The assassination by the United States of General Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s elite Quds Force, near Baghdad’s airport will ignite widespread retaliatory attacks against U.S. targets from Shiites, who form the majority in Iraq. It will activate Iranian-backed militias and insurgents in Lebanon and Syria and throughout the Middle East. The consequences are ominous.

Blowing off the fog of ignorance that now hides the history of the Ukrainian-Canadian left would help to dismantle a problematic conservative consensus. It would throw light on the Ukrainian left’s historic and ultimately unsuccessful efforts to put into practice a progressive form of nationalism, one that protects the independence of distinct cultural groups within a shared democratic space.

Author and investigative reporter, Linda McQuaig’s latest publication offers a very readable and succinct review of the history of key Canadian public services and the threat that privatization poses to our country’s public wealth. She lays out how the virtues of public ownership have increasingly been replaced by the dogma that the market does all things better. McQuaig documents how this agenda has accelerated in the past four decades through deregulation, privatization and free trade initiatives.

“The battle for equality is still pending.” Indeed, Radical claims to equality during the Civil War era helped destroy the chattel bondage of Sumner’s reference and mobilized legions of Americans toward economic reform. But the enduring lesson of those movements is that the political equality which Sumner pursued has proven wholly inadequate in combating material inequality, much less challenging the capitalist system.

The disinformation surrounding the Syrian civil war appears to have been lifted from the Iraq/Afghanistan playbook. It is all the more disgraceful that the media that participated in selling those wars (now recognized as catastrophic failures) is engaging in the same manipulative tactics to encourage ongoing suffering and destabalization in Syria.

The United Nations high commissioner for human rights released a powerful statement that criticized India’s new citizenship law. This “fundamentally discriminatory” act would expedite citizenship for persecuted religious minorities from India’s neighboring countries. But in the list of those minorities, it names only Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians. It does not mention Muslims.

The 500 richest people in the world, all of whom are billionaires, gained a combined $1.2 trillion in wealth in 2019, further exacerbating inequities that have not been seen since the late 1920s. That’s according to a new Bloomberg analysis published on December 27, which found that the planet’s 500 richest people saw their collective net worth soar by 25 percent to $5.9 trillion over the last year.

Known as Bolivia’s Chapare region, the Tropico of Cochabamba is a sanctuary for elected President Evo Morales’ most dedicated base of support. Since the November 10 coup, it has effectively become a self-governing territory where the military junta is absent. In this 12,000 square kilometer swath of land, hundreds of unions have flourished over the years.

The outcome for SNC-Lavalin signified that everything was back to normal. After a few hiccups, the system had delivered. Corporate wealth was safer than ever from those who did not understand that, to make the world richer, it is always necessary for those who own the means of production to engage in some shady, often anti-social, even criminal behaviour.

Slavery and the other colonial Holocausts that—like the state of Israel—are a manifestation of white settler domination, are systematically excluded from Holocaust Memorial Day. The same media that claims to care about anti-Semitism covers up this racist double standard rather than treat it as a scandal.