On 26 December, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) announced countermeasures against US military-related companies and senior executives.
Most western mass media has been referring to China as imposing sanctions rather than countermeasures, but the distinction is important.
The US uses sanctions offensively, as a punitive measure to achieve its desired aims.
An early objective of the US was to prevent recognition of a Communist China, so the US embargoed the PRC at its inception in 1949. This aim lasted until 1972.
It’s been one of the strangest cricket series on record. Hurried, frenetic, foolish, haphazard, and, at times, unbecomingly immature. The cricket between England and Australia in this, the 2025-6 Ashes series, was a recreational coke line, a narcotics fix, a dopamine thrill. But was it even cricket? One thinks of those deathless lines from the French general Pierre Bosquet responding to the British light cavalry attack on Russian artillery during the Crimean War in October 1854: “C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre: c’est de la folie” (It is magnificent, but it is not war: it is madness). Position …
A new book edited by Kyle Ferrana, China Changes Everything, bills itself as an anthology by “social justice activists, journalists, and commentators” and brings together chapters about the People’s Republic of China written by prominent left-wing analysts, including Arnold August, Roger Harris, Radhika Desai, Carlos Martinez, Gerald Horne, Lee Siu Hin, Margaret Kimberley, Danny Haiphong, KJ Noh, Sara Flounders, and many more.
The publication covers a comprehensive range of subjects in the ongoing “China debate” and includes chapters on such hot topics as China’s relation to Palestine and China’s foreign affairs …
'This administration’s greed and contempt for imperiled wildlife know no bounds.'
by Paul Haeder / December 27th, 2025
As a shark conservation scientist, one of the most common questions people ask me is, “How are shark populations doing?” To answer this question, it’s important to understand two types of fishery surveys: fishery-independent and fishery-dependent. Fishery-dependent population surveys gather data from fishermen’s catches. These data are valuable because there are many more fishermen on the water than marine biologists. However, …
Although Donald Trump’s Department of Labor announced in April 2025 that “Trump’s Golden Age puts American workers first,” that contention is contradicted by the facts.
Indeed, Trump has taken the lead in reducing workers’ incomes. One of his key actions along these lines occurred on March 14, 2025, when he issued an executive order that scrapped a Biden-era regulation raising the minimum wage for employees of private companies with federal contracts. Some 327,300 workers had benefited from Biden’s measure, which produced an average wage increase of $5,228 per year. With Trump’s reversal of policy, they became ripe for pay cuts of up …
Every single person in the United States, from those who’ve been most harmed to those who’ve been most privileged, would be better off if we had a normal government that put even a moderate effort into universally improving everyone’s lives. If we had a government that took trillions of dollars away from the war machine and the untaxed oligarchs and provided, as a matter of basic rights, for all
economic welfare,
education, preschool through college,
healthcare,
a clean and sustainable environment, and
public transit,
then nobody would ever be denied an education or a job for any reason of hateful idiocy. Why should they be when …
Repentance and reparations — not hasbara — is the only way forward
by Phil Rockstroh / December 26th, 2025
I hold joint US/German citizenship due to the historical fact that my maternal family was stripped of their German citizenship by The Reich Citizenship act attendant to Nazi imposed Nuremberg Laws enacted in 1935. Subsequently, as the Third Reich consolidated power, by means of legalized state criminality, my family’s business interests and personal property were stolen by the Nazis. My grandfather was arrested, imprisoned in Sachsenhausen concentration camp and my mother and her sister were dispatched to the UK on a Kindertransport.
On the surface German society evinces the artifice of repentance due to its reprehensible history in regard to its …
Set Aside Political Differences, Converge in Harmony for Truth and Justice
by Philip A. Farruggio / December 26th, 2025
She’s a little lady, 70 something, with this cute, addictive smile. Drives an old bomb of a car, replete with Peace and End the Occupation type stickers on it. She’s a nurse, still works, doing home care for very ill folks with that special Mona type TLC.
I first met her at a progressive discussion event my friends and I organized back in ’03.
Many of us were disgusted with the government’s hog wash version of 9/11 and the ensuing …
At present, there is a pot-calling-the-kettle-black approach being taken by the European Union and the United States regarding the imposition of sanctions upon individuals deemed hostile to free speech. On December 23, the US State Department announced that it would bar five European citizens accused of spearheading efforts to pressure US tech giants to censor or suppress American opinions. This came after the European Union’s own tilt to sanctioning individuals accused of spreading Russian misinformation or disinformation, particularly about the Ukraine War.
Those caught in the State Department vice are former EU Commissioner for the internal market Thierry Breton, a key …
DV coeditor Faramarz Farbod joined AnewZ.tv (Baku, Azerbaijan) this morning to discuss the escalating U.S.-Iran nuclear standoff and the sharp divisions at the UN Security Council over the status of UNSC Res. 2231, the snapback mechanism, the reimposition of sanctions against Iran, and uranium enrichment.
Good for Russia! And cautiously, good for international law!
The International Criminal Court (ICJ), an institution with scant juridical credibility, which was founded under the auspices of the collective West and remains effectively under its control, has agreed to consider Russia’s submission wherein the neo-Nazi Ukrainian regime is charged with committing genocide against Ukrainian citizens, present and former, perceived by the regime and/or identifying themselves as Russians.
That extraordinary development comes in the wake of ICJ’s indictment in March 2023 of the President of Russia and a top government official responsible for child protection for “kidnapping” Ukrainian …
Europe has repeatedly rejected peace with Russia at moments when a negotiated settlement was available, and those rejections have proven profoundly self-defeating. From the nineteenth century to the present, Russia’s security concerns have been treated not as legitimate interests to be negotiated within a broader European order, but as moral transgressions to be resisted, contained, or overridden. This pattern has persisted across radically different Russian regimes—Tsarist, Soviet, and post-Soviet—suggesting that the problem lies not primarily in Russian ideology, but in Europe’s enduring refusal to recognize Russia as a legitimate and equal security actor.
It has become a wallowing cringe. The extolling of multi-culti values, the incessant self-praise of diversity, variety and cosmopolitanism, only to then impose, in the name of such values, a restrictive regime of speech, language and conduct seemed suitable to – who else? – the jerky authorities. In diversity we must oppress; in variety we must police. The Bondi Beach killings by two alleged ISIS supporters during a Hanukkah event have seen Australian lawmakers succumb to the panic of immediate results and shoddy gains.
It matters not how poor the legislation is, how ill-thought its words are: something must be …
European powers plan to cut up China for themselves; Germany, Italy, the British Empire, Austria-Hungary, Russia, and France are represented by Wilhelm II, Umberto I, John Bull, Franz Joseph I (in rear), Nicholas II, and Émile Loubet. The United States, represented by Uncle Sam, opposed this, also wanting to retain power in China. Puck, 23 August 1899, by J.S. Pughe.
*****
The Century of Humiliation for China began with the First Opium War (1839-1842) and ended with the end of World War II. During this period several European countries carved …
On a night when much of the world turns its attention to the image of a child placed in a manger, it becomes necessary to confront a reality that contradicts the season’s sentimentality. While hymns are sung and rituals are performed, countless children lie tonight under rubble, under hunger, and under fear. The children of Palestine—who bear no responsibility for the circumstances into which they were born—are subjected to levels of suffering they neither initiated nor deserved. Their cries rise into the same sky that once received the cry of an …
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies / December 23rd, 2025
The United States has now intercepted multiple Venezuelan oil tankers as part of its escalating aggression against Venezuela, while also destroying dozens of small boats in the Caribbean and Pacific under the banner of “drug enforcement,” killing over 100 people whose identities the U.S. has obscured. At the same time, the Trump administration has threatened a naval blockade of Venezuela—a sovereign …
by Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East / December 23rd, 2025
Based on protest data from 2021–2025 and extensive documentation, the report highlights a stark disparity: pro-Palestine demonstrations accounted for 10.1% of all protests but drew 37% of all police interventions, even though over 96% of pro-Palestine protests were entirely peaceful.
On September 29, 2020, during the first 2020 presidential debate with the Democratic Party’s candidate Joe Biden, moderator Chris Wallace asked then-President Trump if he would condemn white supremacist and militia groups and tell them to “stand down” amid ongoing violent protests.
You have spoken repeatedly of Germany’s responsibility for European security. That responsibility cannot be discharged through slogans, selective memory, or the steady normalization of war talk. Security guarantees are not one-way instruments. They go in both directions. This is not a Russian argument, nor an American one; it is a foundational principle of European security, explicitly embedded in the Helsinki Final Act, the OSCE framework, and decades of postwar diplomacy.
Germany has a duty to approach this moment with historical seriousness and honesty. On that score, recent rhetoric and policy choices fall dangerously short.
Since 1990, Russia’s core security concerns have …
Former students from my Memoir Writing and "other writing" classes working up the gumption to "tell their stories"
by Paul Haeder / December 22nd, 2025
It truly is a liberating process, and an emotional landmine. Imagine, strangers, adults, grayhairs, all coming from different avocations, life experiences, even abilities to draw words onto “paper,” hanging out for two hours a day, once a week, eight weeks, with ME!
One of the most common and persistent criticisms made about charter schools over the last 30+ years is that they frequently shortchange special needs students. Every year numerous articles appear on this troubling topic and highlight the refusal of the charter school sector to overcome this nagging problem and put it behind them once and for all—even after multiple warnings from various authorities.
It is worth noting that special needs students are typically under-enrolled in non-profit and for-profit charter schools, mainly because they are deemed to be too high-needs and too expensive to enroll. Profit margins matter in both …
Bureaucracy, in a formulation by the great German sociologist Max Weber, fanatically defends secrecy, and is bound to confect any explanation in doing so. When it comes to swatting away scrutiny by United Nations human rights delegates, local officials can be relied upon to obfuscate, blur and lie about a Member State’s observance of conventions and fundamental norms. In October 2022, and again in December 2025, UN bodies have been trying to piece together various troubling pieces of the Australian criminal justice system. In a country lacking a bill of rights, administrators and officials have often shown themselves indifferent to …
Anyone interested in socialism in the twenty-first century must take into account what is happening in China seriously. It’s future economic supremacy will either shape global capitalism, which socialists worldwide will have to respond to or the future of socialism will be determined by China’s planned transformation toward a socialist economy.
— Jan Turowski1Jan Turowski, “How the Chinese Talk About Socialism,” Rosa Luxemburg Stifling.
China has achieved what is perhaps the most spectacular modernization in the history of the world in timespan and scale, accomplishing in decades what took centuries elsewhere… it has developed productive forces in agriculture, industry, technology, science and …
The Swedish police have promised it will go nowhere, but the attempt by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to draw attention to the inappropriateness of María Corina Machado as a Nobel Peace Prize recipient raises a few salient matters. On December 17, Assange submitted a criminal complaint to the Swedish Economic Crime Authority and the Swedish Crimes Unit. The legal complaint is directed against the Nobel Foundation, arguing that the pending transfer of 11 million SEK ($US 1.18 million) and the award of the prize medal to Machado violate the terms of Alfred Nobel’s will of November 27, 1895.
While western publics are being demonised as racists, the technology and strategies used today against Palestinians will become the walls of tomorrow’s prisons for us all
by Jonathan Cook / December 20th, 2025
Western establishments’ fear of the phrase “Globalise the intifada” has little to do with any danger supposedly posed to Jewish populations from its use.
The threat is posed by the slogan’s central idea, not by some specific target.
“Globalise the intifada!” is the modern equivalent of “Power to the people!” – a slogan long used by anti-colonial movements, by revolutionary socialist parties, by the ANC in its fight against South African apartheid, and by the Black Panthers in their struggle against white supremacy in …
Candidates for the U.S. Congress usually have websites, and often those websites include some minimal platform (what they would do if elected). Sometimes there’s none at all. Sometimes there’s a great deal of substance on numerous topics. But the vast majority of Congressional candidates have no foreign policy whatsoever. They want to be given a job to oversee a discretionary budget of which some 60 percent goes …
In our Donald-in-Wonderland world, the US is at war with Venezuela while still grasping for a public rationale. The horrific human toll is real – over a 100,000 fatalities from illegal sanctions and over a hundred from more recent “kinetic strikes.” Yet the officially stated justification for the US empire’s escalating offensive remains elusive.
The empire once spun its domination as “democracy promotion.” Accordingly, State Department stenographers such as The Washington Post framed the US-backed coup in Venezuela, which temporarily overthrew President Hugo Chávez, as an attempt to “restore …
A significant number of Zionist trolls plaguing the comment sections of my posts were, as I was, raised on Zionist hasbara i.e., outright lies.
As I grew up, and later visited Israel, I was repulsed, as the son of a Holocaust survivor, by the Third Reich-adjacent mindset of Israelis; by their by-rote bigotry; by the military hagiographic palaver they have internalized e.g., the glorification of war criminals such as the Irgun/Stern gang terrorists, the latter among the principal founders of the …
By awarding its peace prize to Trump’s favorite Venezuelan opposition figure, pro-war coup plotter Maria Corina Machado, the Nobel Committee contravened the principles enshrined in its founding documents, as well as Swedish law, Julian Assange alleged in an explosive brief reviewed by The Grayzone.
The Swedish government violated its own laws by awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Venezuelan opposition figure Maria Corina Machado, according to an explosive legal brief filed by Julian Assange, the Wikileaks co-founder and former political prisoner who was hounded across …
