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 and learning systems.

To whit: the creation of an academic program called ‘Claude for Education’, offering free student access to advanced models of ChatGPT and Gemini, and awards to faculty members who incorporate AI into their courses.

Announced on May 5, Columbia’s in-house chatbot program effectively subsidizes corporate erosion of student reading and writing skills, while plagiarizing the intellectual property of university faculty, the protesters’ hand-out said.

Students also oppose Columbia’s ‘AI Minor’ program, offered in the 2025 academic year, and a new ‘AI Masters’ program to be offered this coming Fall, both of which they say soft-pedal the ethical hazards of AI systems.

Instead, critics say, the two programs “capitalize” on the profitability of advanced AI platforms, while catering to the “rapid rise in industry demand” for AI-trained students.

JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs are among the corporate heavyweights Columbia’s new AI-based programs are designed to serve, the protesters hand-out said.

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“We cannot trust Columbia to properly educate its masters students on the risks of this technology when the university is invoking the “projected value of the global AI market”,” the hand-out said.

Citing Columbia University’s “historical collaboration with the military industrial complex” — including the development of atomic bomb technology at Columbia, and its involvement in the advancement of Cold War-era military theory — the hand-out also called on Columbia to disclose how much money it’s receiving from AI companies.

Topping their complaints, on the eve of university commencement ceremonies, Columbia students were angered by the news that the names of graduating students would be read out, not by an esteemed, two-legged faculty member, but by an AI “robot.”

“Class Day is the only time that every student is individually acknowledged by the administration,” the students rote in their protest flyer. “The switch needlessly removes human intention from a special Columbia tradition.”

Of course, no tradition is more foundational — at Columbia, or any other academic institution — than the right to freely pursue scholarship, study, teach, and speak out on matters of public concern — especially contentious ones — without fear of reprisal.

Since the start of Israel-USA’s genocidal war on Gaza, in October 2023, under pressure from the Trump Administration and the university’s “corporate-heavy” Board of Trustees, Columbia has been among the country’s most free speech-averse campuses — banning protests against the Gaza genocide, calling in police to break up protest encampments, and suspending and expelling students.

Based on feedback from 55,000 currently enrolled students at 251 US colleges and universities, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) places Columbia University second to last in its ‘Speech Code Ranking’, assigning it a ‘Yellow’ rating – “Abysmal.”

Sixty-five percent of Columbia students told FIRE that they “self-censor” “at least 1-2 times a month.”

FIRE identifies sixty Columbia faculty members, instructors and students who’ve been investigated, sanctioned, terminated, suspended or expelled by the administration for speaking out against the Gaza genocide. The suspension and expulsion of Columbia Masters students Catherine Curran-Groome, Aidan Parisi and Brandon Murphy was reported here.

Columbia’s commitment to free expression is steadfast and enduring, Acting President Claire Shipman wrote in September 2025.

Others are see things differently.

The pursuit and persecution of Columbia student protest leaders speak volumes about academic freedom and free speech on the West Harlem campus.

With the apparent complicity of Columbia authorities, ICE thugs have targeted Columbia students Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi, both active in support of Palestine, and in opposition to US-Israeli genocide in Gaza. The Trump regime is seeking to deport both. Columbia University has not come to their defence — certainly not loudly.

Columbia University students & faculty protest in front of university’s main gate (David Kattenburg)

In the minds of some Columbia students, the administration’s jaundiced view on free speech and its passionate embrace of AI go hand in hand. Listen to them, and a few of their faculty supporters, in this edition of the GPM. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Students perform protest songs against AI, in front of Columbia’s main gate (David Kattenburg)

Students perform protest songs against AI, in front of Columbia’s main gate (David Kattenburg)

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In this GPM edition, we also speaks with Michael Harris, a professor of mathematics at Columbia University, specializing in number theory.

The last time Michael and I sat down was in Leiden, in the Netherlands, in September 2025, at a conference of computer scientists and mathematicians. Among the outcomes of that gathering — a declaration on the ethical principals of AI. The Leiden Declaration, as it’s called, will be publicly revealed in July, possibly at the International Congress of Mathematicians, scheduled to take place in Philadelphia. Stay tuned for details.

Michael Harris (David Kattenburg)

A domain where anything goes; where Trump and his minions, Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio, and US ‘Homeland Security’ chiefs, consider themselves free to carry out military/policing operations without restraint, largely immune from Congressional oversight, and beyond the reaches of international and domestic US law.

Their preferred  modus: sudden, highly dramatic acts of violence and murder that can be parlayed into media spectacles, staged for instant transmission to the American public and the world on Donald Trump’s “Truth Social” platform.

“Smash and grab” operations, American historian Nikhil Pal Singh calls these.

In a recent article for the journal Equator, Singh unpacks the Trump regime’s core innovation: the expansion of the borders of US state power, collapsing foreign and domestic violence into a single domain of impunity.

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“Homeland empire,” US academic Nikhil Pal Singh calls this.

Nikhil Pal Singh is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at NYU, focusing on the intersection of contemporary US history and political theory.

Singh’s first book, Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy, was recognized as the best work of US civil rights history by the Organization of American Historians.

Singh’s other works include Climbin’ Jacob’s Ladder: The Black Freedom Movement Writings of Jack O’Dell, Race and America’s Long War, and Reconstructing Democracy: Black Intellectuals in the American Century.

Listen to our complete conversation with Nikhil Pal Singh. Click on the play button above, or go here.

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.

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In response to the relentless decline of terrestrial forest cover, between 1995 and 1997, an International Arrangement on Forests (IAF) was established within the United Nations, as a framework for the development of forest policy and cooperation.

Out of the IAF, the UN Forum on Forests (UNFF), the Collaborative Partnership on Forests, the Forest Financing Facilitation Network, and the UN Strategic Plan for Forests 2017–2030 emerged.

The Strategic Plan sets six Global Forest Goals: to reverse forest cover loss, improve forest livelihoods, support the development of sustainable forest products, promote inclusive forest governance and cooperation across sectors, and to mobilize financial resources crucial to achieving these goals.

The UNFF is the international community’s core venue for discussion on all matters forest-related.

The UNFF is a commission of the Economic and Social Council, one of the UN’s five principal arms. All UN members states belong to the Forest Forum. Annual sessions focus on forest protection policy, knowledge exchange, and the promotion of practical measures to conserve and expand Earth’s forested cover.

Between May 11 and 15, the UNFF held its 21st session in New York City. The GPM was there.

The highlight of UNFF21 — this year’s Forest Goals Report.

The Global Forest Goals Report 2026 is less than optimistic. With less than five years to go till 2030 — target date for global sustainability goals established at the 1992 Rio Summit — Earth’s forests are in peril, it says.

Global forest area has declined by more than 40 million hectares over the past decade, the report says. Financing for sustainable forest management remains far below estimated needs. At the same time, it says, countries are advancing reforms, expanding restoration efforts, strengthening forest governance, and scaling up cooperation.

Listen to voices from this year’s session of the UN Forum on Forests. Click on the play button above, or go here.

In order of appearance:

UNFF21 chair, a Turkish forester, Ismail Belen.

Lok Bahadur Thapa, Permanent Representative of Nepal, and President of the UN’s Economic and Social Council.

Annaliena Baerbock, former German Foreign Minister, and President of the current, 80th Session of the United Nations.

Bjorg Sandkjær, former Deputy Minister for International Development at the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Assistant Secretary-General for Policy Coordination in the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs. Sandkjær presented this year’s Forest Goals Report.

On the sidelines of formal sessions, the GPM spoke with:

Ana Paula Vargas, a consultant for Brazil’s Ministry of Indigenous Peoples.

David Flood (Zonzei Maiingun), a member of Matachewan First Nation, an Ojibway band in Treaty 9 territory, northeast Ontario, and General Manager of Wahkohtowin Development, a social enterprise jointly operated by three First Nations.

Listen to our complete conversation with David here:

The GPM also spoke with Juliette Biao, Secretary General and Director of the UN Forum on Forests.

As West Africa’s first female forester, Biao helped resolve forest-related conflicts in the international park separating Burkina Faso, Niger, and her home country, Benin. Since 2022, Biao has served as the Director of the Secretariat of the UN Forum on Forests. Ms. Biao is a dual national — of Benin and Canada.

Listen to all these voices in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

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It may be right. Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu seem to think so, and are clearly frustrated.

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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 start of their war) have not been released, but we can imagine what the two discussed.

Netanyahu, the subject of an arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in besieged, occupied Gaza, almost certainly pressed Trump, a convicted felon, for an end to their supposed cease-fire with the Islamic Republic, and a resumption of savage bombing.

Israel-USA’s declared aim: preventing Iran from developing a bomb.

Washington’s position has always been clear: Only Israel has the right to enrich uranium and amass a nuclear weapons arsenal — undeclared and exempt from international inspection — and to threaten to nuke its neighbors.

Israel’s aim is much more expansive: annihilating the Islamic Republic; fracturing it into a patchwork of ethnic entities; pushing it into crippling chaos.

Will Trump agree to start bombing Iran again? Netanyahu, a staunch advocate of permanent war against the self-declared ‘Jewish’ state’s neighbors, does have a knack for pulling Trump by the nose.

‘Bibi’ is “a very good man,” Trump insisted, a few days after their phone talks, but he, Trump, is in charge.

Netanyahu “will do whatever I want him to do,” Trump  reassured a crowd of corporate media flacks, somewhere between Washington and his Florida golf course. None of them asked about Israel’s nuclear arsenal.

Judging from recent developments in the Persian Gulf, Iran will actually do what it wants to do.

Within hours of Trump’s blustering claim that he, not Israeli’s indicted war criminal, is calling the shots, and that Iran will never, ever get a nuclear bomb, the Islamic Republic announced that its far more powerful nuclear option has been fine-tuned.

Henceforth, Tehran declared on X (where pronouncements of this sort are made), all maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz — from the waterway’s eastern portal, between Kuh-e Mobarak in Iran and Fujairah in the UAE, to its western end, across the narrow strait between Qeshm Island in Iran and Umm al-Quwain in the UAE — will be managed by a freshly minted Persian Gulf Strait Authority (PGSA).

Alternatively pegged at a dollar per barrel of transported oil, or a $2 million flat fee, PGSA transit tolls must be shelled out in advance, in crypto currency.

Iran’s transit toll appears to expand on an earlier, more modest levy, two months and a bit after Israel-USA launched its war against Iran, in flagrant breach of Article 2(4) of the UN Charter .

“Iran’s demands over the Strait of Hormuz demonstrate that Iranian officials believe they won the war,” says Washington-based Institute for the Study of War.

They’ve certainly turned the table on the conjoined twins who’ve been assaulting them. 

For his own thoughts on whether this is so, and on rapidly evolving associated events in Iran today, the GPM spoke with a distinguished scholar on all matters Iranian.

Ervand Abrahamian is a Professor of History at Baruch College and Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Among the books he’s authored: Iran Between Two Revolutions (1982), Khomeinism: Essays on the Islamic Republic (1993), Tortured Confessions: Prisons and Public Recantations in Modern Iran (1999), Inventing the Axis of Evil: The Truth About North Korea, Iran, and Syria (2004), and A History of Modern Iran (2008).

Professor Abrahamian’s latest work, Oil Crisis in Iran – From Nationalism to Coup d’Etat, explores the motivations of the US-UK-engineered overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq, back in August 1953, based on an analysis of previously unreleased diplomatic communications.

Continued favourable access to Iranian oil was the key driver of the CIA-MI6-engineered coup, Abrahamian argues, not fears of Soviet influence over the democratically elected Mossadeq administration, at the height of the Cold War.

The GPM sat down with Professor Ervand Abrahamian at his Brooklyn home, across the East River from the United Nations. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

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Listen to our complete conversation here:

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 seem to be listening.

Indeed, according to numerous informed observers outside the Trump Administration, the Islamic Republic has actually turned the tables on Israel-USA, scoring what many see as a strategic victory over the conjoined entity.

To catch up on the current situation, the GPM reached out to Arang Keshavarzian, Associate Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. Keshavarzian is the author of Bazaar and State in Iran: Politics of the Tehran Marketplace (2007), Geographies and Histories of the Iranian Revolution (2021), and Making Space for the Gulf: Histories of Regionalism and the Middle East (2024).

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Watch our complete conversation here:

Boys will be boys. Tech Bros certainly will.

While Donald Trump and his crusading Christian warrior chief, Pete Hegseth, vow to rain hellfire on Iran, Silicon Valley ‘titans’ pronounce on how they intend to rule the world, backed by AI-based surveillance and weapon systems.

Over a mid-April weekend, AI wunderkind Alex Karp, founder of the surveillance giant Palantir, posted a 22-point manifesto about all this. Like most pompous pronouncements, Alex Karp’s bursts with Big Narrative.

The “Technological Republic” owes a “moral debt” to America and the world, and “free email” won’t cover the bill. Civilizational decadence must be squashed, says Karp, along with “vacant and hollow pluralism,” and the “dysfunctional and regressive” belief that all cultures are equal. (They’re not, says Karp)

Karp’s fixes? AI-based military deterrence, obligatory “national duty” (as if humans have something to offer in his dystopian future), reinvigorated religious faith at upper state echelons … and the remilitarization of Germany and Japan.

Inevitably, Alex Karp’s manifesto has drawn fire. Among those speaking out, a group of academics at the University of Ottawa. David Murakami Wood is one of them.

David Murakami Wood is Professor of Criminology in U. Ottawa’s Faculty of Social Sciences, and Canada Research Chair in Critical Surveillance and Security Studies. His research focuses on emerging AI-based “smart cities”, private surveillance companies, AI regulation, and the relationship between surveillance and the climate crisis.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Watch our complete conversation here:

This is the situation in Apartheid Israel.

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Since Israel’s conquest of the West Bank, back in 1967, the apartheid regime has spirited over a million Palestinians into prisons, most of them inside Israel ‘proper’, in flagrant breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention; tens of thousands without charge, including children, under  routinely extended rounds of preventive detention

Palestinian political prisoners and hostages are routinely subjected to what experts define as torture.

In a July 2023 report to the UN Human Rights Council, Italian legal scholar Francesca Albanese laid out Israel’s carceral system in graphic detail, a system she says has turned occupied Palestine into a “carceral continuum,” and “constantly surveilled open-air panopticon.”

In her most recent report,  released in February 2026, Albanese says that “torture has become integral” to Israel’s system of domination and oppression.

A “continuous, territorially pervasive regime of psychological terror,” is how Albanese describes Apartheid Israel’s system, “designed to break bodies, deprive a people of their dignity, and force them from their land.”

Francesca Albanese is Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in occupied Palestine. The GPM has spoken with her on a couple of occasions. Here’s a conversation we had back in 2023. Listen to it in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Here’s a more recent conversation with Francesca, following Israel’s assault on Jenin refugee camp, in the northern West Bank, in early 2025, replicating its then-well advanced genocidal assault on Gaza: 

Of the ten-thousand Palestinians currently held in Israeli dungeons, none are more prominent than Marwan Barghouti.

Marwan Barghouti is a veteran member of Palestine’s Fatah movement and political party.

In 2002, the Second Intifada just underway, Barghouti was convicted by a military court for his alleged involvement in attacks in which five Israelis dies. Barghouti denied the charges, and refused to recognize the court. The Inter-Parliamentary Union declared, at the time, that Barghouti was denied a fair trial.

Barghouti, now 66 years-old, is serving a life sentence. He’s widely considered Palestine’s most popular leader – far more so than Israel-USA’s collaborative man in Ramallah, Mahmoud Abbas. Should he ever be liberated, Barghouti is considered the most likely figure to replace Abbas, uniting Palestinians across political factions, and advancing the so-called Two-State Solution.

For this reason, the apartheid regime has no intention of releasing him.

The Palestinian Mandela, Marwan Barghouti is commonly called. The comparison isn’t quite apt. Nelson Mandela was liberated, after 27 years in jail. A similar figure, native American leader Leonard Peltier, spent almost fifty years in jail, before Joe Biden pardoned him.

Will the Israelis ever liberate Marwan Barghouti? Not unless they’re forced to — and no one is going to do that.

Of late, Barghouti has been starved, beaten, denied access to health services, and set upon by dogs. Apartheid Israel’s fascist security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has gone to the bother of visiting Barghouti in jail, just to taunt him!

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For the latest news about Marwan Barghouti, the GPM reached out to his lawyer, Ben Marmorelli.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Watch our conversation here. Ben’s audio isn’t that good. Listen closely.

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 Israeli activities deemed unlawful by the International Court of Justice and other human rights bodies, the report reveals. Among these: eleven Canadian pension funds, eight banks, seven insurance companies, and 85 fund managers.

Canadian investments are tied to the development and manufacturing of lethal weapons, population surveillance and control systems, construction equipment used to demolish homes and property, and to the systematic plundering of Palestinian natural resources, the Just Peace Advocates report says.

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Among the corporations benefiting from Canadian investment largesse: Israel’s notorious weapons manufacturer Elbit systems, Lockheed-Martin, the manufacturer of the F-35 jet fighter, and the population surveillance and spyware company Palantir, leader in the emerging techno-fascist sector.

Disclosure gaps mean total Canadian investments in Israeli settler-colonialism, apartheid and genocide are likely higher. The Carney government must oblige Canadian corporations to divest, the report says.

The GPM spoke Just Peace Advocates campaigner Becca Steckle. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Watch our complete conversation here:

Over a hundred Canadian financial institutions have invested in Israel’s occupation of Palestine – to the tune of over a half trillion US dollars – and are therefore complicit in Israeli policies and practices judged to be unlawful by the International Court of Justice and other human rights bodies.

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Of course, they’re playing with the dollars of individual Canadians. Do people have the power to control how their dollars are invested? The GPM spoke about this with Peter Larson.

Peter Larson is an independent researcher and blogger based in Ottawa, Canada. He was the founding Chair of the Middle East Study Group of the Canadian International Council (National Capital Region), a board member of the National Council on Canada Arab Relations, and the first chair of its National Education Committee on Israel/Palestine. Peter is the long-time chair of OFIP – the Ottawa Forum on Israel-Palestine.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Watch our complete conversation here:

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 than self-defense, as provided for under Article 51, which Israel-USA cannot claim.

Well, who cares? The ruination of the UN Charter, the trampling of its most sacred injunctions and canonical legal conventions, is not something most world leaders lose sleep over, certainly not in the morally enlightened West.

For those like Mark Carney, an international banker now serving as Canada’s 24th Prime Minister, it’s the disruption of global supply chains, trade in fossil fuels and other lucrative commodities, and the integrity of the procedural rules governing the smooth functioning of trade and financial systems (“rules-based international order”) that matter the most.

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In search of words to capture how lawless the world Mr. Carney waxed nostalgically for in Davos actually is – a world of colossal inequality, insatiable corporate greed, apartheid, genocide, and other monstrous crimes, live-streamed on ‘social media’; a world where laws count for nothing, and no one comes to their defense; not even their supposed Western guardians – worried observers turn to Antonio Gramsci.

Antonio Gramsci was a fierce critic of Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime. Jailed in 1926, the Italian Marxist died there in 1937. His famous words live on, summing up darker times Gramsci could never have imagined:

“The old world is dying,” Gramsci wrote, “and the new world struggles to be born … Now is the time of monsters.”

The GPM speaks about these dark, monstrous times with Atif Kubursi.

Atif Kubursi is Professor Emeritus of Economics at McMaster University, and the President of Econometric Research Limited. Since joining the United Nations Industrial Organization as a Senior Development Officer in 1982, Kubursi led missions to Indonesia, Thailand, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Sudan, and Egypt. In 2006 he was appointed Executive Secretary of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia.

Professor Kubursi has published extensively on macroeconomics, economic development strategies, international trade, and regional planning centering on the environment. He joined McMaster University as an Assistant Professor of Economics in 1969, and became a full professor in 1981. He is currently a Professor Emeritus.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Alternatively, give this a listen:

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 to Amend the Export and Import Permits Act, also known as the No More Loopholes Act, failed by a vote of 295 to 22. Fifteen members of Mark Carney’s pro-genocide/apartheid Liberal government voted in favour of closing the loophole. Another fifteen abstained. Canadian anti-war activists see that as a victory.

Back in September 2024, US-Israeli genocide well underway in Gaza, and Justin Trudeau still Prime Minister, Trudeau’s Foreign Minister, Melanie Jolie, announced that new arms shipments to Israel would cease to be permitted, regardless of their route. Old export permits would be honored.

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As it turns out (reported by Canada’s independent journal The Maple), bombs, ammunition, and spare parts for the F-35 fighter bomber and other murderous hi-tech systems continued to flow to Israel via its conjoined twin, the US.

In the lead-up to the March 11 vote on the No More Loopholes Act, a handful of Canadian antiwar and human rights organizations lobbied Parliamentarians to close the Israel loophole. Rachel Small is Canada Organizer for one of those groups, World Beyond War.

Listen to our conversation with Rachel Small. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Watch out complete conversation here:

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Are you worried about the direction the world is heading today?

Does the relentless rise of fascism, anti-immigrant hatred, and authoritarian tyranny scare 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 bum you out the most.

If so, you may wish to resist. Before you get up/stand up, sit down and give Henry Giroux a read. No one captures the contours of fascist culture and aesthetics, the role of critical education in resisting “fascist plague,” and the imperative to resist more sharply and colourfully than Henry Giroux.

Henry Giroux is Professor for Scholarship in the Public Interest, and Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario. Among his latest books: The Violence of Organized Forgetting, Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of Spectacle, America at War with Itself, and Dangerous Thinking in the Age of the New Authoritarianism (together with Brad Evans).

Listen to our conversation in today’s GPM podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Listen to our complete conversation here:

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 it hasn’t experienced in 15 million years, a recent report states.

“The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory” was published last Fall in a journal called One Earth. The GPM spoke with one of its authors.

Katherine Richardson is principal investigator at the Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate and Professor of Biological Oceanography at the University of Copenhagen. She co-authored the groundbreaking 2009 study that introduced the Planetary Boundaries/Safe Operating Space concepts.

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Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Watch our complete conversation here:

Earth’ surface is a little over one degree warmer today, on average, than it was at the start of the industrial revolution 200 years ago.

Doesn’t seem like much.

Under the Paris Agreement, governments agreed to limit temperature rise to 1.5 degrees. That target seems to have been exceeded.

In a series of landmark reports published in 2009, 2015 and 2023, researchers warned that a two degree rise in global surface temperature may actually exceed a critical planetary threshold, pushing Earth down a cascade of tipping points into “hothouse” mode, unlike anything this third rock from the sun has experienced since the mid-Miocene epoch, fifteen million years ago.

Stability landscape for Earth system departing the Holocene (PNAS, used with permission)

The GPM spoke with one of the leading proponents of hothouse Earth science, Will Steffen.

A native of Norfolk, Nebraska, Steffen emigrated to Australia in the 1970s, where he took up a position at the Australian National University in Canberra. Steffen served as the Executive Director of the International Geosphere–Biosphere Programme, a ground-breaking initiative aimed at studying the chemical, physical and biological processes governing Earth as system. His name came to be associated with a host of ideas about our planet, and humanity’s fate, and the associated ideas of Planetary Boundaries and Safe Operating Space.

Will Steffen’s Great Acceleration curves helped corroborate the idea, first proposed by Paul Crützen, that Earth has entered a new Epoch, the Anthropocene.

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Will Steffen passed away in January 2023. The GPM spoke with him in 2018. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Listen to our complete conversation here:

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 Rapporteur on the Human Rights Situation in Occupied Palestine.

Since assuming the unpaid position in 2022, the Italian legal scholar and human rights advocate has submitted a host of excoriating reports to the UN, detailing Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity.

In response to her filings, in July 2025, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, slapped crushing sanctions on Albanese. Albanese’s reports amount to “lawfare,” Rubio declared, and a “gross infringement” of Israel-USA’s right to commit internationally unlawful acts with impunity.

Albanese family has now launched a lawsuit against the Trump Administration.

“Francesca’s expression of her views about the facts as she has found them in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and about the work of the ICC is core First Amendment activity,” the legal filing says.

Francesca Albanese isn’t the only one in Little Marco’s crosshairs.

Following the issuance of arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then War Minister Yoav Gallant, eleven prosecutors and judges at the International Criminal Court have had their bank accounts frozen, credit cards cut off, and online services terminated. Of course, they’re all banned from entering the US.

Smelling blood, pro-Israeli Apartheid lobby group UN Watch has called on the UN to dismiss Albanese from her post as Special Rapporteur. Based on a doctored video from UN Watch, France, Germany, Italy, Austria and Czechia seconded the group’s call. The Human Rights Council has yet to act on the call. Annual meetings of the Council, in Geneva, Switzerland, have now closed.

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The GPM reached out to Francesca Albanese’s predecessor in the Special Rapporteur position, Canadian legal scholar Michael Lynk. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Listen to our conversation here:

Watch our complete conversation here:

Speaking of ‘lawfare’ (in the positive sense), a handful of human rights groups have just filed a complaint to the International Criminal Court, calling on it to prosecute top international football chiefs for aiding and abetting Israeli crimes in Palestine.

Gianni Infantino is the President of the International Football Federation, FIFA. Aleksander Ceferin is the President of UEFA, the European Football Federation.

According to the 120-page filing, submitted to the world’s only permanent criminal court on February 16, Infantino and Ceferin have provided extensive organizational and financial aid to Israeli football clubs based in illegal Jewish settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, at the expense of Palestinian teams and players.

FIFA and UEFA have allowed settlement clubs to compete in European and international matches, all the while ignoring Israel’s systematic persecution of Palestinian footballers. Settlements are illegal under international law – a war crime under the court’s founding instrument, the Rome Statute.

By allowing settlement football clubs to compete in league play, Infantino and Ceferin have aided and abetted Israel’s apartheid regime, a crime against humanity under the Rome Statute, for which they bear personal responsibility, the filing states.

To learn more about the ICC filing, the GPM reached out Rebecca O’Keeffe, a spokesperson for one of the filings sponsors, Irish Sport for Palestine.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

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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 oppose authoritarianism, that bums you out the most.

If so, you may wish to resist. Before you get up/stand up, sit down and give Henry Giroux a read. No one captures the contours of fascist culture and aesthetics, and the role of critical pedagogy in resisting “fascist plague,” more sharply and colourfully.

Henry Giroux is Professor for Scholarship in the Public Interest, and Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy, at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario. Among Giroux’s latest works: The Violence of Organized Forgetting, Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of Spectacle, America at War with Itself, and Dangerous Thinking in the Age of the New Authoritarianism (together with Brad Evans).

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Listen to our conversation with Henry Giroux in today’s GPM edition. Click on the play button above, or go here.

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US-Israeli genocide continues to be waged in Gaza and the Palestinian West Bank (notwithstanding the October 10 “ceasefire,” reportedly violated by Israel over 1600 times, killing over 600 Palestinians), but Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney won’t talk about, much less condemn US-Israeli perfidy.

British, German and French leaders Keir Starmer, Frederick Merz, and Emanuelle Macron won’t either.

Israel’s largest trading partner, the EU, continues to extend generous aid and assistance to a regime declared unlawful by the international community’s supreme judicial body, the International Court of Justice.

Western leaders want to help Israel out — militarily, economically, diplomatically – not hold it accountable under international law. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and the Munich Security Conference, Carney and other leaders commented dispassionately on the collapse of the euphemistically phrased  “international rules-based order,” all the while ignoring Israel-USA’s relentless assault on the UN Charter.

Rather than standing up for the canonical instruments of 20th century international law — the UN Charter, the four Geneva Conventions, the Genocide and Apartheid Conventions, and the International Covenants on civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights — Carney seems to believe Canada should get smart and adapt to the rules of the jungle.

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In startling contrast, those who do name Israeli crimes, and call for justice – like Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights Situation in Occupied Palestine – get mercilessly condemned. The US government has slapped crushing sanctions on Albanese, and on the prosecutors and judges of the International Criminal Court.

Out on the street, Canadians of conscience do their best to shift the needle, but it ain’t easy. Getting the government to stop funneling weapons and ammunition to Apartheid Israel, via the US, will take lots of organization, and vast amounts of energy.

In contrast, the simplest acts may be the most rewarding.

To learn more about the size and shape of simple acts of justice, the GPM reached out to David Mivasair.

Originally from Baltimore, Rabbi David Mivasair has lived in Canada for years. He’s a member of a group called Independent Jewish Voices Canada, and a tireless Palestine solidarity activist in Hamilton, Ontario.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

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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 flushing into municipal wastewater plants.

Those treatment plants do their best to remove organic pollutants, but others remain. Among these, thousands of compounds contained in household detergents, cleansers, and personal care products, partially metabolized pharmaceutical products, and vast quantities of microplastics from washing machines and dryers.

More exotic toxins are there too, including polyfluorinated alkyl substances (PFAS) — those ‘forever chemicals’, virtually impossible to break down, biologically — and mercury, naturally present in soils, and generated through the burning of fossil fuels.

Dr. Karen Kidd has spent her career studying the effects toxic contaminants have on fish and tiny invertebrates living in Canadian lakes and rivers. Kidd is a Professor in the Department of Biology at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario.

Orb-weaving spiders inhabiting the riparian edge of those rivers are a powerful research tool in the Kidd lab.

Riparian arachnids dine on insects emerging from surface waters, and on their larvae. Chemical contaminants inside those aquatic insects appear to alter the composition of microbial communities living inside their terrestrial spider predators — a complex microbial mix that can be monitored.

Like the human microbiome, spider endosymbionts like Wohlbachia know no other home, and help spiders out.

They also help ecotoxicologists monitor the presence and impact of freshwater contaminants.

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The GPM paid a visit to the Kidd lab, to learn more about how the microbiomes of tetragnathid (‘four-jawed’) spiders are being used to monitor river pollution.

Karen Kidd has been Jarislowsky Chair of Environment and Health at McMaster University since 2017. Before that, she was a Canada Research Chair on the Chemical Contamination of Food Webs at the University of New Brunswick, and a Research Scientist with Fisheries and Oceans Canada. Dr. Milena Esser is a postdoctoral fellow in Karen Kidd’s lab, and Colleen Wardlaw is a Ph.D. candidate.

Listen to our conversation in today’s edition of the GPM. Click on the play button above, or go here.

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With all eyes fixed on the genocidal war Israel-USA has been waging in Gaza since October 2023, the self-proclaimed ‘Jewish State’ has also been consolidating its unlawful colonization and de facto annexation of the Palestinian West Bank.

Since the Gaza genocide began, Israeli soldiers and Jewish settlers have been prosecuting a parallel campaign of terrorism and ethnic cleansing up and down the Palestinian West Bank. Ten thousand indigenous Bedouins have been displaced from their communities in the fertile Jordan Valley. Another 30,000 have been forcibly driven from their homes in the so-called ‘refugee camps’ of Jenin, Tulkarem and Nur Shams.

With the full support of Israeli soldiers and police, in and out of uniform, Jewish settlers have forcibly displaced the entire Bedouin population between Ramallah and the Jordan Valley. Over sixty communities have been erased. A clear war crime – arguably a crime against humanity — that the most powerful Western and Gulf/Arab states fully support.

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The GPM spoke about the ethnic cleansing of West Bank Palestinians with Fathi Nimer. Nimer is Palestine Policy Fellow of the Palestinian Policy Network, Al-Shabaka.

Listen to our conversation in today’s GPM edition. Click on the play button above, or go here.

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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, founding instrument of NATO: protecting the western hemisphere from the rapacious Chinese and Russians.

No one in a position to know such things believes Russia or China actually threaten the self-governing, autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark. Everyone’s military aircraft and ships go wherever they’re able, first and foremost the US’s, with a constellation of 800 military bases encircling the planet.

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The real origin of Donald Trump’s Greenland lust is as clear as his and his War Minister’s willingness to militarily seize it. Borrowing a phrase from Bill Clinton — it’s the precious minerals, stupid.

Trump didn’t abduct Venezuelan president Nicholas Maduro, effectively taking over the South American nation, because Maduro is a drug trafficker. Just a flimsy ruse. Trump wanted Venezuelan oil.

Likewise, it’s the wildly valuable rare-earth metals embedded in Greenland rock that Trump thirsts for.

If the US does invade Greenland, Canada could be next. So says Robert Huish, Associate Professor in International Development Studies at Dalhousie University. He’s not the only one.

“Perhaps not immediately as the 51st state,” Huish writes, in a recent article for The Conversation, “but quite possibly as a U.S. territory that would deny Canadians any voting rights for Congress or the Presidency.”

The GPM reached out to Robert Huish, an Associate Professor in International Development Studies at Dalhousie University, in Halifax. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

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Wanna get fired from the job you love? Just condemn Israel for the hideous crimes it’s been committing against the Palestinian people, in occupied Gaza and the Palestinian West Bank.

Call Israel a settler-colonial state, or an apartheid regime. Accuse it of committing genocide.

Post your comments on Facebook, X, Instagram or TikTok. Then, wait a bit.

More likely than not, pro-Israeli/Zionist forces will complain to your boss or the school or university where you teach, and you’ll be out the door.

If you’re a person of colour, or a Palestinian, or Muslim, you’ll be out the door real fast.

Dozens of American academics, teachers and civil servants have been investigated, suspended or fired for their peaceful, pro-Palestine discourse or activism. Those who’ve held on to their jobs – those who’ve never said anything at all — feel the chill.

Here in Canada, the situation is less extreme, but worrisome, nonetheless. Especially for those who speak out on social media – in the most measured of ways. Read their stories here and here and here.

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One Canadian academic who’s experienced the chill is Mohammad Zubairi. Zubairi is an Associate Professor in the Department of Pediatrics in the Faculty of Health Sciences at McMaster University. In late 2024, Zubairi was appointed Post-Graduate Medical Education Director for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion — a well-established policy rubric in Canada, unlike Trump’s US, where it’s been all but stamped out. Complaints about Zubairi’s appointment soon rolled in, from Zionist forces in both Ontario and the U.S.

Judging from the way it handled complaints, McMaster University appears to be an enlightened institution. Zubairi has held onto his job – a job he greatly enjoys.

The GPM sat down with Mohammad Zubairi in the studios of 93.3 CFMU-FM, McMaster University Radio. Zubairi is a developmental and behavioural pediatrician. Since late 2024, Zubairi has served as the Post-Graduate Medical Education Director for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

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.

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Last November, Ibhawoh presented the document at the 30th Conference of the Parties to the UN Climate Change Convention, in Belem, Brazil, COP-30. Ibhawoh teaches Global Human Rights in the Department of History, and the Centre for Global Peace, Justice and Health at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario. He is the founding Director of the McMaster Centre for Human Rights and Restorative Justice, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and current Chair of the United Nations’ Expert Mechanism on the Right to Development.

The GPM sat down with Bonny Ibhawoh in his McMaster University office. Listen to our conversation. Click on the play button above, or go here.

The Chagos Islands — not a place many people have heard of, much less visited. You can barely find them on a map, in the middle of the Indian Ocean.

Long before Europeans arrived, the Chagos Islands were culturally tied to the island of Mauritius, as it’s known today, 900 km east of Madagascar.

The Dutch occupied the island between 1638 and 1710. The French seized it in 1715, naming it Île de France. In 1810, the British seized it from the French, consolidating their colonial possession in the 1814 Treaty of Paris.

Mauritius, they called it — declaring it part of Britain’s far-flung “Indian Ocean Territory.”

At the height of the decolonization movement, in March 1968, Mauritius gained its independence – with one small cut-out: the Chagos islands, 2200 km northwest of Mauritius.

The Chagos Archipelago consists of a number of islands and atolls, the largest of which is Diego Garcia. Due south of the oil-rich Persian Gulf, about 27 square kilometers in size, Diego Garcia would be the perfect place to set up a military base, the British thought. In cahoots with their fast friends in Washington, that’s exactly what they did.

In late 1966, Diego Garcia became a shining star in the expanding constellation of US military bases all around the planet (now 800 in total). Also, a great ‘Black Site’ where official enemies could be detained and tortured in secret, without due process.

The Chagossians were forcibly displaced, in the cruelest of ways.

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Between 1967 and 1973, the Chagos Archipelago’s entire population was either blocked from returning or forcibly removed by the UK. The forcible expulsion of Diego Garcia’s population took place between July and September 1971. Britain declared the entire archipelago a “Marine Protected Area.”

In 2010, Mauritius undertook proceedings against the UK. They dragged on for years.

In 2017, the UN General Assembly asked the International Court of Justice, the international community’s supreme judicial body, to render an Advisory Opinion on the matter. The ICJ issued its Advisory Opinion in February 2019:

The decolonization of Mauritius was not lawfully completed when that country acceded to independence, the Chagossian people’s inalienable right to self-determination has been violated, the UK’s administration of their island home is an internationally wrongful act, and the UK must end its administration of the archipelago “as rapidly as possible,” the ICJ declared.

The UN General Assembly endorsed the ICJ ruling shortly thereafter, calling on all UN member states to secure Chagossian independence by November 2025.

Colonialists to the core (and the tightest of US allies), Britain said sure, then hedged its bets.

In May 2025, the UK struck a deal with Mauritius. Under that deal — ostensibly aimed at implementing the ICJ ruling — Mauritius would lease Diego Garcia to the UK for 99 years, with a 40-year extension option.

This past December, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) called on the UK to suspend that deal. In addition to denying the Chagossian people’s right to return to Diego Garcia Island, CERD said, the UK-Mauritius deals prevents Chagossians “from exercising their cultural rights and preserving their cultural heritage,” and perpetuates longstanding violations of the Chagossian people’s right to self-determination.

Under international law, the right to self-determination is jus cogens (obligatory;  no questions, no exceptions) and erga omnes (owed to all; all states are obliged to enforce it). 

A very long story that David Vine has been following for years.

David Vine is a Professor of Anthropology at American University, in Washington D.C. He’s the author of a trilogy of books about the US penchant for permanent war, and about America’s network of 800 military bases around the world. Island of Shame, the Secret History of the US Military Base on Diego Garcia, was published in 2011. All royalties go to the Chagossian people.

The latest of David Vine’s books, published in 2020 by University of California Press, is entitled The United States of War – a Global History of America’s endless conflicts, from Columbus to the Islamic State.

Listen to our conversation with David Vine. Click on the play button above, or go here.

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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 Tarasuk, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Nutritional Sciences at the University of Toronto. Tarasuk is the lead investigator for PROOF, a research program that explores policy interventions to reduce food insecurity in Canada.

Listen to our conversation in today’s GPM. Click on the play button above, or go here.

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Zohran Mamdani … Prior to his historic victory in the New York City mayoralty election, last November, his name was barely known.

Zohran Mamdani is the first South Asian, and first Muslim to be elected mayor of the U.S.’s most populous city.

He’s also the first Democratic Socialist mayor of a major American city. 

In the very first line of his acceptance speech, Mamdani tipped his hat to America’s most illustrious, trailblazing democratic socialist – Eugene Debs.

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“The sun may have set over our city this evening,” Mamdani declared last November 4, to huge applause, “but as Eugene Debs once said: “I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity.””

How many of Zohran Mamdani’s supporters actually knew who Eugene Debs was? Few, for sure.

Eugene Debs was one of America’s great trade union leaders and political radicals. In contrast to late 19th/early 20th century labour leaders like Samuel Gompers, the founder of the American Federation of Labour, Debs was a man of the left, with a distinctive class-based analysis.

Debs was an anti-capitalist, a socialist, and a fierce political radical. He marched with Susan B. Anthony, America’s trailblazing women’s rights activist. Emma Goldman was his friend.

Perennial socialist candidate, Eugene Debs ran for president three times in the early 20th century, under the banner of the Democratic Socialist Party.

The most radical, personally hazardous of Debs’ positions — his opposition to and active promotion of resistance against American involvement in the First World War. 

On September 14, 1918, U.S. District Judge David C. Westenhaver sentenced Eugene Debs to ten years imprisonment for an anti-war speech he’d delivered to a Socialist Party gathering in Canton, Ohio, three months earlier, in alleged violation of the Espionage Act of 1917. 

In response to the jail sentence, Debs famously declared:

“Let the people take heart and hope everywhere, for the cross is bending, the midnight is passing, and joy cometh with the morning.”

To learn more about Eugene Debs, the GPM reached out to Shawn Gude.

Gude is the author of a new biography of Eugene Debs, due to be published on the 100th anniversary of Debs’ death, this coming October. Gude is a senior editor for Jacobin Magazine. His book — American Socialist: The Life & Times of Eugene Debs – will be released by Simon & Schuster in October 2026.

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Listen to our conversation with Shawn Gude. Click on the play button above, or go here.

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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 launched a full-scale assault on northern Gaza, home to an estimated million Palestinians. Benjamin Netanyahu’s aim — to drive them and the remainder of the estimated 2.1 million Gazans who’ve managed to survive Israel’s biblical onslaught into a vast concentration camp on the southern end of the enclave, there to be bombed, to perish from starvation and disease, or to pack up and get out.

Israel is reportedly in negotiations with South Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, Libya, and Indonesia to accept Palestinian deportees.

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Meanwhile, a slew of Western leaders have vowed to recognize Palestinian statehood at the 80th session of the UN General Assembly, scheduled to convene on September 8, in NYC (or Geneva, if that’s where the UNGA moves its proceedings, following US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s refusal to grant visas to Palestinian delegates).

Recognizing Palestinian statehood is their best way to secure what they call ‘peace’.

Palestinian statehood — with conditions.

Only Western-approved Palestinian parties and candidates will be allowed to run (Hamas excluded, of course), and Palestine will need to be demilitarized, therefore defenseless in the face of certain Israeli assault. Hardly a day goes by when Israel doesn’t violate the territorial integrity of Lebanon and Syria, both of them UN member states.

Of course, Palestinians will be obliged to guarantee Israeli security.

The GPM spoke about Israel-USA’s war on Gaza, and the future of the Palestinian people, with American-Palestinian journalist and author, Ramzy Baroud. Baroud is the editor of the Palestine Chronicle, former Managing Editor of London-based Middle East Eye, and former Deputy Managing Editor of Al Jazeera Online.

Baroud is also the author of six books, and a contributor to many others. His latest volume, co-edited with British-Israeli author Ilan Pappé — Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak Out — has just been published by Clarity Press.

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Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

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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: ‘medicide’.

The most recent figures from the World Health Organization tell the story:

Half of the 36 hospitals operating in Gaza before October 7, 2023 have been destroyed. The other half are partially functional, overwhelmed with the injured and refugees.

Two-thirds of little Gaza’s primary health care facilities have been demolished. In North Gaza, home to an estimated million souls at this moment (people Israel-USA wants to forcible expel), one partially functional hospital remains.

As if the situation in Gaza weren’t sufficiently appalling – two years into a war widely described as genocidal, by people who know what genocide is and have the honesty to use the word (too many to cite here) — Gaza is now swept by infectious pathogens few if any drugs can treat.

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In a recent report in the British medical journal The Lancet Infectious Diseases, a half-dozen strains of multidrug-resistant bacteria have been described, isolated from 1300 tissue specimens gathered at one of Gaza’s sole surviving microbiology units, at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, in Gaza City, between November 2023 and the end of August, 2024.

Among the strains of drug-resistant bacteria the researchers identified, notorious wound pathogens Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Staphylococcus aureus, Klebsiella, and E. coli.

Two-thirds of all isolates were resistant to multiple antibiotics, from different drug classes (a benchmark for establishing ‘multidrug resistance’), indicating “sustained selection pressure.”

In other words, prevailing conditions in Gaza are ‘selecting for’, and therefore driving the emergence of resistant strains of virulent bacteria few if any drugs will treat.

Conditions are also ripe for the spread of these diseases.

Crowded field hospital wards, squalid tent encampments, and the almost complete destruction of Gaza’s sewage and freshwater systems are a perfect storm for the spread of diseases no drug will treat.

To make the situation even more acute, antibiotics are in short supply in Gaza. So are wound irrigation fluids and sterile dressings, and the materials needed to culture bacteria, in order to establish the best antibiotics to treat them.

Sixteen percent of Pseudomonas samples examined by the Lancet study’s authors were resistant to the drug colistin, the drug of last resort when all others fail. The last remaining bullet.

“The international medical community has a duty to act and respond to this crisis,” the authors of the Lancet piece write.

“First and foremost, healthcare workers and governments worldwide must advocate for the cessation of the Israeli military invasion that has resulted in a surge of trauma injuries and the widespread deliberate targeting of hospitals, laboratories, and water desalination plants; without this ceasefire, the infection burden will escalate further.”

The GPM spoke with one of the authors of the Lancet report.

Bilal Irfan is a bioethicist at Harvard Medical School, and a researcher at the medical school’s Brigham & Women’s Hospital, specializing in conflict health. Irfan has been collaborating with Palestinian medical students and physicians in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza in the documentation of Israeli medicide.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

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And here’s another Lancet piece, released on August 18, 2025, lead author Bilal Irfan, entitled “Is Gaza still a place for newborn life?”

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 day.

All “blood lies,” says criminal fugitive Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, under arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court.

Still, Israel’s fast friends seem moved, and are now declaring the horror show has to stop.

“Dangerous,” a couple of dozen Western officials recently declared. “Inhumane,” “unacceptable,” “egregious.”

Outrageously unlawful? No. No Western state has gone that far. No mention of the G-word, nor the A-word.

But a sea change seems to be underway, in places you’d least expect – the UK, the Netherlands … Germany.

And Canada — rock-solid Israeli Bro when Stephen Harper was Prime Minister.

Justin Trudeau vowed a more nuanced, Palestine-friendly policy. Displaying true Liberal colours, however, Trudeau’s Foreign Minister, Chrystia Freeland, vowed Canada would be Israel’s “asset” at the UN Security Council — should it win a seat.

It didn’t.

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Now, in the Red Chamber of the Canadian Parliament, the Senate, sturdier voices are calling for justice and action.

In late June, then again in late July, Canadian Senators called on Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to uphold international law, urging the Canadian government to implement a half dozen punitive measures against Israel. The GPM spoke with one of them, Canadian Senator from the Province of Manitoba, the Honorable Marilou McPhedran.

Marilou McPhedran is a Canadian lawyer and human rights advocate. She was the Dean of the University of Winnipeg’s Global College, in Manitoba, between 2008 and 2012, and has been a member of the Senate of Canada since October 2016.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Watch our complete conversation here:

War and police repression — land and climate destruction: flip sides of the same coin.

Twenty-two months into Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, US bombs and missiles have reportedly generated about 40 million tonnes of concrete rubble, liberally seasoned with the toxic residues of US, British and German munitions.

Cleaning up Israel-USA’s mountain of poisonous detritus, reducing it to a finer grade of carcinogenic rubble, trucking it all off (underlying terrain to be replaced by Trump/Witkoff real estate?), will generate an estimated 90,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases.

By some estimates, rebuilding Gaza (if this can be imagined) will generate thirty million tonnes of Earth-warming gases — and a shit-load of cash.

Meanwhile, in Israel-USA — intellectual co-author/perpetrator of Israeli mass murder and destruction — Donald Trump’s “Big Ugly Billionaire Bailout Bill” pulverizes America’s fledgling renewable energy industry. Wind turbines and solar panel farms have been slashed. They kill birds and mar the landscape, the NYC/Florida-based sociopath says.

Buried in his ten-thousand-word pile of vicious legislative rubble, a $150 billion allocation to ICE – US Immigration Control & Enforcement. Trump’s Brown Shirts are now terrorizing black, brown and Latino communities coast to coast.

The GPM talked about all this with Aaron Kirshenbaum, War is Not Green organizer for the US antiwar and justice organization CODEPINK.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Watch our complete conversation here:

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 Mazin Qumsiyeh, his partner Jessie and friends are planting native Palestinian seeds, raising chickens, rabbits and fish, and offering up habitat for insects, birds, bats, and other small mammals.

Rescuing their beloved landscape from Euro-North American land thieves and eco-vandals.

The Palestine Institute for Biodiversity & Sustainability, their oasis is called. Perched above the Palestine Institute’s splendid gardens, a 1200-square meter museum is now nearing completion.

For an update on the Palestine Institute’s new museum, and gardens beneath, we reached out to Mazin Qumsiyeh.

Mazin Qumsiyeh is a Palestinian scientist, scholar, author, and environmental justice advocate. Together with his partner Jessie Chang, Mazin founded the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability, and the Palestine Museum of Natural History. Mazin has published over 150 scientific papers and books on topics ranging from cultural heritage to biodiversity.

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Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Learn how to volunteer here.

Watch a complete conversation of ours here, recorded in the Palestine Institute garden back in April 2024. Thanks to Paul Tekenbroek for video production. 

Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza drags on, with no end in sight.

Mainstream commentators with some degree of sympathy for the Palestinian people argue that Israel needs to be ‘pressured’ to end the war.

Others say Israel will have to be forced to withdraw from Gaza. Indeed, to terminate its unlawful occupation of all Palestinian territories.

Unlawful is how the International Court of Justice described Israel’s 58-year-old occupation, in a UN-solicited Advisory Opinion issued over a year ago. In the wake of the ICJ’s ruling, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution calling on Israel to end its occupation within a year. That would be this coming September.

Israel will certainly not do so. The US won’t pressure it, let alone force it. The US and Israel are blood-brothers; conjoined twins.

So, hope turns to European capitals. Last week, French Prime Minister Emmanuel Macron announced that France would formally recognize the State of Palestine.

The UK may follow, but British Prime Minister Keir Starmer is much more weak-kneed that Macron, and anxious to please Donald Trump, who thinks Gaza should be completely bulldozed, then turned into a real estate paradise for people like himself and his wealthy friends.

Last May, speaking to a People’s Tribunal on the Gaza genocide in Sarajevo, Israeli historian Ilan Pappé offered his own thoughts on the troubling situation.

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Pappé is a professor at the University of Exeter’s College of Social Sciences and International Studies, where he directs the European Centre for Palestine Studies.

He’s also the author of various foundational works on Palestine. Among these, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, and Ten Myths About Israel. His most recent work — Lobbying For Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic — was released last year.

Listen to Ilan Pappé in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.