Browsed by
Category: History/Archeology

Angered by SCOTUS, Trump brands U.S. as ‘STUPID’ for allowing birthright citizenship

Angered by SCOTUS, Trump brands U.S. as ‘STUPID’ for allowing birthright citizenship

The Daily Beast reports: Donald Trump abruptly exited the Supreme Court on Wednesday after some of his own conservative justices did not appear convinced by his bid to upend birthright citizenship in America. Trump made the unprecedented decision to sit in on oral arguments, staring down the court’s nine justices as they quizzed his lawyers on one of the most consequential constitutional questions they face this year: whether all children born in the United States can continue to automatically receive…

Read More Read More

The underground bankers who reshape the flow of global money

The underground bankers who reshape the flow of global money

Miles Kellerman writes: The global financial system is a colossal factory containing an endless web of information assembly lines. Every time you tap your card on a payment terminal, whether it’s for a coffee on the way to work or a new vacuum cleaner, you are sending a new informational signal to that factory. Like raw material, that signal is then loaded on a conveyor belt where it is checked and modified by your bank, the seller’s bank, a payment…

Read More Read More

A pliant autocracy in Iran won’t solve America’s problems in the Middle East

A pliant autocracy in Iran won’t solve America’s problems in the Middle East

Fawaz A. Gerges writes: Over the past few weeks, U.S. President Donald Trump and his team have voiced contradictory objectives for the war they, together with Israel, launched against Iran. But it is clear that after Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed, Trump hoped to deal with a transactional authoritarian figure. He called “what we did in Venezuela”—forcing the replacement of one autocrat, President Nicolás Maduro, with another, Delcy Rodríguez—a “perfect scenario” for Iran and insisted on being “involved with…

Read More Read More

Why China insists on internal unity and international harmony

Why China insists on internal unity and international harmony

Peter C Perdue writes: If you think that the People’s Republic of China is still a communist country, you are in for a shock. It is, of course, a single-party state ruled by the Chinese Communist Party. But what is the role of the CCP today? The Party celebrates billionaires, runs a capitalist economy, and depends heavily on global trade and investment. This is far from what Mao Zedong imagined when he took power in 1949. Then, the CCP claimed…

Read More Read More

‘A new world is being born’: Rebecca Solnit on the ‘slow revolution’ the far right cannot tolerate

‘A new world is being born’: Rebecca Solnit on the ‘slow revolution’ the far right cannot tolerate

Zoe Williams writes: When I speak to Rebecca Solnit, she is beaming, and I can’t immediately figure out why. Her new book, The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change, blasts in with a pragmatic positivity, it’s true. She writes with a “pull yourself together, don’t even think about despair” tone. But that’s not why she’s smiling – it’s because Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor just got arrested. “Why is the UK doing these things the US should be…

Read More Read More

World’s earliest known dog identified at ancient hunter-gatherer site

World’s earliest known dog identified at ancient hunter-gatherer site

Science reports: In the summer of 2004, Douglas Baird was leading excavations at a remote hunter-gatherer site called Pınarbaşı in central Turkey when his team found something unusual: three puppies placed in a pit directly above a human burial. The bones were too small to tell whether they belonged to wolves or dogs. Their proximity to the human suggested the latter, but the remains—dated to about 15,800 years ago—were nearly 5000 years older than any confirmed dog. “Our minds were…

Read More Read More

Iran’s conventional navy is largely gone. The threat to the Strait of Hormuz is not

Iran’s conventional navy is largely gone. The threat to the Strait of Hormuz is not

RFE/RL reports: The United States and Israel have largely destroyed Iran’s conventional naval fleet in a massive bombing campaign since February 28. But Tehran’s threat to the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s most important shipping routes, has not diminished. Iran has effectively closed the narrow waterway, through which 20 percent of the world’s oil supplies flow, by using asymmetric warfare tactics. Besides Iran’s conventional navy, the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the elite branch of the country’s…

Read More Read More

Trump’s secret police

Trump’s secret police

Christian Gläßel and Adam Scharpf write: Since the Pendleton Act of 1883, the U.S. federal government has rested on a simple promise: professionalism, merit-based recruitment, independent oversight. Over time, U.S. federal law enforcement became a global reference point—effective, technically sophisticated, built to serve the law rather than a leader. And it traveled. For decades, officers from across the world sought training through U.S. programs such as the FBI’s National Academy and the Justice Department’s ICITAP. Now that model is collapsing…

Read More Read More

Will China save Western civilization?

Will China save Western civilization?

Chang Che writes: In November, 2024, on the day of the U.S. Presidential election, Tim Whitmarsh landed in Beijing, jet-lagged and disoriented. It was the middle of the academic term at the University of Cambridge, where Whitmarsh holds the Regius Professorship in Greek. He had been flown business class halfway around the world and put up at a five-star hotel for what he had been told would be the first World Conference of Classics. What followed, he later wrote, was…

Read More Read More

Putin resurrected and exported a fascist ideology to the West

Putin resurrected and exported a fascist ideology to the West

Zaza Bibilashvili and Tom G. Palmer in conversation at The Unpopulist: Zaza Bibilashvili: Over the last decades we’ve witnessed the rise of authoritarianism and a worldwide crisis of liberal democracy. What caused such developments and what should be done to reverse the trend? Tom G. Palmer: Most prognoses focus on demographics, technological changes, economic structures, and so on, which gives an air of inevitability to trends. I think that there are such contributing factors, notably the rise of media fragmentation…

Read More Read More

Why, for the West, it will always be ‘five minutes to midnight’ for the two-state solution

Why, for the West, it will always be ‘five minutes to midnight’ for the two-state solution

Michael Lynk writes: In 1982, Meron Benvenisti, former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, spoke to the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in Washington, D.C., about research that he and other social scientists in Israel were conducting into the political implications of the rapidly expanding Israeli settler population in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT). That year, there were 22,000 settlers living in the occupied West Bank, with another 76,000 settlers in East Jerusalem and 6,500 in the Gaza Strip. According to an Anthony…

Read More Read More

Iran’s Islamic Republic is designed for survival

Iran’s Islamic Republic is designed for survival

Ali Hashem writes: The latest Israeli and U.S. war on Iran began with airstrikes on the home and offices of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. The premise seemed to be that Khamenei’s sudden elimination would pose a dire threat to the current ruling system. The goal would be to achieve what happened in Libya after Muammar al-Qaddafi or in Syria after Bashar al-Assad, where regimes collapsed as soon as their leaders were no longer in power. In those systems, the state’s…

Read More Read More

Leaked Interior Department database reveals revisionist plans to rewrite American history

Leaked Interior Department database reveals revisionist plans to rewrite American history

Reuters reports: The U.S. Interior Department said a database revealing how President Donald Trump’s administration planned to revise information on key phases of ​American history at national park sites was deliberative and the employees ‌who released it “will be held accountable.” An internal government database first reported by the Washington Post and posted on two public websites on Monday revealed the scope of the Trump administration’s ​effort to revise or remove information on African-American history, LGBT rights, ​climate change and…

Read More Read More

The unresolved contradictions that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei leaves behind

The unresolved contradictions that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei leaves behind

Mehrzad Boroujerdi writes: The 13th-century Persian poet Saadi once offered a prescient warning: “He who would not practice statecraft with his foe will not be able to maintain his rule.” It is a maxim Ayatollah Ali Khamenei chose not to heed. “The enemy” was among the most frequently invoked terms in the lexicon of Iran’s late supreme leader — most often directed at the United States and, at times, Israel. In the end, those very adversaries brought his 37-year rule…

Read More Read More

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei brought his country and regime to ruin

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei brought his country and regime to ruin

Barbara Slavin writes: Many if not most successful revolutions boast inspirational leaders followed by less charismatic figures who serve to entrench the new ideology and system of government. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the second-ever supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, exemplified that latter role. Khamenei never had the fervent following of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, and he became increasingly unpopular as his rule dragged on. But after succeeding Khomeini in 1989, Khamenei managed to…

Read More Read More

The ideological connections between Stephen Miller, Calvin Coolidge, and Hitler

The ideological connections between Stephen Miller, Calvin Coolidge, and Hitler

To the following question, What are the ideological connections shared by Calvin Coolidge, Hitler, and Stephen Miller? Google AI responded: The ideological connections between Calvin Coolidge, Adolf Hitler, and Stephen Miller are primarily centered on strict immigration restriction based on eugenics, nativism, and the pursuit of national “homogeneity” or “racial purity”. While separated by different political contexts—1920s American conservatism, 1930s Nazism, and 21st-century American populism—they are linked through a chain of influence and shared admiration for the Immigration Act of…

Read More Read More