On April 21, the first day of the 14th annual Rx and Illicit Drug Summit, organizers announced a surprise presenter for the closing plenary on April 24: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., newly minted Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services and vocal proponent of building labor camps for people who use drugs.
After Kristi Noem, the newly confirmed secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), traveled to Guantánamo Bay earlier this week, she toldCNN the Venezuelan migrants being transferred to the notorious U.S. naval base and military prison are “the worst of the worst that we’ve pulled off our streets.”
Immigration attorneys say the facts on the ground do not support Noem’s official narrative about what’s going on at Guantánamo Bay, where President Donald Trump has ordered the construction of a tent city in order to detain up to 30,000 migrants, regardless of the site’s capacity, including asylum seekers fleeing violence and poverty. For civil rights groups, the transfer is only the latest in a series of legally dubious efforts by the federal government to dodge constitutional requirements by incarcerating people at the notorious offshore facility.
Support for Truthout comes from assorted left-leaning foundations and individual contributors. Major foundation donors include the Schumann Media Center, the Lannan Foundation, and the Cloud Mountain Foundation. Other donors include former militant extremist and academic William Ayers. Another donor is the Park Foundation,an environmentalist grantmaking group focused on opposing fracking, or drilling for natural gas.
When they request asylum in the United States, migrants have to say something against their government. But everyone in the Venezuelan community knows that it’s a lie. Venezuelan comedians in Florida, like George Harris, joke about the Venezuelans lying to the migration people just in order to receive asylum.
In December 1982, following Israel’s devastating invasion of Lebanon six months earlier, the United Nations General Assembly passed resolution A/RES/37/43 concerning the ‘[i]mportance of the universal realization of the right of peoples to self-determination’. It endorsed, without qualification, ‘the inalienable right’ of the Palestinian people to ‘self-determination, national independence, territorial integrity, national unity and sovereignty without outside interference’, and reaffirmed the legitimacy of their struggle for those rights ‘by all available means, including armed struggle’. It also strongly condemned Israel’s ‘expansionist activities in the Middle East’ and ‘continual bombing of Palestinian civilians’, both said to ‘constitute a serious obstacle to the realization of the self-determination and independence of the Palestinian people’. In the four decades since then, Israel’s violence against the Palestinian people and its colonisation of their land has not ceased. Up to the present moment, all over historical Palestine, from the Gaza Strip to Sheikh Jarrah, Palestinians are still under that same occupation, subject to suffocating control over virtually every aspect of their lives – and the sadistic, unaccountable violence of the Zionist state.
Now, taking a page from DeSantis, Congress is considering inserting an amendment into the National Defense Authorization Act that would ban visa holders from targeted countries from making certain agricultural purchases. These restrictions would apply to all 50 states, and be based solely on national heritage. This is wrong and legislators must reject it.
From the time that Russian forces invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Western media coverage of the war has been dominated by the perspectives of Ukrainians who support Zelensky’s government and who oppose Russia. While it is vitally important that we be informed of their perspective, we cannot truly understand the Ukraine war without hearing from Ukrainians who reject Zelensky’s rule. In the Western mainstream discourse, those Ukrainians are virtually invisible.
In this new essay, John Pilger recalls the ‘electric’ opposition of writers and journalists to the coming war in the 1930s and investigates why today there is ‘a silence filled by a consensus of propaganda’ as the two greatest powers draw closer to conflict.
Ms. Cat’s Chronicles 
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