The U.S. Secret Service will protect former President Donald Trump and more than a dozen members of his family, including extended family members, after the 45th President, defying usual agency regulations, ordered the expanded protections."Trump issued a directive to extend post-presidency Secret Service protection to 14 members of his family... Read more »

James Krapfl, McGill University It's been a rocky ride, but a new U.S. president was just inaugurated. Many are thrilled to be moving on from the Donald Trump era, especially after the raid on the U.S. Capitol by angry Trump supporters. But it might be worthwhile to reflect on one... Read more »

The first half of this Inauguration Day has been devoted, at least rhetorically, to unity. But Sen. Mitch McConnell is still in charge of the Senate Republicans, and he's still Mitch McConnell. The chamber is evenly divided, which does one good thing: It makes Vice President Kamala Harris one of... Read more »

After the inauguration of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris on Wednesday, Fox News critiqued the 46th president's speech, taking issue with Biden's strong denouncement of nativism, racism, and white supremacy – which, they suggested, might offend Trump voters.Denouncing nativism, racism, and white supremacy was apparently upsetting to... Read more »

Donald Trump is the only American president to be impeached twice. This time, he stands accused in a single article of impeachment of "incitement of insurrection" for delivering an incendiary speech on January 6 to an angry mob of supporters, sparking them to storm the U.S. Capitol building to prevent... Read more »

When poet Amanda Gorman took center stage during President Joe Biden's inauguration to deliver her poem "The Hill We Climb," it became immediately clear why she was chosen to precede him on the podium. Only four presidents —John F. Kennedy, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and now, Biden — have had... Read more »

When a government agency is as punitive, secretive and capricious as the US Department of Justice often is, trying incremental reform can feel about as satisfactory as non-alcoholic beer. That was the tack under Obama's Attorney General Eric Holder, Jr., and it almost certainly will be under Biden's choice, Merrick... Read more »

by Thomas Klassen, York University, Canada The end of Donald Trump's dysfunctional tenure in the White House means the start of a relatively normal presidency under Joe Biden. But what does normal even mean after four years of a presidency and a president that have been anything but? Biden emphasized... Read more »

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.Late at night on Jan. 5, the day before President Donald Trump was scheduled to deliver a defiant speech before thousands of his most dedicated supporters, his former... Read more »

When Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, he included in it a list of the colonists’ grievances with the British government. Notably absent were any complaints that the British government infringed upon the freedom of speech. In those days, public speech was as acerbic as it is today. If... Read more »

Interviewed by Mrs. Clinton Monday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi eagerly rose to the bait when Clinton spoke of "her concerns that the outgoing commander-in-chief was compromised by the Kremlin". Setting the stage, Clinton expressed the hope that "we’ll find out who he [Trump] is beholden to, "who pulls his strings". Clinton... Read more »

For more than a decade, a handful of former Israeli politicians and US diplomats identified with what might be termed the “peace process industry” have intermittently warned that, without a two-state solution, Israel is in danger of becoming an “apartheid state”. The most notable among them include Ehud Barak and... Read more »

The attempt to reverse a democratic election in a classic quiet coup in America has now turned ugly and noisy. On the very same day as Joe Biden condemned the coup, he nominated Victoria Nuland as under secretary of state for political affairs: the same Victoria Nuland who clumsily revealed... Read more »

Jake Sullivan, President Joe Biden’s newly appointed National Security Adviser, began issuing orders to Russia two days before his installation. Sullivan urged Moscow to release Alexei Navalny, the opposition leader arrested on his return to Russia on Sunday. Insisted Sullivan: "The Kremlin’s attacks on Mr. Navalny are not just a... Read more »

Medical apartheid is moving at full speed in Palestine. Israel has refused an informal request from the World Health Organization (WHO) to immediately make COVID-19 vaccines available to Palestinian medical workers to avert a health disaster, citing shortages of jabs for their own citizens. The specified reason does not hold... Read more »

In an interview with the British newspaper, The Times, in 2015, former US Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, vehemently denied that exporting democracy to Iraq was the main motive behind the US invasion of that Arab country 12 years earlier. Rumsfeld further alleged that "the idea that we could fashion a... Read more »

Long before he played various roles in the Obama administration, Robert Berschinski was described as among the “rarest of creatures.” For starters, he was an R.O.T.C. cadet at an Ivy League school – Yale – on September 11, 2001, at a time when graduates of elite universities have been conspicuously... Read more »

With the mainstream media still obsessing about the January 6th “violent coup attempt” at the US Capitol Building, the incoming Biden Administration looks to be chock full of actual purveyors of violent coups. Don’t look to the mainstream media to report on this, however. Some of the same politicians and... Read more »

Two related events—the 75th anniversary of the January 24, 1946 UN General Assembly Resolution 1 (which established a commission to plan for the abolition of nuclear weapons) and the January 22, 2021 entry into force of the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (designed to finally implement that... Read more »

Trump incited his supporters to violently storm the Capitol Building in Washington DC in an attempt to revive his failed efforts to overturn the results of the election. Five people are dead as a direct result of the attack, including one police officer (ironically a Trump supporter) who was beaten... Read more »

It’s clear that technical departments within the UN sometimes have their work corrupted by the US government and its allies. Consider recent reporting by the Grayzone on OPCW whistleblowers who exposed manipulation of an investigation into alleged chemical weapons use in Syria in 2018. Or recall an example from further... Read more »

One of the reasons people may get duped into seeing Venezuelan politician Leopoldo López as a victim is his trial which began in 2014, when he finally went to jail after supporting a fourth US-backed attempt to violently overthrow Venezuela’s democratically elected government. Overthrowing the late Hugo Chavez (who was... Read more »

Defense of the Easily Defensible By Dave Markland In 2018 Haymarket Books published Rohini Hensman’s Indefensible: Democracy, Counter-revolution and Anti-imperialist Rhetoric. Its focus is on left journalists and analysts like John Pilger and the late Edward S. Herman who have committed the inexcusable sin of being overly suspicious of United... Read more »

Abstract [A Rough Draft of a Work-in-progress.] The idea of machines which are almost identical to human beings has been so seductive that it has captured the imaginations of the best minds as well as laypeople for at least a century and half, perhaps more. Right after Artificial Intelligence (AI)... Read more »

Back in 2016, while campaigning for president, Donald Trump discovered a useful tactic for drawing the votes of disgruntled blue-collar workers: denouncing the loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs and promising to restore them.  At a rally in hard-hit Ohio, he assailed the Democrats and assured his listeners that he would... Read more »

On September 15, UN investigators ( the so called “Mission”) published a 411 page report  about the human rights situation in Venezuela.[1]  Part 1 of my analysis of the report focused on its gross dishonesty about opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez. The Mission reviewed his career since 2000 but never mentioned... Read more »

Unlike their elected riulers, most Germans don’t want to be part of the nuclear ‘theater’ Trump, once again doing the right thing for the wrong reasons, wants to pull US troops out of Germany because Germany doesn’t spend enough on “defence”. The German population tend to like it but don’t... Read more »