Episodes

GPM # 62 The wheels of justice turn slowly, nowhere more slowly than at the world’s top international courts, where lawless powerful states and their allies enjoy impunity — perhaps. No state commits crimes with more assured impunity than the State of Israel. Its unique dispensation may be crumbling. Last week in The Hague, the chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, British barrister Karim Khan, announced that he’ll be seeking arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benj...

GPM # 61 Israel’s assault on Gaza is now into its eighth month. As Israel wages war on Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied, effectively annexed West Bank, Western governments wage war on their own citizens who condemn Israeli crimes – on students, faculty and off-campus antiwar protestors, many of them Jewish. McCarthyism is abroad, once more — communications surveilled; gatherings banned; reputations smeared; careers ruined; artists blackballed; academics dragged before angry legislatures. ...

GPM # 60 Palestine solidarity protests have been taking place around the world, no more dramatically – and in the face of brutal police violence – than on university campuses. In the Netherlands, students and faculty can expect to be dealt with in two very different ways. At the end of March, at the most august proceedings of the University of Utrecht’s 388th birthday gathering, in a magnificent old church — Dies Natalis — a handful of students and faculty stood up and spoke out against genoc...

GPM # 59 It’s a vast, living web beneath our feet – a tangled underground network of microscopic tubes weaving through the soil, pulsating with nutrients, tying the roots of trees and other plants into networks that extend over square kilometers. Mycorrhizal fungi they’re called. Most plants rely on them entirely. In exchange for plant sugars, mycorrhizal fungi provide phosphorus and nitrogen. But, mycorrhizal networks do more than just feed plants. They cycle carbon from atmosphere to soil, ...

GPM # 58 Lots of reports in the news these days about Israeli military assaults on Palestinian refugee camps. In little Gaza – Israel reduces refugee camps to rubble with 2000-lb American bombs, or plows them into the mud with armoured Caterpillar D9 bulldozers. In the Israeli-occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, Palestinian refugee camps are routinely assaulted by heavily armed soldiers or police in search of “terrorists” to arrest or — more likely — gun down, no questions asked. Teargas ...

GPM # 57 Jeff Halper was a Child of the Sixties. The 78-year old American-Israeli activist ticks off all the boxes. Born in Hibbing, Minnesota in 1946, his older brother was a classmate of Robert Zimmerman, soon to be known as Bob Dylan. Bob and younger Jeff hung out in the basement of Bob’s home. Bob attended Jeff’s Bar Mitzvah. In the early Sixties, Halper traveled to Mississippi in support of the civil rights movement. He resisted the draft. Following high school graduation in the summer o...

GPM # 56 Earth would do perfectly fine without people. Human beings are much less indifferent. Denied earth’s bounty, they’d be be nowhere. Nothing. The bonding relationship begins with soil. From this most precious of substrates, food grows. And water springs, the sina qua non of life. Equally precious are gifts that can’t be counted, measured or monetized: rootedness, memory, narrative, identity, belonging, heritage, tradition, continuity. In the hands of those who covet land, Earth’s reso...

GPM # 55 Seven months into Israel’s assault on Gaza, starvation in the besieged enclave is widespread. In north Gaza, famine is “projected and imminent.” These are the latest findings of a UN-affiliated group of food security experts, released on March 18. The Famine Review Committee based itself on something called the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or IPC system. According to IPC metrics, famine has begun when at least 20% of households face an extreme lack of food, at least...

GPM # 54 An astonishing fact: In the 248 years since the United States of America became an independent republic, the US has only been at peace for about eleven. The United States of War, you could call it. David Vine does. Vine, a Professor of Anthropology at American University, in Washington D.C. has recently completed the third in a trilogy of books about Washington’s fondness for permanent war – and about the role military bases play in its warfighting pursuits – across North America, at...

GPM # 53 Nothing like a huge bazaar. Who doesn’t love wandering through a crowded food market, or scouting out old vinyl or antiques in a packed convention hall, bursting with merchants and awesome deals. How about an arms convention, merchants of death at every turn, hawking surface-to-air missiles, armored personnel carriers, speed boats bristling with guns, and killer drones of all sizes — for deadly prices? That’s what the Doha International Maritime Defence Exhibition & Conference, or DI...

GPM # 52 Some time in the next six months, the International Court of Justice, in The Hague, will issue an advisory opinion on the legal consequences of Israel’s 57-year occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza. The UN top court will be responding to a request from the UN General Assembly, asking it to determine whether Israel’s occupation is legal, and if not, what Israel’s obligations are under international law, and what the obligations of third states are to set things right. ...

GPM # 51 This past Friday, March 1, marked the 70th anniversary of the Bravo Shot, the first in a series of high-yield US thermonuclear tests in the Marshall Islands, just north of the equator, in the central Pacific. The Pentagon carried out 67 nuclear tests in the Marshalls between 1946 and 1958 — 44 at Eniwetok Atoll, in the northern end of the chain, and 23 at Bikini Atoll. Castle Bravo was the biggest, and a big experiment: a fission-fusion device fueled by lithium-deuteride, designed by...

GPM # 50 Israel and its allies moved heaven and Earth to prevent it from happening. This past week in The Hague, it did. On Monday, February 19, in response to a late December request from the UN General Assembly for its authoritative legal opinion — a request Israel, the US and fifteen other states voted against — the UN’s supreme judicial body, the International Court of Justice, convened oral hearings on the status of Israel’s 57-year belligerent occupation of the Palestinian territories, u...

GPM # 49 Some like it hot – or get used to it. In Iceland, where volcanoes belch hot gases and volcanic cracks burst open, spewing thousand-degree magma across the landscape, volcanism is a way of life. This past November, the town of Grindavík, population 3400, on Iceland’s Reykjanes peninsula, was evacuated as red hot magma — 1200-degree hot; that’s 2200 Fahrenheit — started pouring out of a nearby crack. Iceland owes its very existence to this thick, super-heated fluid. The world’s 18th la...

GPM # 48 We have heard it before – to avoid impending Earth crisis (if it isn’t too late), people need to change their eating habits. Those who have the choice, should opt to eat food grown or raised close to home. Unpackaged, unprocessed foods contain less embodied carbon. Grilled Meat (David Kattenburg) And, experts says, eat less meat. Takes lots of energy to grow meat. Livestock production generates lots of CO2 and methane, and “leaks” nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus into the envir...

GPM # 47 Remember the closing scene from Planet of the Apes? The first in the franchise? American astronaut George Taylor, played by Charleton Heston, trots on horseback down a lonely beach, accompanied by a female human buddy. Suddenly, astronaut George spies an awful sight, something terribly familiar, poking out of the sand. This isn’t a far-off planet, it’s Planet Earth, Taylor’s home, long since destroyed by nuclear war, its proud structures now fossilized. Without a doubt, that’s how al...

GPM # 46 Israel’s high-flight lawyers may have thought they dodged a bullet at the International Court of Justice last Friday, in The Hague, when it ruled on South Africa’s application against Israel under the 1948 Genocide Convention. Days after that ruling, the Israelis are not uncorking champagne. In a virtually unanimous decision, on January 26, the UN’s supreme judicial body delivered the lion’s share of what South Africa had requested in its December 29 application to the court, accusin...

GPM # 45 It’s an astonishing fact: In the 248 years since the United State of America became an independent state, the American republic has only been at peace for about eleven. The United States of War, you could call it. David Vine does. Vine, a Professor of Anthropology at American University, in Washington D.C., has recently completed the third in a trilogy of books about permanent war as a US way of life, and about the role military bases play in Washington’s warfighting pursuits – acros...