Two years into his prison term for a 2020 murder, Ivan Rossomakhin was recruited into a Russian private military company (PMC) in exchange for freedom. He returned home from Ukraine in 2023 and, within days, killed an 85-year-old woman in a nearby town. One...

The economic repercussions of COVID-19 have dealt a heavy blow to intimate music venues in the U.S. and abroad. According to the music industry news platform Hypebot, “The UK lost 125 smaller music venues” in 2023, “and Australia lost 1,300 or one-third of its...

What will it take to end Israel’s genocide in Gaza? That’s the question confounding people of conscience all over the world since last October. After Israeli citizens, tax-paying residents of the United States have the most leverage over the perpetrators of genocide given that the...

You’ve seen them in front of houses and public spaces like food stores, parks, schoolyards, and coffee shops; small, birdhouse-like cases that anyone can take a book from or leave a book in for others to enjoy. ...

The contradictions of China-bashing in the United States begin with how often it is flat-out untrue. The Wall Street Journal reports that the “Chinese spy” balloon that President Joe Biden shot down with immense patriotic fanfare in February 2023 did not in fact transmit...

The year 2020 marked parity between the total GDP of the G7 (the U.S. plus allies) and the total GDP of the BRICS group (China plus allies). Since then, the BRICS economies grew faster than the G7 economies. Now a third of total world output...

The emerging new always both frightens and inspires the fading old. History is that unity of opposites. Sharp-edged rejections of what is new clash with enthusiastic celebrations of it. The old gets pushed away even as bitter denials of that reality surge. The emerging new...

It was inevitable that when brown-skinned Afghan refugees fleeing war were turned away from European borders over the past few years, the callous actions of these governments would come back to haunt them. A whopping 1 million people have fled Ukraine from Russia’s...

The growing disconnect between the capitalist system and the economic realities plaguing the United States is now nearing completion. On the ground, the accumulated problems of U.S. capitalism undermine its empire and challenge its very future. Meanwhile, the ever-deepening inequalities of wealth and income conjure...

The declines of U.S. capitalism and of its imperial position provoke fear among its mainstream politicians. Their response, in large part, has been to deny that any such decline is happening. These politicians do this partly by acting as though the U.S. remains in the...