceous particles, or fly ash, wafting over from the blast furnaces at the steel mills in nearby Hamilton – aka ‘Steel Town’.

Then there’s Plutonium-239.

“The nice thing about plutonium as a marker of the mid-20th century is that Plutonium-239 does not occur naturally,” says McCarthy. “If you were to model what you should see in the sediment, you would see exactly what we see at Crawford Lake. And part of the reason for that is that our not-anoxic bottom waters in our meromictic lake keeps it in place.”

Crawford Lake core (courtesy: Patterson lab)

But Crawford Lake is just one of nine candidate sites the Anthropocene Working Group will have to choose from, as the Golden Spike marking the base of the Anthropocene.

They are expected to announce their decision some time this summer, following a series of votes that have taken place over the past year. To be approved, a candidate site must receive sixty percent of votes from the AWG’s twenty-three voting members.

Having chosen their Golden Spike, the AWG’s third, and perhaps most momentous decision will be how that Golden Spike should be ranked in the geochronological time scale. It could simply be a ‘stage’ – the shortest time unit – or, it could be the start of a brand-new Epoch, terminating the one we’ve been in for the past 12,000 years, the Holocene.

Epochs are periods of massive change. Holocene conditions – warm and stable – were what made  human civilization possible in the first place. If the Holocene is over, humanity could be in trouble.

Whatever the AWG decides, the fate of its complete proposal will be far from certain.

Having formally drafted its full proposal – when the Anthropocene began, its Golden Spike (GSSP) and how that GSSP should be ranked — the AWG will present that proposal to its parent body, the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy. If two-thirds of the SQS’s members agree, the proposal will be submitted to the International Commission on Stratigraphy, where supermajority approval will also be required, before passing it up to the supreme body on all matters geological — the International Union of Geological Sciences.

The odds are stacked against it. Up and down the geo-bureaucratic hierarchy, no one’s more skeptical about the Anthropocene idea than Phil Gibbard. Gibbard, a Cambridge University geologist, is an authority on the Quaternary period, the last 2.6 million years of Earth time. He’s also the Secretary General of the International Commission on Stratigraphy.

Gibbard has various reasons for opposing the formalization of the Anthropocene as a new stage in Earth history, with a base in the mid-20^th century.

“In geological terms, that’s today! It’s just yesterday morning!” says Gibbard. “We have no clue about, seen from thousands of years in the future, whether this would be more than a blip!” 

Gibbard acknowledges the profound impact humans have had on planet Earth, but he thinks those impacts began thousands of years ago.

“So, you could say that, really, marking off these last few decades from the rest of the Holocene is an artificial distinction, and one which is too focused on humans,” says Gibbard.

Rather than designating the Anthropocene as a new epoch in the geological time scale, or just a new ‘stage’ of the Holocene (in which case it couldn’t be called the ‘Anthropocene’; only epochs get to have that cene suffix), Gibbard and other Anthropocene skeptics have proposed that it simply be declared an “event,” a general phenomenon that’s been playing out for thousands of years.

Phil Gibbard, Cambridge University

Only time will tell if the Anthropocene is an ‘event’ of very long duration, or just a blip, says Simon Turner, secretary of the Anthropocene Working Group.

Standing in a hallway at University College London, down the hall from the geology department, checking out an exhibit about time-traveling Objects of the Misanthropocene (see photo on the very bottom of this story), Turner reflects on the popularity of the Anthropocene idea in non-scientific circles.

“The thing with the Anthropocene, people get it,” says Turner. “They get the idea of, like, human activity on the planet. The Holocene … I can probably pull someone over here now and say, have you heard of the Holocene? And they will not have heard of it … and geology is just down the corner, so you would hope someone has!”

Simon Turner, Secretary of Anthropocene Working Group (David Kattenburg)

In a crowded office at the University of Vienna, Eva Horn reflects on the fierce debates the Anthropocene idea has triggered, each with their own ‘epistemology’, or intellectual/knowledge framework. Together with U. of Vienna geologist Michael Wagreich, Horn founded the Vienna Anthropocene Network.

“What I find, being an outsider to their fights, that are incredibly interesting and clarifying … Normally an Epoch, a geochronological Epoch, gets ratified about … hmmm … 12,000 years later? After it began,” says Horn, with a questioning shake of her head.

“Now what they are trying is to describe the present! Not the Earth’s past, but what’s happening after 1950. Like what, 70 years? No, we don’t do that! We do two billion years. We can talk about that!”

Eva Horn, Vienna Anthropocene Network (David Kattenburg)

Thomas Homer-Dixon has his epistemology too, along with a healthy dose of skepticism about the Anthropocene debate.

“There’s absolutely no doubt that humankind is producing massive changes in the biological and physical processes on the planet,” says Homer-Dixon. “And that those changes have accelerated in the last fifty years. Whether it deserves a fundamentally new label, I’m not convinced.”

“In a funny sort of way, it’s accentuating human exceptionalism in just the kind of way that’s gotten us into this problem in the first place. We have this existential need to say, ‘Well, we’re really important and we’re changing everything here and let’s put a name on it! Our time in geological history.’ Well, OK, fine, if you need that, that’s great.”

Homer-Dixon’s bottom line: humanity is definitely in trouble deep, and may have only a century to pull back from the fast-approaching existential abyss. Conjuring up German philosopher Karl Jasper’s idea of humanity’s great ‘Axial Age’, between the 8^th and 3^rd centuries BCE (“a pause for liberty, a deep breath bringing the most lucid consciousness”), Homer-Dixon reaches deep down for hope.

If hope fails, says Homer-Dixon, humanity’s  prospects will be similar to that of the dinosaurs, 66 million years ago: blindly groping through the ashes of a biosphere devastated by an asteroid of its own making.

Homer-Dixon has written various books about all this: The Upside of Down, Environment, Scarcity and Violence and The Ingenuity Gap. His most recent work — Commanding Hope; The Power We Have to Renew a World in Peril strikes a hopeful chord.

Listen to this story in today’s podcast. Click on the button on top, or go here.

This podcast features instrumental guitar by Dan Weisenberger and Eliya. Also some wonderful percussion by Paul Panchezak and electronica created by Mo Karrouze.

Explanatory text in front of a time-traveling object of the Misanthropocene, University College London (David Kattenburg)

The US anti-abortion movement portrays itself as “pro-life,” “pro-family” and traditionally conservative – whatever that may mean.

Not far beneath the surface, however, something darker bubbles – a wellspring of misogyny, racism, hatred of immigrants and antipathy for individual freedom of all sorts – among these, the freedom of a woman to control her own body.

The GPM speaks about the history of women’s reproductive rights with Lauren MacIvor Thompson. Lauren Thompson is an Assistant Professor of History at Kennesaw State University, in Kennesaw, Georgia, and a historian of early-twentieth-century women’s rights and public health at Georgia State University College of Law’s Center for Law, Health & Society.

Listen to my conversation with Laura MacIvor Thompson. Click on the audio link above, or go here.

Tys Theysmeyer in Cootes Paradise (David Kattenburg)

Intact, natural ecosystems are home to a wide range of plants and animals. Cities are ecosystems too. The healthiest ones coexist with nature. On the edge of one of Canada’s largest cities, the benefits provided by natural ecosystems and the importance of protecting them are on full display.

Here’s a story from Hamilton, Ontario – a place called Cootes Paradise.

Click on the audio link above, or go here.

You gotta laugh to keep from crying sometimes. The bluesman who wrote those words could have had today’s climate news in mind: epic rains and floods from Somalia to south Asia; savage wildfires in Spain and the western Canadian province of Alberta; eye-popping heat in Vietnam and Thailand, that actually kills.

Last year was Europe’s hottest ever, swept by heat waves that killed an estimated twenty thousand.

And, greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise.

Methane — shorter lived but more powerful than CO2 — reached its highest recorded level in 2022.

So did the energy content of Earth’s oceans, where 90% of atmospheric heat goes.

As oceans heat, they expand. Ocean levels reached a record high in 2022, and their rate of rise has doubled since satellite records began. Fast melting glaciers accelerate the rate of rising seas.

All this, two years into what would normally be a cooling, La Niña phase. As warmer El Niño conditions kick in, the next few years promise to be even warmer, pushing Earth surface temperatures above 1.5 degrees, the ideal limit established at the 2016 Paris climate summit.

These are the findings of the World Meteorological Organization, in its State of the Global Climate report for 2022. I spoke with the report’s lead author, John Kennedy. Kennedy is the Chair of the World Meteorological Organization’s Expert Team on Climate Monitoring and Assessments.

Listen to my conversation with John Kennedy. Click on the audio link above, or go here.

Thanks to Dan Weisenberger for his wonderful guitar instrumentals.

We’ve all heard it before: To avoid impending Earth crisis (if it isn’t too late), people need to change their eating habits. Those who have the choice, should opt to eat food grown or raised close to home.

Go for unpackaged, unprocessed food products. They contain less embodied carbon than products wrapped in cardboard, plastic or tin.

Grilled Meat (David Kattenburg)

And, experts says, eat less meat. Takes lots of energy to grow meat. Livestock production generates lots of CO2 and methane, and “leaks” nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus into the environment.

Aside from all this, people who get to eat probably eat too much. So says Allan Buckwell, a British agricultural economist. Turning to a concept associated with Swedish theorist Stefan Rockström, Will Steffen and other Earth scientists, Buckwell co-authored a 2018 paper entitled What is the Safe Operating Space for EU livestock.

Emeritus Professor Allan Buckwell taught agricultural economics at Newcastle University and Wye College, in the UK. He was Policy Director of the Country Land and Business Association, and is currently Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for European Environmental Policy.

I spoke with Allan Buckwell about food consumption. Listen to today’s podcast. Click on the audio bar above, or go here.

Mention the word bacteria, some people recoil in horror. Truth be told, most prokaryotes are perfectly harmless, and even helpful. Better yet, bugs are fun to grow, observe, play with and harness for useful purposes – outside and inside your body.

In today’s podcast edition, Dutch microbiologist Marjan Smeulders shows off the mixed cultures she and her students assemble. Winogradsky columns, they’re called, after the Ukrainian microbiologist, ecologist and soil scientist Sergei Winogradsky.  Easy to assemble.

Marjan Smeulders in incubation room, Winogradsky columns at her side (David Kattenburg)

Winogradsky column in a soft drink bottle (David Kattenburg)

Listen to today’s podcast. Click on the audio bar above, or go here.

Jerusalem, Jerusalem. Gotta say it twice.

Gilo settlement, seen from Beit Jala, separating Beit Jala and Bethlehem from Jerusalem (David Kattenburg)

The “eternal, undivided capital” of what a growing number of credible observers call an apartheid state. Under Article 7(2)(h) of the 2002 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, Apartheid is defined as an “institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.”

In search of Israeli Apartheid, go no further than East Jerusalem. Home to 362,000 indigenous Palestinians and 234,000 Jewish settlers, transferred into East Jerusalem, across the Green Line, beyond Israel’s legal borders, in flagrant breach of international law.

Demolished Palestinian home in Al-Walaja, south of Jerusalem (David Kattenburg)

East Jerusalem’s Jewish settlers get all the breaks. The Palestinians get surveilled, humiliated, harassed, arrested, attacked and shot, no questions asked.

Their homes get confiscated, or bulldozed.

Israel’s aim? To get rid of them, thereby boosting Jewish demographics, in ‘Judaized’ East Jerusalem.

Israeli flag and surveillance cameras above Jewish colony in Palestinian Silwan (David Kattenburg)

I toured East Jerusalem with a chap named Shai Goren. Goren is a teacher and tour guide with the progressive Israeli group Ir Amim. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the audio bar above, or go here.

Thanks to Dan Weisenberger — once again — for the wonderful guitar instrumentals in the GPM podcast.

Between the winter of 1992 and spring of 1994, backpack on my back and a vintage 1963 Nagra III audio device over my shoulder (reel-to-reel), I traveled across Canada twice, visiting places and interviewing people from Prince Edward Island to the west coast of Vancouver Island, and in every province in between.

Out of this adventure, thirty-two hour-length documentaries about planet Earth, global ecology and the human endeavour — The Earth Chronicles.

These were halcyon times to finance a project of this sort. Co-producer Peter Hutton and I managed to raise an astonishing $120,000 for the Earth Chronicles radio project (equivalent to about $220,000 dollars today), from a dozen Canadian federal and provincial agencies and other private groups. Greyhound and Voyageur bus lines donated travel passes.

Producing the Earth Chronicles was a task of equally epic proportions.

In my room in a student abode lovingly dubbed the Yellow Brick House, countless hours were spent listening back to all these voices, magnetically captured on dozens and dozens of reels of quarter-inch tape; wax pencil and razor blade in hand, slicing, splicing and assembling sequences; lengths of quarter-inch tape around my neck, over my shoulder and knees, and piled up neatly across the floor.

Across town, in the production studio of CFMU, McMaster University Radio, I pumped out thirty-two editions of the Earth Chronicles, focusing on a variety of Earth and environment themes, and special places across Canada – without narration (something I announce at the start of this doc, with certain insistence).

Here’s one of them — Trees & Earth. Not everyone introduces themselves. Most do, eventually.

Listen to this documentary by clicking the audio panel on top, or going right here.

Thanks to the following for their wonderful music. I need to locate all these folks, and let them know I’ve resurrected their old tunes.

Paul Haslam (hammer dulcimer); Vanessa LeBourdais (Old Tree Stump, Clearcut); Colleen and Kelt Eccleston (Carmana … or Rainforest?); Timothy Weber & Straight From the Kitchen (Big Tree Shout); Dan Weisenberger & Eliya (forest-inspired instrumental)

Richard Sommer reads his Sonnet 12, and David Inman recites Shakespeare.

So, how did The Earth Chronicles change my life? I discovered Brandon, Manitoba, the “Wheat City,” and ended up moving out there. Another story.

London’s largest ever public protests for climate and Earth justice have come to a close. An estimated hundred thousand attended the four-day event, over Earth Day weekend, organized by Extinction Rebellion and other UK groups.

“Unite To Survive” was their rallying cry.

Earth Day 2023 protest in London (Credit: Denise Laura Baker and Extinction Rebellion)

They want the UK government to set up Citizens’ Assemblies, that would formulate and propose solutions. I spoke with Marijn van de Geer, External Coordinator for Media and Messaging, and Internal Coordinator for Citizens Assemblies with Extinction Rebellion UK.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the link above, or subscribe here.

Battir, Palestine, where local villagers cooperate with, rather than appropriate, natural Earth productivity. Listen to Vivien Sansour. Click on audio link (David Kattenburg)

Fossil fuel burning and the resulting pollution of Earth’s atmosphere is just one of the insults our planet faces in this human-engineered age of ours – the Anthropocene.

In their relentless hunger for food, fiber and fuel, humans have transformed an estimated three quarters of the planet’s vegetated land surface, and a quarter of its natural productivity. Human Appropriation of Net Primary Production, or HANPP, this is called.

Fridolin Krausmann is an authority on this. Krausmann is professor of sustainable resource use at the Institute of Social Ecology, at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna. His research focuses on the metabolism of societies and their economies, and ways of bring socioeconomic metabolism into line with Earth’s natural source and sink capacities.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the link above, or subscribe here.

Environmental bacteria

Bacteria are Earth’s most ancient creatures. Their numbers and total mass are colossal. By some estimates, the combined mass of all bacteria on Earth is a thousand times greater than all humans. Those microbes make planet Earth go round. The vast majority are perfectly harmless, and actually essential for life on this planet.

Marjan Smeulders studies environmental bacteria at Radboud University, in the Netherlands. She studies bacterial adaptations to their environment, and the role they play in ecological systems. Bacterial remediation of human pollution is an obvious application.

Marjan Smeulders is also a climate activist with Scientists4Future NL and Scientist Rebellion NL.

Listen to my conversation with Marjan in today’s podcast. Click on the link above, or subscribe here.

The wonderful guitar in GPM podcasts, courtesy Dan Weisenberger

Here’s a story about a trip I took, some years ago, in the company of a Palestinian woman named Vivien Sansour. Vivien studied cultural anthropology in university. Since then, she’s become a champion for seed and food sovereignty in her native land.

Vivien Sansour (David Kattenburg)

Vivien and I drove from the Palestinian town of Beit Jala to nearby Battir. There, standing on the edge of a deep valley, I feasted my eyes on one of the world’s most astonishing sights: an amphitheater of ancient stone terraces covered in a cornucopia of fruits, vegetables, herbs and olive trees.

The engine of all this biodiversity? A very special microclimate. Also, a source of pure spring water that Battir’s eight extended families have been cooperatively managing for generations.

Battir’s gardens earned it World Heritage status from UNESCO back in 2014. “Endangered” status, no less. For years, Israel has been wanting to run its Apartheid Wall right across Battir valley, a move that would destroy it. Battir’s UNESCO status has put Israel’s plans on hold — for the time being.

Listen to this story in today’s podcast. Click on the link on top — or follow us on Blubrry.

Credit: Andrew S. Wright

For human beings, Earth is a supremely human place. A world of concrete, steel, glass, plastic, cars, paved streets and highways, and lots of other human beings, generating mountains of waste. Here and there, pockets of nature for human beings.

Dutch chemist Paul Crützen coined a term for Earth’s human age – the Anthropocene. Crützen proposed that it be declared a new ‘Epoch’ in Earth history, terminating the one geologists say we’ve been in for the past 12,000 years, the Holocene. Now, a scientific panel is about to shift Crützen’s proposal up a notch.

The Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) was set up by a subcommission of the International Union of Geological Sciences. Its task — defining the Anthropocene, geologically. Some time this Summer or early Fall, the panel’s proposal will be submitted to its parent body, the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy.

Listen to this story in today’s podcast. Click on the link on top — or follow us on Blubrry.

Thijs van Kolfschoten in his lab (David Kattenburg)

Thijs van Kolfschoten is a member of that Subcommission. He’s a Professor Emeritus of palaeo- and archaeozoology at the University of Leiden, in the Netherlands. Thijs took me to his lab, filled with bones of all sorts. We spoke about early humans, and the Anthropocene idea.

Sleep Waves (David Kattenburg)

We all know sleep is critical for survival, and a lack of it can have dire consequences. A good night’s sleep certainly helps us function better during the day. But why exactly? Researchers are only now beginning to connect the dots between brain plasticity and the healing powers of sleep.

Listen to this story in today’s podcast. Click on the link on top — or follow us on Blubrry.

Bacteria are Earth’s most ancient creatures, and there are lots of them, with a total mass a thousand times more than all humans. Those microbes make planet Earth go round. Some of them are dangerous pathogens. Most of them aren’t.

Indeed, some bacteria are great kitchen companions. Anna Sigrithur has been fermenting food and drinks for years. When Anna isn’t chopping up cabbage or pine cones, setting them up to ferment, she’s studying fermentation culture at Concordia University, in Montreal.

Anna Sigrithur preparing Nordic fermented feast. (Kate Sjoberg)

Listen to our conversation with Anna Sigrithur in today’s podcast. Click on the audio link above, or subscribe to the GPM Podcast right here.

Since the dawn of civilization, nothing has fascinated humans more than the diversity of life around them. Aristotle was among the first natural historians. Naturalis Historia, by Pliny, is the Roman Empire’s largest surviving work.

The collection, description and preservation of living things has come a long way since then. Today, biologists use fancy tools to collect creatures, and DNA barcoding technology to identify them. At the Naturalis Biodiversity Center, in the Dutch city of Leiden, a group of natural historians and molecular biologists have set out to identify all species of multicellular life in this sea-bound nation, and to systematically define them, based on their DNA barcodes.

DNA barcodes are small fragments of DNA characteristic of one or another species. A half-dozen standardized barcodes exist for different groups of organisms. COX1 is used to identify animals. Botanists use a chloroplast gene. The ‘Internal Transcribed Spacer,” or ITS barcode, is used to identify fungi. Bacteria have their own barcodes too. Within any broad group, that standard barcode varies from species to species. A digital device reads it, just like a supermarket scanner reads the barcode on a can of soup or a roll of toilet paper. Predictably, DNA barcode readers are getting small.

Barcode readers at Naturalis are the size of standard computer printer.

Kevin Beentjes and his DNA barcode reader (David Kattenburg)

Earth’ surface is a little over one degree warmer today, on average, than it was at the start of the industrial revolution 200 years ago. That doesn’t seem like much. Under the Paris Agreement, governments agreed to limit temperature rise to two degrees. At present emission rates, that target will likely be exceeded.

In a landmark report published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Scientists, back in 2018, researchers warned that a two degree rise in global surface temperature may actually exceed a critical planetary threshold, pushing Earth down a cascade of tipping points into “hothouse” mode, unlike anything this third rock from the sun has experienced since the mid-Miocene epoch, fifteen million years ago.

I spoke with the lead author of that report, Will Steffen.

Stability landscape for Earth system out of the Holocene (PNAS, used with permission)

Will Steffen was an eminent Earth system scientist. A native of Norfolk, Nebraska, Steffen emigrated to Australia in the 1970s, where he took up a position at the Australian National University in Canberra. Steffen served as the Executive Director of the International Geosphere–Biosphere Programme, a ground-breaking initiative aimed at studying the chemical, physical and biological processes governing Earth as system. His name came to be associated with a host of ideas about our planet, and humanity’s fate. Planetary Boundaries; Safe Operating Space. Steffen’s Great Acceleration curves helped corroborate the idea, first proposed by Paul Crützen, that Earth has entered a new Epoch, the Anthropocene. Will Steffen passed away in January 2023.

As Earth’s atmosphere warms, so do its oceans. Simple physics. Water absorbs heat. Earth’s oceans have absorbed about ninety percent of human-generated atmospheric heat.

As oceans warm, they expand, and their level rises. Sea level rise has been accelerating, steadily, since the start of the 20th century. According to the most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, seas are now rising at a rate of about 4 mm. per year.

That may seem small. At business-as-usual rates, this could add up to a meter by 2100. But uncertainty is huge. Sea level could rise two meters by the end of this century, and five meters by 2150. Earth’s great coastal cities would drown.

It gets worse. Melting ice sheets add to sea level rise. As the Greenland ice sheet melts, North Atlantic waters freshen, and the northward circulation of waters from the tropics slows down. The collapse of Earth’s ‘great ocean conveyor belt’, was the subject of a Hollywood disaster movie. It could come true.

Stefan Rahmstorf is Co-Chair of the Department of Earth System Analysis at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), and Professor of Ocean Physics at the University of Potsdam, just outside Berlin.

Sandra Witelson (David Kattenburg)

Men are from Mars, women from Venus – John Gray wrote, back in the 1990s. Science sees it another way: male and female brains are wired differently, which explains lots: why relationships work or not; how men’s and women’s brains age, get damaged or stay resilient; why men have such a hard time listening.

Listen to my conversation with McMaster University brain researcher and psychologist Sandra Witelson, and University of Minnesota cognitive neuroscientist Apostolos Georgopoulos.

The Islamic Republic of Iran is routinely described as the most malign and aggressive force across the Persian Gulf and Middle East. Iran does have its “proxies” — militant allies in Yemen, Syria and Lebanon. Its own forces are stationed in Syria. (US forces are stationed in neighboring Iraq)

Unlike the US, Iran hasn’t actually attacked another country since the mid-19th century.

In contrast, Since its founding in 1948, Israel has launched multiple unprovoked or ‘preemptive’ assaults on Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.

According to the US Institute of Peace — a US government-funded institution — Israel has “allegedly conducted” at least two dozen operations against Iran – including assassinations, drone strikes and cyberattacks.

Israeli military chief Aviv Kochavi admitted more than 500 aerial assaults on Syria during 2020. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has documented nine strikes since the start of 2023. In February, fifteen people were killed by an Israeli airstrike on central Damascus.

Then, there’s Lebanon. Israel attacked Lebanon for the first time in 1978. In the summer of 1982, between fifteen and twenty thousand died in the course of Israel’s aerial assault on Beirut.

Forty years later, Israeli fighter jets and drones penetrate Lebanese airspace on an almost daily basis, generating constant noxious noise. Lawrence Abu Hamdan has documented over 20,000 Israeli aerial incursions into Lebanese airspace over the past fifteen years.

Born in 1985 in Amman, Jordan, Abu Hamdan is a specialist in audio analysis, sonic arts, forensic audio analysis and ‘the politics of listening’. He has testified as an expert witness at the UK Asylum and Immigration Tribunal and produced evidence for Amnesty International, Defence for Children international and the UK group Forensic Architecture.

He’s also the founder of AirPressure.info

Remember the closing scene from Planet of the Apes? The first in the film franchise? American astronaut George Taylor – played by Charleton Heston — and a female human buddy trotting, horseback, down a lonely beach. Suddenly, an awful sight. Something very familiar, poking out of the sand. The Statue of Liberty. This isn’t a far-off planet. This is Planet Earth, Taylor’s home, long since destroyed by nuclear war, its proud structures now fossilized. Without a doubt, that’s how all of Earth’s great cities will end up, millions of years from now, nuclear war or not.

Mark Williams is a paleontologist at the School of Geography, Geology and the Environment, at the University of Leicester, in the UK. He studies the geology of cities, and their propensity to be fossilized.

Williams is a member of the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG), a task group of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (one of seventeen subject subcommissions of the International Commission on Stratigraphy, the largest constituent body of the International Union of Geological Sciences). The AWG’s task — to come up with a formal proposal to formalize the ‘Anthropocene’ as a new time unit in Earth’s geochronological time scale.

Cities are key components of the Anthropocene, says Williams.

Mark Williams with a pair of ancient fossils

Their precise scientific name is a mouthful. Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. But you don’t want them in your mouth. Hard to avoid. Forever chemicals are in adhesive tape; non-stick cookware; greasy food wrap; microwave popcorn bags. Lipstick! They don’t break down, they build up in your body, and they’re very bad for your health. And, most people have them in their blood!

A recent mapping study reports that PFASs are present at high concentrations, in thousands of locations across the UK and Europe. Here’s a report from the US.

Sliedrecht environmental activists dump “contaminated” soil at Chemours gate, Dordrecht, Netherlands

Of all the astonishing things that take place inside a healthy human body, none are more astonishing than pregnancy. Women’s bodies undergo enormous change in the course of nine months of pregnancy, all aimed at promoting fetal growth and development.

Even more astonishing, bacteria in a pregnant woman’s gut help steer the process. Deborah Sloboda studies the role a woman’s gut microbiome plays in healthy pregnancy. Sloboda is a professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Biomedical Sciences, and an associate member of the Departments of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Pediatrics at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario.

Old songs linger in your head. Usually pleasurable. Perhaps a godsend. Indelible musical memories may help restore cognition and speech in people suffering from dementia, or after a stroke. Here’s something to sing and think about.

Roger Dumas’ Musical Wiring

Mobile phones are covered in germs. Not surprising. You talk into them, covering them with droplets. You touch them with hands, you just sneezed or coughed into! Hands that have touched all sorts of surfaces. You take them into the toilet! I spoke with Lotti Tajouri, an Australian researcher who knows just how contaminated mobile phones are — and how you can clean them. Lotti Tajouri is an Associate Professor of Molecular Genetics at Bond University, in Robina, Australia. He’s also a member of the Dubai Police Scientific Council.

Roy Campe tanks up on hydrogen at the port of Antwerp

On the path to zero carbon emissions, hydrogen is a no-brainer. Three-quarters of Earth’s surface is covered in water, and each water molecule contains two hydrogens – the smallest element, but packed with energy. Indeed, hydrogen is where all living things get energy from. So may future cars and cities. Today, cars and cities are responsible for almost half of global CO2 emissions. But — how feasible is hydrogen as a fuel? How green is it. Can hydrogen be produced in the volumes necessary to stave off complete climate breakdown? How quickly?

The Green Planet Monitor. Voices, Words & Images From a Warm Wet Planet

In most countries, being a soldier is something you do willingly — if not gladly – if your country is under attack, or if following orders, carrying a gun and shooting people on command turn your crank. By and large, young people opt not to join the military.

Not so in Israel.

The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) are Israel’s most beloved national institution. Obligatory conscription, at the age of eighteen, is a ‘rite of passage’, a ‘sacred duty’ Israeli youth look forward to and embrace with pride.

But there are exceptions.

Horrified by the “Jewish” state’s permanent military occupation of the Palestinian West Bank, and its apartheid-style subjugation of five million Palestinians, a small but increasing number of young Israelis are refusing to serve.

This past summer, the GPM spoke with two young Israeli resisters. Both are members of the anti-occupation network Mesarvot.

Noam & Ayelet

Noam Aharony is eighteen, and has just been granted conscientious objector status. Ayelet is sixteen, but has started gearing up to say no.

Last May, on Pride Day, Ayelet got detained for carrying a sign that read “No Pride in the Occupation” – and a Palestinian flag.

The GPM spoke with Noam and Ayelet in a park in Tel Aviv. Lots of birds over our heads. They do quiet down.

This coming November, in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, the international community will take yet another crack at addressing the climate crisis.

If the 27^th Conference of the Parties to the UN Climate Change Convention is anything like COP-26, in Glasgow, it will be a bust. The fossil fuel industry will be out in force, as it always is, furiously lobbying for oil, gas and coal exploration and exploitation.

HSB Living Lab

As industry and world leaders cop out once again, others dig for solutions – where solutions count the most. Cities consume almost eighty percent of global energy resources, and generate sixty percent of earth-warming emissions.

Urban buildings account for a third of energy consumption and forty percent of emissions.

Here’s a story from the Swedish city of Goteborg, about a Living Lab for carbon neutrality.

Per Ericson and his water purification system

It’s a staggering statistic.

This past May, US officials announced that Covid has killed a million Americans. The number is likely higher. Globally, over six million have died since the pandemic began in January 2020.

Meanwhile, a potentially deadlier enemy is sweeping the planet — bacterial pathogens, that are drug resistant. According to a recent report in the medical journal The Lancet, in 2019, drug-resistant bugs were linked to five million deaths worldwide. One and a quarter million deaths were directly attributable to them.

According to a UK government study, by 2050, anti-microbial resistance (AMR) could kill ten million annually.

As with Covid, drug-resistant bacteria aren’t equal opportunity killers. Marginalized folks are the hardest hit.

The GPM spoke with two experts in the field. Shira Doron is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Tufts University, in Boston, and the Director of the Antimicrobial Stewardship Program at Tufts Medical Center. In 2021, she co-authored a letter to the journal Nature Medicine, entitled “Antibiotic resistance: a call to action to prevent the next epidemic of inequality.” Shira Doron joins us from Boston.

Tomislav Meštrović is an associate professor at University North in Croatia, and a scholar at the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. He’s worked closely with the authors of that Lancet study on the global burden of drug-resistant infection. Tomislav joins us from Seattle, Washington.

Vincent Merckx and student Cas Verbeek, prospecting for mycorrhizal fungi in Amsterdam

It’s a living web beneath our feet – a tangled network of microscopic tubes weaving through the soil, pulsating with nutrients, tying the roots of trees and other plants into vast networks. Mycorrhizal fungi they’re called. Most plants rely on them entirely.

But, mycorrhizal fungi do more than just feed plants. They cycle carbon from atmosphere to soil, regulating Earth’s climate – and they face a host of threats. Soil scientists have come together to protect fungal networks, and are calling on citizens to help out.

Special thanks to Bart Braun and the Naturalis Biodiversity Center, in Leiden, the Netherlands, for the audio track of Toby Kiers’ presentation. Thanks, as well, to Loreto Oyarte Galvez and AMOLF + VU, Amsterdam, Netherlands, for this remarkable video of complex flows inside the hyphae of an arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi — in real time.

By David Kattenburg

The A-word seems apt. How better to describe Israel’s national Covid vaccination campaign?

Since December 20, Israeli health authorities have administered jabs of the Pfizer vaccine to an astonishing quarter of Israel’s ‘official’ population — almost two million doses — all the while reportedly denying the vaccine to the five million Palestinians living under military rule in the occupied/colonized West Bank and Gaza.

In ‘Area C’ of the West Bank, the 60 percent slice where Jewish settlers live, in “flagrant” breach of international law, settlers have been vaccinated while Palestinians have not.

The Sars-CoV-9 virus has hit Palestine/Israel hard. As of January 14, the World Health Organization (WHO) reports 169,388 cases in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza, and 1821 deaths. This corresponds to case and mortality rates of approximately 3.2% and 1% respectively. Israel, in contrast, has reported a total of 487,680 Covid cases and 3651 deaths since the start of the pandemic, out of that ‘population’ of nine million, for case and mortality rates of about 5.4 and 0.7% respectively.

Israel’s declared and commonly accepted population of nine million includes Israeli Jews living in both Israel ‘proper’ (within Israel’s lawful territory) and in its illegal West Bank settlements, plus the estimated 2.3 million Palestinians who are either citizens of Israel or hold Jerusalem residence cards.

Another five million Palestinians reside in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, most under nominal Palestinian administration but effective Israeli military rule, bringing the total population under Israeli governance or subjugation to fourteen million.

The Palestinian Authority’s reported preference has been to secure vaccines on its own — the Russian Sputnik V vaccine — while making supply arrangements through the World Health Organization’s Gavi-COVAX program.

Perversely, the PA’s ability to confront the Covid pandemic in areas under its nominal jurisdiction has been compromised by an estimated 8000 Covid infections among its health care workers. An informal request by the WHO that Israel include front line Palestinian workers in its vaccination campaign has been declined, the Independent reported today.

Palestinian physician Mustafa Barghouti confirms this in the interview below.

In response to criticism from international human rights groups, Israel and its lobbyists argue that, under the terms of the 1994-95 Oslo Accords, the Palestinian Authority is responsible for vaccinating Palestinians.

Indeed, Article 17, Annex III of the Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement on the West Bank and Gaza Strip (28 Sept., 1995; Oslo II) states that “Powers and responsibilities in the sphere of health in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip will be transferred to the Palestinian side,” and that the Palestinians “shall continue to apply the present standards of vaccination of Palestinians.”

Article 17 also states, however, that “Israel and the Palestinian side shall exchange information regarding epidemics and contagious diseases, shall cooperate in combating them and shall develop methods for exchange of medical files and documents,” and that “The health systems of Israel and of the Palestinian side will maintain good working relations in all matters.”

Article 17 stipulates that “Imports of pharmaceutical products to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip shall be in accordance with general arrangements concerning imports and donations, as dealt with in Annex V (Protocol on Economic Relations).”

The Paris Protocol, as it’s called, has widely been seen as hobbling the Palestinian economy, in parallel with a host of other Oslo-era constraints on the Palestinian autonomy. Thwarting Palestine’s ability to emerge as a truly sovereign state was Israel’s aim from the start, historians of the post-Oslo era say.

Most crucially, under Oslo, the PA only exercises civil authority in forty percent of the occupied West Bank, in designated Areas A and B. The remaining sixty percent (including the Jordan Valley) was assigned full Israeli military and civil control. Here, an estimated 300,000 indigenous Palestinians live in the midst of a half million Jewish settler-colonists and their military protection forces. Settlers have the same citizenship and national rights as any Jewish person in Israel ‘proper’. Palestinians have no rights at all, and endure life under Israeli military rule. Jewish settlers get vaccinated. Palestinians don’t. Not yet, anyway.

Another 150,000 Palestinians live in East Jerusalem, where the PA has no authority. On several occasions, Israeli police have interfered with or blocked attempts by the PA to deliver health care and Covid protection in East Jerusalem. Israel’s advocates deny this. Israeli interference with Covid response measures has been reported here and here and here.

In any case, Israel cannot use Oslo arrangements to deny vaccines to Palestinians. Under the 4th Geneva Convention (1949), Israel is obliged to ensure that Palestinians are protected from the pandemic. ‘Protected people’ is how the Palestinians are described under the Convention.

Israel’s status as an occupying power in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem), the Golan Heights and Gaza has been confirmed by the UN Security Council on numerous occasions, most recently in UNSC 2334 (Dec. 2016) — “Reaffirming the obligation of Israel, the occupying Power, to abide scrupulously by its legal obligations and responsibilities under the Fourth Geneva Convention.”

Article 56 of the FGC states:

“To the fullest extent of the means available to it, the Occupying Power has the duty of ensuring and maintaining, with the cooperation of national and local authorities, the medical and hospital establishments and services, public health and hygiene in the occupied territory, with particular reference to the adoption and application of the prophylactic and preventive measures necessary to combat the spread of contagious diseases and epidemics.”

Israel’s reluctance to include West Bank and Gaza Palestinians in its Covid vaccination is blatantly discriminatory, critics say. “Israel’s COVID-19 vaccine programme highlights the institutionalized discrimination that defines the Israeli government’s policy towards Palestinians,” said Saleh Higazi, Deputy Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International. “There could hardly be a better illustration of how Israeli lives are valued above Palestinian ones.”

AI’s comments mirror those published in a late January report by the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD). CERD described Israeli policies thus:

“[Policies] and practices that amount to segregation, such as the existence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory of two entirely separate legal systems and sets of institutions for Jewish communities in illegal settlements on the one hand and Palestinian populations living in Palestinian towns and villages on the other hand. The Committee is appalled at the hermetic character of the separation of the two groups, who live on the same territory but do not enjoy either equal use of roads and infrastructure or equal access to basic services, lands and water resources.”

Listen to a conversation with Dr. Mustafa Barghouti. Barghouti, currently ill with Covid, is a Palestinian physician, politician and activist. He helped found the Palestinian National Initiative (PNI) and ran for president in 2005. Barghouti has been a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Central Council, and served as Minister of Information in the Palestinian unity government in 2007.

For an equally informed but more diplomatic perspective, listen to my conversation with Dr. Gerald Rockenschaub, the World Health Organization’s Head of Office in the Occupied Palestinian Territories: