War

Mark Rudd ( Waging Nonviolence ) – What is the ethical response to witnessing a great moral crime? Turn away and allow oneself to be distracted? Pretend it doesn’t exist? Or acknowledge the crime for what it is, and take some sort of action to try to stop it? Students at Columbia in 1968 understood […]

Artificial Intelligence

Gaza War: Artificial Intelligence is radically changing Targeting Speeds and Scale of Civilian Harm

The Conversation

By Lauren Gould, Utrecht University; Linde Arentze, NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies; and Marijn Hoijtink, University of Antwerp | – (The Conversation) – As Israel’s air campaign in Gaza enters its sixth month after Hamas’s terrorist attacks on October 7, it has been described by experts as one of the most relentless […]

Artificial Intelligence

A Brief History of Kill Lists, From Langley to Lavender

Medea Benjamin and Nicholas J.S. Davies

( Code Pink ) – The Israeli online magazine +972 has published a detailed report on Israel’s use of an artificial intelligence (AI) system called “Lavender” to target thousands of Palestinian men in its bombing campaign in Gaza. When Israel attacked Gaza after October 7, the Lavender system had a database of 37,000 Palestinian men […]

Artificial Intelligence

Gaza Conflict: Israel using AI to identify Human Targets raises Fears Innocents are Targeted

The Conversation

By Elke Schwarz, Queen Mary University of London | – A report by Jerusalem-based investigative journalists published in +972 magazine finds that AI targeting systems have played a key role in identifying – and potentially misidentifying – tens of thousands of targets in Gaza. This suggests that autonomous warfare is no longer a future scenario. […]

Climate Crisis

“Now I Am Become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds:” Genocide and Ecocide stalk the Earth

William J. Astore

( Tomdispatch.com ) – When I was in the U.S. military, I learned a saying (often wrongly attributed to the Greek philosopher Plato) that only the dead have seen the end of war. Its persistence through history to this very moment should indeed be sobering. What would it take for us humans to stop killing […]

Israel/ Palestine

The Most Dangerous Wars: When Local Conflicts become Geopolitics

Foreign Policy in Focus

By Walden Bello ( Foreign Policy in Focus ) – The three major wars or conflicts that are ongoing today demonstrate the volatility of the intersection between the local and the global. In the Hamas-Israeli conflict, we see how the maintenance of the Israeli settler-colonial state is intertwined with the preservation of the global hegemony […]

Pentagon

Daring Look a Sacred Cow in the Teeth: Military Spending and National (in)Security

William J. Astore

( Tomdispatch.com ) – In an age when American presidents routinely boast of having the world’s finest military, where nearly trillion-dollar war budgets are now a new version of routine, let me bring up one vitally important but seldom mentioned fact: making major cuts to military spending would increase U.S. national security. Why? Because real national […]

Displaced and Refugees

Sudan: Urgent Action Needed on Hunger Crisis

Human Rights Watch

Security Council Should Act on Access for Aid Deliveries ( Human Rights Watch ) – (New York, March 15, 2024) – United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is expected to alert the Security Council in the coming days that Sudan has entered a downward spiral of extreme conflict-induced hunger, Human Rights Watch said today. The council […]

China

The American Empire in (Ultimate?) Crisis

Alfred W. McCoy

( Tomdispatch.com ) – Empires don’t just fall like toppled trees. Instead, they weaken slowly as a succession of crises drain their strength and confidence until they suddenly begin to disintegrate. So it was with the British, French, and Soviet empires; so it now is with imperial America. Great Britain confronted serious colonial crises in […]