Episodes

Eighty years ago, on October 16, 1946, in the cavernous gymnasium of Nuremberg prison, in Allied-occupied Germany, ten Nazi leaders were hanged by their necks for their atrocious crimes against the people of Europe, and broader humanity. Among them, Joachim von Ribbentrop (he of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, leading to Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland); senior military officers Wilhelm Keitel and Alfred Jodl; Foreign Affairs chief Alfred Rosenberg; Hans Frank, chief of the Nazi regime’s General...

“The Crime of Government Against Negro People” In the summer of 1944, when Nazi death camps were known to exist, but the total number of their victims had yet to be tabulated, a Polish Jew named Rafael Lemkin came up with a word for the crime Hitler and his henchmen were committing. Genocide — the ‘crime of crimes’ — couldn’t have been a more appropriate international legal issue for the international community’s newly minted governing assembly to pronounce on, three years after its founding. ...

Twenty-Five Years Later, Situation Much Worse David Kattenburg The death toll in flash flooding along the Nepal-Tibet-Chinese border — triggered by the collapse of a Himalayan glacier, and ensuing tsunami of water, mud and rock — has now topped 1300. Over 4400 are missing, including 500 foreign pilgrims and trekkers from India, the UK, US, Australia and Canada. The Langtang Girung glacier’s collapse set off vibrations detected by seismologists around the world, pegged at between 4.4 to 5.2 o...

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...

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, t...

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 $1...

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 ...

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/mon...

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, cur...

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 Cryo...

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 w...

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...

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 the...

Forests are among planet Earth’s core biological systems. Covering about a quarter of its land surface, forest biomes regulate Earth’s climate, and host most of its biological diversity. Forests also provide humans with food, fiber, and energy. Their contribution to human cultural and psychic wellness, individually and collectively, is beyond calculation. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription In response to the relentless decline of terrestrial forest cover, between 1995 and 1997, an Interna...

Battered and bloodied by US and Israeli bombs and missiles, weakened by years of economic sanction and US maritime blockade, Iran still thinks it’s come out on top. It may be right. Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu seem to think so, and are clearly frustrated. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription The Israeli Prime Minister spoke with Trump at least twice this past week. Read-outs of their phone conversations (there have been dozens of calls and personal visits to the White House since the...

Iran Turns Tables on Israel-USA On May 4, Donald Trump swore that Iran would be “blown off the face of the earth” if it didn’t immediately restore maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. Trump’s genocidal fulminations have become familiar. Late last month, he predicted that “a whole civilization will die” if Iran doesn’t do what he wants. Weeks earlier, Trump vowed to send Iran “back to the Stone Ages” (plural) if Iran didn’t lower its neck to US-Israeli imperialism. Well, Iran doesn’t...

Imagine this: the incarceration of an entire people — thousands behind bars; millions more hemmed in by barbed wire, towering walls, and a seamless hi-tech surveillance system; their movements strictly monitored, mapped, controlled and restricted; millions of facial images, phone numbers, family and community networks, and past carceral history fed into the most sophisticated network of biometric, increasingly AI-based algorithms. This is the situation in Apartheid Israel. Donate with a $15/mo...

Complicity The Canadian financial sector is deeply engaged in supporting Israel’s unlawful occupation of Palestine, bankrolling Jewish colonization, apartheid and genocide there, along with internationally wrongful Israeli acts in Lebanon and the illegally annexed Syrian Golan Heights. That’s the finding of a new report released on April 9 by the Canadian human rights group, Just Peace Advocates. Over a hundred Canadian financial institutions have invested half a trillion US dollars in Israel...

Lawless World In the purely notional realm of international law, nothing is more fundamentally unlawful than the war Israel-USA launched on Iran on February 28, 2026. Like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, almost four years earlier, the conjoined entity’s assault on the Islamic Republic was an act of naked aggression, pure and simple. Article 2(4) of the UN Charter prohibits the “threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state,” for any reason other...

Critical Education in the Age of Genocide Earlier this month, in the Canadian House of Commons, a private member’s bill aimed at halting the flow of lethal weapons, munitions and their hi-tech components to Israel, via the US, was defeated. Although the ‘No More Loopholes Act’ did not mention Israel, or any other state, Israel-USA’s genocidal assault on Gaza was clearly on the mind of the Parliamentarian who tabled it, last September, New Democratic Party member Jenny Kwan. Bill 233, An Act t...

Unsafe Operating Space In response to expanding climate system breakdown, in September 2023, UN Secretary General Antonio Gutteres warned that humanity has “opened the gates of Hell” and is “hurtling towards disaster, eyes wide open.” Since then, a team of scientists have spelled out humanity’s predicament in drier fashion. Six out of sixteen planetary ‘tipping’ points may have been transgressed, points of no-return beyond which the Earth system could slip into an entirely new state, something...

Genocide Excused, Justice Condemned UN Rights Expert Francesca Albanese Under Attack “Speak out, you got to speak out against the madness. You got to speak your mind, if you dare.” David Crosby’s rallying cry for peace and justice back in 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War, rings loud and clear today. If US-backed Israeli genocide, ethnic cleaning and apartheid are what you’re speaking out against, better watch your back. No one knows this better than Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rappo...

Critical Pedagogy in the Age of Fascist Plague Independent Jewish Voices Are you worried about the direction the world is heading today? Does the relentless rise of fascism, anti-immigrant hatred, and authoritarian tyranny trouble you? Perhaps it’s the ceaseless enrichment of a handful of already obscenely rich men peddling climate-destroying AI technologies, or the perfidious silence of corporate media, or the sterilization of public education systems that collaborate with, rather than oppo...

Ecotoxicology / Ethnic Cleansing in Palestine Anyone who’s flown across Canada, coast to coast, knows the country is blanketed in lakes and rivers. To a greater or lesser extent, like everywhere else on planet Earth, Canadian surface waters contain chemically pollutants. Industrial effluents are the major source, right? Think again. The largest source of surface water pollution in Canada are domestic sinks and toilet bowls, and storm waters draining across urban streets and green spaces, all ...