You know something is amiss when a World Cup referee is denied entry to the United States while Canada and Mexico appear to present no such obstacles.

The case for letting Malibu flood:

Bats move through desert night skies with a purpose that is easy to overlook and difficult to replace. As they travel from plant to plant, feeding on nectar, they are also performing one of the most important ecological services in arid landscapes: pollination.

If we are to understand the conditions facing vulnerable children, we have to begin with a difficult truth: poverty remains the central force shaping their lives. It is not the only factor, but it is the most consistent one.

Trump, an unapologetically ignorant leader, cannot possibly imagine how Cubans over the decades have come together to help each other through crises, whether weather-caused or man-made.

"We are in this land of scorching sun and heat, searching for a large Amazon solar installation in rural San Bernardino County, California. This is the home of the endangered desert tortoise and Joshua trees, but more recently, it’s become a plaything for greedy Silicon Valley entrepreneurs."

There is nothing like walking quietly with a group of committed people through the hot Arizona desert to bring home the deadly reality faced by migrants coming to the U.S. through its southern border.

For more than a decade, TSA agents have plundered passengers at airport security checkpoints on the flimsiest or most shameless pretexts. If you get stopped at an airport security checkpoint with $100 or more in cash, TSA agents can fleece you.

The world is witnessing the very real limits of U.S. global power.

One Month Inside the Trump Administration’s Siege on the Cuban People.

The Paris Commune reminds us of an important fact: here was one revolution that did not take place in a poorer country, but in one of the world’s leading capitalist nations.

Why do the Washington Post and George Will love the F-35?

The New York Times attempted to ‘balance’ Nicholas Kristof’s documentation of the systematic rape of Palestinians by Israeli forces with yet another unverified rape ‘investigation’ claiming that Hamas had weaponized sexual violence on October 7.

"The working-class community of Garden Grove is experiencing the consequences of our violent and unhinged war machine, a predicament they paid for but never wanted." - @joshuafrank.bsky.social

AI development does not represent or grow out of neutral technological progress or “market forces.” It is a deeply coercive and political project driven by a collusive state-capitalist oligopoly and supported by an ideology that openly devalues human life.

Corruption has never been far from the center of American politics. What distinguishes Donald Trump from earlier corrupt presidencies is that corruption no longer operates behind closed doors, shielded by the liberal rituals of institutional legitimacy and the euphemisms of political decorum.

Remembering the Anti-War Women of Waterloo.

Four Reasons We’re Being Lied To:

What can Texans learn from their own Left populist roots?

Surprise! The Trump-appointed federal Commission of Fine Arts approved construction of the 250-foot triumphal arch that the president plans to erect between Washington’s Lincoln Memorial and the Arlington National Cemetery.

In Secretary of War Hegseth, America has a man with a bone-deep desire for national revenge, one largely animated by his poorly disguised sense of embarrassment at, and personal emasculation over, the utter failures of the wars he fought in.

The defining signature of the past 6,000 years of human civilization is the domestication of the hydrosphere—capturing, damming, canalizing, reorienting, propertizing, privatizing, consuming, profiting from, depleting, and poisoning it.

Should American workers and American consumers oppose Chinese investments? To think about this question it is instructive to examine the case of car manufacturing in Sweden.

Every El Niño that’s hit in recent decades has been hotter than the last, and this one will no doubt be on trend. Scientists are worried that this 9,000-mile freight train of warm water will be the most severe we’ve seen in over 150 years.

Rather than taxing the very rich and distributing the windfall to the very poor, Starmer prefers to flatter and cajole the tech and finance barons in the hope they will invest more in British industry. (Fat chance.)

"I am a surgeon in Havana, Cuba. I will not use my name — not because I fear my government, but because I fear yours and what it can do to those I love."

There is a metastasizing culture of Islamophobia in the United States, where politicians have discovered that Muslim hate is a reliable path to election and commentators have built empires of followers on the broken backs of a vilified community.

Interest rates are rising as if this will simply compensate investors for the risk of inflation. The reality is that it will increase the economy’s inability to cope with the breakdown that is already in progress.

The untimely death of the Voting Rights Act.

Here’s what real GDP growth looks like in the United States and China since Donald Trump came into the White House. www.counterpunch.org/2026/05/18/k...

There are thousands[†] of communes across Venezuela, which function as a form of self-governance with a vision of ultimately replacing the bourgeois state with a communal one driven by popular power.

We often laud China for its boom in renewable energy projects, but seem to ignore the fact that it’s still building coal-fired power plants at a faster pace than any other country.

$109 billion: the amount Americans spent on lottery tickets in 2025, more than they shelled out on movies, concerts, books, and sporting events combined. It’s the Crap Shoot Stage of Capitalism.

Addressing the flaws of fish farming is crucial to preventing the entrenchment of a global industrial system in oceans and climate agendas.

The United States has been scrambling to secure lithium supply chains for electric vehicles, grid storage, and defense technology. Turns out it was here all along. Right under the Appalachian Trail, which some optimists still hike end to end, imagining a country that rewards persistence.

Mitchel Cohen genuinely thought that the world could get better. That it had to get better, not out of some utopian vision but from sheer necessity. We had to stop poisoning ourselves. No, that’s not quite right. He believed that we had to stop Them from poisoning Us.

"the final blow for this beloved landscape came with news of a fast-tracked 40,000-acre industrial AI park to be built in the very heart of a place that had become a part of me."

There are many differences between the Suez Crisis in 1956 and the US war on Iran today, but similarities in the larger context suggest that the US is facing the same kind of “end of empire” moment that the British Empire faced in that historic crisis.

Mike Hammer demonstrates a continuity in Cuba policy between the Biden and Trump regimes: in soothing tones of compassion for the “Cuban people,” he has advocated choking the island through tightening the blockade during both.

Carbon dioxide levels just hit a new record of 431 parts per million. Some of you may remember that 350 was the safe upper limit for atmospheric carbon. Oh, how times have changed.

The indictment of Comey and the invective against Kimmel are efforts to criminalize or police thought. The fact that thoughts, even treasonous ones, can’t be easily be suppressed, is irrelevant when the goal is to create an atmosphere of repression and control. www.counterpunch.org/2026/05/08/d...

Purdue Pharma, one of the drug companies at the center of the opioid crisis, was finally put to death as the result of lawsuits over its pushing of OxyContin.

Of all the really stupid prosecutions Trump and his Department of Justice have pursued since he became the despot in chief, the charges against former FBI Director James Comey, are the most ridiculous.

The liberal left again adopted a self‑defeating posture during the recent fuel and cost‑of‑living protests in Ireland. Instead of supporting the protesters or attempting to engage with them, they stood on the sidelines criticising.

The past keeps showing up, whether or not we invite it.

The Court Roberts has presided over is not perceived as a legal institution. It is perceived as a political one, and the perception is accurate. The man who promised impartiality has delivered the most politically consequential Court in modern history.

We need so much copper for the energy transition that an old, dormant mine in Utah has reopened. A recent study found that, in the worst-case scenario (which is on the path we’re on), we’ll need 373 new copper mines by 2050 to keep up with demand.

One of the inevitable problems with leading a conspiratorial movement, as Trump has done, is that your paranoid, conspiracy-minded followers will ultimately come to turn those conspiracies against you.

Nations are judged not only by what they do, but also by what they make us see, and what they force us to feel. Nations are not merely political or economic constructs. They are aesthetic phenomena that leave lasting visual and emotional imprints.

The 2025–26 Iran conflict has forced a reckoning with a basic fact of modern warfare: the side that can absorb costs longest wins, regardless of whose aircraft are more advanced.