Category: Uncategorized

by HANNA DUGGAL & MARIUM ALI

The US has the highest national debt in the world, a quarter of which is owned by other countries.

On Sunday, a key congressional committee in the United States approved President Donald Trump’s new tax cut bill, which could pass in the House of Representatives later this week.

The bill extends Trump’s 2017 tax cuts and may add up to $5 trillion to the national debt, deepening worries after a recent US credit ratings downgrade by Moody’s on Friday, which cited concerns about the nation’s growing $36 trillion debt.

The US has the highest amount of national debt in the world and is facing growing concerns about its long-term fiscal stability.

What is US debt?

Debt is simply the total amount of money the US government owes to its lenders, currently amounting to $36.2 trillion. This represents 122 percent of the country’s annual economic output or gross domestic product (GDP), and it is growing by about $1 trillion every three months.

The highest debt-to-GDP ratio was during the pandemic in 2020, when the ratio hit 133 percent. The US is among the top 10 countries in the world with the highest debt-to-GDP ratio.

US national debt increases by $1 trillion every three months

The United States has the highest amount of national debt in the world, owing some $36 trillion or 122 percent of its annual economic output.

Al Jazeera for more

by NAYA DAUR

Mullah Omar was never hiding in Pakistan, as many believed. He was actually “all the time in Afghanistan, in Zabul.” Dam’s work dismantles the common myth that Mullah Omar was hiding in neighboring Pakistan for much of his life.

The decades-long struggle between the Taliban and the Western world has been a complex and frequently a misunderstood conflict. Mullah Omar, the elusive leader of the Taliban, remained one of the most mysterious figures in modern history. In her book, Looking for the Enemy: Mullah Omar and the Unknown Taliban, Dutch journalist Bette Dam takes readers on a journey to uncover the truth about Omar’s life and leadership, and by extension, the Taliban itself. Dam’s in-depth research and personal experiences in Afghanistan, where she lived for 15 years, reveal surprising insights that challenge widely held perceptions about the militant group and its origins.

In an insightful interview with senior journalist Raza Rumi, Dam hunts through the making of her book and reflects on her experiences living in Afghanistan and her extensive investigation into Mullah Omar’s life and the Taliban. 

The pursuit to uncover the truth behind Mullah Omar was no simple task. For years, the Taliban’s leader was shrouded in mystery. Only a grainy black-and-white photograph was available to the world! “For twenty years, the Taliban was the number one enemy of Western forces in Afghanistan. But it was an enemy that they knew little about,” Dam explained. She reflected on the initial challenge she faced. The Western world’s understanding of the Taliban was superficial at best, and the true nature of Mullah Omar’s leadership remained largely unknown.

Dam’s quest of Omar was driven by the belief that understanding this hard-to-catch leader was key to understanding the Taliban. Her investigation spanned five years. She sought information from a variety of sources within Afghanistan. The result was Looking for the Enemy, a work that not only traces Omar’s life but also paints a more subtle picture of the Taliban and its local roots.

The book’s most shocking revelation, Dam told in the interview, was that Mullah Omar was never hiding in Pakistan, as many believed. He was actually “all the time in Afghanistan, in Zabul.” Dam’s work dismantles the common myth that Mullah Omar was hiding in neighboring Pakistan for much of his life. Her findings point to a far more complex narrative about the Taliban’s leader and his relationship with the land he sought to control.

One of the key insights from Dam’s book is the recognition that the Taliban was not a foreign entity imposed upon Afghanistan by outside powers, but rather a local movement that grew out of Afghanistan’s tribal structures and internal struggles. “I got to know also his education in Uruzghan. He went to a madrassa there” Dam said. She highlighted that Omar’s education and early life were deeply influenced by Afghan local traditions. He was not influenced by the international extremist ideologies that many would later associate with him.

Naya Daur for more

by DAFYDD TOWNLEY

While Elon Musk has clearly been a major influence on the Trump administration, the less well known, but arguably more influential, power behind the presidency is Russell (usually Russ) Vought. Vought is the director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) – the nerve centre of the administration’s sweeping changes.

Vought is also rumoured to be about to take over running the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) from Musk.

Unlike Musk, Vought acts mostly outside the media spotlight. He is fully committed to a radical overhaul of the way the US presidency works – and his deep religious convictions have led him to believe there should be more Christianity embedded in government and public life.

He has vowed to “be the person that crushes the deep state”, and was part of the first Trump administration, where he held the position of OMB deputy director – and, briefly, director.

Vought worked with Trump in his first term on executive order 13957, which aimed to reclassify thousands of policy jobs within the federal government. This was designed to allow the White House to quickly change who was employed in these roles.

This was subsequently revoked by the Biden administration. But Trump issued a similar executive order 14171 in January, which will implement quicker hiring and firing procedures. The Office of Personnel Management estimates that this could affect 50,000 federal roles.

In an interview with conservative commentator and podcaster Tucker Carlson, Vought said that this was necessary for the White House to “retain control” of the agencies under its command. Without it, he claimed, ideological “opponents” within the agencies had the power to diminish the efficiency of White House initiatives. And his role as head of the OMB, he argued, was “to tame the bureaucracy, the administrative state”.

During the Biden presidency, Vought was one of the main authors – credited as the key architect – of the Heritage Foundation’s influential Project 2025, widely seen as the blueprint for Trump’s second term of office. The 900-page document, whose full title is Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, was a major talking point during last year’s presidential election campaign.

The Conversation for more

by RESEARCHERS, SCIENCE PROFESSIONALS, UNIVERITY STAFF AND STUDENTS

*For researchers, science professionals, university staff and students based in Europe, Horizon Europe partner countries or affiliated to an EU institution*

To:

Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission

António Costa, President of the European Council

Kaja Kallas, High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice President,

Ekaterina Zahrieva, Commissioner for Startups, Research and Innovation

Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, which has raged for over 19 months, has turned Gaza into hell on earth. Since Israel imposed a total blockade on March 2, 2025, and unilaterally resumed its military offensive in violation of the ceasefire agreement, over 2 million people have been facing the worst levels of hunger, starvation and disability imaginable, amidst relentless bombings. The level of death, destruction and human suffering is apocalyptic. The trickle of aid Israel allowed to enter on May 23 is just a camouflage to avert further international pressure. Ethnic cleansing looms behind the intensified attacks. The Palestinians, already suffering from decades of occupation, colonization and apartheid, are experiencing their darkest hour, as settler violence, forced displacement and home demolitions engulf the West Bank.

A plausible case of genocide has been found by the international Court of Justice (ICJ), and arrest warrants were issued against the prime minister and former defence minister of Israel by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The ICJ further unequivocally ruled in its advisory opinion that Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is illegal. The UN General Assembly resolution further determined that the Occupation and all illegal activities should be ended by September 2025.

While Israel blatantly ignores the orders of the ICJ and countless UN resolutions, no action has been undertaken by the EU in line with these moral and legal obligations. On the contrary, the EU continues to grant Israel privileges through the EU-Israel Association Agreement and shields Israel from accountability, despite Article 2 of the agreement stipulating “respect for human rights” as an essential element. Only very recently has a review of the Association Agreement been initiated. In the meantime, weapons made in Europe are still flowing into Israel, killing civilians in Gaza. The past 19 months of your inaction has cost thousands of lives, with a likely death toll of 100,000 civilians.

While Palestinian universities have been deliberately annihilated by the Israeli military, Israeli academic institutions continue to enjoy a privileged status as partners of European science under the framework of the Association Agreement, receiving over €2.6 billion in EU research funding since 2007. This includes projects in the dual-use and security research area involving Israeli academia and arms companies, some even explicitly mentioning future military applications. Israeli universities, far from being stalwarts of “academic freedom”, have been an integral part of the Israeli settler-colonial project since their inception. They produce scholarship that seeks to normalize and legitimize crimes committed by the State of Israel, they develop technology and strategies that are deployed by the Israeli military against Palestinians, and they undermine academic freedom by repressing critical Jewish and Arab voices in their own institutions.

It is highly probable that the EU funding to the Israeli military-security complex involving academia and industry over the past 18 years has played a role in the maintenance of occupation, colonization and apartheid, given the central role of the security technologies in controlling, subjugating and repressing the occupied population. Continued research funding to Israel is not only morally unacceptable but also exposes the EU to the risk of being complicit in Israeli crimes of genocide, occupation and apartheid. The risk is particularly high given that no adequate monitoring mechanism is in place to prevent misuse of the outcomes of EU-funded research in the implementation phase after projects have formally ended, leading to possible violations of international law.

We therefore demand that the EU:

1. Suspend all ties with Israeli research institutions, and revoke Israel’s status as a Horizon Europe associated country

2. Take the lead in reconstructing Palestinian universities and institutions destroyed by Israel

3. Initiate an investigation into the human rights impact of past and future research funding awarded to Israel

Beyond these specific demands we join the call of millions of people around the globe to end this genocide. We call on you to mobilize all diplomatic, economic and political leverage, including an arms embargo and economic sanctions, to pressure Israel to comply with international law. As Israel’s largest trading partner and a crucial partner for its research and innovation sector, you have real leverage, and according to the rulings of the ICJ you have a responsibility to act. Your failure to do so betrays the core values of the EU, namely respect for human rights and the rule of law, and undermines the EU’s standing in the global community.

See ANNEX: Genocide, ongoing Israeli crimes and European complicity

Signatories:

Organisations

1. Dutch Scholars for Palestine (DSP), The Netherlands
2. Belgian Academics and Artists for Palestine/Belgian Campaign for Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (BA4P/BACBI), Belgium
3. Association des Universitaires pour le Respect du Droit International en Palestine (AURDIP), France
4. Red Universitaria por Palestina (RUxP), Spain
5. TUDelft4Palestine, Netherlands
6. Scottish Universities Jewish Staff Network
7. Lund Academics for Palestine, Sweden
8. documentingtheleft.org, Israel
9. UvA Staff for Palestine, Netherlands
10. Spanish Society for International Human Rights Law
11. Jewish Network for Palestine, UK
12. UAntwerpforPalestine, Belgium
13. Scientist Rebellion, Netherlands
14. TU Delft Student Intifada, Netherlands
15. VDA for Palestine, Lithuania
16. Enschede Students for Palestine, Netherlands
17. Radboud Staff for Palestine, Netherlands
18. University College Dublin (UCD) Justice for Palestine, Ireland
19. BK Scholars for Palestine, Netherlands
20. Academics for Palestine, Ireland

330 Individuals

ESSF for more

by KERMIT PATTISON

Mounting evidence from genome studies indicates that, contrary to received wisdom, our species has undergone profound biological adaptation in its recent evolutionary past

The Indigenous peoples of the Bolivian highlands are survivors. For thousands of years they have lived at altitudes of more than two miles, where oxygen is about 35 percent lower than at sea level. This type of setting is among the harshest environments humans have ever inhabited. Scientists have recognized for some time that these residents of the Andes Mountains have evolved genetic adaptations to the thin air of their lofty home. Now researchers are learning that they have also evolved another remarkable genetic adaptation since their ancestors first settled the highlands of South America around 10,000 years ago.

In the volcanic bedrock of the Andes, arsenic is naturally abundant and leaches into the drinking water. The dangers it poses are well known: inorganic arsenic is associated with cancers, skin lesions, heart disease, diabetes and infant mortality in other populations. But the biochemistry of Andeans has evolved to efficiently metabolize this notoriously toxic substance. Populations in Bolivia—along with groups in Argentina and Chile—have evolved variants around the gene AS3MT, which makes enzymes that break down arsenic in the liver. It is a prime example of natural selection, the evolutionary process by which organisms adapt to their environments to survive longer and produce more offspring. Apparently natural selection among the Uru, Aymara and Quechua peoples of the Bolivian Altiplano took DNA sequences that are present but rare in other populations around the world and increased their frequency to the point where the normally uncommon sequences are predominant in these groups. The case is one of many discoveries of relatively recent biological adaptation that could upend a long-standing idea about the evolution of our species.

Scientific American for more

by DEAN BAKER

I really did not want to waste my time writing about David Brooks just now. When Donald Trump is threatening democracy, the rule of law, and just about everything else that is decent about this country, I hate the idea of wasting time pissing on David Brooks. Unfortunately, I think it is necessary.

Brooks persists in pushing a lie that bears considerable responsibility for getting us Donald Trump. In a piece titled “Can We Please Stop Lying About Obama?,” Brooks tell us that trade was no big deal and we should just get over it. Sorry folks, trade was a big deal and the people who try to tell you otherwise are the liars.

There is a simple story, which is true, that Brooks uses to paper over the harm down by trade. The simple story is that manufacturing has been falling as a share of total employment since the 1970s. It was even falling in countries with large trade surpluses, like Germany and Japan.

The reasons are straightforward. As we get richer, we spend more money on services, like going to restaurants and travel, and proportionately less on goods. In addition, manufacturing tends to have more rapid productivity growth than services, which means we need fewer workers in manufacturing to produce the same amount of output.

That explains why manufacturing has been declining as a share of total employment in the United States and pretty much everywhere else. But that doesn’t explain the pattern we have seen in the United States.

From 1970 to 2000, while there were cyclical ups and downs, manufacturing employment only fell by a bit more than 200,000, or 1.0 percent, over a thirty-year period. From December of 2000 to December of 2009, we lost 5.8 million manufacturing jobs, roughly one-third of total employment in the sector.

That was not just the same pattern we had been seeing over the prior 30 years or the subsequent 15 years. This was a period when the trade deficit exploded, hitting 6.0 percent of GDP in 2005.

The people who try to say either that this massive loss of manufacturing jobs was no big deal, or it had nothing to do with trade, are the liars. And the victims have every right to be angry over such lies.

To be clear, there is no going back, as I and others have written. Donald Trump’s dream of re-industrializing America is absurd on its face. It’s not going to happen, and it would not be a particularly good thing even if it did.

CEPR for more

by JENNY NOYCE

An exemplar of modernism, Virginia Woolf’s revolutionary novel explored ideas—psychology, sexuality, imperialism—that roiled the twentieth century.

One hundred years ago this May, “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” The opening line from Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway is among a handful of famous phrases scribed by modernist authors that retain the aura of their just-barely post-Edwardian era even as they bear the distinct stamp of modernity. In her novels and essays, Woolf explored the early twentieth century’s swiftly shifting attitudes toward modern phenomena and ideas: feminism, imperialism, psychology, sexuality. Like her fellow modernists, Woolf made an “inward turn” away from realist representation and into the human mind; she insisted that a character’s internal landscape merited deep exploration. Art, Woolf believed, should attempt to represent humans’—and particularly women’s—perceptions and sensations. In making this attempt, Woolf innovated distinctive literary forms and theories that continue to influence writers and scholars well into the twenty-first century.

Virginia Woolf, born in 1882, was a central figure in the Bloomsbury Group, a loose affiliation of writers, artists, and intellectuals including Lytton Strachey, Vanessa Bell, E. M. Forster and others, who began meeting regularly in 1905 to discuss art, politics, philosophy, and literature. The Bloomsbury Group was a “collectivity of friends and relations who knew and loved one another for a period of time extending over two generations,” writes scholar S. P. Rosenbaum. While “it is somewhat misleading to think of Bloomsbury as a movement based on philosophical, moral, artistic, or political affinities,” the meetings were a productive site for debate and discussion wherein Woolf developed and refined many of her ideas about writing and art. “[A]ll novels,” Woolf wrote in 1924, “deal with character, and that it is to express character—not to preach doctrines, sing songs, or celebrate the glories of the British Empire, that the form of the novel […] has been evolved.”

In 1917, Woolf and her husband, Leonard Woolf (also a member of the Bloomsbury Group), established the Hogarth Press. Initially, the press served as the avenue for publishing their own work as well as that of friends, but by the end of World War I, the Woolfs had expanded “into a broader set of political and fictional works,” writes Ursula McTaggart, including political pamphlets, feminist works, translations, and literature by international, colonial, and working-class authors. Over time, “Hogarth translations and feminist publications stressed collective voices over authorial ownership and restructured the history of great men to include international, colonial, and female outsiders.” In so doing, the press “facilitated the construction of an alternative literary history that moved beyond the traditional British canon,” writes McTaggart, and published works now widely recognized as exemplars of modernism, including T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land (1923), novels by Forster and Katherine Mansfield, and Woolf’s own fiction and essays.

JSTOR Daily for more

by SETYO BUDIANTORO

It’s time to shift global finance’s metrics from return on investment to return on humanity

On paper, the global financial system was built to allocate capital toward the most productive uses. But in practice, it has often become a force that funds collapse, with growing speed and sophistication.

We now live in an era where capital has lost its moral compass, accelerating the very crises it claims to mitigate and solve. Finance, instead of being a servant of life, has become its master — setting the rules for who gets to dream, who gets to survive and whose futures are deemed “bankable.”

In 2022, global fossil fuel subsidies reached US$7 trillion, about 7.1% of global GDP, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Meanwhile, total global climate finance remains around $1.3 trillion per year, falling short by more than $2.4 trillion annually to meet the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C target of limiting global warming.

That means we are financing destruction five times more than we are funding preservation. We are not merely failing to solve the crisis — we are actively underwriting it.

Inequality tells the same story. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, the richest 1% of humanity captured nearly two-thirds of all new wealth — $42 trillion out of $67 trillion — while over 3 billion people remain excluded from formal financial services, ranging from productive credit to basic insurance. The world speaks the language of financial inclusion yet silently maintains walls of exclusion — not through accident, but architecture.

The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) — the world’s shared commitment to dignity, equity and sustainability — face a deepening financing gap. Developing countries need over $4.2 trillion annually to meet them, but only a third is being mobilized. And among all the capital flowing through Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) funds, only about 10% reaches initiatives that meaningfully impact the SDGs.

The rest is theater – a repackaging of comfort, not a redirection of conscience. A study by Scientific Beta in 2021 found no meaningful correlation between ESG scores and actual carbon emissions, reminding us that what looks sustainable on paper often remains extractive in practice.

But perhaps the most dangerous thing about finance’s current trajectory is not just that it funds the wrong things — it’s that it numbs us into thinking this is normal. That forests must be priced to be protected. That lives must be profitable to be worth saving. That the future must yield returns to deserve attention.

Asia Times for more

by MAHIR ALI

Among the innumerable miracles Donald Trump claims to have performed in the past four months, has he also sidelined the Netanyahu regime?

That was one of the more lurid fantasies doing the media rounds when, earlier this month, the US president restricted his Middle Eastern foray to the Gulf, ignoring Israel. What’s more, his administration has concluded a deal with Yemen’s Houthis and is negotiating with Iran; furthermore, Trump held talks in Riyadh with the former jihadist who is now guiding Syria’s fortunes. None of these efforts is likely to have enjoyed Israel’s imprimatur.

Be that as it may, had Trump landed in Jerusalem, the media’s focus would have shifted to his genocidal hosts. It’s hardly surprising, then, that the usually vocal Zionist lobby barely objected to the president’s flight plan. Extensive reports about the ethics of accepting a luxury Boeing from Qatar or the fuzzy details of purported trillion-dollar deals with Riyadh, Doha and Abu Dhabi could only help to distract attention from infants dying of malnutrition and the daily devastation wreaked on Gaza by mainly US-supplied weaponry.

Last Friday, when one of Gaza’s few remaining paediatricians, Alaa al-Najjar, turned up to work at one of the territory’s few remaining medical facilities, the incinerated bodies of seven of her 10 children were delivered to the Nasser hospital, too charred to be recognised. Two others, including six-month-old Sayden, were buried in the rubble of her home in Khan Yunis. One cannot even begin to imagine the kind of fortitude it takes to carry on in such circumstances, as Dr al-Najjar did, because there were other lives that might be saved.

The US almost certainly could halt Netanyahu’s genocidal campaign at a stroke.

On Monday, a Gaza City school where hundreds of people from besieged Beit Lahia had sought safety, was targeted, killing at least 35. As usual, children and women dominated the list of fatalities. The IDF described it as “a Hamas and Islamic Jihad command and control centre”. Simultaneously, 19 people were massacred in a house in Jabalia.

On the same day, thousands of Israelis marched through the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City chanting slogans such as “death to Arabs”, “Gaza is ours” and “let their villages burn”. One of the banners proclaimed “without a Nakba there is no victory”. The state-sponsored march is coordinated by Am K’Lavi, an outfit chaired by Baruch Kahane, the son of the late terrorist rabbi Meir Kahane. Unsurprisingly, the marchers were joined by their Kahanist national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who has been particularly unconcerned about disguising his genocidal intent.

A poll conducted in March and published last Thursday by Haaretz suggests 82pc of Israelis support the expulsion of native Gazans and Palestinian refugees from the strip, and 47pc see no problem with killing all of its inhabitants. Would the responses from those living under Nazi rule or occupation in the 1930s-40s have been much worse had they been asked about their Jewish neighbours?

But never mind all that. There’s Trump’s tariffs against China and the EU, his crude vendetta against Harvard and particularly international students there and elsewhere, his misguided drama about “white genocide” while entertaining his guests from South Africa, and his mindless messaging about the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, which he has failed to instantly resolve. Might the verified genocide against Palestinians not be worthy of his attention because the victims are not white?

He can’t control the actions of Vladimir Putin (or, for that matter, the utterances of Volodymyr Zelensky), but the US almost certainly could halt Netanyahu’s genocidal campaign at a stro­­ke. It chooses not to do so, and Trump de­­liberately igno­res Israel’s unceasing transgressions aga­inst every known foundation stone of humanity.

Dawn for more

by JONATHAN COOK

Western capitals are still coordinating with Israel and the US on their ‘criticisms’ of the genocide – just as they coordinated on their support for the slaughter

After 19 months of being presented with dissembling accounts of Gaza from their governments, western publics are now being served up a different – but equally deceitful – narrative. 

With the finishing line in sight for Israel’s programme of genocidal ethnic cleansing, the West’s Gaza script is being hastily rewritten. But make no mistake: it is the same web of self-serving lies.

As if under the direction of a hidden conductor, Britain, France and Canada – key US allies – erupted this week into a chorus of condemnation of Israel. 

They called Israel’s plans to level the last fragments of Gaza still standing “disproportionate”, while Israel’s intensification of its months-long starvation of more than two million Palestinian civilians was “intolerable”. 

The change of tone was preceded, as I noted in these pages last week, by new, harsher language against Israel from the western press corps. 

The establishment media’s narrative had to shift first, so that the sudden outpouring of moral and political concern at Gaza’s suffering from British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney – after more than a year and a half of indifference – did not appear too abrupt, or too strange. 

They are acting as if some corner has been turned in Israel’s genocide. But genocides don’t have corners. They just progress relentlessly until stopped.

The media and politicians are carefully managing any cognitive dissonance for their publics.

Middle East Eye for more