Infinite War: The Pentagon’s Gravy Train Rolls On
On not so great wars, theirs and ours.
Global News and Analysis
What Senator Jeff Merkley Saw at an Immigrant Detention Center for Children
Source: The Nation
“The tiniest kid at the front of the line, he was knee-high to a grasshopper. He was 4, maybe 5 years old.”
When Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley tried to visit a detention center for child immigrants in Brownsville, Texas, last weekend, he was turned away. The Facebook Live video of his journey through the bureaucratic shadows went viral. In the 20 hours after it was shared, it was viewed 1.1 million times.
As viral videos go, it was rather low-drama: it mostly featured Merkley standing around in the hot Texas sun for almost a half hour, waiting for a supervisor of the nonprofit Southwest Key shelter to come tell him why he could not enter the facility. One high point was when the senator inadvertently shared his personal cell-phone number with his million-plus viewers, trying to get someone in authority to return his call.
Teaching the Holocaust Will Change After All Survivors Are Dead
More states are requiring Holocaust and genocide education as a way of dealing with the increase in hate crimes.
Trump’s ‘cruel’ measures pushing US inequality to dangerous level, UN warns
Source: The Guardian
Scorching report on poverty finds ‘systematic attack on welfare program’ will leave millions deprived of food and healthcare
Donald Trump is deliberately forcing millions of Americans into financial ruin, cruelly depriving them of food and other basic protections while lavishing vast riches on the super-wealthy, the United Nations monitor on poverty has warned.
Philip Alston, the UN special rapporteur who acts as a watchdog on extreme poverty around the world, has issued a withering critique of the state of America today. Trump is steering the country towards a “dramatic change of direction” that is rewarding the rich and punishing the poor by blocking access even to the most meager necessities.
Noam Chomsky on Donald Trump and the “Me First” Doctrine
In Trumpian lingo, "America First" means "me first" and damn the consequences for the country or the world.
It’s ‘Feminist Christmas’ in Ireland
Source: The Nation
“We’ll never go back,” say activists, as a vote to repeal the ban on abortion wins by an overwhelming margins.
The vote to repeal the amendment banning abortion was supposed to be close. That was what the polls said, and that’s how the press reported it. That was how organizers for both sides thought it would go. But when the voting was over at 10 pm on May 25, the first exit polls showed Yes had achieved an electoral tsunami, crushing No by a two-to-one margin. I was with the psychiatrist Veronica O’Keane and other Doctors for Choice when the word came down, and I swear I saw them dancing in the streets that night.