LA’s early diversions nearly destroyed Mono Lake, which lost half its volume and dropped 45 feet. Toxic dust began to swirl, and gulls’ nesting grounds disappeared. It wasn’t until the mid-1970s that ...

The geography of the crisis seemed widely misunderstood. Ceuta has remained under Portuguese and subsequently Spanish sovereignty since 1415, remaining with Spain after Portugal regained independence ...

The U.S. public has been skeptical of the blockade for decades. A 2016 Pew Research Center poll revealed that 73% of Americans favored ending the blockade. More recently, a February 25, 2026 poll by Y...

The U.S.-Israeli invasion of Iran was planned as a short war, but it is turning into an unmitigated, gale-force cock-up.  Fighting continues in the sixth month and as many as 17 nations may be involve...

The UK Green Party’s former leader Caroline Lucas recently nailed the Labor Party for “burying the most explosive report” of the year by UK military and intelligence sources. The concealed report warn...

The remediation of nuclear waste has long been a classified endeavor. Accidents, exposure to radiation, and worker injuries on the job rarely, if ever, make the newspapers where they would receive pub...

One of the glaring inconsistencies of American life is that the culture prides itself on “individual freedom,” but insists on blind participation in collective ritual. The inculcation of the conformis...

When House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries sent out a recent “dear colleague” letter, its second sentence cited “the position articulated by… pro-peace organizations like J Street.” The congressman ...

The morning of June 27, 2021: Lytton, British Columbia, woke up and, without realizing it, set a record it never knew it was in the running for. This is,

Don’t worry folks, we’re keeping our PG rating here. I’m talking about GDP. I had some people question my line in yesterday’s post that China’s economy is

Every democracy worthy of the name recognizes a simple but indispensable truth: dissent is not its enemy but its lifeblood. The freedom to criticize those in power, expose injustice, challenge entrenc...

Trump and his followers promised a right-wing counterculture that challenged long-held norms and taken-for-granted assumptions about governance. They offered a Gonzo Governance agenda to upend princip...

Much of the time, it seems as if the war machine runs on autopilot. Indeed, the United States has been engaged in warfare for almost the entirety of our

Farmworkers are the backbone of America, but this country has a long history of exploiting the very people on whose labor we depend. Under the Trump

It’s dry, hot, and windy. The dust is swirling. My buddy Colby and I are in the heart of the blazing Mojave to visit California’s most expansive open-pit mine. Owned and operated by the Australian min...

The assault on birthright citizenship is an attempt to steal one of Reconstruction's greatest democratic achievements. As constitutional scholar Sherrilyn Ifill reminds us, the framers of the Fourteen...

Earthquakes interrupt everyday life, but not history. Nor do they suspend politics. If anything, they compress history into a few dramatic days, revealing

Nothing encapsulates the decline of the American project quite like the optics of its 250th anniversary. While four hundred masked neo-fascists marched through the capitol in navy-blue button-downs an...

We’re in for it. At least that’s the dire warning from scientists about the El Niño conditions now brewing in the Pacific Ocean. What’s actually in store

You know something is amiss when a World Cup referee is denied entry to the United States while Canada and Mexico appear to present no such obstacles. That is what happened when Somali match official ...

The first major swell of the year pummeled Southern California this week, and onlookers flocked to ritzy Balboa Peninsula in Newport Beach to watch adrenaline junkies attack the Wedge – a mutant wave ...

Bats move through desert night skies with a purpose that is easy to overlook and difficult to replace. As they travel from plant to plant, feeding on

If we are to understand the conditions facing vulnerable children, we have to begin with a difficult truth: poverty remains the central force shaping

The US, with Donald Trump as president, has become a bizarre place. The country is at the moment in a sort of lull in a major war that Trump and his

The road is dusty and trash-strewn. My friend and collaborator Colby Groves is hanging out the car window as I drive, gazing at a patchwork of solar panels lined up behind a chain-link fence. “This ha...

There is nothing like walking quietly with a group of committed people through the hot Arizona desert to bring home the deadly reality faced by migrants coming to the U.S. through its southern border....

For more than a decade, TSA agents have plundered passengers at airport security checkpoints on the flimsiest or most shameless pretexts.  If you get stopped at an airport security checkpoint with $10...

While Washington’s war with Iran drags on, month after month, without any end in sight, the world is witnessing the very real limits of U.S. global power. As President Donald Trump lurches repeatedly ...

One Month Inside the Trump Administration’s Siege on the Cuban People All eyes are on Cuba as the corporate press is now reporting that U.S. troops are in

May 28, 2026, marks the 155th anniversary of the Communards’ last stand at Père-Lachaise Cemetery and the end of the Paris Commune. A few days ago, the

Thirteen years ago, I made the case against the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter in National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism.  My argument was based on overall cost (“the most expensive program i...

The agenda setting New York Times is a “paper of record,” with a journalism staff of 3000, about 7 percent of all journalists working in the US. The paper has also been a reliable source of pro-Israel...

The news alerts were ominous. A chemical tank at an industrial site in Garden Grove, fifteen miles south of where I live, could blow at any moment. A nervous Orange County Fire Captain warned of two p...

Earlier this month, researchers at the University of California San Diego published a study offering “the first empirical evidence that a modern artificial intelligence system can pass the Turing test...

Corruption has never been far from the center of American politics. Some of the most notorious scandals stretch from the cronyism of Warren G. Harding to the abuses of power exposed during the Waterga...

This Memorial Day, I found myself thinking about Waterloo. Not the Waterloo of Nelson vs. Napoleon, battleships, and London’s Trafalgar Square, but

Media outlets are filled with stories about how AI is taking all the jobs. There are also plenty of stories telling us that soaring deficits and rising debt are going to bankrupt the government. These...

What Talarico did in his primary race was test an idea that we never really got to see come to fruition during Bernie Sanders’s second campaign here in Texas. The counties where Talarico did well were...

Surprise!  The Trump-appointed federal Commission of Fine Arts approved construction of the 250-foot triumphal arch that the president plans to erect between Washington’s Lincoln Memorial and the Arli...

Earlier this year, President Donald Trump surveyed his top military brass on the prospect of making war in Iran. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine urged caution, presciently pred...

The defining signature of the past 6,000 years of human civilization is the domestication of the hydrosphere—capturing, damming, canalizing, reorienting, propertizing, privatizing, consuming, profitin...

Volvo withered under Ford, and its workers were subjected to a succession of layoffs.  In 2010, just eleven years after its purchase,  Ford sold Volvo to a Chinese company for $1.8  billion.  The Chin...

Ocean temperatures have been steadily rising. As someone who spends a lot of time in the ocean, I can attest that it has been exceptionally warm this year. And the data backs it up. Surface temperatur...

The biggest winner in England, unfortunately, was Reform U.K., led by the racist, corrupt, and irrepressible Nigel Farage. It captured 1500 seats nationwide and gained control of 14 municipal councils...

Last month, I operated on an elderly man with a perforated peptic ulcer. The surgery was textbook. I closed his abdomen cleanly, without complication. We had antibiotics available that time. What we d...

A hate crime had struck close to home. On the TV screen, more than four dozen police cars, blue lights swirling in a cold, mechanical rhythm. The news ticker crawled across the bottom of the TV screen...

Interest rates are rising as if this will simply compensate investors for the risk of inflation. The reality is that it will increase the economy’s

The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais, invalidating a congressional map that included a second majority-Black district in the state,