Global

When I ran for mayor of Buffalo, New York, last year, my past-due parking tickets became a major reason for reduced favorability among voters. When Stacy Abrams ran for governor of Georgia in 2018, there was a lot of talk in the mainstream media about how much debt she was in. I share these examples because in general, the working poor do not willfully withhold payment for debts. We are faced with the very real decision between paying often illegitimate debts (like parking tickets and student loans) and feeding our children or paying for life-saving medical treatment for our loved ones.

The latest stab at reviving nuke power is mocked by the actual reactors.

Today 93 are allegedly operable in the US, more than 400 worldwide….including the 15 in Putin’s Ukraine crosshairs, plus four lethal corpses at Chernobyl.

Every atomic reactor is an apocalypse in progress, set to explode at any time from error, terror, age, nature.

Every nuke spews heat, radiation, carbon, gases. They all kill birds, fish, people, eco-systems, the planet. They all create unmanageable wastes, untamable fire, unconscionable inequity, uninsurable danger.

All US reactors are more than 25 years old. They can’t get private insurance. Nobody can guarantee their individual safety.

A dozen-plus earthquake faults could shatter California’s Diablo Canyon, says former NRC site inspector Michael Peck. So could the San Andreas.

Diablo is embrittled, cracked, decayed, under-maintained. Its radiation, heat and chemicals fry the planet and the seascape. Its owner killed eight people in San Bruno with an avoidable gas explosion, then eighty more torching northern California.

 The horrific scenario, however, awaits countries in the Global South which, unlike Germany, will not be able to eventually substitute Russian raw material from elsewhere.

Industrial production in the United States grew by leaps and bounds after the Civil War in the 1860s. Chicago was one of those major industrial centers where factory hands labored a six day work week, Monday through Saturday, putting in a bit over 60 hours weekly.

Like most times throughout U.S. history, bosses nurtured immigration to keep wages low and complaints in check. Thousands of Chicago’s immigrants in those days hailed from Germany and Bohemia, responsive to unionization thanks to their backgrounds in anarchy and socialism from their home countries — some had read the recent writings of Marx and Engels, for instance.

The 17th annual South East European Film Festival kicked off with Croatian co-writer/director Antoneta Alamat Kusijanovic’s film Murina, which reminded me of Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1960 L’Avventura. While Antonioni’s classic won Cannes’ Jury Prize, Murina scored the renowned French film fete’s Caméra d’Or (Golden Camera) accolade for best first feature film. If Antonioni’s masterpiece about alienation is largely set in the Mediterranean off of the Italian coast and was shot in black and white, Kusijanovic’s directorial debut of a full-length production was lensed in stunning color in the Adriatic Sea and at remote Croatian isles, located in what had been part of former Yugoslavia.

By Nobel Peace Prize Watch, April 28, 2022

Honorable Prime Ministers of the five Nordic countries, Magdalena Anderson, Mette Frederiksen, Katrín Jakobsdóttir, Sanna Marin, and Jonas Gahr Støre

The war in Ukraine once again shows that the world is like a city with brutal gangs constantly roaming the streets, looting and fighting with loads of heavy weapons. No one will ever feel safe in such a city. The same applies at the international level. No amount of weaponry can make us safe. No country will be safe until also neighboring countries can feel safe. The present international system is broken, to avoid future wars we need deep reforms.

Starting on April 15, the Israeli occupation army and police raided Al-Aqsa Mosque in Occupied East Jerusalem on a daily basis.

BANGKOK, Thailand -- A Las Vegas-based cannabis company has become the first foreign franchise to jointly open a medical marijuana clinic in Thailand, treating Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, cancer, eating disorders and insomnia in Bangkok's flashy tourist zone.

"I hope that Thailand becomes the Silicon Valley of Cannabis for Asia," the clinic's Thai partner Julpas Kruesopon -- "or as most people in Thailand call me now, 'Mister Weed'" -- said in an interview.

"I welcome Israeli companies. I welcome European companies. The key is to grow the industry," Mr. Julpas said.

The Herbidus Medical Center opened in March along Bangkok's main Sukhumvit Road which is lined with restaurants, hotels, massage parlors, sex bars, and extravagant shopping malls amid exotic sleaze and 5-star venues.

The U.S.-Thai joint venture "makes us, to the best of our knowledge, the first international company with an operational presence in the Asian legal cannabis market," Audacious CEO Terry Booth said in a statement.

Mr. Julpas said theirs was "absolutely" the first joint cannabis clinic with a foreign company in Thailand.

Thousands of out-of-towners and Angelenos flocked to attend the 13th annual Turner Classic Movies Classic Film Festival, which featured a panoply of motion pictures from across the decades, talents, parties and panels celebrating – and analyzing – the cinema as an art form and “that screwy ballyhooey Hollywood,” where the fete took place on location April 21-24.

The cornucopia of screenings included 1982’s E.T. The Extraterrestrial at TCL Chinese Theatre IMAX, with the Turner Classic Movies channel’s host Ben Mankiewicz interviewing director Steven Spielberg onstage at the fabled movie palace, renowned for its courtyard with stars’ footprints/handprints in cement, where Lily Tomlin was thus immortalized at a Festival ceremony attended by her co-star Jane Fonda. Other extravaganzas shown on the big screen at this venerable venue formerly known as Grauman’s Chinese Theatre included: 1956’s Giant, starring James Dean, Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson; 1939’s The Wizard of Oz with Judy Garland; 1952’s Singin’ in the Rain starring Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds; and 1973’s The Sting, featuring Paul Newman and Robert Redford.

"Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

I truly wish these words of Ike, uttered seven decades ago, were no longer quite so relevant. Perhaps what he should have called it was a “cross of irony.”