Tag Archives: Opinion

It’s said we become stronger in the face of adversity, as the journey back requires a degree of self-reflection that encourages healing. In the two decades after September 11, however, the US has learned nothing about itself. I was raised as a military brat – a special category of American …

Are Israel’s child-killing snipers any different to the Mafia’s hitmen? It is easy to kill and get away with killing. A former hitman I got to know well while writing a book years ago about Canada’s nefarious spy service once made that stunning admission to me. It was stunning because …

Wikipedia can serve as a model to combat disinformation and distrust online.

The world is getting ever more reliant on rare earth metals as it eyes a more environmentally friendly future. And this is a problem because we don’t have enough of them and they are massively polluting to process. You may not be aware of the significance of rare-earth metals (or …

With incredibly convenient timing, China has been accused of mounting cyberattacks against Microsoft, taking the attention away from another more serious spying scandal that implicates the US, Israel, and others. On Monday, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union accused China of being behind a hack of …

Countries should follow Kazakhistan’s successful model and bring ISIL-linked fighters and their families home. It feels like a long time ago that we fought the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS). The world has moved on to other problems since the military defeat of …

Hypocrisy oozes from the Canadian prime minister’s statements on the Indigenous children’s mass grave. Justin Trudeau is a lie. Canada’s prime minister has proven that he is a calculating chameleon devoid of convictions, who, when the circumstances oblige, is conditioned to star in self-aggrandizing photo-ops and spout banal platitudes – …

Misinformation could be causing real harm in the community Like viruses, false information spreads through networks. In March 2020, more than a quarter of the top Covid-19 related videos on YouTube contained misleading claims and those had more than 60m views worldwide. The World Health Organization’s Covid “myth-busters” page counters …

This moment calls for humility – we cannot innovate ourselves out of this mess We are living through what scientists call the Anthropocene, a new geological age during which humans have become the dominant force shaping the natural environment. Many scientists date this new period to the post-second world war …

The CIA’s role in the Crypto AG case makes clear that spies don’t need a way into messaging apps, but a secret bird’s-eye view from the word go. This is far more effective than any ‘backdoor’ foreign powers may have access to. On May 12, the head of Switzerland’s federal …

For Netanyahu, Jerusalem and Gaza are the gifts that keep on giving. Israel is a colonial war machine that never sleeps. Its mounting provocations in Jerusalem in recent weeks have predictably driven Palestinians to the streets in protest. Hence, the short answer to the question, “why?”, is simply, “why not?”, …

On February 12, 2021, newly inaugurated President Joe Biden asked Congress for a mid-year emergency increase in refugee admissions to address urgent humanitarian concerns that were ignored by the standing Trump refugee policy. In our community in Dearborn, we were hoping to finally welcome refugees again and see families reunite …

And it has made colonial violence a permanent feature of Palestinian lives in the holy city. For us Jerusalemites, it is frankly nauseating to hear commentators throw around cliches of “cycle of violence”, call for a “return to calm”, and generally engage in bothsidesism, whenever violence erupts. And in the …

In 2016, the libertarian magazine Reason polled a few dozen staff, contributors, and allies on who would get their votes for president. Almost all planned to cast a ballot for Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson. I was alone in stating a firm intention to vote for Hillary Clinton, for three …

The latest successful rocket test by SpaceX could mean we’ll see humans on Mars in the next decade, funded by private entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. But will they take charge of the newly conquered Red Planet too? On a clear night, there’s nothing better than gazing …

It is time to drop the Western exploitative neoliberal model and build a pan-African prosocial collaborative economy. In the wake of George Floyd’s killing by police officers in the United States and the global movement for Black lives, there has been a resounding call to re-examine the relationship between society …

On April 17, President Trump was asked by a misinformed reporter why the U.S. supported the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, which had been accused, without evidence, of engineering and possibly releasing COVID-19. The president responded that he was aware of it and would “end that grant very quickly,” …

When two countries who are supposed to be military allies fall out and almost get themselves into a shooting match, you know there’s going to be trouble ahead. The problem for NATO is, this time, it may prove terminal. For a story that involves high seas skullduggery, clandestine gun-running, a …

The statues that were erected to claim the public spaces around them for white people only are finally coming down. Towards the end of Mozart’s signature opera, Don Giovanni, the eponymous character meets his squire Leporello in a graveyard, next to a statue of “Il Commendatore”. In the very first …

On June 19, 1865, the news of emancipation finally reached Galveston, Texas. On that day, the crack of the master’s whip would no longer be sanctioned by the laws of the United States. Exercising the powers vested in him by President Lincoln, Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger, along with more than …