Episodes

Israel-USA & Palestine — Free Speech Chilled GPM # 110 Donald Trump wants Greenland, he repeatedly declares, and will seize control of the largely frozen island “one way or the other.” Military force is a clear option. “We won’t get anything unless I use excessive strength and force,” Trump told a packed room at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland last week. Trump’s rationale for such a move, in blatant odds with the UN Charter, not to mention the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty, found...

GPM # 109 Development is a human right. So are clean air and water, and a stable climate. No one is more engaged in advancing these ideas than McMaster University professor Bonny Ibhawoh. For the past year, Ibhawoh and his colleagues have been formulating a policy document exploring the connections between sustainable development as a human right, and climate justice – bringing a justice dimension to discussions about how to mitigate and adapt to climate breakdown. Donate with a $15/monthly...

GPM # 108 One in four Canadians live in households experiencing food insecurity. That’s the finding of a report from Statistics Canada, released in December 2025. Over the last five years, the rate of “severe food insecurity,” situations in which Canadians skip meals, has doubled. Food insecurity is highest in Nunavut – 60-70% of households experience it there — and the lowest in Quebec. For insight into the nature and drivers of food insecurity in Canada, the GPM reached out to Valerie Tara...

GPM # 107 Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza drags on, with no end in sight. Over 63,000 Palestinians have been killed by US bombs and missiles, almost twenty thousand of them children. Tens of thousands more lie dead and rotting beneath the rubble. Over 80% of the Gazans Israel has killed were civilians, its own data reveals. Indirect deaths — from infectious disease, chronic ailments that can no longer be treated, and forced starvation — may bring that number to 200,000. Last week, Israel laun...

GPM # 106 Israel-USA’s genocidal war on Gaza drags on. Sixty-one thousand have been killed by US bombs and missiles. Some German and British ordnance in there. Indirect deaths — from infectious disease, chronic disorders that can no longer be treated (due to Israel-USA’s blockade), and malnutrition — may bring that number to 200,000. Over 150,000 have been injured. Israel-USA’s wanton destruction of Gaza’s health care system — infrastructure and personnel — has given rise to a new term: ‘med...

GPM #105 Twenty-two months into Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, the official death toll now topping 60,000 (possibly approaching 200,000), famine has now been formally declared by the UN agency that declares such things – the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or IPC. It’s a “worst case scenario,” the IPC declared at the end of July. No news for those who follow the media. Skeletal toddlers and non-lactating Gazan mothers crowd TV screens and online news platforms day after d...

GPM # 104 You have to laugh to keep from crying sometimes. Two years into Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza — bloody slaughter and mass starvation live streamed on TV screens — the old blues lyric rings true. For tears of joy, not rage, friends of Palestine should consider visiting Bethlehem. Clinging to the walls of a fertile valley beneath the loveliest of holy towns, hemmed in by concrete walls, watchtowers, checkpoints, and a string of mega-Jewish settler-colonies, a biologist named Mazi...

Trump’s War on Diversity, Equity & Inclusiveness GPM # 103 It’s been seven months since the start of Donald Trump’s second administration. A hundred and eighty days. Feels like years. With lightning speed, razor-sharp precision, and the ferocity of junkyard dogs, Trump and his minions have slashed thousands of federal jobs, gutted departments responsible for health, education, environmental protection; for international development assistance; for the funding of medical and climate research. ...

GPM # 102 Criminal kingpins defend themselves. Cross them at your own risk. White Rose activists resisting the Nazis; Italian journalists and prosecutors pursuing the mafia; dissident Russian politicians challenging Vladimir Putin – and getting too popular … they all paid the price: guillotined, gunned down, poisoned, or starved to death in gulag dungeons. White Rose activist Sophie Scholl Now, condemning the US government and its foreign policies, or pursuing its beloved partner in crime in...

GPM # 101 We’ve been sharing extracts from a People’s Tribunal on the Gaza Genocide, that took place in Sarajevo at the end of May. Inspired by the 1966 Russell Tribunal on the US war on Vietnam, and the 2003-2005 World Tribunal on the US war on Iraq, the Gaza Tribunal was launched in London in November 2024. Faced with a “total failure of the organised international community to implement international law in the most severe, visible case of genocide in real time,” the Gaza Tribunal “aims to ...

GPM # 100 “Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, which includes mass killing, arbitrary detention, torture, and the imposition of a legal regime that provides far less due process than that provided to Israelis living in the same territory, meets the legal definition of apartheid.” So say four American human rights lawyers and scholars in a report released on May 15, entitled “An Analysis of Israel’s Laws and Policies and the Responsibilities of US Academic and Other Institutions.” Sandra Babco...

GPM # 99 The official death toll in Gaza now stands at 55,000. According to a pair of reports in the British medical journal The Lancet, the number may be much higher. Before the war, Gaza’s population was pegged at 2.3 million. These days, mainstream media talk about 2.1 million Gazans. What happened to the remaining 200,000? Fifty to seventy-five thousand have likely been blown to bits by US bombs and missiles, many of them now buried under vast piles of rubble. Another 150,000 would have ...

GPM # 98 Israel-USA’s genocidal war on Gaza has just entered its 21st month. According to Gaza health officials, almost 55,000 have been killed since the war began (the actual number may be two or three times higher), and 125,000 have been injured, with fewer and fewer places to seek care. Gaza’s health system — among the region’s most functional, before the war — has been laid to waste. Hospitals, clinics, emergency rescue vehicles and health care personnel are perfectly legitimate targets, ...

GPM # 97 Israel’s war on Gaza is about to enter its twentieth month. Widely described as genocidal by legal scholars and human rights experts, Israel and its conjoined twin (‘Israel-USA’) say it’s nothing of the sort. One would hardly expect genocide perpetrators to acknowledge committing the crime of crimes. Israel’s ability to commit the highest of crimes with impunity — aided, assisted, and shielded by Israel-USA — makes the world a more dangerous place, Norway’s international development...

GPM # 96 A Conversation With Michael Lynk Nineteen months into Israel-USA’s genocidal war on the people of Gaza, the official death toll now over 53,000, likely much higher and climbing fast (approaching 200,000, some say), two questions beg to be asked – how and why did it start, and why has it been so hard to stop? According to The Guardian, the Gaza war was “triggered by Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack on Israel, in which militants killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted an...

GPM # 95 Earth is in trouble. Alongside the collapse of its climate system, the unraveling of the planet’s living fabric poses a threat the human species may not survive — certainly not human ‘civilization’, such as it is. Earth’s biosphere is now in the throes of a mass extinction event rivaling anything the planet has experienced since life emerged, 3.8 billion years ago. An estimated million species are believed to be on the brink of extinction. Most will vanish into oblivion before they’...

GPM # 94 Sex is complex (whether you’re XY or XX). So sang a Manitoba trio called the Welfare Starlets. This past week, the UK Supreme Court ruled that the distinction between XY and XX isn’t that complex at all. Under Britain’s 2010 Equality Act, the court declared, in a unanimous, landmark decision, the terms “woman” and “sex” refer exclusively to a biological woman and to biological sex – not to transgender women, even those with so-called Gender Recognition Certificates. The April 16 ruli...

GPM # 94 “The world as we know it is gone.” So wrote British Prime Minister Keir Starmer a few days ago, in a Sunday Telegraph opinion piece. Sound frightful? Take a close look. Sir Keir was contemplating the consequences of Donald Trump’s global on-again, off-again, on-again tariff war, now savaging financial markets from Wall Street to Taipei. The financial world, in Keir Starmer’s mind. The world of Big Business, powerful corporations, and several thousand fabulously rich men, some of th...

GPM # 92 Among the many theories about how planet Earth works, none are more fascinating than the role of complexity – the idea that, as human societies develop, they get increasingly complicated; tied together and dependent on connections and systems that defy comprehension, that endlessly proliferate and are liable to come undone, in self-amplifying cascades. Thomas Homer-Dixon has devoted his academic career to studying complex systems, and how they break bad. Pernicious and virtuous cascad...

GPM # 91 The Israeli military has directly targeted the women and girls of Gaza, committing acts that constitute the crime against humanity of murder, and the war crime of wilful killing, a UN human rights report says. “More than a human can bear: Israel’s systematic use of sexual, reproductive and other forms of gender-based violence since 7 October 2023,” the report is entitled. Released on March 13 by the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory...

GPM # 90 It’s every stuffy conservative Canadian politician or Zionist cheerleader’s most disagreeable moment – getting accosted by Yves Engler. Yves Engler is a prolific political commentator and writer, the author of thirteen books and countless articles about Canadian foreign policy and international affairs, through an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist lens. He’s also a master of guerilla-style political disruption, with an uncanny ability to find out which Canadian political figures are ...

GPM # 89 Disciplinary Purgatory By David Kattenburg “A university is definitely not a democratic institution.” So said Columbia University’s Vice Dean of Graduate Faculties, Herbert Deane, back in April 1967, at the height of campus protests against America’s war on Vietnam. “Student or faculty opinion should not in itself have any influence on the formation of administrative policy,” Deane declared, in an interview with the university’s student newspaper, the Daily Spectator. “When decisio...

GPM # 88 Clinging to the walls of a fertile valley beneath the city of Bethlehem, a half dozen kilometers south of Jerusalem, hemmed in by concrete walls, watchtowers, checkpoints, and a string of mega-colonial settlements, a biologist named Mazin Qumsiyeh, his partner Jessie and their friends are planting native Palestinian seeds, raising chickens, rabbits, fish, and hyenas, and offering up habitat for birds, insects and other wildlife. Rescuing their beloved landscape from the depredation of...

GPM # 87 Each year, fossil fuel burning sends 37 billion metric tons of CO2 into Earth’s atmosphere. A little over a tenth of those emissions – 4 billion tons – are associated with heating air and water in homes and buildings. So, clean ways to generate heat are in … hot demand. Low power pumps transfer heat from air to water, and air to air. Then there’s geothermal energy – piping hot water from beneath Earth’s surface, using it to heat buildings. At the Technical University of Delft, in th...