Montreal City Council Dodges A- and G-Words Montreal is even-handed. This past Monday evening, the City Council of Canada’s second largest city passed a highly amended motion expressing solidarity with the Palestinian people, all the while confirming friendship and institutional ties with the apartheid state that’s been subjugating, oppressing, persecuting, and killing Palestinians for almost eighty years. The original motion, tabled by Projet Montreal and supported by 700 members of Montreal’s arts community, condemned the “apartheid regime imposed in Palestine and the genocide being perpetra
First Nations Voices By David Kattenburg Between the winter of 1992 and spring of 1994, backpack on my back and a vintage, analog Nagra III reel-to-reel tape recorder over my shoulder, I traveled across Canada – twice — visiting places and interviewing people from Prince Edward Island to the west coast of Vancouver Island. Out of this audio-recording adventure, thirty-two hour-length docs emerged, exploring planet Earth, global ecology, and sustainable human endeavour. The Earth Chronicles, the series was called. Totem Pole Arrival Event, Winnipeg, September 2016 (David Kattenburg) Totem Pole
More Voices From Gaza Who ever heard of Henrietta Lacks? Countless people owe their health to her — perhaps even their lives. Henrietta Lacks was the daughter of Virginia sharecroppers. At the age of thirty, checked into the ‘coloured ward’ at Johns Hopkins Hospital, in Baltimore, Lacks was diagnosed with cervical cancer. In the course of surgery that followed, unbeknownst to her or her family, a piece of her cervix was removed, then passed along to a cell biology researcher. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription Henrietta Lacks died of her cancer on October 4, 1951. Her highly aggressive can
More Poetry From Gaza-Buchenwald In many countries, joining the army, taking up arms, is something young men and women are willing to do if their country is actually under direct and immediate attack. Or, if they enjoy carrying a gun, following orders, and shooting people on command. Some enlist for the money. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription Otherwise, joining the army, navy or air force is something young people typically don’t want to do. Not so in Apartheid Israel. Happy Israeli youth get inducted into their army (David Kattenburg) The Israeli Defense Forces (Occupation Forces) are t
More Poetry From Buchenwald on the Mediterranean It’s a vast, living web beneath our feet – an impossibly tangled underground network of microscopic tubes weaving through the soil, pulsating with nutrients, plugging the roots of trees and other plants into living networks that extend over square kilometers. Mycorrhizal fungi they’re called. Most plants rely on them entirely. In exchange for plant root sugars, mycorrhizal fungi provide plants with phosphorus and nitrogen. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription But, arbuscular and ectomycorrhizal fungi do more than just feed plants. They cycle c
In Gaza today, rendered largely uninhabitable after a thousand days of joint US-Israeli genocide, young women and men are writing poetry — and publishing it. Inside Nazi Germany’s ghettos and concentration camps — Warsaw, Krakow, Lodz, Auschwitz, Sobibor, Dachau, Buchenwald — Jewish poets wrote poetry too. Inside Israel-USA’s concentration camp on the Mediterranean, poets are organizing themselves. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription Coastal Lines Press is a new Gaza poetry collective, currently consisting of 38 writers. Facilitated by a global network of illustrators and distributors, they
Snowball Earth Long before the explosion of multicellular life in Earth’s oceans, a half billion years ago, those oceans were covered in ice hundreds of meters thick. Beneath that ice, darkness reigned, and photosynthetic organisms fell silent (there were no animals back then). Snowball Earth, is how geologists describe the planet back then. Joe Kirschvink, a geophysicist at the California Institute of Technology, pioneered the concept in the early 1990s. Viewed from the moon during the Cryogenian and early Ediacaran periods of the Neoproterozoic Era of Earth time, between about 720 and 640 mi
Love of Rock By David Kattenburg Between the winter of 1992 and spring 1994, backpack on my back and vintage, analog Nagra III reel-to-reel tape recorder over my shoulder, I traveled across Canada – twice — visiting places and interviewing people from Prince Edward Island to the west coast of Vancouver Island. Out of this audio-recording adventure, thirty-two hour-length docs emerged, exploring planet Earth, global ecology, and sustainable human development. The Earth Chronicles, the series was called. Together with co-producer Peter Hutton, I raised an astonishing $120,000 for the radio proje
At Columbia University, one of the US’s most prestigious academic institutions, the suppression of free speech and widespread adoption of artificial intelligence go hand in hand. On May 12, in front of the university’s closely guarded gates at Broadway and West 116th Street (one of the last places where Columbia students are free to stage loud, public protests), a small group of students and faculty gathered to protest what they believe is the uncritical integration of AI into Columbia teaching and learning systems. To whit: the creation of an academic program called ‘Claude for Education’, of
A Conversation With Nikhil Pal Singh From Caracas to Minnesota, from Iran and Cuba to the streets of Los Angeles, Chicago and New York City, from the Persian Gulf to the waters of the eastern Pacific and Caribbean, Donald Trump and his henchmen are collapsing US foreign military and domestic policing operations into a single, unified domain of imperial impunity. A domain where anything goes; where Trump and his minions, Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio, and US ‘Homeland Security’ chiefs, consider themselves free to carry out military/policing operations without restraint, largely immune from Congress
Managing Earth’s endangered forests. Voices from the 21st UN Forum on Forests, in NYC.
Beaten and bloodied by US and Israeli bombs and missiles, and a largely ineffective US maritime blockade, Iran appears to think it's thwarted Israel-USA's unlawful war of aggression. It may be right. Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu seem to think so. For wisdom on who won Gulf War III, and rapidly evolving events in Iran today, the GPM spoke with a distinguished scholar on all matters Iranian, Ervand Abrahamian.
Israel-USA’s February 28 assault on Iran constituted a flagrant breach of the UN Charter, but don't expect Western powers and the corporate media to say so. Has Iran now turned the tables on Trump? The GPM explores this idea with Iran scholar Arang Keshavarzian. And, shades of Dr. Strangelove. An obscure tech titan wants to rule the world, and has even come up with a Manifesto. All hail the Republic of Palantir. The GPM speaks about Alex Karp's weird manifesto with U. Ottawa scholar David Murakami Wood.
Apartheid Israel’s all-encompassing system for surveilling and jailing Palestinians. A conversation with UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese. And, the current status of the settler-colonial apartheid state’s most famous prisoner, Marwan Barghouti. The GPM speaks with Barghouti’s lawyer.
New report: The Canadian financial sector is deeply involved in supporting Israel’s unlawful occupation of Palestine, bankrolling unlawful Jewish settlement, apartheid and genocide there, as well as internationally wrongful Israeli acts in Lebanon and the illegally annexed Syrian Golan Heights.
The GPM speaks about Israel-USA's war on Iran, and the wider state of the world, with Atif Kubursi, Emeritus Professor of Economics at McMaster University.
In Ottawa, legislation that would have halted Canadian military support for US-Israeli genocide in Gaza fails. The GPM speaks with Rachel Small, Canada Organizer for World Without War. And, the second part of a conversation about critical education with Canadian academic, Henry Giroux.
Hothouse Earth. A very unsafe operating space for human beings -- indeed, totally uninhabitable. As Earth warms, at an increasing pace, invisible points of no return transgressed, that’s where we may be heading. The GPM speaks with the co-author of a recent report, and listens back to a conversation with a pioneer in Earth systems science, Will Steffen.
Western powers agree: Israel-USA must be free to commit high crimes with impunity. Those who name its crimes, and call for justice, face condemnation and sanction. Case in point: UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese. But the Italian law scholar won't back down. The GPM speaks with her predecessor, Michael Lynk. And, a red card for Israeli footballers? Nowhere near enough. Human rights groups want top football chiefs to be prosecuted for their support of apartheid Israel, and have taken their case to the International Criminal Court. The GPM speaks with Irish Sport for Palestine.
In the age of fascist plague, critical pedagogy challenges fascist aesthetics. The GPM speaks with culture critic Henry Giroux about the role universities should be playing in countering authoritarianism. And, antizionism: Canadian rabbi David Mivasair talks about it, and about the power of small, personal acts in challenging US-Israeli genocide in Gaza.
Microbes inside spiders reveal Canadian river pollution. The GPM speaks with ecotoxicologist Karen Kidd. And, relentless Israeli genocide, apartheid, land theft, and ethnic cleansing. The GPM speaks with the Fathi Nimer, Palestine Policy Fellow of Al-Shabaka, the Palestine Policy Network.
Donald Trump wants Greenland, and won’t take no for an answer. Will Canada be next? The GPM speaks with Dalhousie University professor Robert Huish. And, speaking out against US-Israeli genocide in Palestine. Watch your back. Zionist campaign against a McMaster University professor thwarted.
Sustainable development and a stable climate – these are human rights. The GPM speaks with Bonny Ibhawoh, Chair of the UN Expert Mechanism on the Right to Development. And, the Chagossian people have a right to return to their ancestral homeland, in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Big problem: the UK and US have turned it into a huge military base -- launch pad for US wars around the planet. The GPM speaks with author David Vine about the plight and human rights struggle of the Chagossian people.
Food insecurity in Canada ... It’s widespread. And, Eugene Debs: trailblazing American union leader and socialist radical; inspiration for NYC's new Democratic Socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, and for Democratic Socialists up, down and across North America.
The GPM speaks about Israel-USA's war on Gaza, and the future of the Palestinian people, with American-Palestinian journalist and author, Ramzy Baroud.
