USA

Civil rights activist Angela Davis spoke at the Women’s March on Washington on Saturday in front of a crowd of hundreds of thousands who...

By Lasanda Kurukulasuriya* Recent media reports in Sri Lanka reveal that a $13.7 million USAID-funded program for ‘democracy and accountability’ is to be implemented by...

  By George Gallanis 14 January 2017 With the inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump only days away, the Obama administration announced on Thursday a vast expansion...

With superpowers backing different sides in the bloody conflict in Syria, Isis continuing to fight in the Middle East, a spate of terrorist attacks across the globe and Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump both talking a tough game, the YouGov survey of 9,000 people across nine countries found popular opinion thinks world peace has rarely been further away.

Terrified of what Trump may do, his opponents tend to ignore what the lame ducks are actually doing. The last gasp Clintonite campaign to blame Hillary’s defeat on “fake news”, supposedly inspired by The Enemy, Russia, is a facet of the growing drive to censor the Internet – previously for child pornography, or for anti-Semitism, and next on the pretext of combating “fake news”, meaning whatever goes contrary to the official line. This threat to freedom of expression is more sinister than eleven-year-old locker-room macho boasts by Trump.

Widespread social unrest will ignite when Donald Trump’s base realizes it has been betrayed. I do not know when this will happen. But that it will happen is certain. Investments in the stocks of the war industry, internal security and the prison-industrial complex have skyrocketed since Trump won the presidency. There is a lot of money to be made from a militarized police state.

Rick Perry has been nominated to run an agency he wants to erase. Yes, this happened. One does not know whether to laugh or cry. Mr. Trump looked over Perry's résumé, realized George W. Bush and that big rock in the park had other commitments, and tapped him to run an agency responsible for a bunch of stuff that could kill us all in an afternoon. More than that, Perry is an avowed climate denier and a fossil fuel devotee, so all the vital alternative energy research currently underway at the Energy Department is about to go swirling down the drain.

PropOrNot managed to connect with the Washington Post on its own. Last week, the Post published a story based in part on PropOrNot’s research. Headlined “Russian Propaganda Effort Helped Spread ‘Fake News’ During Election, Experts Say,” the report claimed that a number of researchers had uncovered a “sophisticated Russian propaganda campaign” that spread fake-news articles across the Internet with the aim of hurting Hillary Clinton and helping Donald Trump. It prominently cited the PropOrNot research. The story topped the Post’s most-read list, and was shared widely by prominent journalists and politicians on Twitter. The former White House adviser Dan Pfeiffer tweeted, “Why isn’t this the biggest story in the world right now?”

The push to delegitimize the election results continued after a trio of top Senate Democrats called for a nonpartisan commission to investigate allegations that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election. Sens. Ben Cardin (Md.), Dianne Feinstein (Calif.) and Patrick Leahy (Vt.), the top Democrats on the Foreign Relations, Intelligence and Judiciary committees, back the creation an independent commission with 18 months to report its findings The Hill reports.

Dear Presidents Putin and Obama, Prime Ministers, Foreign Ministers and Secretary General of NATO: We are writing to you concerning the all-too-real, all-too-current, risk of global thermonuclear war. We write with a tight deadline, as this risk is current, pressing, and urgent. It cannot be postponed until after the Jan20 inauguration date for US President-elect Trump.