Posts:
By Stephen Roach The riddle once posed in the 1960s by former French finance minister (eventually president) Valéry Giscard d’Estaing is about to be solved. Giscard bemoaned a U.S. that took advantage of its privileged position as the world’s dominant reserve currency...
By Vijay Prashad and Pilar Troya A recent poll showed that if Andrés Arauz Galarza were allowed to run in Ecuador’s presidential election of 2021, he would win in the first round with 45.9 percent of the vote. The pollsters found that Arauz — who was the minister of...
By Nick Paton Walsh As 2020 slides into and probably infects 2021, try to take heart in one discomfiting fact: Things are most likely never going "back to normal." It has become a well-worn phrase our politicians, officials, experts, even family, like to lean on — an...
By Jan Dynes Ah, to swim in inky black water rippling gently, surrounding you like the comfort of loving arms, knowing sunrise is still hours away. I don't care that I should be sleeping, I am floating, floating in my own special infinite world under a sky of...
By Natan Sharansky and Gil Troy Three decades after the Soviet Union fell, embers of the kind of totalitarian thinking that spawned the Communist Revolution are inflaming Western debate — and inciting Americans. Anyone born into Soviet oppression, and who resisted it,...
By Malcolm Kendrick In February, U.S. Covid-19 guru Anthony Fauci predicted the virus would be "akin to a severe flu" and would therefore kill around 0.1 percent of people -- or one in a thousand. Then, fatality rate predictions somehow became mixed up to make it look...
By Vijay Prashad On September 7, 2020, Julian Assange will leave his cell in Belmarsh Prison in London and attend a hearing that will determine his fate. After a long period of isolation, he was finally able to meet his partner — Stella Moris— and see their two sons —...
By Malcolm Kendrick The release of previously repressed studies shows that if you substitute saturated fats with polyunsaturated fats, this increases the risk of cardiovascular disease. My fellow doctors need to accept the evidence. Whilst we are in the middle of the...
By H.L. Mencken A dog is standing proof that most so-called human rights, at bottom, are worth nothing. A dog is proverbially devoid of any such rights and yet it lives well and happy. For one dog that is starved and mistreated, there are 10,000 that are coddled and...
By John Williams As an expat, it takes a while to figure out what is “normal” in your new surroundings and culture. Everyone and everything is different, and some have a very hard time adjusting to the way things are in their new land. They are the ones who often end...
By Stuart Braun Back in 1970, the earth's biocapacity was more than enough to meet annual human demand for resources. But in the half century since, we have steadily outgrown our single planet. Humanity now consumes around 60% more than Earth can yield in a year,...
By Joe Emersberger The London-based news service Reuters routinely buries information that would badly damage the reputation of U.S. allies in the Americas. Whether those allies are bureaucrats from the Organization of American States and the dictatorship they helped...
By Peter Andrews The coronavirus misinformation that scientists, politicians and media have fed to the public has been shocking. Take a tour through the bizarre, contradictory and downright ludicrous myths that have done more damage than Covid. Myth 1: Slowing the...
I look at Facebook daily and it is distressing to continually see the labels socialist, radical and now “Marxist” used as epithets, thrown at any idea or activity that does not have its imprimatur from the right. Not a word of discussion about the idea itself. I am...
By John Keeble Ah, the Atlantic hurricane season has kicked off with promises of record violence – a timely reminder that the planet is still crashing out of control regardless of our very understandable focuses on the pandemic and Black Lives Matter. Or, put another...
By David Wallace-Wells Over the six months of the COVID-19 pandemic, you would never have gone broke betting on the disease continuing to surprise — on its apparent ability to grow weirder, less predictable, and less consistent, at times by the day. What first looked...
By Cristian Schulthess Regarding the recent post, In face of unprofitability and the coronavirus, international companies flee Argentina The article is a bit of a mixed bag of nuts. Foreign companies were buying up Argentine industries. Their leaving reduces foreign...
Ecuador is one of a very few countries in the world which currently allows travelers from the U.S. to enter the country, and even here, there is a mandatory 14-day quarantine. However, if you are over 65 and can show a recent clean Covid test, you are permitted to...
By Matthew Smith For decades, oil rich Ecuador proved to be a risky and unprofitable jurisdiction for foreign companies seeking to tap its vast mineral wealth. This peaked with the $9.5 billion court ruling against integrated international energy major Chevron in...
By John Keeble A British city that traded 500,000 slaves during the 17th and 18th centuries has been catapulted into the Black Lives Matter forefront by the toppling of a slaver's statue and its replacement in a dawn protest raid with a resin-and-steel figure of a...
